Читаем Hostage полностью

When the phone went dead, Talley put it aside, and thought of the dream. The dream was always the same, a small clapboard house surrounded by a full SWAT tactical team, helicopters overhead, media beyond the cordon. Talley was the primary negotiator, but the nightmare reality of the dream left him standing in the open without cover or protection while Jane and Amanda watched him from the cordon. Talley was in a life-or-death negotiation with an unknown male subject who had barricaded himself in the house and was threatening suicide. Over and over, the man screamed, 'I'm going to do it! I'm going to do it!' Talley talked him back from the brink each time, but, each time, knew that the man had stepped closer to the edge. It was only a matter of time. No one had seen this man. No neighbors or family had been found to provide an ID. The subject would not reveal his name. He was a voice behind walls to everyone except Talley, who knew with a numbing dread that the man in the house was himself. He had become the subject in the house, locked in time and frozen in place, negotiating with himself to spare his own life.

In those first weeks, Brendan Malik's eyes watched him from every shadow. He saw the light in them die over and over, dimming like a television with its plug pulled, the spark that had been Brendan Malik growing smaller, falling away until it was gone. After a while, Talley felt nothing, watching the dying eyes the same way he would watch Wheel of Fortune: Because it was there.

Talley resigned from the LAPD, then sat on his couch for almost a year, first in his home and later in the cheap apartment he had rented in Silver Lake after Jane threw him out. Talley told himself that he had left his job and his family because he couldn't stand having them witness his own self-destruction, but after a while he grew to believe that his reasons were simpler, and less noble: He believed that his former life was killing him, and he was scared. The incorporated township of Bristo Camino was looking for a chief of police for their fourteen-member police force, and they were glad to have him. They liked it that he was SWAT, even though the job was no more demanding than writing traffic citations and speaking at local schools. He told himself that it was a good place to heal. Jane had been willing to wait for the healing, but the healing never quite seemed to happen. Talley believed that it never would.

Talley started the car and eased off the hard-packed soil of the orchard onto a gravel road, following it down to the state highway that ran the length of the Santa Clarita Valley. When he reached the highway, he turned up his radio and heard Sarah Weinman, the BCPD dispatch officer, shouting frantically over the link.

'… Welch is down. We have a man down in York Estates…'

Other voices were crackling back at her, Officers Larry Anders and Kenn Jorgenson talking over each other in a mad rush.

Talley punched the command freq button that linked him to dispatch on a dedicated frequency.

'Sarah, one. What do you mean, Mike's down?'

'Chief?'

'What about Mike?'

'He's been shot. The paramedics from Sierra Rock Fire are on the way. Jorgy and Larry are rolling from the east.'

In the nine months that Talley had been in Bristo, there had been only three felonies, two for nonviolent burglaries and once when a woman had tried to run down her husband with the family car.

'Are you saying that he was intentionally shot?'

'Junior Kim's been shot, too! Three white males driving a red Nissan pickup. Mike called in the truck, then called a forty-one fourteen at one-eight Castle Way in York Estates, and the next thing I know he said he'd been shot. I haven't been able to raise him since then.'

Forty-one fourteen. Welch had intended to approach the residence.

Talley punched the button that turned on his lights and siren. York Estates was six minutes away.

'What's the status of Mr. Kim?'

'Unknown at this time.'

'Do we have an ID on the suspects?'

'Not at this time.'

'I'm six out and rolling. Fill me in on the way.'

Talley had spent the last year believing that the day he became a crisis negotiator for the Los Angeles Police Department had forever changed his life for the worse.

His life was about to change again.

JENNIFER

Jennifer had never heard anything as loud as their guns, not the cherry bombs that Thomas popped in their backyard or the crowd at the Forum when the Lakers slammed home a game-winning dunkenstein. The gunfire in movies didn't come close. When Mars and Dennis started shooting, the sound rocked through her head and deafened her.

Jennifer screamed. Dennis slammed the front door, pulled her backwards to the office, then pushed her down. She grabbed Thomas and held tight. Her father wrapped them in his arms. Layers of gun smoke hung in shafts of light that burned through the shutters; the smell of it stung her nose.

When the shooting was done, Dennis sucked air like a bellows, stalking back and forth between the entry and office, his face white.