Fire with Fire, page 20
“In an hour, ideally,” Surge said.
“You’re kidding yourself. You’re all kidding yourselves,” Binchley sneered. “What you’re asking is impossible. And I’m not gonna do anything while you’re sitting here with your arm around me like we’re on a fucking date.”
“I’m just sitting close so I can make sure you don’t do any of your special little tappity-tap-taps and call for help on this thing.” Surge flicked his fingers at the laptop. “Not that you’d have anybody to call. But still.”
“I can’t focus,” Binchley said. “You’re breathing on me.”
“Just forget I’m even here.” Surge snuggled in closer.
“Get off me, man!”
“Surge,” Lamb called.
The big man picked up his coffee and eased himself up from the narrow bench seat. The whole trailer rocked noticeably. He went to the curtain leading to the bedroom, and Lamb pointed to the limited view of Charlie’s bare feet sitting still motionless on the ragged carpet at the foot of the bed.
“I think he’s asleep.”
“Leave him alone,” Surge said. “He can have an hour. It won’t kill us.”
Lamb hesitated. Charlie’s story in the bathroom had made all the hairs on her body stand on end. She felt an unfamiliar, calm violence stirring in her chest. It was as if a new power had been unlocked. A killer ability making itself known, machine parts clanking and clacking to life.
“You said you had guns.” She turned to Surge. “When you arrived here. You said you had guns and food and supplies in the bag.”
“Yeah. I’ve got Pop-Tarts. You like Pop-Tarts?”
“I want a gun,” she said.
“Hmm, did Hoss say you could have a gun?” Surge asked, looking at her over the rim of his coffee mug.
“I’m qualified to use one.” Lamb shrugged. “I got ninety-five percent in my marksmanship exam at the academy.”
“That’s not what I asked, Lambert, you cheeky, murderous little pickle.”
“Surge.”
“What do you want it for?”
“To protect my partner,” Lamb said. She looked up at the big man towering over her and casting a huge shadow across the entire kitchen area from the tiny lights embedded in the ceiling. “And to get the fuckers who messed with him and put them in jail. I’m not going to be able to do those things without a gun.”
Surge’s smile was huge. “I love your attitude, Lamb,” he said. “I fucking love it! You bring it, Lambanator! Bring the fire and the fury! Bring the pain! Bring everything you got!”
He put his coffee down, gripped Lamb’s arms, and shook her hard. Then he went to his bag on the floor beside the corduroy chair and handed her a gold-plated Glock 19. She held out the gun and marveled at it. She could see her own awestruck reflection in the polished slide.
“What in the—”
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Surge smiled like a new father. “Good size for you, too.”
“I’m not even going to ask,” Lamb said. She checked the mag and chamber, made sure the safety was on, and tucked it into her waistband.
Binchley sighed dramatically. “Where do I send the images?”
“You’ve got pics already?” Surge asked, sliding in beside the biker again.
“I’ve got a small scoop of pictures from a geo-search,” Binchley said. “I haven’t hacked into anything yet. These are just what’s available if you know where to look.”
Surge took a laptop from the bag and flipped it open. “Send them to this laptop. Let me take a look.”
Binchley’s tattooed fingers were fluttering over the keys like a pianist’s.
“God, this is great. This is great-great-great! I always believed in you, Binchley! I always believed in you!”
Lamb watched as Surge looped an arm around the biker and squeezed him into his side.
* * *
“We should say something about ourselves,” Ashlea said suddenly. She shot upright from Bendigo’s lap, swiping back her hair, a decision made. No one had spoken since the second swab burning. Ibrahim had been sitting at Bendigo’s side, staring at his knees, probably wondering exactly what Bendigo was wondering. About what the plan was. About how they were going to free themselves from two hostage-takers with guns and possibly a bomb using only two pairs of scissors and the will to survive. Everyone looked at Ashlea. Outside, Bendigo could hear a chopper thumping as it passed overhead.
“What are you talking about?” Ryan asked Ashlea. His voice was low. Exhausted.
Bendigo sensed that the energy of everyone in the room had plummeted. He wondered if it was simply hopelessness, or if the police had decided to try microdosing them with something through the vents. Fentanyl, maybe. He’d read that dozens of people were killed in a siege in Moscow when police had tested that little brain wave.
“Look”—Ashlea turned to Bendigo—“we need to humanize ourselves. Make them see us as people. Make them realize we … we have lives and families to get back to.”
She straightened and looked at Elsie and Ryan.
“My name is Ashlea Pratt. I’m twenty-eight. I … I have a cat named Romeo. I started a degree in law, but it bored me to death, so I took a summer internship at the LA Times and now I work there. This whole backlog story—I wasn’t even supposed to be here. I wasn’t supposed to take the assignment. But I was trying to get them to take me seriously, to give me something to write about other than social media trends. I’m supposed to go to Florida in a month with my mom. It’ll be her first vacation since I was born.”
There was silence, then Ibrahim burst out with a little laugh. They all looked at him, Ashlea frowning hard.
“I’m sorry, it’s just…” He stifled a smile. “It’s hard to sum up your whole life in just a few sentences, I guess.”
“What’s wrong with how I summed up my life?” Ashlea asked.
“Nothing.” Ibrahim shrugged as much as his bound hands would allow. “I thought it was kind of cute. It sounds like a nice life, that’s all.”
“It is a nice life, and I have to get back to it,” Ashlea huffed. “You try, if you’ve got something more meaningful to say.”
“Uh, okay. I’m Ibrahim Solea.” He glanced at the Delaneys. Nothing further came for a while. He looked at the ceiling, smirked. “I’m studying architecture. My girlfriend just dumped me for a guy who lives in her building. He’s a personal trainer.”
“Oh, jeez. I’m sorry.” Ashlea’s mouth twisted in sympathy.
“That’s your story?” Bendigo said. He could feel his mood lightening infinitesimally. “‘I’m Ibrahim and my girlfriend just dumped me’?”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly finished.”
“How did you find out?” Ashlea asked. “About the other guy?”
“We were at one of those rooftop bars downtown, watching the sunset,” Ibrahim said. “She asked me to take a picture of her looking at the view. A text from him came through while I was holding the phone.”
“Can you all just stop?” Ryan sighed. “We know you’re people. We know you have lives. We don’t care. This isn’t about you.”
“Why don’t you tell us about yourselves?” Ashlea asked. Ryan and Elsie looked at each other. “Or … I don’t know. Tell us about Tilly.”
“Yeah, tell us about the girl you’re going to kill us all for,” Bendigo deadpanned. “Was she cute? She’d better have been. I don’t want my life to have ended prematurely for some misbehaving little beast.”
Ashlea kicked Bendigo’s ankle.
He looked over. “What?” he said.
“I’m trying to build something here,” Ashlea hissed.
“What are you trying to build? An affection for your captors?” he asked. “Isn’t that going to make things unpleasant for you when they chance a peek through the curtains over there and a sniper blows their brains out?”
Now Ryan laughed. It was a mean sound.
“Or are you hoping Elsie isn’t going to use you as a human shield when SWAT bursts through those doors,” Bendigo continued, nodding at the door to the hall, “because she wants you to have a nice vacation in Florida with your mom?”
“I bet you have a miserable life,” Ashlea said, slumping back against the table. “You sound like you do.”
“I have a life with purpose,” Bendigo said. “It’s the best thing you can hope for.”
“Divorced,” Ibrahim said.
Ashlea chuckled, nodding.
There was silence for a while. Bendigo turned over their words in his mind, listening to the rumble and bumble of activity outside the lab. Vehicles moving. People shouting. What he assumed was the impotent positioning and repositioning of police teams around the building as officers became tired and were relieved, new angles were considered, equipment was added or removed from the scenario in preparation for a forced or unforced entry. Chess pieces being moved around a table with only one player.
Eventually, he said, “I am divorced.”
He felt, rather than saw, Ashlea raise her head to look at him.
“My life isn’t miserable, but it’s featureless,” Bendigo went on. “It’s routine. It’s boring. At least, it is for everyone but me. Because I enjoy the work that I do, and the work I do is meticulous and structured and orderly. I come here. I supervise the activities of my staff. I chart results, submit paperwork, fulfill clinical criteria, and meet strategic obligations. I don’t do a lot of testing, because I’m mostly managerial these days, but I still do some. When a challenge presents itself, such as obtaining a viable sample from a particularly difficult derivation, I enjoy meeting that challenge.”
“Is it sad?” Ibrahim asked.
Bendigo frowned. “Why would it be sad?”
“I don’t know. The kind of stuff that would come in here, it would tell a story, I guess, wouldn’t it? Like a … a bloody pair of shoes. Or a gun, or … Don’t you look at the stuff in here and think: Holy shit. I mean, it’s a crime lab, man. Everything coming in here would have a sad story behind it.”
“You said you saw Tilly’s swimsuit before it got lost,” Ashlea said. “Didn’t you wonder what had happened to the girl who wore it?”
“No,” Bendigo said.
Ryan shook his head. Elsie’s face was unreadable.
Bendigo continued, “How could I do my job if I were sitting here crying over every artifact that came through for testing? I’d never get anything done. And to involve myself emotionally in individual cases would be to compromise the integrity of the work. I might decide I want to test a baby blanket that comes in covered in blood before I test a gang member’s torn bandanna, because I’m suckered in by the apparent tragedy of it.”
No one spoke.
“That’s precisely why Tilly’s swimsuit went missing, I suspect,” Bendigo carried on. “Neither my staff nor I attached any special meaning to it. So whatever happened to it—whether it was accidentally discarded or destroyed or any number of other possibilities—it happened because of chance. Pure chance. It’s not any more tragic than any other workplace mishap or oversight that might happen here. That goes for the rape kit backlog, too. It’s a logjam. They happen.”
He looked at the Delaneys.
“I suppose I am telling you something about myself,” Bendigo went on. “The most important thing there is to know about me. It’s that I am wholeheartedly against what you’re doing here. You’re trying to tell us that your daughter’s case is more important than any other case we have here. More important than the cases you’re compromising every time you burn a sample. More important than our lives. More important than any or all of the possible crimes being committed right now, while you have half the city’s law enforcement bodies out there in the parking lot, trying to secure our freedom. I’m against that.”
He waited, wondering if his point was taking root in the minds around him. It was Ibrahim who broke the silence.
“Di-vorced!” he said.
Ashlea blurted out a laugh. Bendigo knew it was stress-induced, hysterical, nonsensical. But it disgusted him just the same.
Bendigo sighed and made a decision. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said. “I’ve been trying to hold it. But it’s urgent now.”
Elsie raked her fingers up into her messy bun and scratched hard at her scalp as though trying to wake herself.
“I’ll take him,” she said. She picked up her pistol, took Bendigo’s arm, and helped him to his feet. Bendigo clutched his bound hands against the scissors hidden in the waistband of his trousers.
19
In the hall, the air seemed thinner. Colder, somehow. Bendigo got a rush of adrenaline, felt the shape of the scissors pressing into his fleshy backside, handles and point shifting against the fabric of his underwear as he walked. He imagined a dozen scenarios. The scissors suddenly dropping through his trousers, hitting the linoleum with a clatter, Elsie meeting his eyes. The animalistic surge of power. Fight for survival. The violent, fumbling struggle for them. Would she have the presence of mind and the capability to simply shoot him dead there, or would she indeed fight him for them? And if he had to punch her to gain the upper hand, could he? Was his aim to stab her or to use the scissors as a threat to gain control of the gun? And if he got the gun, was his aim to free the other hostages or simply to bolt? There was no plan and no reasonable way to form one when the hallway quickly became the bathroom, and the environment and the odds and all the infinite minuscule variables of such a potential plan were transformed instantaneously.
Elsie guided him silently to the aisle of stalls. He stood there, looking at the rows of open doors with his hands bound behind his back, befuddled and nauseous.
“You’ll have to free my hands so I can…” He trailed off, strangely ashamed.
Elsie wore a similar mask of shame. Hers was more reasonable. She was holding a gun on him while he begged to be allowed to urinate standing and holding himself like a man. Her instructions made her cheeks redden, the shame deepening.
“Get down on your butt and you should be able to slip your wrists down under your legs and bring them in front.”
Bendigo felt a flash of rage. Wondered if he needed that rage to do what he had to do. With the scissors. With the gun. He crouched and then sat on the cold, damp bathroom floor and shuffled his wrists under his backside, the cable ties pulling taut into his flesh. With his hands in front of him, he felt giddy with a new kind of power and balance. Another little victory.
“Go on, then,” she said, motioning to one of the stalls. He went into the stall, unzipped, glanced back to see if she was watching. She wasn’t. Bendigo reached awkwardly around himself, twisting hard, and took the scissors. He examined them in the pale light of the stall. They were paper-cutting scissors. Heavy steel, slightly curved tip. There was an acute angle to their married blades that would make stabbing possible with the right amount of force. He opened them, listened to the whisper of their blades parting and looked at the wide obtuse angle made by their cutting edges. This was the right idea. Less force needed. He quietly took a long strip of toilet paper, wrapped one cutting edge and handle together, and gripped the makeshift handle so that the scissors became a knife, one sharpened edge facing out.
“Are you going to—” Elsie started.
She was interrupted by the sound of Bendigo vomiting into the toilet. He gripped the scissors in one fist and the edge of the cistern in the other and emptied his stomach, then stood there, retching, feeling dizzy, thinking about Ashlea and her stupid cat and how utterly, ridiculously impossible his chances were of killing Elsie and freeing himself, let alone of getting back there and freeing the two kids. And that was how he thought of them. As kids. Ibrahim and Ashlea had gloriously smooth skin and bright eyes, and they laughed easily, even with death staring them in the face, and their heads were full of dreams and not dread. He was sure they were both on the cusp of big, thrilling, character-defining times. A young go-getter such as Ashlea would have a man and a baby and a foreign correspondent position in a couple of years, a Pulitzer in a decade, a patriarchy-smashing magazine, and a cute studio in Berlin a decade after that. Ibrahim was going to lock eyes with some beauty across the university chow hall or at some frat party any day now and forget all about the fiasco with the personal trainer, and the girl would challenge him, make him reach up, stand with him while they cut the ribbon on his first building. Or maybe they were both going to lead completely mediocre lives. Lonely lives. Lives tragically shortened by some less cataclysmic event than being taken hostage and murdered in a forensics lab. But they were only going to do that, any of that, if Bendigo saved them both using a pair of scissors wrapped in toilet paper. His knees were wobbly. He turned, sat on the toilet, kicked the door of the stall closed, and tried not to cry.
“She isn’t a misbehaving little beast,” Elsie said.
Bendigo wiped sweat from his brow. His throat was burning. “What?”
“Tilly,” Elsie said. Her voice echoed off the tiles around them. “She isn’t a bad kid.”
Bendigo leaned his head against the wall of the stall.
“She was all about farms, the last time we … we saw her. The last time we knew her,” Elsie continued. He heard a creaking. Imagined her leaning against the row of sinks outside, before the long row of mirrors. “I guess she’s different now. Older. But she got obsessed with farms a few months before she disappeared. She wanted to draw them. Talk about them. Visit them. Wanted me to braid her hair in two long pigtails, wanted me to buy her a straw hat. She kept asking if she could have a cow. She saw this Billy Crystal movie where the guy has a cow as a pet and walks it down the street.”
Bendigo had seen the movie on a plane once. He found himself smiling, despite it all.
“But mostly, she just wanted to be like her big sister,” Elsie said. “The fixations came and went. Farms. Under the sea. Bugs. Trains. I’d just started reading her The Chronicles of Narnia at night, because my mother had read them to me, and she loved that. But the one thing that was constant was her … was her wish to be just like Jonie. She wanted to wear Jonie’s clothes. Go into her room, touch her stuff. When Jonie was around, Tilly would sing songs she’d heard coming from Jonie’s bedroom. She would memorize the words and she would sing them, acting all casual, as if she wasn’t trying to impress Jonie. But the singing … to me, it was like a lost little bird calling in the night, waiting for an answer. Jonie was going through her teenage thing, and she didn’t have time for Tilly.”
