“They got him,” the agent said, looking at them. He sounded unsure.
“Bullshit,” said Lily. “They never got inside. If you got a radio, you better call the paramedics, because it sounds like Hood sprayed the place . . . .”
The building door popped open and Kieffer, in a crouch, his gun drawn, stepped down onto the stoop.
“What’s happening, what’s happening?” shouted the armored agent on the corner.
“Back it off, back it off,” Kieffer shouted. “He’s got hostages.”
“You dumb sonofabitch, Kieffer . . .” Lucas shouted.
“Get out of here, Davenport, this is a federal crime scene.”
“Fuck you, asshole . . . .”
“I’ll arrest your ass, Davenport.”
“Come down here and you can arrest me for kicking a federal agent’s ass, ’cause I will,” Lucas shouted back. “You dumb cocksucker . . .”
The federal entry team and the Minneapolis teams stabilized the area and hustled the other tenants out of the apartment building and adjacent buildings. The city’s hostage negotiator set up a mobile phone to call Hood.
When Lucas and Lily returned to the surveillance apartment, Daniel was talking with the AIC and Sloan was leaning against the apartment wall, listening.
“ . . . go on television and explain exactly what happened,” Daniel was droning piously. “We’ve had substantial experience with this type of situation, we had the scene cleared and stable, we had an excellent action plan prepared by our best officers. Suddenly, with no coordination and without proper intelligence—intelligence that we had: we knew that door wouldn’t fall to AVONs, which is one reason we didn’t try them—suddenly, an FBI team takes jurisdiction and promptly launches what I can only describe as a rash action, which not only endangered the lives of many police officers and innocent people in adjoining apartments, but also jeopardizes the chances of capturing Bill Hood alive, and cracking this terrible conspiracy which has taken the lives of so many people . . . .”
“It should have worked,” the AIC said bitterly.
Daniel discarded his pious-preacher voice and turned hard. “Bullshit. You know, I never would have believed you’d have tried this. I thought you were too smart. If you’d come in with your team, taken some time, talked it over, we could have done a joint operation and you would have gotten the credit. The way it happened . . . I ain’t taking the rap.”
“Could I get everybody out of here? Just for a minute,” the AIC asked loudly. “Everybody?”
“Lucas, you stay,” Daniel said.
When the other cops were gone, the AIC looked briefly at Lucas, then turned to Daniel.
“You need a witness?”
“Never hurts,” Daniel said.
“So what do you want?”
“I don’t know. I’ll probably want your seal of approval and some active lobbying on a half-dozen federal law-enforcement-assistance grant applications . . .”
“No problem . . .”
“ . . . and a line into your files. When I call you on something, I want what you got and no bullshit.”
“Jesus Christ, Daniel.”
“You can write me a letter to that effect.”
“Nothing on paper . . .”
“If there’s nothing on paper, there’s no deal.”
The AIC was sweating. He could have had a coup. He was now in charge of a disaster. “All right,” he said finally. “I gotta trust you.”
“Hey, we’ve always been friends,” Daniel offered, slapping the FBI man on the back.
“Fuck that,” said the AIC, wrenching away. “That fuckin’ Clay. He’s calling me every fifteen minutes, screaming for action. He’s coming here, you know. He’ll have that fuckin’ gun in his armpit, the asshole.”
“I feel for you,” Daniel said.
“I don’t give a shit about that,” the AIC said. “Just find something that’ll get me off the hook.”
“I think we can do that,” Daniel said. He glanced at Lucas. “We’ll say that Minneapolis made the call and we decided to use FBI experts to attempt an entry. When that couldn’t be accomplished, we went to an alternate plan that used city officers to negotiate a surrender.”
“The fuckin’ TV’ll never buy it,” the agent said unhappily.
“If we both agree, what choice have they got?”
• • •
Del, Lily and Sloan were standing together in the hallway when Lucas and Daniel left the surveillance apartment.
“What’d we do?” Del asked.
“A deal,” Daniel said.
“I hope you got a lot,” Del said.
“We did all right, as long as we can pull Hood out of there,” Daniel said.
“Maybe this wasn’t a time to deal,” Sloan suggested. “Maybe this was a time to tell it like it is.”
Daniel shook his head. “You always deal,” he said.
“Always,” said Lucas.
Lily and Del nodded and Sloan shrugged.
Hood had fired seven shots with a big-bore pistol through the oak door after the molded-compound AVON rounds had failed to blow it open. When they saw that the door wasn’t going to fall, the agents had cleared away from it and nobody was hurt. The firing stopped, there was the odd explosion, and then silence.
Twenty minutes after the attempted entry, with Daniel still meeting with the agent-in-charge, the police hostage negotiator called Hood. Hood answered, said he wasn’t coming out, but that his friends in the apartment had nothing to do with any of it.
“You know me?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’ve had a line on you, Billy,” the negotiator said. “But that wasn’t us at the door, that was another agency.”
“The FBI . . .”
“We’re just trying to get everybody out, including you, without anybody getting hurt . . . .”
“These guys in here, they didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Could you send them out?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want any of those white guys to snipe them. You know? The fuckin’ FBIs, man, they shoot us down like dirty dogs.”
“You send them out, I guarantee no harm will come to them.”
“I’ll ask them,” Hood said. “They’re scared. They’re sleeping, and all of a sudden somebody tries to blow up the fuckin’ apartment, you know?”
“I guarantee . . .”
“I’ll ask them. You call back in two minutes.” He hung up.
“What’s going on?” Lucas asked. He and Lily had cut around the building to come up on the negotiator’s car.
“I think he’s gonna let the other two guys out.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. He’s not thinking like they’re hostages.”
“They’re not. They’re his friends.”
“What happened with Daniel?” the negotiator asked.
“The feebs are out,” Lucas said.
“All right.”
The negotiator called back after a little more than two minutes.
“They’re coming out, but they gotta come out the window. The goddamn door is all fucked up, we can’t get it open,” Hood said.
“All right. That’s fine. Break the window, whatever you have to do.”
“Tell those white boys, so they don’t get sniped.”
“We’ll pass the word right now. Give us a minute, then send them out. And you ought to think about it too, Billy; we really don’t want to do you any harm.”
“Save the bullshit and pass the word not to snipe these guys,” Hood said, and hung up.
“The two guys are coming out,” the negotiator told the radio man next to him. “Pass the word.”
As they watched, with Lucas and Lily standing beside the car, a chair sailed through the front window and broken glass was knocked out of the window frame with a broom. Then a blanket was thrown over the window ledge. The first man stood in the window, jumped the five feet to the ground and hurried down the street toward the bl
ocking police cars. A patrolman met him as he crossed the line of cars.
Lily looked at him and shook her head. “Don’t know him. Wasn’t in any of the photos.”
The second man followed a half-minute later, sitting on the window ledge with his legs dangling, talking back into the apartment. After a few seconds, he shrugged, hopped down and walked to the police line. The negotiator got back on the phone.
“Billy? Billy? Talk to me, man. Talk to me . . . . Come on, Billy, you know that’s not right. That was the FBI, we cleared those fuckers out of here . . . . I know, I know . . . . No, bullshit, I don’t do that and the men here don’t do that. You tell me one time . . . Billy? Billy?” He shook his head and dropped the receiver to his lap. “Fuck it, he hung up.”
“What’s he say?” Lily asked.
“He says us white boys are going to snipe him,” the negotiator said. The negotiator, who was burly and black, smiled and picked up the phone and started dialing again. “He’s probably right, fuckin’ white boys with guns.”
The line was busy.
“Where’s that file Anderson made?” the negotiator asked his radio man. The radio man passed a notebook. “Call the phone company, tell them what’s happening and ask them to check the number, see where the call’s going.”
“Check his family,” Lucas suggested. “There oughta be a phone number.”
The negotiator found the Bemidji number in Anderson’s notebook, dialed it, found it busy. “That’s it,” he said. “We ought to have somebody get onto the sheriff’s office up there, get them to go see his wife. We might want to talk to her. We can get her to call here, and then switch her in, so we can hear what they’re saying.”
A plainclothes cop hurried up. “One of the roommates says that Hood tried to fire a rifle and it blew up on him. He’s hurt. He’s got a cut on his face, he’s bleeding. The roommate doesn’t think it’s too bad.”
Lucas looked at Lily, and Lily grinned and nodded.
Five minutes later, the negotiator got through again.
“You can’t get out, Billy. All that’s gonna happen is that somebody’s gonna get hurt. We’ll get you a lawyer, free, we’ll get you . . . Fuck.”
“Try his wife?” Lucas suggested.
“How about those two guys who came out?” asked Lily. “Maybe they’d help . . . .”
Kieffer drifted up to the car. “I thought you were out of here,” Lucas said, standing to confront him.
“We’re observing,” Kieffer said bitterly.
“Observe my ass.” Lucas stood directly in front of Kieffer, their chests almost touching.
“Fuckin’ touch me, Davenport,” Kieffer said. “I’ll have your ass in jail . . . .”
“I’ll touch you,” Lily said, pushing between them. Lucas reluctantly gave a step. “You gonna put me in jail for assault? I’m not so polite as these Minneapolis assholes, Kieffer, and I don’t have to honor any of Daniel’s deals. I can go talk to the TV on my own.”
“Fuck it,” Kieffer said, stepping back. “I’m observing.”
The negotiator tried again, spoke longer this time. “You can trust us . . . . Wait a minute, let me talk to a guy . . . .”
He finally turned to Lucas, covered the mouthpiece on the phone and said, “You know any Indians?”
“A few.”
“You want to try him? He’s scared. Mention these people you know . . . .”
Lucas took the phone. “Billy Hood. This is Lucas Davenport from the Minneapolis cops. Listen, you know Dick Yellow Hand, a friend of Bluebird’s? Or Chief Dooley, the barber? Do you know Earl and Betty May? They’re friends of mine, man. They’d be worried about you. I’m worried about you. There’s nothing you can do in there. You’ll just get hurt. If you come out, you’ll be okay. I swear.”
There was another moment of silence. Then Hood said, “You know Earl and Betty?”
“Yeah, man. You could call them. They’d tell you I’m okay.”
“You white?”
“Yeah, yeah, but I don’t want to hurt anybody. Come on out, Billy. I swear to God nobody wants to shoot at you. Walk on out and we can all go home.”
“Let me think, man. Let me think, okay?”
“Okay, Billy.” The line went dead.
“What?” Lucas asked the negotiator, who had been listening on a headset.
“He may be calling these people. Earl and Betty, was that their names?”
“Yeah. Just about everybody knows them.”
“We’ll give him two minutes and try again.”
Two minutes later, the line was busy. After three, they got through. The negotiator said a few words, then handed the phone to Lucas.
“Is this the guy who knows Earl and Betty?” Hood asked.
“Yeah. Davenport,” Lucas said.
“I’ll come out, but I want you to come up here and get me. If I just come outside, one of those white boys is gonna snipe me.”
“No, they won’t, Billy . . . . Listen . . .” Lucas hunched over the phone.
“Bullshit, man, don’t bullshit me. Those guys been against me for a long time. Ever since I was born, man. They’re just waiting. I got nothing against you, so you’d be safe. You want me out, you come up here.”
Lucas looked at the negotiator. “What do you think?”
“He killed the guy in New York,” the negotiator said. “He tried to kill the FBI team.”
“He had a reason. Maybe he really wants the protection.”
“He’s scared,” the negotiator agreed.
“What are you going to do?” Hood asked.
“Hold on a minute, we’re talking,” Lucas said. He looked at Lily. “There might not be any other way to take him alive.”
“You’d be nuts to go in there,” Lily objected. “We’ve got him. Sooner or later he’s got to come out and nobody has to get hurt. Nobody out here . . .”
“We need to talk to him.”
“I don’t need to talk to him,” she said. “I just need him any way we can get him. Dead or alive.”
“You don’t care if we get the rest of the group?” Lucas asked.
“Sure. Theoretically. But Hood’s my man. After he’s taken care of, the rest is up to you and the feebs.”
Kieffer had been standing back from the car, looking down the street at the apartment. “It’d take some balls to go in there,” he said.
His tone was ambiguous, as if he weren’t sure that Lucas would do it.
“Hey, we aren’t talking balls here,” the negotiator said, anger in his voice.
“Yeah, what the fuck did that crack mean, Kieffer?” Lily asked, turning to Kieffer with her hands on her hips.
“Take it easy,” Lucas said, waving them off. He didn’t look at Kieffer but stared past the negotiator at the apartment window. With the glass broken out, it was a black square in the red stone. “I’ll give it a try.”
“God damn it, Davenport, you’re crazy,” Lily said. But then she said, “Talk to him through the window. Don’t go inside, just talk over the ledge.”
Lucas got back on the phone. “Billy? I’m ready, man.”
“Well, come on.”
“You’re not bullshitting me?”
“I’m not, I just don’t want one of them white boys to snipe me, man.”
“They see him from across the street. They got a gun on him. He’s halfway up into the room,” the radio man said quietly, as he listened on his headset. “Del says that when you get up there, if he tries anything, you drop below the window; we’ll hose him down.”
“Okay.” Lucas glanced at Lily, nodded and said into the phone, “I’m stepping out, Billy. I’m down the street, way to your right as you look out the window.”
“Come on, man. This is getting old.”
Lucas stepped out from behind the car, his hands held wide and open at shoulder height.
“Okay, man,” he yelled at the window.
He walked slowly down the street, his hands wide, conscious of two dozen sets of eye
s following him. The day was cool, but he could feel sweat starting on his back. A line of blue-and-white pigeons watched from a red-tiled roof down the street. On another roof, beside a chimney and out of Hood’s line of sight, an ERU officer was lined up on the window with an M-16. A police radio poked unintelligible sentences into the morning air. Lucas was thirty feet out.
“Come on, man, you’re okay,” Hood called from the window. Lucas moved closer, his hands still away from his side. When he was five feet from the window, Hood called again. “Come straight on in. I’ll be off to the left. I don’t want to see no gun pointing at me, man. I’m really tight, you know?”
Lucas reached out, touched the outer wall of the building and eased up to the window. Looking in at a sharp angle, he could see nothing but a broken-down chair. He moved a little farther into the window opening. There was nobody in his line of sight. The red beanbag was squashed in the middle of the floor, with a dent in it, as though somebody had been thrown on top of it.
“I’m giving up, man,” Hood said. His voice came from off to the right, but Lucas still couldn’t see him. He took another step.
“I want you inside,” Hood said.
“I can’t do that, Billy,” Lucas said.
“You’re just setting me up, man. You’re just making me a target. If I come to that window, I’m a dead man, aren’t I?”
“I swear to God, Billy . . . .”
“You don’t have to swear to God. Just get up in that window. I’ll be there. I want you to go out right in front of me, man, so those white boys don’t snipe me.”
Lucas looked around once, muttered “Fuck it” under his breath, put his hands on the window ledge and boosted himself up. As he crawled onto the ledge, Hood was suddenly there, his back to the outer wall. He was looking at Lucas over the shotgun.
“Step in further,” he said. The muzzle of the shotgun followed Lucas’ head like a steel eye.
“Come on, man,” Lucas said. There hadn’t been any shells in the closet with the shotgun. Since Hood was using it, he either had found the shells or was bluffing with an empty weapon. Why would he bluff? He’d used a pistol of some kind, anyone would be willing to believe that the pistol was loaded . . . . “This can’t do any good.”