“There are no police outside,” Wallace shouts. He’s walked Zoe with him as he’s approached Daniel, the gun held out before him.
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Zoe thinks at Daniel. If he gets himself killed now, that will negate her own meaningful death.
Wallace says, “None of the tellers had a chance to push the alarm. I was watching.”
“It was pressed as you were first coming in,” Daniel tells him.
Wallace has reached Daniel and has his gun aimed at Daniel’s forehead, inches away. But Daniel’s words have him worried. “No,” Wallace insists. “There was no reason then—”
Daniel tips his head toward the window and urges him, “Look.”
The arm Wallace has around Zoe’s neck gives a spasm. He orders Bobby, “Open the blinds.”
Bobby does as instructed.
Wallace says, “Shit!”
And it’s only then that Zoe sees the police cars all over the street.
A man with a flak jacket and a megaphone calls out, “Put down your weapon and let’s start working on a peaceful resolution to this situation.”
Whether it was Charlotte pressing the alarm, or Milo Van Der Meer calling it in, the troops have been summoned.
“Shit!” Wallace says again. “Close the blinds!” Angrily, he shoves Zoe away from himself, so that she falls to the ground, dropping the bag of money. She skids on the smooth marble floor, and she ends up actually sliding into Daniel.
Go! Daniel mouths at her again.
It pains her to abandon him, to have him watch her abandon him. Even though that’s what he’s telling her to do. Even though they both know she can’t help these people now. Even though she knows they’ll all be stuck with this if she dies. She puts her arms around herself. It’s 1:38, with the second hand closing in on the final seconds of the minute. This story line is spiraling down into total disaster, and she only has one playback left. She tells herself, I can’t risk Daniel. It isn’t like it’s clear what they should have done differently. There are too many variables. She needs to keep Daniel out of the bank. She would rather not have to sacrifice Charlotte. And Bobby. And the teller who was crying because Zoe was being taken hostage. Not to mention the baby stroller woman outside.
But she can’t risk Daniel.
For her tenth try, she needs to let them die so he can live. Her voice shaking for the treachery of it, she says, “Playback.”
And.
Nothing.
Happens.
CHAPTER 13
THE MINUTE HAND OF THE CLOCK MOVES TO 1:39.
Now, now time is supposed to be up.
Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!
Zoe knows she counted the playbacks correctly. So all of a sudden the universe is changing the rules on her?
Daniel is looking at her quizzically. He whispers, so as not to alert Wallace, “Does it always happen like this? You jump to where you’re going, but for the rest of us …?” He lets his voice drift off because she has very obviously not jumped anywhere.
Zoe lets her arms drop to her sides. “No,” she whispers back to him. “It didn’t work.”
“OK,” he says. “What does that mean?”
“We must have taken more than twenty-three minutes.” She’s working it out as she speaks. “This clock is set manually. It must be a minute off from the cell phones, which use a satellite and are all the same. We have to wait a full twenty-three minutes from now before I can do another playback.”
“To here?” Daniel’s voice is louder than it should be. “Why would we want to come back to this?”
Which, of course, is the whole point.
One of the bank managers—Zoe thinks it’s the one who, the time Bobby the guard was wounded, was tending him—goes, “Shhh!” at them.
Fortunately, Wallace has taken a time-out for a minor temper tantrum, so he hasn’t noticed. He kicks over the display table with the deposit and withdrawal slips.
Zoe’s breath catches, as Bobby’s gun, which he had placed on the table, hits the ground …
… And slides on the highly polished floor, a fraction of a second too fast for Bobby to intercept, and into one of the managers’ offices.
So, for good or bad, that’s one weapon out of play. Daniel’s is still on the low table with the coffee supplies. He can’t reach it without getting up; Zoe can’t reach it without going over Daniel.
And meanwhile …
“Hey!” Wallace has caught on that he has no time for irritability. At least not against inanimate objects. He kicks Daniel in the ribs. “Shut,” he commands, “up.” Then he says, “This changes nothing. Get up.” He tugs on Zoe’s right arm, the one that belongs to the hand that’s still clutching the meaningless folder. She’s halfway between kneeling and standing when he tells her, “Put that down, and pick up the money.”
A plan—born of desperation and perhaps of watching a few too many action/adventure movies—begins to form in her mind. Zoe figures Wallace can only kill her once. Unless, of course, someone else in here has the playback ability—but, if someone does, she’ll never know. In any case, she doesn’t let go of her own papers but picks up Wallace’s bag with her left hand. From the bottom. She gives the bag what she hopes is an imperceptible shake, and the stacks of bills begin to slide out through the opening.
“You stupid—” Wallace starts.
Just as Zoe flings her elbow into his stomach.
It’s not that she’s strong, but she has caught him unawares.
He lets go of her right arm and doubles over, just a bit. In a moment he will straighten up, and Zoe knows he will be very, very angry. But in this moment she goes for the one self-defense move she knows: She brings her knee up into his groin.
Only …
He takes a step back.
So she misses.
And her advantage of surprise is over that quickly. He strides forward and strikes her with the back of his hand—a lot harder than she had managed to hit him.
Already badly positioned, she falls over.
She has heard people refer to seeing stars after a blow to the head, and had assumed this was simply a convention in cartoons. But now she sees stars, and they’re exploding. Also, the room is spinning. But even with all of that going on she knows exactly where she is, and she expects to fall on Daniel.
Except she doesn’t.
He has rolled out of the way.
Not—she suddenly realizes—to avoid her, but to get at his gun.
She realizes this because Wallace has already come to the same conclusion. Wallace has dropped to his knees, and now he pulls Zoe in front of him, using her as a shield, his arm once more around her neck. “So help me, I will kill her,” he announces.
The stars from Zoe’s vision clear, revealing Daniel on his knees also, his gun trained on Wallace behind her.
And she can feel Wallace’s gun pressed against the side of her head.
Oh crap, Zoe thinks. This is like a replay of the original time, only now it’s her in the middle. It doesn’t help to think about how that first time ended.
Daniel asks, “What would killing her accomplish?”
“I don’t want to,” Wallace claims, which is a relief to hear. Only he undermines this by adding, “But I don’t want to get killed.”
Daniel says, “And that won’t happen if you put the gun down.”
“I don’t want to get arrested either,” Wallace says.
Daniel shakes his head. “Can’t help you there,” he admits. “But the penalty for attempted armed robbery is less than for murder.” Very gently, almost pleading now, he says, “Put the gun down, Wallace.”
Zoe feels the gun going tap-tap against her temple as Wallace’s hand begins to shake.
“All I wanted,” Wallace says, “was a fresh start.”
“I understand,” Daniel says.
The barrel of Wallace’s gun digs firmly into Zoe’s flesh. “Yeah?” Suddenly he’s angry again. “Someone like you understands someone like me? Is tha
t what you’re saying?” He speaks very slowly and distinctly. “If I have to kill her, it will be your fault. It will be because you made me kill her. Are you so cocky you can live with that, Mr. Fancy-East-Ave.-Office P.I.? Knowing you made me kill her?”
“Killing her gains you nothing,” Daniel tells him.
And Wallace finishes, “Except for the satisfaction of knowing you didn’t want me to.”
And that, Zoe thinks, is that. A deadlock. A dead end. A dead draw. Stop thinking “dead,” she tells herself. But, of course, she can’t.
A voice behind Zoe announces, “Yeah, well, I don’t want you to kill her either,” and Zoe realizes it’s bank guard Bobby. She guesses, by the way Wallace has stiffened, that Bobby has located the gun she saw go sliding under the furniture of the bank manager’s office. She gathers that Bobby is holding his gun at Wallace’s head. Wily P.I. that he is, Daniel, who was facing that direction, had kept his face from showing anything during Bobby’s approach, had kept his eyes from wavering off Wallace.
“Even if,” Wallace says, “one or both of you get a shot off before I can, even if you put the bullet in my brain and I’m dead in an instant, in that instant my finger will tighten on the trigger, and she’s dead.”
Déjà vu, Zoe thinks. She knew what Wallace was going to say, before he said it, because she has heard him say much the same thing already.
And she has seen the result.
If she could get her mouth to work, she would warn Daniel to back up, because he’s about to get her blood all over him. And she knows how hard it was for her to get his blood off her. It is only in this moment that she feels it is well and truly gone.
Daniel is still looking at Wallace, not at Zoe. Same as last time. He even has much the same scared and desperate look in his eyes as he did then, though it is not his life in danger. He says, “Nobody has to die.”
Does his voice have a tremor? Or does it just sound that way to Zoe because she herself is shaking?
“You don’t want to hurt her,” Daniel says to Wallace. “And I’m willing to take her place. I’ll walk out of here with you.”
At which point Zoe’s voice does work. “No,” she tells Daniel, though every ounce of self-survival instinct is telling her to shut up. “He says he’ll let me go once he’s safely out of here. You said he wasn’t a bad man. We have to trust him.”
Zoe doesn’t trust him. On a scale of one to ten, she fears her chance of survival is probably about one. But if Daniel takes her place, she suspects his chance will be lower.
Finally, finally, Daniel is looking at her. She’s convinced he can read her mind. And, in turn, she can read his. They both know he’s never going to agree to let Wallace take her out of here.
And apparently Wallace can read their minds, too. They are at an impasse. She feels him take a steadying breath. His arm tightens around her neck.
She remembers what it felt like to get shot, that run-into-by-a-freight-train feeling, but she also remembers that—at first—she didn’t even know she’d been hit. Maybe she’ll be lucky and this will be like that. Maybe she’ll be dead before she knows it.
Zoe always wondered, when she read in history class about people getting their heads chopped off, how quick a death that was. Did Marie Antoinette, did Anne Boleyn, did Sir Thomas More die the instant the blade cut through their bodies—or did it take a second or two for their brains to stop sending signals? It would be kind of grim to think they might have gotten a dizzying, disorienting view of their place of execution as their severed heads bounced free from their bodies. To imagine that they had time to think: Yikes! Is that my own headless body I just caught a glimpse of?
Specifically, what Zoe is wondering—beyond how badly a bullet to the brain will hurt—is whether she’ll be aware, as she falls, of the splatter of her blood on Daniel kneeling in front of her.
She closes her eyes, because she doesn’t want to see.
Wallace can only kill you once, she reminds herself. She takes her stolen, wet, stupid, useless paperwork, and she smacks his face with it as hard as she can.
The sound of the gun going off is louder than she expected.
But the freight train is right on schedule.
CHAPTER 14
WELL, SHE HAD ASSUMED DYING WOULD BE FASTER.
And quieter.
Zoe opens her eyes a crack, determined to close them again quickly if there’s the gunshot equivalent of any head-bouncing-off-the-executioner’s-block view to be seen.
What she sees is Daniel, his blue eyes not six inches from her own. He’s saying something, but she can’t hear a thing over the ringing in her ears.
Ear. It’s her right ear that seems to have become home to a vast and inexhaustible collection of clanging cymbals.
She goes to touch her right ear and finds Daniel’s hand there already. She feels for her left ear, and her fingers brush Daniel’s other hand—not covering that ear, but close by. Supporting her head? Maybe? She has to concentrate to get her bearings. She is sitting, not kneeling—which was her last recollection—and not lying down on the floor bleeding out. Or at least she doesn’t think so. Surely she would know by now, even if she was a little slow about catching on that other time. But she doesn’t want to embarrass herself by being the last to know, so she glances around for blood splatter.
None to be seen.
What she does see is one of the bank tellers unlocking the front door to let in the police. Customers and staff getting up off the floor. And Wallace, face down on the ground practically within touching distance, his hands clasped behind his head, with Bobby’s knee on his back, Bobby’s gun pressed to the nape of his neck. Apparently Bobby is a better bank guard than Zoe has given him credit for. No one is dead.
No one is dead.
Not her. Not anyone.
“I didn’t hurt her,” Wallace is protesting. “And, even if she was hurt, that wouldn’t’ve been my fault. My gun only went off accidentally when you ran into me.”
“Oh,” Zoe says to Bobby, not sure if she’s whispering or shouting, “you overpowered him.”
Bobby, looking a bit pasty and wobbly, manages a smile of sorts as he first shakes his head—well, it’s more of a twitch—then nods toward Daniel to indicate he was the one who did the running-into. But before Zoe can turn to thank Daniel, Bobby indicates for her to look up to the ceiling.
There’s a hole, with plaster dust still wafting down like a late-season sprinkling of snow—just like Rochester in March. Or April. Sometimes May …
She forces herself to focus. She wasn’t knocked over by the force of the bullet hitting her, but by Daniel tackling Wallace, forcing his gun arm up so that he fired into the ceiling.
“Thank you,” she says to, or shouts at, Daniel.
He takes his hand away from her ear, which makes the noise in her head get louder.
“Ringing?” he asks sympathetically.
She can hear him through her left ear, over the racket in her right. She nods because she doesn’t want to be obnoxiously loud, like those hard-of-hearing people who refuse to admit they are hard of hearing. She presses her own hand against her ear, even though she liked it better when Daniel was doing it.
Charlotte has come up behind Daniel and is looking at Zoe appraisingly. “Tinnitus,” she proclaims.
Daniel nods. “Should go away over the next few hours.”
Well, that’s a relief to know.
Charlotte is nodding, too. Until she helpfully adds, “Unless there’s permanent hearing loss. That happened to my brother-in-law when he set off illegal fireworks two summers ago. But you should know, one way or the other, within twenty-four hours.”
Daniel scowls at Charlotte, but she doesn’t notice because she’s leaning in close to Zoe. “Thank you,” she tells Zoe. “You were very brave.”
“Very, very brave,” Daniel amends.
“No.” Zoe shakes her head, because she knows how terrified she was.
But Charlotte nods emphatically. She
says, “I was not. I was, in fact, a disappointment to myself. I will hold you up as a model.”
Is she serious? It’s hard to keep a grudge against someone who says something like that seriously.
Paramedics have come in after the police, and a pair of them kneel beside and in front of Zoe, displacing Charlotte, which is no great loss, but also Daniel. “Hey,” one of them says to her, in that jovial tone medical professionals use when they don’t want you to worry, “how are you doing?”
“Tinnitus,” Zoe explains, probably too softly or too loudly.
The paramedic makes a dismissive gesture. “Not to worry. That’ll only last a few hours.”
Daniel winks at her, then goes off to answer questions for the police.
She assumes he’ll have the sense not to talk about playback, because she certainly has no intention of bringing it up.
The paramedics look her over just short of forever. They inform her that she has a powder burn on her right temple, from the gun going off so close. It didn’t hurt until she knew about it, but now it’s hot and sore. They tell her that this, too, should go away sooner rather than later.
Partway through their examination, she glances to where she last saw Daniel, wondering how he’s doing, but apparently the police have finished questioning him. He’s no longer there. She looks around. The bank is not that big: Daniel is gone. Oh, she thinks. Not that she had any right to expect him to hang around and wait for her. She has no right to feel disappointed. What did she expect? She’s known him a lot longer than he’s known her.
The paramedics talk and talk at her, wanting to bring her to the hospital for observation, but she finally convinces them that she feels fine.
Then it’s her turn with the police. They talk and talk at her, wanting more details, but she finally convinces them that at the moment she can’t think straight because she has a splitting headache due to the tinnitus. She doesn’t mention that the noise level inside her head is beginning to move down the scale from full cacophony to simple clamor. She gives them her parents’ old Thurston Road address rather than saying she lives in a group home on Newell, and promises she will report to the downtown precinct office tomorrow to give her statement. She’s trying to leave them with the impression that she’s here with one of the other customers, a responsible adult, and she is just wondering how she is going to get out of the bank without anyone noticing she is in fact alone, when she sees that Daniel has returned.