Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [120]
He lunged, I twisted, but he grabbed me around the waist. We wrestled into the hallway until he threw me down in a narrow kitchen—open cupboard doors and shelves littered with dry blown leaves and pebbles and white enameled cabinets streaked with rust. Again my head slammed. He got his hands around my throat. I surprised him with a quick release, knocking his arms apart, but did not kick or grab because I did not want him to feel attacked; he would overpower me in an instant with a mindless homicidal fury.
“No sir, don’t do it, I’m with the FBI.”
I scrambled toward the front room, he dug his fingers into my back, my waistband, I rolled and broke the hold, but then my strength was ebbing, something I had not imagined in fantasies of kung fuing through the air.
“I’m a federal agent, I can help you—”
I kept up evasive action as best I could, trying to get to the purse, writhing away by inches, dragged back, trying to get him to hear me.
“Sir! Don’t mess! I’m a federal agent, you’ll get the death penalty, I’m a federal agent—”
I must have said it, choked it, twenty times even as he climbed on top of me and put his thumbs on my eyes in some bullshit marine move, and I slammed his inner elbows so his torso fell on mine, his spit all over my face, and he reared up again and I saw myself dead on the floor in that putrefying kitchen with cockroaches swarming the drain, and my mind kept repeating, It’s only pain, and, The wisdom to know, the wisdom to know—until suddenly he stopped and said, “It’s no good.”
Oh God, what was this? Was I saved because Ray Brennan could not get an erection? Could that be true? The same thing that happened with Juliana in the van? Saved? By some crazy, unbelievable irony? Saved, by impotence?
It wasn’t that. It was crazier: “I just can’t hurt you if you’re going to fight.”
I waited, thoughts pinwheeling, breathing the breath of this stranger.
“Then can we … get up, please?”
He shifted off me and I hand-over-handed my way up the cabinets and would have vomited in the sink if it weren’t for the cockroaches.
I had reason to believe he had hit his upper limit and would now press the reset button and regain control. I knew a lot about Ray Brennan. Had this been an UNSUB I would have lost my urine when he pulled me through the door, but this was old home week, reuniting with the crazy brother whose psychotic breaks and hospitalizations you know so well. I just can’t hurt you. Unless you are drugged unconscious, or playing dead, like a doll … or really dead.
Juliana said: “He banged my head as if I were a doll.”
Sometime in there the phone had stopped ringing.
“This is what is going to happen,” I said in the stillness. “Sir? Do you hear my voice?”
He had retrieved the knife from where it was sticking upright in the floor.
And I had my leather bag.
“The negotiator wants to talk to you. That’s why they’re calling. His job is to get you out of here in one piece.”
I did not mention Bridget. This was Ray Brennan’s moment in the sun.
“They want to talk to you, sir. They know I’m in here. I’m one of them, and you know, because you’re former military, that we take care of our own. It comes down to this: if I’m not alive, you’re not alive.”
Brennan had stopped his slow advance, knife in hand, and shook his head, as if shaking off a dream.
“Run that by me again? You’re telling me you’re not one of those nuts who tries to get you to believe in Jesus?”
He had taken a while to dial it in, but that was fine; I had managed to reach unobtrusively into the bag and hit 911.
“I talk to God,” he was saying, “so I don’t need your crap.”
“I don’t sell Bibles. I’m a federal agent.”
The phone inside the bag was lit. The screen was active. I was betting the farm that a well-trained emergency operator had picked it up and stayed on the line and that we now had an open channel to 911. Someone would be listening and relaying information to the team of negotiators, ten or twelve of them sitting in a squad car