32. Declan
DECLAN
The last finger never folds. The lead officer opens his hand flat instead, turns it palm down toward the pavement, and the stack comes off the glass and settles back along the wall.
Somebody says hold twice on the radio. Gage’s forearm stays across my chest for three seconds after there is no reason to hold me back.
The explanation comes through the command vehicle in a flat voice.
The subject has moved the hostage through a second doorway into the glass room and locked it, and a room with two glass walls and a weapon already presented is a room they take when they have run out of better ideas.
The speaker changes with the door. Before that I had two women in a hallway and every word of it.
Now the microphone in the wall under the credenza sits behind a closed door and a table, and what comes out of the command vehicle is Avery’s cadence with half the consonants gone.
I recognize the careful voice Avery uses when she is frightened.
I get that much, and I get Sasha’s voice going up at the ends of her sentences.
I do not get the sentences. Cruz stands with his ear eight inches from the speaker and does not pretend he is hearing more than I am.
Cruz waits until my hand has closed twice on the frame of the command-vehicle door, then puts a clipboard against my chest hard enough that I take it or wear it.
Employee roster off the front desk, nineteen names, a pen clipped at the top.
“Names against faces,” he says. “Everybody behind that barricade gets a mark. You give the officer a number and you give him what’s missing.
” It is busywork, and he hands it to me anyway, because a man holding a clipboard has both hands occupied.
My gun is locked in Gage’s desk and my keys are in Cruz’s jacket, and I put them there myself, which is the only part of this morning I can call a decision.
The names go sideways on me the way they always do when my pulse is up.
I take the reading strip out of the emergency file cover, lay it under the first line, and work down the page the way Avery taught me the winter she lost patience with watching me guess.
One line showing, finger under the word, say it out loud before you decide what it is.
Baird. Coyle. Ferreira. Two Kowalskis. It takes me a long time to do a job a fifth grader does in ninety seconds, and I do not rush it, because rushing a page is how I put my name on a route sheet for the woman standing in a room with Avery.
The faces are easier. A receptionist in a cardigan with no coat over it, arms crossed, shaking hard enough that the officer keeps checking on her.
Two paralegals sharing one phone. A courier who will not leave because his van is inside the tape.
A man from the title company on two who keeps asking whether he can move his car.
I mark seventeen, then go through the roster again with the strip, because seventeen is not a number I am willing to be wrong about.
I get seventeen the second time. Avery is one of the two that are missing. Nadia Bell is the other.
I give the officer the clipboard, the number, and both names, and I tell him Bell was on the floor when the elevator came up and is not on this street now.
He talks into his shoulder. The answer comes back that a woman is on the stairwell landing between two and three, that she has been told twice to stay down and has twice said she intends to, and that the stairwell sits inside the containment until the team takes it.
“She’s behind a fire door with the latch thrown,” the officer says.
“Right now that’s the best address in the building.
” Cruz writes the time in the margin and hands the clipboard back for me to hold.
Trigger comes around the front of Gage’s truck with his hood up and his phone already dark in his hand.
He is nineteen, he has been useful all morning, and he wants to be useful again.
“Alley door’s on the latch,” he says, low, close to my ear, with one eye on the officers.
“Service side. I walked past it coming in. We put a hand on that bar and we’ve got Bell down the stairs in forty seconds, and nobody upstairs hears a thing.
” He has the geometry right. I have gone through worse doors than that with less information and been proud of myself in the truck afterward.
“No.” It comes out flatter than I mean it to, so I give him the reason, because a kid told no without a reason goes and does it anyway.
“That door opens onto thirty feet of stairwell under the floor she’s standing on.
Latch bar bangs, the pressure changes, somebody’s boot squeaks on a landing, and the woman with the gun hears a door open in a building she thinks she locked.
Then she stops talking and starts deciding.
” Trigger looks at the alley mouth for a while, then puts his back against the truck and leaves it there.
My hands hurt. I have bent the clipboard along its spine and did not notice doing it.
Everything I have ever been any good at is on the other side of that glass.
I took a door off its hinges in Hammond with a halligan and two men behind me.
I went through a screen door in Terre Haute with nothing in my hands.
That is everything I know how to do. It is what Cruz kept me for, what Gage called me for at two in the morning for years, and the part of me Sasha sat across a table and admired.
There is a door ninety feet from me with Avery behind it, and the correct use of all of that today is to hold a clipboard on a curb and let strangers work.
Sasha’s voice comes up through the speaker in a run of three or four sentences and the only word that arrives whole is mug.
Cruz keeps his eyes on the front doors. He spent enough time in my mother’s kitchen to know there was only one mug Sasha could mean.
I gave that woman a key, a hoodie, a page out of a route book, and a bed in a house with Avery’s labels still inside the cupboards, and now she is reciting those memories one by one into a wall microphone.
Avery answers. It takes her a moment, it is short when it comes, and I cannot make out a word of it.
An officer with a beard and a laminated card comes over and asks about Sasha the way you ask a man about a tool.
Does she reload under stress. Is she right-handed.
Does she carry a second weapon. Has she ever been shot at.
I answer all four in under a minute. Yes, right, sometimes an ankle rig with a small revolver in it, and no.
He writes it down and goes away, and the useful thing about me on this street turns out to be knowing a woman well enough to describe how she will go about killing somebody.
Cruz reads the elapsed off the command log and says it out loud for both of us.
Twenty-two minutes since the first unit stopped the street.
The ambulances are staged past the second cruiser, lights off.
Gage stands at the corner of the building with the officer holding the floor plan, pointing up.
The sun has come around far enough to put the front of Bell & Rourke in glare, and the lobby is a sheet of white I could not see a person cross.
The speaker goes quiet for eleven seconds, long enough that Cruz grips my shoulder before I know I have leaned.
Then the shot comes, once flat through the speaker and once a half-beat later off the front glass, the same clap arriving twice out of step with itself, and I stand on the curb holding a bent clipboard and I do not know whose gun it was.