Chapter 31
“Who is this?” Tommy shouts the question instead of a greeting into the phone. He is back to using the post office phone,
his cell phone shoved into his back pocket and his gun tucked into his waistband. The women are grateful it is no longer in
his hand. He’d been so angry over what Nadine did—the kind of angry that can make a person do reckless, regrettable things.
They’d feared—real, certain fear, unlike anything they’d felt up to that point—that he would kill her.
Instead, he’d just paced and cussed, paced and cussed, ignoring the ringing phone, intermittently talking to himself. “They’re
back there trying to get in. I can hear them.” He walked over to the counter, stepped behind it, and craned his neck to see
into the back part of the building, looking backward and forward, from his hostages to the area where—he wasn’t wrong—they
could all hear people doing something to the building.
If they gained access and came in, the women wondered, would he shoot them? Himself? Was that the way this would end? The
thought brought on more fear. Sylvie thought of Robert. Morrow thought of Maya. Blythe thought of Aaron. Nadine thought about
her secret, of dying without ever telling it.
They were all lost in their private thoughts when Tommy moved to the phone, picking it up like it was what had wronged him as he waited for someone to answer.
When he yelled, “Who is this?” they all jumped in unison and looked wide-eyed at one another before looking to Tommy.
Now they watch him listen to whoever is speaking, each one still trembling and rattled.
They don’t want anything else to set him off.
“Where’s the girl?” he asks, spittle hitting the receiver. He is holding the phone so tightly his knuckles are white. They
cannot hear what is said in return. It was better when he was using his cell phone; they could at least sort of hear what
the person on the other end was saying. “I’m talking about the girl I’ve been talking to all day,” Tommy says. There is more
silence as he listens again. “I ain’t talking to you, dude. I want the one I’ve already been talking to. I need to speak to
that girl.”
He needs Hope, Sylvie thinks. We all do.
Outside, in the NOC, thanks to the technology available to the new team, everyone has listened to Tommy’s ravings through
the speaker, the escalating anger they tried and failed to talk him down from. Finally, Chris gives up further attempts at
discussion and turns to scan the outer area, finding Hope on the back wall. With a frown on his face, he waves his arm to
summon her.
She goes to take a step toward him, but Bo places his hand on her arm to halt her. “I told you,” he says. “Rapport. It’s not
easy to establish, and it isn’t something you can just hand off to someone else.” He raises his eyebrows at her. “Now you
just need lady luck on your side.”
Hope hums the Sinatra song as she walks away from him and enters the back area to take Chris’s seat.
Across from her, Adam watches as she puts on the headset.
She has done this many times before, in a different NOC, with a slightly different setup, with a different face across from her.
And though she ran away from it, she can do it again.
“Hello, Tommy?” she asks. She is pleased there is no waver in her voice. There is, she realizes, no waver inside her at all.
A resignation, a determination, has replaced all nervousness. She has been assigned a task, and the task is to see this thing
through.
“What’s the deal?” Tommy asks. “They said you’re leaving?” Tommy doesn’t have a waver in his voice either. But he does have
anger with an undercurrent of desperation.
“There’s another team here now,” she explains. “From the county. They are more . . . set up to handle things than we are.”
“Seemed to me we were doing just fine without the county,” Tommy huffs.
“Well, if that were true,” she says, “then your hostages would already be released.”
There is a silence. Then, “And I’d be in jail for the rest of my life.”
This she remembers how to deal with, her training ingrained in her no matter how long she has ignored it. Time to minimize.
“You won’t go to jail for the rest of your life. Not if I have any say about it.” She pauses. “And I do. I will.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, you didn’t have any say about whether you got to stay here and talk to me. So I’m not sure you’ve
got much say in what they do to me after this.”
“Actually, there’s lots we can do. And the sooner we resolve this, the more bargaining power we have.”
“Who’s we?” Tommy asks.
She smiles, thinking of Bo, of his belief in the rapport between her and Tommy. “You and me,” she says.
There is another spate of silence as he takes this in.
She needs him to believe she is there for him, that she is on his side.
She glances over at the team who wanted to be where she is right now.
In some ways, she is on his side and not theirs.
Needless to say, once this is over and Tommy is in custody, that can no longer be true.
But Tommy doesn’t need to know that. He won’t know until it is too late.
“When’s Covey going to be here?” Tommy changes the subject. “You promised.”
“I did,” she says. “And I always keep my promises. Do you remember the promise I asked you to make?”
“Yes,” he grouses.
“Are you still going to keep that promise?” A silence follows, and she imagines that he is looking at the women, remembering
his promise not to harm them.
“Tommy?” she prompts. “You can’t expect me to keep my promise if you’re not going to keep yours.”
“Yeah,” he says, his voice gruff. “I’m gonna keep it.”
“Good,” says Hope. “I’m glad to hear that.”
On the screen in front of her a text box pops up. It is Adam asking, What did he promise?
She types her response, That he would not harm anyone. Across from her, Adam gives her a thumbs-up, looking relieved. But also surprised. He thinks, Hope suddenly understands, that I’m a rookie, that I’m just winging this and I’ve never negotiated before. No wonder this team is so anxious to move
me out of the way.
“I don’t have an exact ETA on Covey’s arrival, but your stepmother said she was going to get here as fast as she could. She
said she needed to get ready first, and then she had to make the trip here.”
Tommy gives a dismissive little laugh. “That woman won’t go anywhere without her face on.”
“In my experience, that’s true of a lot of women,” Hope says.
She thinks of her mom, who always fussed at her for not wearing lipstick.
She hears her voice even now: “You need color or you look sick.” Even on her deathbed her mother had insisted Hope help her sit up and apply the bare minimum of makeup.
“Wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m dying,” she’d quipped.
Sometimes Hope was able to laugh when she said this.
Sometimes she had to excuse herself and cry. After
her mother was gone, Hope stopped wearing makeup altogether. She stopped doing a lot of things. But she cannot think about
that now.
“Tell me about Covey,” she says, to keep Tommy talking.
“Not much to tell,” he says. “He’s a Boykin spaniel, a hunting dog. He was . . . with my dad when he died. They say that he
came and sat right by my dad when he . . .” She hears the emotion pinch off his voice and gives him time to compose himself,
listening to the pain that radiates through the air between them. A big part of negotiation, she knows, is just listening
to someone whom no one has listened to in a long time.
“Back when I still lived at home,” he resumes, “I helped train him. I went on his first hunts. So he was sorta my dog too.
And after my dad was . . . gone, I wanted to bring him to live with us, but Jane—that’s my stepmother—she said she couldn’t
part with him. Said he was her emotional support animal now.” Hope can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “We went back and
forth over it, but in the end there wasn’t really anything I could do about it. So he lives with her, and my dad is gone,
and I—” She can hear him swallow back the tears. “I’m here,” he finishes.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she says to him for the second time, feeling as inane as the words sound.
“Why are you sorry? It’s not your fault.
” She can hear him trying to make things lighter, to banish the heavy feelings welling up inside him, threatening to spill over.
He doesn’t want the women he’s holding hostage to see anything but the bravado he’s been relying on all day.
But Hope sees the crack and decides to stick her finger in it.
With all the compassion and gentleness she can muster, she says, “It’s not yours either.”
His retort is quick. “You don’t know that.”
Hope looks at the screen in front of her, at the words Adam typed, taking in the shape of the word promise, the roundness of the p, the dot on the i.
“What don’t I know?” she asks.
There is another long silence. For a moment she thinks that he will hang up on her, that she has pushed too far. But then
he speaks.
“I wasn’t there,” he says. “The day of the accident. I could’ve been, but . . .” Hope realizes she’s holding her breath, waiting
on how he will finish the sentence. She exhales at the same moment he says, “It doesn’t matter.”
Behind her, from the outer area, she hears shuffling, breathing, little human noises that remind her they are all out there
listening to this, each with opinions, she is sure, of what she should be doing or saying, each deciding what they would do
if they were in her shoes. But they aren’t in her shoes. She looks down at her feet, scrunches all ten of her toes as she
does what comes next, what feels natural. “Trust your instincts,” her mentor Rich used to say, “your instincts and your training.”
“It does matter,” she says. “I know that better than anyone.” Tommy says nothing in response, so she continues talking. “I