A Spark of Light(15)

We are all capable of things we never imagined.

Well, Detective, he thought. You asked me to make you understand and I did. You and I, we’re not that different.

Not the hero and the villain, not the pro-life activist and the abortion doctor, not the cop and the killer. We are all drowning slowly in the tide of our opinions, oblivious that we are taking on water every time we open our mouths.

He wished he could tell his daughter that he realized this, now.

He pulled the trigger.





Four p.m.





AFTER HOURS OF TALKING WITH THE SHOOTER OVER A SECURE LINE, Hugh had been lulled into complacency. He had mistakenly assumed that it was possible to reason with a madman.

But then there had been another gunshot, and Hugh’s only thought was of his daughter.

When Wren was two, he had taken her along when he went down to fix a little dock that sat out behind Bex’s property, on the edge of a weed-choked pond. He was hammering treated wood into place while she sat on the grass, playing with a toy her aunt had given her. One minute she had been laughing, chattering to herself, and the next there was a splash.

Hugh hadn’t even thought. He jumped off the dock into the water, which was so murky and clogged that he couldn’t see a foot in front of him. His eyes burned as he struggled to spot anything that might be Wren. He dove over and over, his hands outstretched and spinning through weeds, until finally he brushed against something solid. He broke through the water with Wren wrapped in one arm, laid her on the dock, fitted his mouth against hers, and breathed for her until she choked up the swamp.

Hugh had screamed at Wren, who’d burst into tears. But his anger was misdirected. He was furious at himself, for being stupid enough to take his eyes off of her.

There had been a gunshot, and Hugh was in that muddy pond again, blindly trying to save his daughter, and it was all his fault.

There had been a gunshot, one that struck his sister, and he hadn’t been there.

There was a gunshot, and what if that meant he was too late, again?

Captain Quandt was immediately at his side. “McElroy,” he said. “There’s active gunfire. You know the protocol.”

The protocol was to engage rather than wait and suffer the loss of more victims. It was also risky as hell. When gunmen felt threatened, they started panicking, firing at random.

Had he been Quandt, he might well have made the same call. But Hugh hadn’t yet confessed to Quandt that his own child was inside. That this wasn’t random at all.

There had been other hostage situations that had become bloodbaths because the law enforcement agencies were too aggressive. In 2002 Chechen rebels went into a theater, taking hundreds of hostages and even killing two; Russian forces decided to pump an untested gas inside to end the standoff. They killed thirty-nine terrorists but also over a hundred hostages.

What if that happened when Quandt went in?

“It wasn’t active gunfire,” Hugh said, trying to buy time. “It was a single shot. It’s possible that the threat neutralized himself.”

“Then there’s zero risk,” Quandt pointed out. “Let’s go.” He didn’t wait for Hugh to respond, just turned on his heel to organize his team.

There had been several moments in Hugh’s experience that changed his life. The day he asked Annabelle out. The night that suicidal kid on the roof turned and gave Hugh his hand. When Wren took her first breath. This would, he knew, be another of those moments: the one that ended his career.

“No,” Hugh said, to Quandt’s back. “My daughter’s one of the hostages.”

The SWAT commander turned slowly. “What?”

“I didn’t know at first. I found out after I got here,” Hugh explained. “But I didn’t—I didn’t step down. I couldn’t.”

“You’re relieved of your position,” Quandt said flatly.

“Only my chief can do that,” Hugh said. “And I’m in too deep now with the hostage taker to walk away. I’m sorry. I know the rules. I know it’s a conflict of interest. But my God, Captain—nobody has greater incentive for this to end well than I do. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand that when you lied to me, to the chief, to everyone—you knew exactly what you were doing.”

“No. If I knew what I was doing, she’d be here with me.” Hugh cleared his throat and forced himself to look the commander in the eye. “Don’t make my daughter pay for my stupidity. Please,” he begged. “It’s my kid.”

He was underwater again, and flailing in the weeds. He was drowning.

Quandt stared him down. “Everyone in there,” he said, “is somebody’s kid.”

—


BEX STARED AT THE FLUORESCENT lights overhead in the hospital’s operating room, wondering if she was going to die.

She was worried. Not for herself, but for Wren, for the rest of the people in the clinic. And of course for Hugh, who shouldered this burden. He would blame himself for anything that went wrong today. Some men wear responsibility and some are worn by it; Hugh had always been the former. Even at her father’s funeral, when Hugh had been just eight, he insisted on shaking the hand of everyone who came to grieve. He was the last to leave the grave site, walking back to the parking lot with the minister. Bex had settled her sobbing mother in the car and gone back to get Hugh. “I’m the man of the house now,” he’d told her, and so she had spent the rest of her life walking behind him, trying to inconspicuously take away some of the load he carried.