A Spark of Light(26)

She was responding.

She was all right.

He sank into the folding chair someone had brought him a couple of hours ago, holding the phone between his hands and willing the response to come faster.

“Hugh?”

At the sound of Chief Monroe’s voice, he slipped his phone beneath a stack of papers. He could not let on that Wren was inside. That he knew Wren was inside. The minute he did, his neutrality was compromised. “Yeah, Chief?”

He looked up to see a guy in camo approaching. “This is Joe Quandt,” the chief said. “He’s the SWAT commander. Joe, this is Detective Lieutenant Hugh McElroy.”

Hugh recognized Quandt; they’d worked together before.

Quandt held out his hand. “Sorry for the delay,” he said.

It was not unusual for a countywide SWAT team to take a bit of time to congregate. The individuals constituting it came from all over the state and after receiving the call of a crisis in progress, had to converge upon it. Hugh had had three hours on his own to manage the situation, but now that Captain Quandt had arrived, there would be a struggle to see who would actually be in charge.

Hugh immediately began to give a rundown of the past three hours. If he acted like he was in charge, maybe it would remain that way.

“Have you got aerial photos?” Quandt asked, and Hugh nodded. It was one of the first things he’d asked for, so that when the SWAT team needed to get snipers into position, they’d know where to place them. He shuffled through the materials on his command desk, surreptitiously glancing at his phone as he did so. Those dots were still there, but no message yet.

. . .

. . .

“I’ve already instructed my team to take the perimeter,” Quandt said. Hugh knew this was a relief to the chief, who didn’t have the manpower to block the clinic entrances, restrict the media, and reroute traffic. “We’ll be ready to go in in about fifteen minutes.”

SWAT teams existed to back up the negotiator, but they also itched to do what they were trained for—end the showdown by force. Negotiators wanted to do what they were trained to do—negotiate.

“I don’t think that’s wise. He’s got the hostages in the front waiting room,” Hugh said, “and he can see you coming through the mirrored glass, but you can’t see in.”

“We could pump tear gas in …”

“There are injured people in there,” Hugh said, his voice even. And my kid.

The chief turned to Hugh. “So what’s your plan?”

“Give Goddard a little more time,” Hugh said. Let me figure out what’s happening inside first. Let me hear from Wren.

Quandt shook his head. “It’s my understanding that there were shots fired …”

“But not in the last three hours,” Hugh pointed out. “I’ve been able to keep him calm.” He looked at Quandt. “If you go in, can you guarantee that you won’t lose a hostage?”

The SWAT team commander’s jaw tightened. “Of course not,” he said.

Both men turned to Chief Monroe. “Hugh will continue to run with it for now,” the chief replied.

Chief Monroe put his hand on Hugh’s shoulder, turning him away from the SWAT commander. He spoke in a firm, quiet voice. “You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Hugh said, as if hostage negotiation was a set of rules you could follow, rather than a game where the players made up the rules as they went. “I have to get back to … I need to …”

He moved to his makeshift desk again and grabbed his phone.

There was no message, and the dots were gone, too.

He texted again: WREN?

—


WHEN THE SHOOTER HAD YANKED open the door to her hiding place, Wren thought her heart was going to burst. She barely managed to hide her phone in her sock before he grabbed her wrist and pulled so hard that she cried out. She managed to claw his face and drew blood, a triumph about which she was supremely happy. He dragged her into the waiting room in the front of the clinic, the one with the windows where you could see out but people on the street couldn’t see in. She landed sprawled on her belly in front of a handful of people.

There was a woman in sweats, who had freckles all over her face that stood out because she was so pale right now. There was another girl—maybe in her twenties?—with a giant bruise on her forehead. The redheaded lady in scrubs who had opened the closet door earlier and pretended not to see her, and Olive was sitting on the floor. The only male hostage rested his head in her lap and was breathing heavily. His own scrubs had been ripped off at the thigh, and below a belt of fabric and tape, his leg was bloodied.

Her aunt Bex was nowhere.

Wren felt tears spring to her eyes. Was she dead? Had someone dragged her body into another room?

When she was little, and her aunt Bex used to watch her after school while her dad was at work, they did everything Wren wasn’t supposed to do. They ate dessert, and skipped dinner. They watched R-rated movies. Her aunt had promised that not only would she take Wren to get a tattoo when she was eighteen, she would design it for her.

What if neither of them survived that long?

“Tie her hands,” the shooter yelled. “Now! You!” He jerked the gun at the redhead in scrubs.

She took a roll of surgical tape and wrapped it around Wren’s wrists. She was trying to do it loosely, but it was tape, and there was no way Wren was getting free anytime soon. “Are you hurt?” she whispered. “I’m a nurse.”