Good Morning, Killer

the knife halfway into an exposed beam.

“Take it easy.”

“Shut up, bitch.”

Slowly, watchfully, I got to my feet. Immediately my hip flexor gave out, causing an excruciating buckle of the leg.

“If I were you, I’d stay away from the window.”

“Oh, shut up. I was raised by nuns, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

“That’s not why—”

“Shut up.”

He was coming fast with fist cocked and I was cornered, just managing to twist away as the blow grazed my shoulder, bouncing my temple against the denuded plaster as I scuttled behind the couch. Now they would find paint chips in my hair, too. Infuriated, Brennan picked up one end of the couch and tossed it.

If he rapes me, I’ll survive. I’ll let him do it and survive.

“They have night vision!” I shouted hoarsely. “The police snipers! They can see through the windows!”

It was a lie (night vision works only at night) and he knew it—“Bullshit!”—but it distracted him enough so I could move farther behind the angled end of the couch and maybe start a dialogue that showed I cared about his welfare.

“Seriously,” I managed between chattering teeth. “Stay down.”

He nodded several times as if listening to someone else not in the room—Okay, okay—then squatted low and crab-walked like a Russian dancer to the wall space between the windows. I saw how young and lithe he was, younger than Juliana had described, young as a recruit who signs up to save the world.

“I know who you are—”

“Me? I’m Superfuck.”

A wave of nausea spiraled up my gut. The hip gave out again. I was not certain I could remain standing.

“… the schedule,” he was saying.

“Is someone back there? I thought I heard something.”

A phone began to ring.

The mistake the Culver City police had made was calling him Ray. You never wanted to call him Ray. You wanted to ooze respect. You called him “sir.”

“Are you going to answer the phone, sir?”

“Sit the fuck down.”

I sank to my haunches and drew up my knees. The phone, an ancient black rotary, sat on the floor between us. Its rings were coarse and jangling, as if dragged through the wires from another epoch. I held my breath, as the echo of each became another lost opportunity for connection to the outside.

Brennan was sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out so I could stare at the lug soles of his boots. He was playing a high-speed game of mumblety-peg, flipping the knife so it landed perfectly, pulling it out and flipping again, making small quick cuts in a circle on the soft redwood planks.

He had spent a lot of time at this, activating and reactivating his obsessions.

The ringing stopped.

My breath was coming fast and shallow. I told myself I was not alone. Culver City had witnessed the abduction and called for SWAT, which would first set a perimeter. They would soon have the house surrounded, although their positions would not be visible all the way around, giving the illusion of escape through the back. The snipers would maintain a low profile on the roofs.

Meanwhile, Culver City and LAPD would be huddling, trying to figure out what they were looking at. How many hostages? What do we know about this guy? It appeared they had the phone number and were trying to open a negotiation. Let’s hope the Bureau had gotten there by now with a six-hundred- page history of Ray Brennan and his alleged acts. That should tell them his ritual had been interrupted, he was in a panic, and the ringing would only agitate him more.

As desperately as I concentrated on what they would do, I hoped they were focusing on me. I hoped Galloway, or Rick, or someone was out there saying that despite recent events in her personal life, we have a trained negotiator inside with that piece of shit: we should trust that if she is alive, she will follow procedure, so let’s all play this by the books.

“How are we doing, sir? Is everything okay?”

“What do you think?” he asked sardonically.

“I don’t know, sir. You tell me.”

“I’m being torn to pieces.”

“You’re feeling torn apart?”

“—Yeah, now that you brought the whole miserable world with your stupid religious bullshit—”

“I’m sorry that happened. Is there anything I can do for you now?”

“Go away.”

“Let’s go together.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“Let’s walk out of here, right now. Nothing bad has happened yet.”

He sneered and picked at wood grains with the flashing point of the knife.

“Is that a KA-BAR knife?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You must be former marine.”

“I served my country. I love my country.”

“You love your country,” I mirrored approvingly. “You know what? I love my country, too. My name is Ana. What can I call you?”

“Me?” He looked incredulous, as if I had asked a different question. “This is my private property. I’m not the one violating someone’s private rights and busting into their own home with a bunch of cops.” There was a thump and a crash and breaking glass. Brennan and I both scrambled to our feet. The sound had come from the back of the house.

He got up on his toes and roared, “Stay away from me!” throat cords straining.

“It’s not them,” I said calmly. SWAT would not breech, not yet. “It’s not them! Listen.”

There was no more banging, just guttural inhuman sounds trying to get out of someone’s throat, then silence.

“Maybe we should check that out.”

“It’s the other one,” he said.

“You mean there is somebody else in the house?”

“There’s a girl. She’s back in the studio. I was going to kill her,” he stated flatly, “but she begged me to let her pray first.”

“I see. So there’s a girl back there, and she sounds pretty much okay, like nothing bad has happened yet. It doesn’t have to happen, sir—”

The phone again.

“—You can make it stop right now.”

But the phone wouldn’t stop. Brennan had shied away from it sideways, as if he were wired on something. Angel dust? Chain-smoking marijuana for eight days straight?

“It’s just the phone.”

Bridget was in one of those rooms, possibly dying on me. The only way I could help her was to keep in control of myself although I could feel the situation breaking loose and fragmenting with the metal-on-metal shriek of a nightmare out-of-control merry-go-round going tilt, beginning to lift up off its rotors.

“It’s just the phone,” I repeated. “You can answer it or not. You have the choice.”

Give it up! I thought-beamed to the negotiators outside. Brennan was in a state of acute stress, frozen still like a terrified animal.