My eye was on my leather purse, which had been thrown into a corner. Inside the purse was the cell phone. I took an unauthorized step toward the bag.
He lunged, I twisted, but he grabbed me around the waist. We wrestled into the hallway until he threw me down in a narrow kitchen — open cupboard doors and shelves littered with dry blown leaves and pebbles and white enameled cabinets streaked with rust. Again my head slammed. He got his hands around my throat. I surprised him with a quick release, knocking his arms apart, but did not kick or grab because I did not want him to feel attacked; he would overpower me in an instant with a mindless homicidal fury.
“No sir, don’t do it, I’m with the FBI.”
I scrambled toward the front room, he dug his fingers into my back, my waistband, I rolled and broke the hold, but then my strength was ebbing, something I had not imagined in fantasies of kung fuing through the air.
“I’m a federal agent, I can help you—”
I kept up evasive action as best I could, trying to get to the purse, writhing away by inches, dragged back, trying to get him to hear me.
“Sir! Don’t mess! I’m a
I must have said it, choked it, twenty times even as he climbed on top of me and put his thumbs on my eyes in some bullshit marine move, and I slammed his inner elbows so his torso fell on mine, his spit all over my face, and he reared up again and I saw myself dead on the floor in that putrefying kitchen with cockroaches swarming the drain, and my mind kept repeating,
It wasn’t that. It was crazier: “I just can’t hurt you if you’re going to fight.”
I waited, thoughts pinwheeling, breathing the breath of this stranger.
“Then can we … get up, please?”
He shifted off me and I hand-over-handed my way up the cabinets and would have vomited in the sink if it weren’t for the cockroaches.
I had reason to believe he had hit his upper limit and would now press the reset button and regain control. I knew a lot about Ray Brennan. Had this been an UNSUB I would have lost my urine when he pulled me through the door, but this was old home week, reuniting with the crazy brother whose psychotic breaks and hospitalizations you know so well.
Juliana said:
Sometime in there the phone had stopped ringing.
“This is what is going to happen,” I said in the stillness. “Sir? Do you hear my voice?”
He had retrieved the knife from where it was sticking upright in the floor.
And I had my leather bag.
“The negotiator wants to talk to you. That’s why they’re calling. His job is to get you out of here in one piece.”
I did not mention Bridget. This was Ray Brennan’s moment in the sun.
“They want to talk to you, sir. They know I’m in here. I’m one of them, and
“Run that by me again? You’re telling me you’re
He had taken a while to dial it in, but that was fine; I had managed to reach unobtrusively into the bag and hit 911.
“I talk to God,” he was saying, “so I don’t need your crap.”
“I don’t sell Bibles. I’m a federal agent.”
The phone inside the bag was lit. The screen was active. I was betting the farm that a well-trained emergency operator had picked it up and stayed on the line and that we now had an open channel to 911. Someone would be listening and relaying information to the team of negotiators, ten or twelve of them sitting in a squad car or having commandeered a neighbor’s kitchen table, roughing out their situation board, putting together a picture they could convey to SWAT.
“If you’re from the FBI, where’s your gun?”
“I’m not armed. Obviously.”
“Your badge.”
“Don’t have it.”
“And I’m Warren Beatty.”
“They took away my credentials.”
“I’m supposed to believe you?”
“Look — okay—” I used the old negotiator’s line: “Do you want me to lie to you, or do you want me to tell you the truth?”
“Hell, I can’t tell one from the other at this point,” and broke into a grin that was free of anger or guile.
“The truth is, I shot my boyfriend.”
He laughed, and I saw the appealing, easygoing world traveler Juliana had met on the bench.
“No shit?”
I smiled and spread my hands. “I’m not jiving you, man.”
“Was he screwing another woman?”
“Basically.”
Brennan shook his head. “What’d you shoot him with?”
“A thirty-two.”
“That don’t do nothing. You should’ve called me.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“You didn’t kill him?”
“He’s alive and well and testifying against me.”
“So”—the suspect wasn’t stupid, he could put two and two together—“what the hell are you doing here?”
“I’ve been after you, sir, for a long time.”
He liked that.
“I didn’t know I was so important to the FBI.”
“You have created a lot of interest in our office, sir.”
I did not want to feed his grandiosity even more by letting him know that the whole world was there — the suits from Culver City, LAPD and Santa Monica, as well as our SWAT team chief and the highest-ranking supervisors in the Los Angeles field, all gathered in a makeshift command center, all focused entirely on him.
And soon we would hear the helicopters from the local news.
I smiled at Ray Brennan, genuinely, and don’t know why. Perhaps because I saw his desperation, in the skittering tiptoe strut between the front windows and back, checking here, checking there, like a rat constantly smelling the air. Perhaps because, beyond whatever happened to me, I knew the way it would end for him: what SWAT guys call a “head shot,” quick and sweet.
I also knew the psychology of the bond between assailant and victim and so discarded what I was feeling for him, which was compassion. How could that really be? The naked house was unnerving — opposite to what a house should hold — and it was clear he had grown up exactly in this cold-wall emptiness, mother with a wooden tit. It was more than passing strange — Ray Brennan in his phantasmic tank top and camis, and I in black T-shirt and nail-torn jeans, standing almost casually together like strangers at a cocktail party who have just hit on a connection: I shot my boyfriend. He kills girls. What now?
We were not completely strangers. Over the long pursuit and struggle, had we not come to know each other
