again. If we can buy back a hostage with his own money, I say that’s a good deal.”
Jack said, “So you want me to go?”
“You mean you’re still here?” said Paulo.
Jack was definitely starting to like this guy.
chapter 21
W all ’em up, wall ’em up, wall ’ em up.” Falcon had been repeating the same words, over and over again, for at least fifteen minutes. It was driving Theo crazy, but he held his tongue.
With Theo’s help, Falcon had turned the room into a makeshift fortress. Anyone coming through the front door would have to pass through a mountain of furniture to reach the hostages. The entire room had been cleaned out, except for the television. There was a crack of light at the edge of the wall and along the top of the window. The drapes were so old and worn that, in spots, the lining had lost its blackout quality. The room brightened every few seconds as the intermittent swirl of police lights seeped in from the parking lot. Falcon had tried the light switch, but they were obviously without electricity. That didn’t stop him from pushing the on-off button on the TV every few minutes, determined to get a picture.
“Can’t you see that the power’s out,” said Theo.
“Shut up!”
Judging from the number of sirens blaring in the past twenty minutes, Theo figured that an army of police had taken up positions outside the motel. He was pretty sure that he’d heard helicopters as well, though he had no way of knowing if they were part of a tactical team or the media. As best he could tell, the police were regrouping. The gunfight was over. It was time to negotiate. Theo hoped that Falcon was lucid enough to realize that police didn’t deal for dead hostages.
Falcon walked to the corner near the window. Minutes earlier, he’d broken through the glass and fired off two quick shots from that same position. He seemed to have a view of the parking lot from that vantage point.
“I can’t breathe,” the woman hostage said. She was seated on the floor with her back to the wall, her hands tied behind her waist, and a pillowcase over her head. It was cold outside, and the room was comfortably cool. Even in the dim lighting, however, Theo’s eyes had adjusted well enough for him to see the tiny beads of sweat glistening on her arms, physical manifestation of her fear and panic.
Falcon started mumbling to himself again. “Wall ’em up, wall ’em up, wall ’em up.”
Theo’s hands were tied, but his head was uncovered. Falcon appeared to be on a mission to find another pillowcase somewhere in the pile of furniture. “Wall ’em up” seemed to be his way of saying that the hostages should be hooded and blindfolded.
“I really…can’t breathe,” the woman said, groaning.
Falcon was pacing furiously, not even listening to her.
Theo said, “You need to loosen the knot around her neck.” Falcon didn’t respond. Theo said, “Hey, did you hear me? She’s going to suffocate.”
“Quiet! I can’t think!” Falcon had a crazed look in his eyes. The room glowed with each flash of police lights in the parking lot, and it gave his face an angry red sheen.
“This won’t get you nowhere, man,” said Theo.
Falcon glared, then turned away and resumed pacing. “Wall ’em up, wall ’em up.”
“I need some air!” the woman shouted.
“Take the pillowcase off her head, jerk-off!”
Falcon wheeled and swung his arm around violently. The butt of his gun made a dull thud as it crashed against Theo’s skull. Theo fell hard to the floor. It was like a one-two knockout punch-the blow from the gun and his head hitting the carpet. “Shut your trap,” he heard Falcon shouting, but sounds and sights were all just a blur. He fought to remain conscious, refusing to close his eyes. He tried to focus on something, anything, to keep his brain functioning. A trickle of blood ran into his left eye, and Theo tried without success to blink it away. His other eye, the one closest to the carpet, was staring at the bathroom door. It was closed. Like the rest of the room, the dark slat at the threshold of the bathroom door brightened with each pulse of colored light from police vehicles in the parking lot. Theo struggled to concentrate. In the intermittent light available, he could see something on the bathroom floor, on the other side of the slat. It was directly in front of the base of the toilet. The lights pulsed again, and he saw something that looked like a shoe. Two shoes, in fact-men’s shoes.
One of them moved.
Theo showed no reaction, and he wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing. But with each flash of light, he became more certain.
Someone was in there.
chapter 22
W ithin the hour, Jack was on a seaplane headed back to Nassau. The ocean below was as black as the night, making it nearly impossible to distinguish the low-hanging stars from the scattering of lights across the island landscape. Jack was glad that it wasn’t his job to discern up from down. He rode in the copilot’s seat beside Theo’s friend and the owner of the aircraft, Zack Hamilton. A City of Miami police officer was in the row behind them.
The Bahamas are made up of some 700 islands and 2,400 cays, though only about thirty are inhabited, and two-thirds of a total population of 300,000 lives in Nassau. Jack couldn’t count the number of times that he and Theo had, on a whim, hopped on his motorboat and made the sixty-mile trip from Key Biscayne to the nearest Caribbean refueling station-gasoline for the boat, Mount Gay rum for the boaters-on the island of Bimini. Nassau is farther northwest, but it still seemed as though their seaplane had just leveled off when it was time to begin their descent. Slowly, the seemingly random arrangement of glowing dots ahead organized themselves into long, parallel lines of blue guiding lights.
“Prepare for landing,” said Zack. He was speaking into the microphone on his headset, his voice tinny but audible over the drone of the twin prop engines.
“Are you going to put us down on a landing strip?” said Jack.
“Beats the hell out of the forest.”
It was the kind of wiseass response that Jack should have expected from one of Theo’s oldest buddies. “I meant as opposed to the water. This is a seaplane.”
“Runway’s a lot safer at night. But we can do the water, if you really want to.”
“No, thanks,” was what he said, but he was thinking, Not in this flying death-trap.
Zack checked his flight instruments as he finished off his last swallow of orange Nehi and sucked the greasy remnants of a party-sized bag of Cheetos from his fingertips. He seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for anything orange and edible, so long as it was artificially colored and of absolutely no nutritional value. It was just one more trait that served to underscore the fact that Jack was unlike Zack in every conceivable way but two: Their first names rhymed, and they were both friends with Theo Knight. A side-by-side comparison of the two men would have yielded unassailable scientific proof that the tiny fraction of DNA that differentiated one human being from the next was unquestionably the most significant fraction of anything in the entire universe. Zack was nearly seven feet tall, and he wore his hair in cornrows that hung down longer than Jack’s arms. His build made Theo look slight. A knee injury in his rookie season had deep-sixed his NBA career, but fortunately, the signing bonus was big enough to set him up in his own business. Flying became his new passion, and Jack had to admire a guy who had managed to turn a fallback career into something he loved. Still, it was hard to imagine that anything less than the power of Theo could have brought Jack and Zack together at two o’clock on a Saturday morning.
They landed and quickly deplaned onto the runway. With the assistance of local law enforcement, they cleared customs and immigration in expedited fashion. A Bahamian police officer met them in the terminal and took them straight to a squad car parked in a no-parking zone in front of the airport. Jack and Zack rode in the backseat, and the Miami cop took the passenger seat. The car didn’t pull away fast enough to suit Jack.
