It was suffocatingly hot in the hallway where the negotiating team had "contained" the old man and his granddaughter. Eileen and the other trainees had been taught that the first objective in any hostage situation was to contain the taker in the smallest possible area, but she wondered now exactly who was doing the containing and who was being contained. It seemed to her that the old man had chosen his own turf and his own level of confrontation, and was now calling all the shots - no pun intended, God forbid! The narrow fifth-floor hallway with its admixture of exotic cooking smells now contained at least three dozen police officers, not counting those who had spilled over onto the fire stairs or those who were massed in the apartment down the hall, which the police had requisitioned as a command post, thank you, ma'am, we'll send you a receipt. There were cops all over the rooftops, too, and cops and firemen spreading safety nets below, just in case the old man decided to throw his granddaughter out the window, nothing ever surprised anybody in this city.
The cop working the door was an experienced member of the negotiating team who normally worked out of Burglary. His name was Emilio Garcia, and he spoke Spanish fluently, but the old man wasn't having any of it. The old man insisted on speaking English, a rather limited English at that, litanizing the same five words over and over again: "Go away, I'll kill her." This was a touchy situation here. The apartment was in a housing project where only last week the Tactical Narcotics Team had blown away four people in a raid, three of them known drug dealers, but the fourth - unfortunately - a fifteen-year-old boy who'd been in the apartment delivering a case of beer from the local supermarket.
The kid had been black.
This meant that one of the city's foremost agitators, a media hound who liked nothing better than to see his own beautiful face on television, had rounded up all the usual yellers and screamers and had picketed both the project and the local precinct, shouting police brutality and racism and no justice, no peace, and all the usual slogans designed to create more friction than already existed in a festering city on the edge of open warfare. The Preacher - as he was familiarly called - was here tonight, too, wearing a red fez and a purple shirt purchased in Nairobi and open to the waist, revealing a bold gold chain with a crucifix dangling from it; the man was a minister of God, after all, even if he preached only the doctrines of hate. He didn't have to be here tonight, though, shouting himself hoarse, nobody needed any help in the hate department tonight.
The guy inside the apartment was a Puerto Rican, which made him a member of the city's second-largest minority group, and if anything happened to him or that little girl sitting on his lap, if any of these policemen out here exercised the same bad judgement as had their colleagues from TNT, there would be bloody hell to pay. So anyone even remotely connected with the police department - including the Traffic Department people in their brown uniforms - was tiptoeing around outside that building and inside it, especially Emilio Garcia, who was afraid he might say something that would cause the little girl's head to explode into the hallway in a shower of gristle and blood.
"Oigame," Garcia said. "Solo quiero ayudarle."
"Go away," the old man said. "I'll kill her."
Down the hall, Michael Goodman was talking to the man's daughter-in-law, an attractive woman in her mid-forties, wearing sandals, a blue mini, and a red tube-top blouse, and speaking rapid accent-free English. She had been born in this country, and she resented the old man's presence here, which she felt reflected upon her own Americanism and strengthened the stereotyped image of herself as just another spic. Her husband was the youngest of his sons - the old man had four sons and three daughters - but even though all of them were living here in America, he was the one who'd had to take the old man in when he'd finally decided to come up from the island. She had insisted that the old man speak English now that he was here in America and living in her home. Eileen wondered if this was why he refused to speak Spanish with their talker at the door.
She was standing with the other trainees in a rough circle around the woman and Goodman, just outside the open door to the command-post apartment, where Inspector Brady was in heavy discussion with Deputy Inspector Di Santis of the Emergency Service. Nobody wanted this one to flare out of control. They were debating whether they should pull Garcia off the door. They had thought that a Spanish-speaking negotiator would be their best bet, but now -
"Any reason why he's doing this?" Goodman asked the woman.
"Because he's crazy," the woman said.
