They hadn’t seen the news. That was vital. If they did, it could push them over the edge. They were hovering there already.
The front door opened. Jo Ellen staggered in, Joe on her heels, pushing her. She’d been crying—her face was streaked with makeup—but it was blank now, a death mask. Slowly, like she was walking on two broken legs, she came over to where her friends were sitting and collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Marilyn cradled her head in her arms. She turned to Joe. “You’re a bastard.”
He favored her with a smirk. “Really? That makes me feel terrible.” He turned to Bill. “You’re up.”
Bill stood up. He cocked a finger at Pauline.
“No!”
She started screaming. “Please, God, please. No!”
It was awful, hearing her. I was enraged at my own impotence and fear. Then Marilyn did something incredibly brave. Rising to her feet, she said to Bill, “Take me.”
He looked at her like she was insane. We all did. Man, what guts, I thought.
She had unnerved him, that was obvious. He pulled himself together, trying to come on cool. “I want her.”
“Yeah, right. You want me, but you don’t have the balls.” She threw down her trump card. “I’m too much woman for you.”
His face blossomed so crimson it was almost blue. Reaching out, he slapped her as hard as he could. She flew across the room, landing hard on the floor. Shaking the cobwebs from her head, she looked up at him.
“Is that the best you can do?”
He almost choked in rage. “I’ll show you what I can do.” He turned to Joe. “Hold the fort.” Grabbing her by the throat, he shoved her out the door.
While this was going on, I had my eyes fixed on Joe. He was holding his gun in his right hand, the shotgun dangling in his left. There was a nervous look in his eye, a signal to me that he was concerned about controlling the situation.
“Sit down!” he ordered us. He hefted his gun.
I remained standing. I didn’t know how far I could push him, but I had to find out. If I, or any combination of us, were going to try something, it would have to be while Bill wasn’t around. He was the brains in this operation, the leader. There was no question in my mind that he would pull the trigger, if he had to. Joe I wasn’t sure about. He might panic and go off unexpectedly; but he might freeze up, afraid to take action without Bill’s approval.
He looked at me. “Sit down.”
I motioned toward the bathrooms. “I’ve got to hit the john.”
He shook his head. “Hold it.”
“I can’t much longer. I’ve been holding it for hours.”
The kids’ parents caught my drift. “The children have to use the toilet, too,” the father told Joe, standing next to me.
Joe was flummoxed. “Shit.”
“We all have to go,” the mother said. She looked around the room. “Who else has to use the facilities?”
Almost everyone raised their hands. Joe squirmed in his chair.
“I can’t have you all going at the same time,” he complained.
“If you don’t let me go, I’ll piddle on the floor,” Deedee said.
He threw up his hands. “All right. You can go.” He thought for a minute. “One man and one woman at a time.” He pointed to the kids. “Them first.”
“May I go with them?” the mother asked, her arms around her brood.
Joe nodded. “Yeah, okay. You can take two of them now, then the other one.” His eyes darted to me, then back to the kids. “The other one stays here with me. When you come back, we’ll switch.”
“No!” A sharp intake of breath from the mother.
The father leaned over, whispered in her ear. He turned to Joe. “We’ll do that. I’ll be with her. That’s all right, isn’t it?” Without waiting for a reply, he walked one of his daughters over to where Joe was standing.
Joe’s brain was stalled. “Yeah, it’s okay.” Trying to turn the momentum back: “Sit down,” he told the little girl, pulling another chair close to his.
She looked at her dad. “It’s okay, Sarah,” he assured her.
The girl, who was no older than eight, sat down primly, her little hands folded in her lap. Joe’s gun was resting on his thigh, almost touching hers. “Nobody wants to see anyone get hurt, do they?” he asked, his eyes roaming around the room.
The father didn’t flinch. He stood behind his daughter, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. The man was made of steel; I was admiring him more by the minute.
“Be careful where you’re pointing that gun,” he told Joe.
“Nobody’s gonna get hurt,” Joe reiterated almost defensively. “As long as nobody does anything stupid.”
The mother escorted the other two children to the bathroom. They all used the ladies’ room, including Roger, the little boy—she wasn’t about to let either of them out of her sight.
After they came out and the mother rotated with Sarah, her other daughter, I took my turn. Standing at the urinal, my mind was racing. If I was going to make any move at all, it would have to be while BUI was outside in the Winnebago, with Marilyn. Given some help, or luck, I might be able to distract Joe and disarm him. With both of them there, it couldn’t happen.
I came back out. The news on CNN was recycling. The story of the storm was playing, the cars piling up on the freeway.
Joe had shifted his chair. He could see the television now. He wasn’t watching—his attention was on us, his hostages—but in about thirty seconds, the story of the bank robbery would be on. If he glanced up and saw that…I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but they wouldn’t be good.
The remote for the TV was sitting on the corner of the bar. As casually as I could, I drifted in that direction. My movement caught Joe’s scanning eye.
“What’re you doing?” he demanded.
“This old news is boring. Let’s find something more entertaining,” I said as nonchalantly as I could.
I was almost to the bar. The remote was five feet from my hand. Joe looked up at the television. The storm/car-crash story was almost over. The bank robbery was about to roll.
He took it in for two or three seconds, looked back at me. “Yeah, go ahead.”
As I lunged for the remote and grabbed hold of it, the story changed. There was the robbery. As quickly as I could, I hit a button. Comedy Central came on—an old Richard Pryor show from fifteen years ago.
And Joe exclaimed, “What the hell!”
I turned to him. He was locked onto the screen.
“Turn back to the other channel.” He had risen to his feet, his eyes riveted on the screen. Then to us, then back to the screen. One hand holding his gun, the shotgun tucked under his other arm. Next to him, Sarah had resumed her place in the hot seat. Her father was right behind her, his hand firmly on her shoulder.
“Which other channel?” I said, playing dumb.
“The one that was just on, that you changed.”
By now, everyone was looking at the screen. Richard Pryor was strutting back and forth across the stage, his audience falling out of their seats in laughter.
“I don’t know what channel that was,” I said straight-faced. “I’m just surfing.”
He was shaking. “Give me that thing. Bring it over here.”
I had to play Joe very carefully. He was a man out of control who was holding a gun near a little girl’s head. Slowly, I walked toward him, the remote in hand. As I got within five feet of him, the father and I locked in. Be careful, his eyes were telling me.
Okay, I thought to myself, as much as I could think with a gun pointed to a kid’s head, somebody’s going to die here today. Or a lot of us, maybe everyone. So doing something to try to stop that, even if it’s reckless, is better than doing nothing, and ultimately, no more dangerous. The most dangerous thing would be to do nothing.
“Here you go,” I said to Joe, as I tossed him the remote.
His instinct took over, as I’d prayed it would. He reached out to grab the remote on the fly.
Everything happened in slow motion, dreamlike, a Sam Peckinpah movie for real. Joe was reaching to catch the remote control, the shotgun was sliding from under his arm to the floor, the father was pushing his daughter out of her chair, away from the direction Joe’s big gun was pointing. I was lunging toward Joe, catching the shotgun before it hit the floor.
All this transpired in two, three seconds.
If Joe had pulled the trigger on his automatic right away, he might have hit Sarah before she was out of her chair. But he didn’t, because I was going for the shotgun. My movement reflexively compelled him to turn and swing his weapon toward me.
The force of the explosion was unbelievable. It sounded like a bomb going off.
The top half of Joe’s head wasn’t there anymore. The pieces of it, and the pellets that had blown it off, were embedded in the wall.
Everyone started screaming and hitting the floor. The father was protectively lying on top of his daughter. Fragments of Joe’s flesh were splattered across his back.
My reaction was delayed, seeing the carnage before me. Then it hit me. I started shaking so hard I fell to my knees, almost keeling over onto my stomach. I’m sure I would have thrown up, or even passed out, if the adrenaline wasn’t flowing so hard.
The front door flew open. Buck naked, brandishing his big automatic, Bill came roaring in. “What the hell hap—” He stopped in mid-sentence: having heard the shot, he had assumed it was Joe, pulling the trigger on one of us.
In disbelief, he stared down at me.
It wasn’t until mid-morning that the weather cleared enough for the helicopters to land. When they finally arrived, it was in a long-line cluster, one after the other, like ducks heading south for the winter. Along with law enforcement—county sheriff, CHP, FBI—there were news helicopters: the networks, CNN, Fox News, local southern California stations, too.
Long before then I had called Riva and told her what had happened. It took several minutes, once I’d recited my story, to calm her down and reassure her that I was all right, unharmed, safe. I promised her I’d get home as soon as I could—it would depend on how fast they cleared the roads.
In truth, I was extremely rocky. I was alive, and unharmed; but I had killed two men, and the enormity of that, in so many ramifications, was beginning to hit me. Yes, it was self-defense, not only for me but for all the other hostages, and yes, it was completely justified. Nevertheless, I had looked into the eyes of two human beings and killed them.
During my days as a district attorney, I had sent a few men to death row. One of them had been falsely executed. He’d been innocent, as he had claimed all along, which most of them do; you don’t even listen to that stuff. Some years afterward, we found out, to our horror and shame, that someone else had done the crime we’d put him to death for.
All the evidence in the case had pointed to him, and no one ever blamed me; but the experience had weighed heavily on me, so much so that I eventually resigned.
That had been a sobering occurrence; but this hit me harder, even though it was infinitely more justifiable. This was immediate, and there was no refuge, none of the walls we build up as a society to shelter us from such stark reality and ugliness. There’s a formal and rigorous protocol when the state kills someone. It’s as antiseptic and bloodless as we can make it. And it’s still a painful process. In this situation, though, there were no walls. It was primitive and basic, an instinctive reaction. Kill or be killed.
I’d had nightmares for years after that false execution. I knew I was going to have them for this.
Given my status as a former county district attorney, I did the briefing for the law enforcement agencies. Before I told them the whole sordid story, though, they came forth with a piece of information that staggered us.
Bill and Joe were cops. Not anymore; but until recently, they’d worn the badge.
They’d met up as MPs in the army and had stuck together since. In less than eight years they’d done stints with the Border Patrol, a couple of county sheriff departments in Nevada and Arizona, and the Roswell, New Mexico, police department. They didn’t last long anywhere—they stood at the extreme edge of violence-prone behavior, way beyond the unspoken but allowable limit most forces tolerate in their officers. To these two, a badge and a gun conferred unlimited authority to trample people’s civil rights—and they did. The records were full of allegations of beatings, extortions, attempts at blackmail, all kinds of ugly stuff. Including accusations of rape, none of which ever got beyond a disciplinary committee. They had managed to land on their feet after each jurisdiction let them go; they used police unions, threats of lawsuits, whatever they could to stop the unit they were leaving from vigorously informing others about their true natures. The agencies they were leaving were happy to see them go, be someone else’s problem—the old “I’m okay, fuck you” syndrome.
All good things must come to an end. They had finally run out of departments who would hire them, so they went to work as rent-a-cops. While working for a security agency in Palm Springs, they’d concocted their bank robbery scheme. They knew everything about the security procedures at the bank they robbed—they worked there, it was the ultimate inside job. Except that like most crimes of that nature, it didn’t go according to plan, so they’d had to shoot their way out. They were going to escape over the border into Mexico, get lost in the mountains, eventually make their way down to Nicaragua, El Salvador, or parts south. Two million dollars can last a lifetime in Central America. And they might have made it, if the wind hadn’t started blowing.
“Brutal story,” I said to Keller, the FBI agent in charge of the task force.
“Incredible,” he agreed. “Thank God none of you got hurt. Or killed. You all made it through intact.”
A young woman was raped, another almost, three little children were traumatized, possibly for life. I don’t consider that making it through intact, but I kept quiet about it with him. It was over. Bill and Joe were dead, the toothpaste wasn’t going back into the tube.
The father and I finally got around to formally introducing ourselves. “That was incredible, what you did,” he praised me. He had his youngest in his arms. She was holding on to him fiercely.
“You’re the one who’s incredible. You’re a rock, man. You can share my foxhole anytime. That whole way you handled it with Sarah…I wouldn’t have had those guts.”