A Maidens Grave

Maybe your boy didn’t compensate.”
    “If we’d’ve wanted your man dead he’d be dead.”
    “That don’t matter. I keep telling you. Accident or not,” he snarled, “gotta teach you people some manners.”
    The bluff factor dropped to sixty percent.
    Stay calm, Potter warned himself. Out of the corner of his eye he watched young Derek Elb wipe his palms on his pants and stuff a piece of gum into his mouth. Budd paced irritatingly, looking out the window.
    “Let’s just put it down to a mishap, Lou, and get on with what we have to talk about.”
    “Talk about?” He sounded surprised. “Whatta we gotta talk about?”
    “Oh, lots,” Potter said cheerfully. “First of all, is everybody doing okay in there? You have any injuries? Anybody hurt?”
    His instinct was to ask specifically about the girls but negotiators try never to talk about the hostages if possible. You have to make the HT think that the captives have no bargaining value.
    “Shep’s a little bent outta shape, as you’d imagine, but otherwise everybody’s right as rain. Course, ask again in five minutes. One of ’em ain’t gonna be feeling so good.”
    Potter wondered: What did she say to me? He pictured Melanie’s face again. Lips, teeth, lips . . .
    “You need any first-aid supplies?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What?”
    “A medevac chopper.”
    “That’s kind of a tall order, Lou. I was thinking more bandages or morphine, something like that. Antiseptic.”
    “Morphine? That wouldn’t be to make us all dopey, would it? You’d like that, bet.”
    “Oh, we wouldn’t give you enough to dope you up, Lou. You need anything at all?”
    “Yeah, I need to shoot somebody’s what I need. Little blondie here. Put a bullet ’tween the tits she don’t have.”
    “That wouldn’t do anybody any good now, would it?”
    Potter was thinking: He likes to talk. He’s unstable but he likes to talk. That’s always the first hurdle, sometimes insurmountable. The quiet ones are the most dangerous. The agent cocked his head and prepared to listen carefully. He had to get into Handy’s mind. Fall into his speech patterns, guess what the man is going to say, how he’s going to say it. Potter would play this game all night until, by the time things were resolved one way or another, part of him would be Louis Jeremiah Handy.
    “What’s your name again?” Handy asked.
    “Arthur Potter.”
    “You go by Art?”
    “Arthur, actually.”
    “Ain’t you got the info on me?”
    “Some. Not much.”
    Potter thought spontaneously: I killed a guard escaping.
    “I killed me a guard when we were escaping. Didn’t you know that?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    Potter thought: So the girl without any tits don’t mean shit to me.
    “So killing this girl, little blondie here, it don’t mean nothing to me.”
    Potter pushed a mute button—a special device on the phone, which cut off his voice without a click on the other end. “Who’s he talking about?” he asked LeBow. “Which hostage? Blond, twelve or under?”
    “I don’t know yet,” the intelligence officer responded. “We can’t get a clear look inside and don’t have enough information.”
    Into the phone he said, “Why d’you want to hurt anybody, Lou?”
    He’ll change the subject, Potter guessed.
    But Handy said, “Why not?”
    Theoretically Potter knew he should be talking aboutfrivolous things, stretching out the conversation, winning the man over, making him laugh. Food, sports, the weather, conditions inside the slaughterhouse, soft drinks. You never talked to the HTs about the incident itself at first. But he was assessing the risk that Handy was about to kill the girl and the bluff ratio was down to thirty percent; he couldn’t afford to chat about hamburgers and the White Sox.
    “Lou, I don’t think you want to kill anybody.”
    “How d’you figure?”
    Potter managed a chuckle. “Well, if you start killing hostages I’ll have to conclude that you’re planning to kill them all anyway. That’s when I send in our hostage rescue team to take you all out.”
    Handy was laughing softly. “ If them boys was there.”
    Potter and LeBow frowned at each other. “Oh, they’re here,” Potter said. He nodded at the “Deceptions” side of the bulletin board and LeBow jotted, Handy told that HRT is in place.
    “You’re asking me to hold off killing her?”
    “I’m asking you not to kill anyone.”
    “I don’t know. Should I, shouldn’t I? You know how that happens