A Maidens Grave

Christ, Lou, I know you’re willing to kill them. You made your damn point. So just let her go, all right? I’ll send a trooper up with the food; let him come back with the girl.”
    A pause.
    “You really want that one?”
    Potter thought: Actually, I’d like ’em all, Lou.
    Time for a joke? Or too early?
    He gambled. “I’d really like them all, Lou.”
    A harrowing pause.
    Then a raucous laugh from the speaker. “You’re a pistol, Art. Okay, I’ll send her out. Let’s synchronize our Timexes, boys. The clock’s running. You get the fat one for the food. Fifteen minutes. Or I might change my mind. And a big beautiful chopper at five in the p.m.”
    Click.
    “All right!” Tobe shouted.
    Budd was nodding. “Good, Arthur. That was good.”
    Derek sat sullenly at his control panel for a moment but finally cracked a smile and apologized. Potter, ever willing to forgive youthful enthusiasm, shook the trooper’s hand.
    Budd was smiling in relief. He said, “Wichita’s the aviation capital of the Midwest. Hell, we can get a chopper here in a half-hour.”
    “We aren’t getting him one,” Potter said. He gestured to the “Promises/Deceptions” chart. LeBow wrote, Helicopter seating eight, due on hourly deadlines. Commencing at 5 p.m.
    “You’re not going to give it to him?” Budd whispered.
    “Of course not.”
    “But you lied.”
    “That’s why it’s on the ‘Deceptions’ side of the board.”
    Typing again, LeBow said, “We can’t let him go mobile. Especially in a chopper.”
    “But he’s going to kill another one at five.”
    “So he says.”
    “But—”
    “That’s my job, Charlie,” Potter said, finding patience somewhere. “It’s what I’m doing here, to talk him out of it.”
    And poured himself a cup of extremely bad coffee from a stainless steel pot.
     
    Potter slipped a cellular phone into his pocket and stepped outside, crouching until he was in the gully, which protected him from the slaughterhouse.
    Budd accompanied him part of the way. The young captain had found out that the Hutchinson police were in charge of stopping the river traffic and had ordered them to do so, incurring the wrath of several charterers of container barges bound for Wichita, whose meters were running to the tune of two thousand dollars an hour.
    “Can’t please everybody,” the negotiator observed, distracted.
    It was growing even colder—an odd July indeed with temperatures in the mid-fifties—and there was a rich metallic taste to the air, perhaps from the diesel exhaust of the nearby threshers or harvesters or combines, whatever they were. Potter waved at Stillwell, who was walking back and forth among the troopers, grinning laconically, and ordering troops into position.
    Leaving Budd, Potter climbed into a bureau car anddrove to the rear staging area. Already, all the networks and local stations from a three-state area were here, as were reporters or stringers from the big-city papers and the wire services.
    He had a brief word with Peter Henderson, who—whatever his other failings and motives—had quickly put together an efficient transport pool, supply staging area, and press tent.
    Potter was known to the press and they descended on him frantically as he walked from the car. They were as he expected them to be: aggressive, humorless, smart, blindered. They’d never changed in all the years Potter had been doing this. His first reaction, as always, was how he would hate to be married to one of them.
    He climbed to the podium that Henderson had installed, and looked into the mass of white video lights. “At about eight-thirty this morning three escaped felons kidnaped and took hostage two teachers and eight students from the Laurent Clerc School for the Deaf in Hebron, Kansas. The felons had earlier in the day escaped from the Callana Federal Penitentiary.
    “They’re presently holed up in an abandoned factory along the Arkansas River about a mile and a half from here, on the border of the town of Crow Ridge. They are being contained by several hundred state, local, and federal law enforcers.”
    More like a hundred, but Potter would rather bend the truth to the fourth estate than risk nurturing overconfidence on the part of the takers—just in case they happened to catch a news report.
    “There has been one fatality among the hostages . . . .”
    The reporters gasped and bristled at this and their hands shot up. They barked questions but Potter said only, “The