High Noon

brains are going to be all over your nice, shiny floor. You.” He kicked the first man again. “Up. Roll that dolly to the northeast corner.”
    “I…I don’t know which is the northeast.”
    Walken rolled his eyes. “Right rear, fuckhead. Move! You, you, drag that worthless dick back there with it.” He back-walked with Patsy, then shoved her to her knees. “Get some shopping bags, Patsy. You’re going to pick up all this junk people carried in here, put it in shopping bags and put the bags on this counter. Everybody else, facedown. Oh, not you, Mark, sorry. Northeast corner. I’m watching you, Patsy. You be good, now. Pick up the phone, Mark.” He nodded toward the one on the desk. “Call nine-one-one. You’re going to say exactly what I tell you to say. Nothing more, nothing less. Understood?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good.” Walken tucked Arnie’s weapon in his belt, ripped open the top box on the dolly. “You see what’s in here, Mark?”
    Mark’s white face went gray as he looked in the box. “Yes.”
    “Plenty more where that came from. Make the call.”

30
    Phoebe was minutes from the jewelry store when the alarm went off. She stood within sight of it, with the crisis team already moving men and equipment into positions when the nine-one-one call was relayed to her.
    This is Mark D, and I have an emergency. There is an armed man holding me and sixteen other hostages inside my store. He has guns and explosives. He says if he doesn’t receive a call from Lieutenant Phoebe Mac Namara within five minutes from the end of this call, he will shoot one of the hostages. For every minute beyond that five-minute deadline, he will shoot another. If anyone other than Lieutenant Mac Namara attempts to contact him on this phone, or any other, he will shoot a hostage. If there is any attempt to enter this building, he will detonate the explosives. Lieutenant Mac Namara has exactly five minutes from now.
    She reached for her cell phone. “Give me the number inside.”
    “Communications is nearly set up,” Harrison told her.
    “I don’t want him to know that, or that I’m already here. The less he thinks we know, the longer we can stall.” She punched in the number passed to her, sucked in a breath, then punched to call.
    “This better be Phoebe.”
    Answered first ring, she noted, and scribbled down eager/anxious to get started. “It’s Phoebe, Jerry. I’m told you want to talk to me.”
    “You and nobody else. Anyone else calls in here, somebody dies. That’s the first term.”
    “No one else calls you, talks to you, but me. I understand. Will you tell me how everyone’s doing in there?”
    “Sure. Scared spitless. Got us some criers. One guy’s going to have a hell of a headache when he comes to. If he comes to. Hey, I think you know him, Phoebe. Arnie Meeks? You’ve danced with him before, right?”
    Her rapidly scribbling hand jumped. “Are you saying that Arnold Meeks is one of the hostages, and that he’s injured?”
    “That’s what I’m saying. He’s also wearing an accessory. Just like the one I made for Roy. You remember Roy.”
    Not someone she loved this time, she thought, but someone she detested. And a damn clever, vicious way to up the stakes. “Are you telling me that you’ve rigged explosives on Arnold Meeks’s person?”
    “Oh yeah. A whole shitload of them. Any move on the building, and I blow him and a hell of a lot of others to hell. I don’t figure you’ll mind much about old Arnie, right? Guy messed you up, didn’t he? Coward’s way. How about if I pay him back for you?”
    “You don’t sound as if you want to do me any favors, Jerry. Can we talk about you and me, and what you do want?”
    “We’re just getting started. You’d better get things set up fast, Phoebe. I’ve got a little work to do in here. You call me back in ten.”
    “Get the com up,” Phoebe snapped. “Commander, I need Mike Vince here, right here.”
    “Done.” He ordered it. “We’ve got a partial visual, a count of ten hostages on the floor. We can’t confirm if there are seven more. Internal security has locked down the building. There’s a device rigged to the rear door with trip wires.”
    “Don’t try to defuse, please. He’d know. It would give him the excuse to kill a hostage, or set off the rig he has on Meeks. What he wants most is to play me, to pay me back. We need to let him do that, as long as we can.”
    He’d left a tidy house, she thought, and roses for