Shadow Prey

a shit about that,” the AIC said. “Just find something that’ll get me off the hook.”
    “I think we can do that,” Daniel said. He glanced at Lucas. “We’ll say that Minneapolis made the call and we decided to use FBI experts to attempt an entry. When that couldn’t be accomplished, we went to an alternate plan that used city officers to negotiate a surrender.”
    “The fuckin’ TV’ll never buy it,” the agent said unhappily.
    “If we both agree, what choice have they got?”
    • • •
    Del, Lily and Sloan were standing together in the hallway when Lucas and Daniel left the surveillance apartment.
    “What’d we do?” Del asked.
    “A deal,” Daniel said.
    “I hope you got a lot,” Del said.
    “We did all right, as long as we can pull Hood out of there,” Daniel said.
    “Maybe this wasn’t a time to deal,” Sloan suggested. “Maybe this was a time to tell it like it is.”
    Daniel shook his head. “You always deal,” he said.
    “Always,” said Lucas.
    Lily and Del nodded and Sloan shrugged.
     
    Hood had fired seven shots with a big-bore pistol through the oak door after the molded-compound AVON rounds had failed to blow it open. When they saw that the door wasn’t going to fall, the agents had cleared away from it and nobody was hurt. The firing stopped, there was the odd explosion, and then silence.
    Twenty minutes after the attempted entry, with Daniel still meeting with the agent-in-charge, the police hostage negotiator called Hood. Hood answered, said he wasn’t coming out, but that his friends in the apartment had nothing to do with any of it.
    “You know me?” he asked.
    “Yeah, we’ve had a line on you, Billy,” the negotiator said. “But that wasn’t us at the door, that was another agency. ”
    “The FBI . . .”
    “We’re just trying to get everybody out, including you, without anybody getting hurt . . . .”
    “These guys in here, they didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    “Could you send them out?”
    “Yeah, but I don’t want any of those white guys to snipe them. You know? The fuckin’ FBIs, man, they shoot us down like dirty dogs.”
    “You send them out, I guarantee no harm will come to them.”
    “I’ll ask them,” Hood said. “They’re scared. They’re sleeping, and all of a sudden somebody tries to blow up the fuckin’ apartment, you know?”
    “I guarantee . . .”
    “I’ll ask them. You call back in two minutes.” He hung up.
     
    “What’s going on?” Lucas asked. He and Lily had cut around the building to come up on the negotiator’s car.
    “I think he’s gonna let the other two guys out.”
    “Just like that?”
    “Just like that. He’s not thinking like they’re hostages.”
    “They’re not. They’re his friends.”
    “What happened with Daniel?” the negotiator asked.
    “The feebs are out,” Lucas said.
    “ All right. ”
    The negotiator called back after a little more than two minutes.
    “They’re coming out, but they gotta come out the window. The goddamn door is all fucked up, we can’t get it open,” Hood said.
    “All right. That’s fine. Break the window, whatever you have to do.”
    “Tell those white boys, so they don’t get sniped.”
    “We’ll pass the word right now. Give us a minute, then send them out. And you ought to think about it too, Billy; we really don’t want to do you any harm.”
    “Save the bullshit and pass the word not to snipe these guys,” Hood said, and hung up.
    “The two guys are coming out,” the negotiator told the radio man next to him. “Pass the word.”
     
    As they watched, with Lucas and Lily standing beside the car, a chair sailed through the front window and broken glass was knocked out of the window frame with a broom. Then a blanket was thrown over the window ledge. The first man stood in the window, jumped the five feet to the ground and hurried down the street toward the blocking police cars. A patrolman met him as he crossed the line of cars.
    Lily looked at him and shook her head. “Don’t know him. Wasn’t in any of the photos.”
    The second man followed a half-minute later, sitting on the window ledge with his legs dangling, talking back into the apartment. After a few seconds, he shrugged, hopped down and walked to the police line. The negotiator got back on the phone.
    “Billy? Billy? Talk to me, man. Talk to me . . . . Come on, Billy, you know that’s not right. That was the FBI, we cleared those fuckers out of