Jael stepped just inside the door. Lucas had warned her to stay close so she could back off if Scott did anything crazy. "As long as he'sinside the booth, you should be okay."
She began, "Mr. Scott, I am truly sorry"
She did it almost perfectly, Lucas thought, fixing him with her eyes, letting him take in her torn-paper face. "I had a hard childhood. Look at my scars," she said. She touched her face. "I was in a car accident"
They talked for a few minutes, then Scott shook his head as though dazed. "So what's the deal?" he asked Lucas.
Lucas said, "The deal is this: We go back to the lines, we get another camera of your choice. We come back here. You shuck all the shells out of your rifleuh, where's the shotgun?"
"In the car. I couldn't reach it after the crash."
"All right. Anyway you shuck all the shells out of the rifle, lay the rifle to the side. Then you open the booth, and you surrender to Jaelwe're talking the worlds biggest TV audience hereand then we all walk across the gas pad and you'll be taken into custody. With a lawyer right there."
"What channel?"
"Three? You want Ginger back?" Lucas asked.
"No. She was okay, but she was a little too smooth. She didn't have that good jagged quality. How about uh, what do you think?"
"Six. There's a woman with Six, sort of an understated beauty, if you know what I mean."
"Not Ellen?"
"Exactly. Ellen. She's out there, Martin."
He thought about it for a long beat. Then: "All right. Ellen."
Lucas went back, pointed at Ellen Goodrich, who raced out of the crowd, towing her camera. "Lucas what can I say? And what're we doing?"
"We're gonna do the surrender."
"Aw, jeez, that's just that's just" He thought she might weep with gratitude, but she didn't.
"Let's go," Lucas said.
The surrender went well, to a point, Lucas thought.
Jael made a statement, a formal apology for any wrongs that had been done to Alie'e. Scott apologized for the killings, said he still felt that they were necessarybut that Jael through her gracious actions had made up for some of it.
Then, with the TV camera focusing on him, Scott jacked the slide on the Ruger until shells stopped popping out. He said, "I hereby surrender to Jael Corbeau, a brave woman."
He reached out and popped the lock on the door. As it opened, the dark-haired hostage, Ralph, screamed, "YOU COCKSUCKER." He snatched the small portable TV off the shelf, and as Scott turned, startled, Ralph hit him in the face with it.
Scott went down as though he'd been struck by a meteorite, and Lucas shouted, "Hey," and tried to get the door open, but the woman, Melody, began kicking at Scott, screaming "SONABEECH" in an unexpected Mexican accent. Then she snatched a can of Pyroil starting fluid off the shelf and began hitting Scott in the back of the head, slicing off swaths of scalp.
Scott pushed up, tried to crawl through the rain of blows. Jael was there. Lucas tried to push past her, but she screamed, "You killed my brother, you motherfucker." Scott, stunned and bleeding, looked up, and she kicked him in the eye and he went down again.
The camera was crowding in, and Lucas swatted Jael to one side and tried to get at the dark-haired man, who was beating Scott with the remnants of the portable TV. Lucas grabbed him by the shirt, pulled him across Scott's body, and threw him into the cameraman; the cameraman, Ralph, and Ellen Goodrich all went down in a heap. Melody screamed, suddenly panic-stricken, and ran past. For a moment, Lucas and the stunned, bleeding Scott were behind the counter in a little pool of peace and privacy. Scott tried to push himself up, and Lucas whispered, "This is for Marcy, asshole," and hit him in the nose as hard as he could.
There was a satisfying crunch of bone, and Scott went down for the count.
An hour later, the mayor said, "I thought it went pretty well. You know, all things considered."
Chapter 30
The media attention was intense through the morning, until football started. By nine that night, most of the out-of-towners were gone.
On Monday, Lucas, Rose Marie, Frank Lester, and the mayor met in Rose Marie's office. Rose Marie said, "We're getting a ton of stuff on Spooner. He was in it up to his neck. And the Ramsey ME's office is saying they're not so sure that Rodriguez was a suicide. They found residue of wood preservative in his hair."
"Told you," Lucas said comfortably. "He was hit with a goddamn two-by-four and dropped over the banister. By Spooner. Spooner not only killed Rodriguez, I bet he's the guy who leaked Rodriguez's name toSpittle. Set him up, made him the bad guy, killed him."
"Spooner had a safe-deposit box over in Hudson," Lester said. "There were some documents that say he made a personal loan to Rodriguez's company in Miami for half a million dollars. Then, the feebs say, there was a lien registered on the company's property with Dade County, Rodriguez couldn't sell the company without the lien being settled, which meant that Spooner had an alarm if Rodriguez tried to get out. Spooner had another hook, too. If Rodriguez tried to sell, he'd have to settle the mortgages, and as the loan officer at Atheneum, Spooner would have known."
"Where'd Spooner get the half-million for the personal loan?" the mayor asked.
"There was no half-million. It was a fictitious loan. That was Spooner's cut in the business," Lester said. "They put it on paper, and hid the paper. In fifteen years, with interest, Spooner's cut is maybe two million. And that way, Spooner always had a hold on the business, if he and Rodriguez had a personal falling-out. He could file suit down in Dade County, and nobody up here would ever know and Rodriguez would have to settle."
"Still would have worked even after Rodriguez died," Lucas said. "If anybody even found out about the loan, they might have thought Spooner's investment was a little questionablebut hell, it'd be a minor thing. Especially if he trotted out all that bullshit about helping minorities and so on."
"Is anybody going to sue us?" the mayor asked.
"I don't know," Rose Marie said. "Spooner's wife might. She knows that Spooner's name was mentioned in our briefing of Olson, and that led indirectly to his death."
"That won't get her anywhere," the mayor said. "I've done those kinds of suits, and she'd be lucky to get a buck and a half. We didn't kill her husband, his own greed killed him. Along with a nutcase."
"And then there's Al-Balah," Rose Marie said.
"He might not be around long enough to sue," Lucas said. "The guys from Narcotics said he went back on the street, but all of his old territory was under new ownership. The new owners don't want to give it back. There's gonna be trouble."
"That would clean things up nicely," the mayor said.
"What, a cocaine war?"
"Hey, dopers die. There's not a lot you can do about it," the mayor said. "It's a tragedy, of course. No man is an island, et cetera." They all nodded.
When the mayor was gone, Rose Marie looked at Lester and Lucas and said, "We're good."
"I don't believe he bought the whole thing," Lucas said, meaning the mayor.
"He didn't. He knew there was some bullshit going on. But he was a very good lawyer. He knows there are times when you don't ask the obvious question."
"So we're good," Lucas said.
"By the skin of our teeth," Lester said.
"But we're still good," Rose Marie said. She stood up and did a heavy little hop-and-skip over to her window, not quite a jig. "Ail these other cities, all these big crimes, the media goes in, the controversy lasts for months. We have a big crime andbang, one killer's dead, andbang, the other guy confesses to a national audience. One week. The goddamn movie people think the sun shines out of our asses."
Lester seemed embarrassed. He said, "Yeah, but you know"