Lena took out her cell phone and waited for it to power up. It chirped twice, indicating she had messages waiting. She debated who to call, Nan or Ethan. Her uncle Hank briefly entered her mind, but considering their conversation that morning during which he practically begged her to lean on his shoulder, calling him now seemed like giving in, and Lena was not about to do that. She hated the thought of needing people almost as much as she hated having to reach out to them. In the end, she turned off the phone and tucked it back into her pocket, wondering why she had turned the damn thing on in the first place.
Frank came up beside her. His breath was sour when he asked, "Tactical's on the roof?"
Lena pointed at the building by the station. "Two up there that I can see," she said, indicating the black-clad men lying on their stomachs with high-powered rifles.
"Twenty more people from Nick's office just showed up," he told her.
"What for?"
"Stand around with their thumbs up their asses, from what I can see."
"Frank," Lena began, feeling a lump rise in her throat. "Are you sure?"
"What?"
"Jeffrey," she said, the word sticking.
"I saw it with my own eyes," Frank said, obviously upset by the memory. He wiped his nose with his hand as he crossed his arms over his chest. "He just went down. Sara crawled over to him and…" He shook his head. "Next thing I know, the shooter's putting a gun to her head, telling her to move away."
Lena chewed her lip, feeling a surprising shock of sympathy for Sara Linton.
"Nick seems to know what he's doing," Frank said. "They just cut the power to the whole building."
"Will the phones work without it?"
"There's a straight line to Marla's desk," Frank said. "The Chief put it in when he came here. Never knew why until now."
Lena nodded, trying not to think about it too much. When he had first taken the job as Chief, Jeffrey had done a lot of things that had seemed unusual at the time but ended up making perfect sense.
Frank said, "Phone company's made it so they can't call out unless it's to us."
Lena nodded again, wondering who had known to do all of this. If it was left up to her, they would be storming the building right now, finding the fuckers who had started all of this and finishing it by carrying out their bodies feet-first.
She put her foot on the window ledge, retying her shoe so that Frank would not see the tears welling in her eyes. She hated the fact that she could cry at the drop of a hat now. It made her feel stupid, especially because someone like Frank would take it as a weakness, when the truth was, she was crying because she was a hairsbreadth from full-out rage. How could someone do something like this? How could they come to the station, the last place Lena held as sacred, and do this kind of thing? Jeffrey had been her rudder through all of the shit that had happened to her in the last few years. How could he be taken away from her now, when she was getting her life back?
Frank muttered, "Goddamn media's already trying to get in."
"What?" she asked, hiding a sniff.
"Media," he said. "They're trying to get helicopters down here to film it."
"The station's within the no-fly zone," Lena pointed out, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Fort Grant had been shut down under Reagan, putting thousands of locals out of their jobs and running the city of Madison into the ground. Still, the military's no-fly zone was in force, and that should keep the news stations from letting their helicopters hover over the area.
Frank said, "The hospital isn't."
"Fuckers," she said, wondering how anybody could do that job. They were vultures, and the people back home who watched it all live were no better than animals themselves.
Frank lowered his voice, saying, "We gotta keep in control here."
"What does that mean?"
"With Jeffrey gone…" Frank stared out into the street. "We gotta keep our people in charge."
"You mean you?" Lena asked, but she could read on his face that he hadn't meant it that way. She asked, "What's wrong with you? Are you sick?"
He shrugged, wiping his mouth with a dirty-looking handkerchief. "Me and Matt ate something bad last night." She was startled to see tears in his eyes at the mention of Matt. Lena could not imagine what it had been like for him to watch his friend die right in front of his eyes. Frank had been Matt's supervisor when the younger man first came onto the force. Almost twenty years had passed since then and they had spent just about every working day in each other's company.
Frank said, "We know Nick. We know what kind of guy he is. He needs all the support we can give him."
"Is that what you were talking about in the office?" Lena asked. "It didn't seem like you were so hot on supporting him five minutes ago."
"We have a difference of opinion about how this should go down. I don't want some bureaucrat walking in here and fucking things up."
"This isn't a cowboy movie," Lena countered. "If the negotiator knows what he's doing, then we should follow his lead."
"It's not a guy," Frank said. "It's a woman."
Lena gave him a scathing look. Frank had made it clear from Lena's first day that he did not think women belonged in uniform. It must have burned him up knowing that a woman was coming down from Atlanta to take charge.
Frank said, "It ain't about her being a female."
Lena shook her head, pissed off as hell that he was worried about something as stupid as this. "You don't get into the freaking GBI baking cookies."
"Nick trained with this gal when he first joined up. He knows her."
"What'd he tell you?"
"He won't talk about it," Frank said, "but everybody knows what happened."
Lena bristled. "I don't."
"They were holed up in a restaurant outside of Whitfield. Two idiots with guns looking to score off the lunch crowd." He shook his head. "She hesitated. The whole thing went bad in less than a minute. Six people died." He gave her a knowing look. "We got our people in there praying for a savior," he jabbed a finger at the station, "and she ain't got the balls to do it."
Lena stared across the street. They only had six people left in the squad room.
She looked back at Frank. "We need to find out what's going on in there." There were parents and wives and boyfriends who were left hanging, waiting to find out whether or not their loved one was living or dead. Lena knew what it felt like to lose somebody, but at least she had found out Sibyl was dead fairly fast. She hadn't had to wait like the families were doing now. Jeffrey had told her, then they had gone to the morgue. That was that.
Frank asked, "What is it?"
She had let her thoughts get away from her, remembering all the second chances Jeffrey had given her, including this one today. No matter what stupid thing Lena did, he never stopped believing in her. There was no one else who would ever do that again.
Frank repeated, "What?"
"I was just thinking…" she said, but the sight of a helicopter swooping over the college stopped her. Lena and Frank both watched as the big black bird hung in the air over the college, then touched down on the roof of the Grant County Medical Center. The building was little more than two stories of old brick, and Lena half expected it to buckle. It obviously held, because a few seconds later Nick Shelton's phone rang. He opened it, listened for a couple of beats, then shut it.
He said, "Cavalry's here," but there was no relief in his voice. He motioned for Lena and Frank to follow him outside the back of the cleaners, and they all made their way toward the hospital, the heat bearing down like a sauna.
Lena asked Nick, "Is there anything we can do?"
He shook his head, saying, "This's their show now. It's got nothing to do with us."
Lena tried to get confirmation on Frank's story. "You trained with this woman?"