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head above the porch's floorboards. Four negotiators thus far. None of them making so much as a dent.
The Tac Team observers with their night-vision binocs couldn't see far enough into the room to determine whether there was just that single nine-millimeter gun in there or other weaponry as well. There were five observers in all, one each on the back and both sides of the building, two at the front, where all the action was. The observers had reported that all the windows on the sides of the house were boarded over: Sonny and Diz had been expecting company.
This was the first bit of important news Georgia Mobry got out of Dolly sitting there in the window.
Georgia was Brady's top female negotiator, back from her vacation only yesterday, and right in the thick of it now. She was the fourth one working the window, or working the porch perhaps, or more accurately working the bushes, because that's where she was crouched some six feet from the window in which Dolly sat all pale and purple in the lights. They'd all been wondering how Dolly had allowed herself to get into a situation like this one. She had told the detectives where they could find Sonny and Diz and so it would have seemed only sensible for her to stay as far away from there as possible.
But she now revealed to Georgia - who was truly expert at milking cream even from a toad - that she'd begun feeling guilty right after the two black cops left her, and so she'd come back here and told Sonny and Diz what was about to come down, and instead of getting out of there, they gave her some crack to smoke and told her she was their ticket to Jamaica. That was the second bit of important information.
"So please don't do any shooting," she said, "because they'll kill me, they told me they'd kill me."
Which is what she'd said many times before to the other three negotiators who'd been pulled out of the ball-game. But now Georgia knew that Dolly herself had caused her present predicament, and the price of her release was a ticket to the Caribbean.
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"Do they want to go to Jamaica?" she asked, checking it. "Is that it, honey?"
Accent as gentle and as thick as her name and her native state.
"Well, I'm only telling you what they said."
"That you were their ticket to Jamaica?"
"Yeah."
"Gee, I wish I could talk to them personally," Georgia said.
"Yeah, but they don't wanna."
'"Cause I'm thinking maybe we can work something out here."
Like getting you out of there and then blowing these suckers away, Georgia was thinking. To her mind - and she'd been trained by Brady - what they were looking at here was a non-negotiable hostage situation. Sooner or later, somebody was going to order an assault. The computer make on Sonny Cole had come in not ten minutes ago, and it revealed that he'd done time on the West Coast for killing a man during the commission of a grocery-store holdup in Pasadena. So what they had here was not only a man who'd maybe killed a cop's father, but a man who'd been convicted once of having taken a life and who was now armed with a weapon and firing indiscriminately through an open window whenever the spirit moved him.
Desmond Whittaker was no sweetheart, either. In Louisiana, he'd done five years at hard labor for the crime of manslaughter, which would have been murder under subdivision (1) of Article 30 in the state's Criminal Code, except that it was committed "in sudden passion or heat of blood." How the pair had come together in DC was a mystery. So was how they'd ended up here in this city. But they were both extremely dangerous, and if they showed no signs soon of willingness to enter even the earliest stages of negotiation, then somebody was going to ask for a green light for either a direct assault or the use of chemical agents. A sharpshooter was out of the question; nobody could see where the hell they were in that
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room. The only target was the girl in the window. And she was the one they wanted to save.
So Georgia didn't have much hope of success here.
"Why don't you ask one of them to talk to me directly?" she said.
"Well, they don't wanna," Dolly said again.
"Ask them, okay?"
"They'll shoot me," she said.
"Just for asking them? No, they wouldn't do that, would they?"
"Yes, they would," Dolly said. "I think they might."
No two hostage situations were alike, but a hostage serving as mediator was something Georgia had come across at least a dozen times before. Sometimes the taker even gave one of his hostages safe passage to go outside and talk to the police, with the understanding that if he or she didn't come back, somebody else would be going out of the building - dead. Georgia didn't want that to happen here. The pathetic little creature mediating in the window seemed stoned enough not to realize that there were hordes of policemen out here ready and in fact aching to storm that house and shoot anything in there that moved. But she wasn't so stoned that she couldn't smell the immediate danger behind her in that room, an armed man, or perhaps two armed men, threatening to kill her unless -
Unless what1?
"You see," Georgia said, "we're not sure what the problem is here."
You never denned the problem for them. You let them do that.
"If we knew what the problem was, I'm sure we could work something out. We'd like to help here, but nobody wants to talk to us."
You always suggested help. The taker or takers were usually panicked in there. The political terrorists, the trapped criminals, even the psychotics, were usually panicked. If you told them you wanted to help . . .
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"So why don't you ask them how we can help?" Georgia said.
"Well..."
"Go ahead. Just ask them, okay? Maybe we can work this out right away. Give it a try, okay?"
"Well. . ."
"Go ahead."
Dolly turned her head from the window. Georgia couldn't hear what she was saying. Nor could she hear what someone in the room behind her said. She heard only the deep rumble of a masculine voice. Dolly turned back again.
"He said he ain't got no problem, you got the problem."
"Who's that? Who told you that?"
"Diz."
Okay, Diz was the honcho, Diz was the one they wanted to reach.
"What does he say our problem is?" Georgia asked. "Maybe we can help him with it."
Dolly turned away from the window again.
In the distance, beyond the barricades that defined the outer perimeter, Georgia could hear The Preacher's voice extolling the merits of Tawana Brawley, "a priestess of honor and truth," he was calling her, "in an age of political lies and paramilitary deceit. And we have the same thing here tonight, we have a fierce and mighty demonstration of white police power against two young African-Americans as innocent as were the Scottsboro ..."
Dolly turned back to the window.
"He says the problem is getting a chopper to the airport and a jet to Jamaica, that's the problem."
"Is that what he wants? Look, can't he come to the window? He's got the gun, I'm unarmed, nobody's going to hurt him if he comes to the window. Ask him to come to the window, okay?"
Georgia was truly unarmed. She was wearing light body armor, but that was a nine-millimeter gun in there. Red cotton
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T-shirt. Blue jacket with the word police on it in white letters across the back. Walkie-talkie hanging on her belt.