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The Tac Team would be in place for the final assault by now. From the look of the overhanging branches, the high ground observers could be right over the perp—if they could spot him. I opened the mike one more time and repeated the call, expecting no reply and getting none. To Murakawa I said, “Tell the inspector we’re getting no response.”

I leaned forward and moved my feet out to the sides. There was no decent position in here. The damp rose up from the ground. Already my butt felt icy. I thought of the hostage. Most likely she’d be lying on the bare ground. She’d been dragged down the chute. That descent was jarring on foot. To get down there and haul her, the perp had to be in good shape. I wished it were light enough to look at the trail to see if he’d had to stop to adjust his burden, or if we were dealing with someone strong enough to carry the body over the hard spots. Whichever, by the time he got here he’d been dragging her. And when her shoe came off, he’d have been banging her stockinged foot along the ground. Farther along the path the mud would have pulled off the sock, the rocks would have scraped her heel raw, and now, was that heel lying bloody in the mud?

“Any word, Murakawa?” I whispered.

“Doyle can’t get an answer.”

“We got a hostage here who could have broken bones, infected wounds; she’s probably terrified and freezing. She could be dying while they test the wind.”

Murakawa nodded. “Inspector,” he said, softly, “Smith says to ask them to consider the state of the hostage.” Part of the liaison’s job was interpreting.

“So, Murakawa?” I knew I was pushing him, but I couldn’t keep quiet.

“Doyle’s waiting.”

“John could be cooking the hostage by now. Ask him how that’d play in the papers: ‘Kidnapper cooks woman while cops wait for dinner invite.’ Tell him, Murakawa.”

“Inspector, the perp could be up to anything.”

I stood up and bent over. My lower back felt cold and brittle as ice.

Murakawa’s radio crackled. “Inspector says the manager’s office is trying to get the mayor.”

“Shit! What about the city council? We wait, we lose what we’ve done. Tell him this is it!”

I could hear Murakawa calling Doyle as I said into the speaker, “This is the police. This is your last chance. Signal us now!”

Time stopped. The rustling of the leaves, the scraping of the underbrush seemed deafening. My chest shook with each heartbeat, and the thump seemed to echo off the canyon walls. I stared into the charcoal-brown fog around me. No light flickered. Only leaves moved, or so it looked in the dark. No sound broke the rhythm of my heartbeat and Murakawa’s breathing.

I wanted to push Murakawa, make him goose Doyle, goose the O.C., the chief, the city manager sitting on his padded chair in his heated room in City Hall, thinking not of the sludge and jungle down here, of every moment when a sudden noise could loose a trigger, not thinking of the terrified victim, but of the vast and ambiguous larger picture.

“What are they saying, Murakawa?”

“Nothing. Same as a minute ago.”

I wanted to grab his mike, to yell “To hell with public relations!” My legs screamed their need to pace, my feet yearned to kick ass.

“If we’re just going to sit here, we might as well drive down to City Hall and do it with them.” I didn’t expect Murakawa to call that in.

It was a minute before he said, “Okay, Smith. Prepare for Plan C.”

“Tell them we don’t know what we’re dealing with here. John could walk a yard in front of us and we wouldn’t spot him. Tac Team will be banging into each other. Keep on the horn while they move in.”

Murakawa reaffirmed our location, and translated my instructions into phrases more pleasing to an inspector’s ear. Then we waited.

“Okay, Smith,” Murakawa said. “Count three and make the last call.”

I forced myself to count slowly, listening to the silence between each number. “This is the police.” I let another second pass. “We know you’re in here.” I repeated, “We know you’re in here.” I had to make my diversion last long enough for the Tac Team to get a bead on him, figure a path in behind him, and move in quietly. The lead guys would have night glasses, but I didn’t know how good they’d be in dark, fog, and underbrush. “There’s no way out, you know that, don’t you?”

Tac Team’s trained for negotiations to break down, to have the scene mapped out, hours of planning the entry behind them, and a picture of the perp etched into their brains. They’re ready to run in with weapons drawn, assess the threat, and, if necessary, take out the perp. Adrenaline just about busts the skin then. It’s all go. But this, creeping into unknown territory in the dark, not daring to shoot, not knowing what they’d find—all that adrenaline would be pounding back on themselves.

“Let’s talk about what you want here. Let’s talk.”

Ahead a light flickered. I could feel Murakawa’s hand tighten on my shoulder.

I murmured, “You can never guess—”

“Smith,” Murakawa said, “Doyle says Tac Team’s got the hostage.”

I squeezed my lips together to keep from yelling “O—kay!” My heart thumped against my ribs. I was grinning and squeezing my hands so hard into fists my skin hurt. “They’ve rescued the hostage? What shape is she in? And John, what about him?”

“No sign of him.”

“Where’s the hostage?”

Murakawa relayed my question. After a few seconds he said, “Quarry office.”

The light flickered again. It looked to be twenty yards ahead, as much as I could figure in the dark. “Tac, that you up there?”

The light flashed five times—the signal.

“We’re coming on.”

Murakawa grabbed my shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing? John could be halfway there. He could be anywhere.”

Murakawa was right. The negotiator never puts himself in the immediate danger zone, I knew that. Still, I insisted, “He’s not there.”

“Let Tac secure the path,” he insisted.

The adrenaline surged against my skin. I wanted to run forward, to see the victim, to know she was all right. Instead I waited while he called.

“Ask them how she is, Murakawa.”

It was a moment before he said, “Grayson says she’s depressed, seems a bit deflated, but she can be patched up fine.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

Murakawa nodded. His radio crackled. “Okay, now we can move.”

The light stayed on ahead. I flashed my own light on the path and pushed through the underbrush. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to see the woman, to know for myself she was going to make it. The quarry floor would probably be no bigger than an eight-by-ten-foot room. My light caught the edge of the raised cement floor. In front of it was enough firepower to subdue a small nation. The black-suited Tac guys stepped back off the path as I neared the cement floor. The first thing I spotted there was the other black running shoe.

It was a moment before I noted the leg it was attached to—or what remained of it. I stared in disbelief—and rage. The legs were plastic—blow-up dummy legs. It looked like a blow-up dummy like the kind you get from the sex catalogs. But I couldn’t be sure because all the air was gone. In the harsh beams of the flashlight the too-blue eyes, cherry-red lips, and pink cheeks looked garish and the deflated body unbelievably old.

“A dummy,” I muttered. My neck was so tight the words were barely audible; my head throbbed. I wanted to kick something, someone, the perp, till he was as lifeless as the dummy. “Shit! Shit! Shit! We’re the dummies.”

The Tac Team guys were grumbling and shaking their heads. “At least, Smith,” Murakawa said, “you got us down here now. We could have spent half the night up top waiting to liberate these plastic legs.”

I nodded. I hoped the city manager’s officer and Inspector Doyle saw it that way.

The remains of the old quarry office and the ground around it were bright as day. Every one of the Tac Team, plus Murakawa and I, had our flashlights out. We were all spraying the lights, looking for something to save the situation.

It was Murakawa who spotted the wooden box under the overhang against the hillside. It was covered with papers. Envelopes, official forms.

“Here’s the final irony,” one of the guys said. “An extra load of paperwork.”

“Hey,” another said, “add that to your report. You can check it out in your spare time.”

Groans came from all around. Hostage Negotiation Team work was extra—the exercise and the follow-up. Everyone would get home late tonight and spend tomorrow trying to squeeze in writing the report.

“Look at this!” Murakawa held up a form.

“Parking ticket?” someone asked.

“Right.” He turned back to the box. “The whole batch are parking tickets. Christ, there must be hundreds of them.”

We all made for the pile and grabbed. There were plenty to go around.

One of the Tac Team, Samson from traffic, was the first to say “Oh, hell! Parking tickets! And they’ve all got different license numbers.”

“From different cars,” someone said.

I picked up one. “This is dated five months ago.”

“This one’s yesterday,” Murakawa put in.

“I don’t believe it!” Samson said. “This bastard’s been lifting parking tickets from windshields for months. All over town people have been thinking they’ve gotten away with not feeding the meters. They haven’t paid their tickets because they didn’t know they got them.”

“And if this hits the newspapers, no one in town is going to pay a ticket. They’re all going to say theirs got lost,” Murakawa predicted.

“And the people who have paid are really going to be pissed,” I said. It would be the big brouhaha of the year, the kind of fuss that Berkeley was famous for. “It’ll make a great companion piece to the main story for all those reporters who’ve wasted their Sunday night here: Hostage Negotiation Team outwitted by dummy.”

“You think this is the work of our meter maid vandal?” Samson asked hesitantly.

No one answered, but I would have put money on the same thought filling thirty heads: a news photo of the deflated dummy with a caption
TICKETED TO DEATH.
I’d have upped the ante to cover thirty minds sure that the Berkeley Hostage Negotiation Team was going to be the laughingstock of the Bay Area, and the press was going to make the whole department a circus until we found the perp who’d collected this load of parking tickets and the perp (maybe one and the same) who’d been staging pranks on parking enforcement carts all over the city.

Bugging meter maids was one thing, but this prank was something else. I couldn’t have said if it seemed that way because this time it was I who’d been had, or if, in fact, it signalled a turn from the playful to the malicious. And indicated a mind that couldn’t see the difference.

I
F THERE HAD BEEN
any way to avoid it, we certainly would have. But the field operations center was at the Arlington. We had to come back there. And thus, there was no way to avoid having the entire Negotiation and Tac teams emerge from the canyon debacle up the chute, person by hostage-less person, with the regularity of baseballs from an automatic batting machine. After the dark of the canyon, as each one of us hit the blinding lights of four TV crews, we stopped, blinked, and looked like rabbits stunned by headlights.

The adrenaline rush was gone. Now I felt drained and had one of those dull caffeine-hangover headaches that only throb sporadically—as if to remind me that I’d let myself get too caught up in this operation. Every guy on the team looked worn-out and surly; I was willing to bet that at some point in the last hour every one of them had thought that the “victim” was a woman like his aunt or mother or grandmother. But I was the only one on the team who’d thought the “victim” was someone like me.

“What’s the story down there?” Alison Saunders, one of the reporters, shouted leaning far across the second line of tape—the outer perimeter. Behind her cars were still gunning motors for the sharp uphill spurt to the upper lanes of the Arlington. Brakes squealed in the distance as gawkers, drawn by news bulletins, filled the curbs on the far side of the Arlington and doubtless all the streets that fed into it. The crowd had quadrupled in the hour I’d been in the canyon. Earlier it had been mostly neighbors who’d wandered out with glasses of wine. By now some of them had gone home and retrieved the bottles. And there were the crisis junkies who’d grabbed windbreakers and helmets and hopped on bikes, plus the normal array of Berkeleyans: bejeaned ponytailed guys in old flannel shirts and down vests, college girls with used rabbit coats and bare feet in Birkenstocks, shoppers from the stores a block up the Arlington still clutching grocery bags. Clearly our operation was the social occasion of the day.

“Hey, Smith, what went on down there?” Saunders insisted.

Ignoring her, I huddled with Inspector Doyle and McKinley, the field press officer liaison. They’d be the up-front officers with the press. Grayson moved in next to McKinley.

“So you lost him, Grayson,” Doyle muttered.

“Not us, sir. He was probably gone long before we got the go-ahead. The only flashlight signal Smith
thinks
she saw was over an hour ago. And she’s not sure about that. For all we know, the perp plopped the dummy down there and was home in time for the six o’clock news.”

“And he’ll have a good laugh when he sees you guys on at ten,” Doyle said.

I restrained a smile at Doyle’s support. Grayson made no secret about not liking working with a woman. The woman he most resented was me.

“Sir—” McKinley began.

“Do I take it, Grayson, you’ve got no indication at all where he went? Your Tac Team surrounded the whole canyon and he just walked off?”

“Like I said, sir, he could have been gone before we got here, while the focus was in the hands of Negotiation.”

“Or he could have crept up the hillside while you were coming down.”

I had been around Inspector Doyle a lot more than Grayson had. Doyle had had his own hesitations about a woman in Homicide Detail, but we’d worked through most of them. Now, I said nothing to draw attention to myself, or remove Grayson from the line of fire.

“We’ve got deadlines, you know!” Saunders called.

“Put a sock in it, Saunders. We’ll get to you,” McKinley yelled. To me, he said, “So, Smith. Is there a connection to the meter mangler?”