Takeover by Lisa Black Page B

B. We can’t snow him about the money, so we’re going to have to work with the car. Jason, go with her, and take a remote. Get me—us—some answers. We’ve got forty-five minutes.”

CHAPTER 9
    10:09 A.M .
    Theresa had even bought a dress. A wedding dress. A floor-length white dress with lace and a few modest sequins. Hope, this time, would triumph over experience. That was what she hadn’t told Paul about, what she felt a little silly about confessing. Now, not telling him seemed a vote of no confidence, a betrayal. Never mind that if he didn’t make it out of there, the damn dress would cease to matter anyway.
    She waited behind the M.E.’s office, in a sliver of shadow along the brick wall, eyeing the Mercedes, which now sat in the middle of the parking lot as three outfitted bomb squad members worked on it. Two examined the undercarriage with small mirrors on retractable handles, and a third attached a wire to a latch embedded in the front grille.
    Be careful, her grandfather had always instructed her. Don’t ride your bike in the street. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t drive too fast.
    She had always listened. But surely there had to be a time whencaution produced diminishing returns. “Do they understand that we’re in a hurry?”
    Beside her, Jason sketched the coupe’s outline on one page of his notebook. “They understand they don’t want to get blown up.”
    She swallowed her frustration. The poor guys must be close to passing out, working with all that protective gear in this humidity. And an explosion would cause a great deal of damage to her coworkers’ automobiles, not to mention what it would do to herself and Jason. Be smart and think, she told herself. This car was all they had. If Cavanaugh had sent her to it just to get rid of her, he wouldn’t have spared Jason. “What’s that on your belt, that remote that Cavanaugh told you to bring?”
    “It’s a one-way radio. It connects with our phone equipment, so I can listen to both sides of the conversation. I can’t talk to them on it, but it will keep me up with current events if they call Chris again.”
    “Is he always so…” Words failed her. Abrupt? Peremptory? Unsympathetic?
    “Chris? He’s pretty matter-of-fact, but he has to be. Aren’t you matter-of-fact around dead bodies?”
    “They’re already dead before they get here,” she said, aware that this did not answer the question. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”
    “Chris has to stay calm because no one else will. There isn’t time to second-guess. This has been a reasonable job so far. Sometimes the bad guy just shouts threats for an hour or two, nonstop, and Chris has to stay with him for every second. These guys, I’m beginning to think, are professional criminals. They rob banks for a living.”
    Despite the sweat trickling down her spine, a chill swept her skin. “So they’re more likely to use violence.”
    “Less likely,” Jason assured her. “They have a more reasonable assessment of what will and will not happen, and they’re able to judge accordingly. They know that should they go to jail—and by the time they come out of the bank, they’ll have accepted that they’re going to jail—their sentence will be much less if they haven’t hurt anyone. Other hostage situations—like political terrorism or psychotics or domestics, which are the worst, let me tell you—are much more dangerous.”
    She suspected that unlike his boss, Jason had a few minutes to try to make her feel better, and that he had slanted his statistics for her sake. But she appreciated it.
    “You might want to duck,” one of the bomb squad guys told them, shouting to be heard from behind his Plexiglas face shield. “Or go inside.”
    She crouched in the shelter of a Grand Marquis. It belonged to a pathologist of whom she was not particularly fond, and she hoped any flying debris would shatter its rear windshield instead of herself or Jason. But if they blew up the