No Regrets. JoAnn Ross

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      Prologue

      1972

      It was Christmas in Los Angeles. Although the temperature was in the mid-eighties the residents of the City of Angels were determined to rev up that old holiday spirit.

      The venerable Queen Mary was decked out in its winter wonderland finery, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was playing to standing-room-only crowds at the Hollywood Bowl, and at the Shrine Auditorium the Nutcracker ballet continued to entrance.

      Richard Burton was narrating A Child’s Christmas in Wales at the Shubert Theatre, the Mickey Mouse Very Merry Christmas Parade had returned to Disneyland’s Main Street, and even the hookers strolling Hollywood Boulevard had gotten into the act, dressing for the season in skimpy red-and-white outfits.

      But inside a small pink stucco house, located in the shadow of Dodger Stadium, the mood was anything but festive.

      * * *

      “Molly,” Lena McBride whispered desperately, “I’m going to pee in my pants.”

      Ten-year-old Molly McBride drew her sister a little tighter against her. “No, you’re not, Lena,” she whispered back without taking her eyes from their daddy. “You can hold on.”

      “No, I can’t. Please, Molly,” she hissed, as she recrossed her legs and pressed her small hand between them. “You have to do something.”

      It was a common refrain, one Molly had grown up hearing. Although there was only two years’ difference between them, sometimes she felt more like Lena’s mother than her sister.

      “Would you two brats shut the fuck up?” Rory McBride roared, aiming his gun away from his wife and at Molly and Lena.

      Amazingly, his shout failed to wake three-year-old Tessa, who continued to sleep on the rug in the center of the room. Her baby sister had been cranky that morning with a cold. Afraid at what might happen if Tessa woke and began fussing, Molly was relieved that the cough medicine seemed to have knocked her out.

      “How’s a man supposed to think around here with you brats babbling all the time?”

      Having learned to keep quiet when her parents were drinking, which her daddy had been doing until he’d run out of liquor around sundown, Molly didn’t point out that it was the first thing either one of them had said since this all started six hours earlier. When her mama had come home from her afternoon shift at Denny’s smelling—as Rory had put it—of sex and sin, instead of cigarette smoke and fried eggs.

      “Lena needs to go to the bathroom,” she announced.

      “She’ll have to hold it, because she’s not goin’ anywhere.”

      Molly lifted her chin and met his bleary, red-rimmed eyes with a level look of her own. “She needs to go to the bathroom.” Her voice was quiet. But insistent.

      He drew in a long drag on a cigarette—his last—exhaled the smoke through his nose like a fire-breathing dragon and glared at her through the blue cloud. “You always have been a real mouthy little bitch, Molly McBride.” He shook his head with mock regret. “I think it’s high time your daddy shut you up.”

      He pointed the revolver straight at her, winked and pulled the trigger.

      * * *

      A phalanx of police cars was parked out in front of the house. Klieg lights lit up the area, making it as bright as day. Behind the police barricade, despite the fact that it was nearly midnight on Christmas Eve, spectators stood in groups, talking about the action as if they were watching a taping of “The Rookies” while video crews from every television station in the city were jockeying over the best vantage positions.

      “What we’ve got inside that house is potential multiple homicides,” Lieutenant Alex Kovaleski reminded his men. “The guy’s been threatening to kill himself and his wife and daughters for hours.” As chief negotiator of the Los Angeles police hostage team, it was Alex’s responsibility to see that didn’t happen.

      “Why don’t we just rush the house?” a young, impatient rookie asked.

      “This isn’t some Hollywood movie. We do that and there’ll be lots of gunfire that’ll look real dandy on the nightly news, but we could end up taking three little girls out of there in body bags.”

      Alex knew all too well that when a guy took his kids hostage, his real agenda was to get back at his wife for some grievance, either real or imagined. Killing the kids was a surefire way to hurt a spouse, but Alex wasn’t going to allow any children to die tonight.

      “Time’s on our side,” he reminded everyone. “If we get tired, we go home and they send in another fifty cops to take our place. And fifty more. Then fifty more after that. Hell, we can keep rotating cops until doomsday. We can outlast the son of a bitch.”

      They’d already cut off the power and water to the McBride house. Intimidation tactics, certainly. The entire idea of hostage negotiation was to control the hostage-taker’s environment.

      * * *

      “I’m going to kill the fuckin’ bitch,” Rory McBride insisted yet again. It was the fourth time Alex had spoken with him on the phone since the standoff had begun. The previous three times the conversation had ended with McBride hanging up.

      “That’s what you keep saying,” Alex agreed mildly. “But you know, Rory, I don’t think you want to do that. Not really.”

      “What I want is a goddamn drink. And some cigarettes.”

      “Can’t give you any alcohol, Rory. It’s against the rules, remember?” They’d been through this earlier, when he’d threatened to blow out his wife’s brains if the cops didn’t get him a bottle of Jim Beam. “But I suppose I could send a pack of cigarettes in.”

      There was a long silence. Then a curse. “Okay. Make ’em Camels. Filterless.”

      “Sorry, but that’s not quite the way it works.” The way it worked was that the cops took everything away. Then negotiated things back, one item at a time. “Tell you what I’ll do, Rory. Since I’m feeling generous tonight, and I’d like to get this over with so we can all get some sleep, I’ll trade you two packs of Camels for those little girls.”

      Rory McBride’s answer was a ripe curse. When the sound of a receiver being slammed down reverberated in his ear, Alex muttered his own curse.

      Deciding to give McBride a few minutes to calm down, Alex studied СКАЧАТЬ