Terminal

“F-fuck off, you piece of shit.” The curses sounded strange coming out of her mouth, as if she wasn’t used to saying them.

Sherm’s eyes grew wide, but his response was cut off as Keith burst into laughter. Tears streamed down the manager’s face, leaking from his swollen eye. His busted lip pulled back in a sneer as he chuckled.

“Good for you, Kim.”

Sherm finished with Kim and stood up, turning his full attention to Keith.

“I saved the best for last.”

Sherm stepped toward him and Keith stopped laughing. Suddenly, he looked very small and very afraid.

“Tommy, make sure they stay quiet. Keith and I are gonna go have a nice, private talk.”

“But what about the cops?”

“Five-oh won’t be bothering us for a while. They’re still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on.”

“How do you know that?”

“These cops weren’t responding to the robbery. I’m sure of that. When a silent alarm gets triggered, the police dispatcher puts it out to the cars immediately. They get this strong-ass warning tone on their radios— they can hear it even if their radio is turned down. It’s kind of like the Emergency Broadcast System. In a town like Hanover, they’re required to have a minimum of two units respond. One unit takes the rear and the other takes the front, so each cop is diagonal from the other. But here’s the thing, dog. When they do this, there are no lights and no sirens. Five-oh doesn’t want to alert the bank robber that they’re on the way.”

“But we heard sirens.”

“Damn straight we did. We heard a shitload of sirens, which tells me they were responding to the shots fired in the back alley, when Kelvin shot John, then followed him around to the front. If they’d known it was a bank robbery they were rolling up on, they’d have done this whole thing differently. They were looking for Kelvin. They found us instead.”

“You’re pretty smart for a white trash hood,” Keith observed. Sherm ignored the comment, but I saw him flinch. Worse, he was starting to twitch again, and that was never a good sign when you were dealing with Sherm. When Sherm began to twitch, bad things happened.

“So what about us?” I asked. “What’s next?”

My mind raced. All I could think of was Michelle and T. J. She was at work, ringing up cigarettes and lottery tickets and maybe thinking of me too. He’d be at day care, maybe having a snack or drawing a picture of the three of us as stick figures.

“Well, you bought us some time, shooting out the door like that and talking smack to the cops. You surprised me, dog. That was some smart thinking, man. They don’t know what the fuck is going on now, except that they’ve got an unknown number of hostages and gunmen up in here. They’ll pull back, set up shop, and let their dispatcher know what’s going on. Pretty soon, dispatch will call here for the bank contact and have them walk outside with a predesignated signal that everything is cool and it was a false alarm, or that the bad guys are gone.”

He turned to Keith.

“Who’s the bank contact?”

“I am.”

“There ya go.” Sherm grinned at me. “Easy enough to find that out, right?”

“So we’re sending him out when they call?” I asked.

“Oh hell no. Even if he gave them the all clear, there’s no way we could get out of here now. They’d have to come in and double-check. So when Keith here doesn’t respond, they’ll hunker down outside, try to contain us. They’ve probably already got us surrounded, so stay the fuck away from the windows. Hanover doesn’t have a SWAT unit, so they’ll call for York County’s Quick Response Team. Those guys will take at least an hour to respond— maybe more. They’ll want to bring their armored vehicles and their helicopter and shit. Make sure the taxpayers know that their money is being used.

“Meanwhile, they’ll have every available officer here, except for one poor schmuck who’ll be responding to other calls— and I’m betting that even he will creep close to the scene. It’s the day shift, so we’re probably talking five to seven cars, four detectives, a platoon supervisor, probably a captain, and definitely the chief. He’ll want to have his picture on the front page of The Evening Sun tonight. Sooner or later, a police negotiator will try to contact us. When Quick Response shows up, they’ll have a second negotiator trying to deal with us too, if needed. I’ll handle all of that. They might try to break windows or shoot in tear gas and pepper spray grenades, or maybe send in that little surveillance robot, but that should be hours from now.”

“Fuck! What the hell do we do if they fire tear gas?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If we need to, we’ll seal the vault with us inside. I don’t think the gas can get in here. Until then, we chill. We’ve got plenty of time to figure shit out.”

“So we just sit tight? That’s your plan?”

“For now, yeah.”

“But—”

“Once we get the negotiator to play ball with us, we’ll get a ride out of here, a car or maybe a Humvee or something. Take a few of the hostages with us as insurance and let the others go as a good faith gesture.”