DANIEL

“Let’s start with the Hudson case.”

My heart felt like it dropped down to my stomach. Despite doing my best to sit still and confident, I nervously adjusted myself on the barstool. “What?”

“You heard me, Detective.” Gage stood behind his camera, looking me in the eye now. “Did you check the house?”

That one threw me. Gage starting the interview with the very question my superior had asked me in the debrief caused me to trip over my own thoughts. I gave the same answer I gave my chief. “Yes.”

“All of it?” Gage asked the same follow-up question too.

But this time I changed things. I was silent for a second before offering the confession. “No.”

The others at the table exchanged looks.

“Interesting,” Gage noted. He walked over to the backpack, still sitting on the bar. He began to sort through it.

It was a brief moment and not nearly enough for me to do anything major. But I took the chance. With Gage’s back to me, I raised my hand slightly and got Emily’s attention. I mouthed two words. Your phone.

She nodded.

Gage turned back around. He walked back to the camera with an overflowing manilla folder. “That’s not what it says in the official transcript. It says here that you told your superior you checked the house completely. Are you changing your answer now, Detective?”

“You have a folder on me?” I risked a glance at Emily. She was still looking at me, but her hands were underneath the table. She leaned back slightly to give herself a better view.

“I have a folder on every one of you,” Gage responded. He caught my glance and turned toward the table. Emily slowly inched forward, pushing her phone back under the table. Gage sighed. “Don’t bother. You won’t have service here.”

Emily only stared back, giving no indication she understood what he meant.

Gage rolled his eyes. “Please check, Emily. Let’s get this over with so no one else has any bright ideas. Do you have service?”

Emily looked at her phone. Then at the others. Then at me. “No.”

“Of course not. I am not that stupid. Anyone else?”

Gage waited until everyone confirmed the lack of service. “And let me go ahead and address this one — Charlie, does the diner have wifi?”

“No.”

“Thank you. Just so everyone is aware, you have no way to contact anyone. Please do not make me take your phones. Don’t behave like children. We have work to do.”

Gage seemed to be forgetting that one of the people he was holding hostage was a child, but I wasn’t about to bring that to his attention.

Gage brought the gun back to me and resumed the interview. “So you lied to your superior?”

“I don’t understand what this has to do with anyth–”

“I don’t care if you understand!” He stomped his foot to put emphasis on care. “Answer the question.”

I had the impression that I was interacting with someone who was at the emotional level of a toddler. Someone who would throw fits if he did not get his way. And that emotional toddler was waving a gun. I took a breath to steady myself and tried to proceed carefully. “I would not call it a lie. It was not intentional. Calling it a lie implies that I did it on purpose. That’s not what happened. It was a mistake.” I waited to see whether the answer was acceptable.

Gage looked like he was deciding which part of my response to attack. “What was a mistake?”

Brett, the wet man with glasses, stood. “This is insane.”

Gage whirled the gun. “No! Sit! I am not playing. We are going to complete these interviews.”

“This is insane!” Brett’s voice was louder this time.

Denise, who had only said about a dozen words throughout dinner, silently reached up and grabbed her husband’s arm. She tugged him back down to his seat.

“Thank you, Denise,” Gage said. “I can see why your husband appreciates your sensibility. Because he has none.” Gage stopped, almost daring Brett to respond. Brett didn’t and Gage continued. “I will shoot the next person who stands without my permission. I really hope we can get through this peacefully. You decide.”

He returned to me. “What was a mistake?”

“I was the lead detective on the case. The crime scene techs and officers provided all the evidence to me. It was my job to process and connect it. I clarified with one of the crime scene techs that the entire house had been searched. He confirmed. That turned out to be a mistake. There was a closet that had not been processed.” I was reciting facts now, detaching myself from the emotion of the case like I always did.

Gage actually laughed. “I’m sorry, Detective. Are you blaming this on someone else?”

“I’d prefer that you call me Daniel.” I hoped the shift would leave him off balance.

It did not.

“Well, that seems like just another way to avoid taking responsibility, Detective. Are you blaming someone else for your mistake?”

I noticed Emily lean forward, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her fingers. The entire table was deep in the story now. “I am not. I was in charge. I ultimately made the decisions or approved those made by others. The buck stopped with me. It was my fault.”

“So technically we could say you are no better than the murderer himself.”

“Careful, Gage.” It was the first time Marcus had spoken since the interview started. I looked over to find him glaring at Gage.

Gage held up the hand not holding a gun. “Fine. I’ll rephrase.”

Rephrase? Was this a courtroom now?

Tension rose inside me at the thought of this stool and the bar behind me being a witness stand. I’d been in one of those. Far too recently. Answering questions about this same thing.

Gage shuffled through the papers. It didn’t look like the safest thing to do with a gun in one hand, but Gage didn’t seem big on safety. “Detective, evidence was found in the master bedroom closet after the case was already closed. What was that evidence?”

“Shoes. The killer had taken them off and hidden them in there before leaving the scene.”

“Oh dear. That’s an unfortunate miss. So, since the shoes were not discovered until after the man who murdered the Hudson family in their own home was found innocent, is it correct you had a hand in helping him go free?”

I looked at Marcus. As if he were my attorney and would interrupt again. He didn’t. But he did shake his head.

“No,” I answered. “That is not correct. I have spent my entire career making sure guilty people go to jail and innocent people are kept safe.”

Gage cocked his head. “Come now, Detective. Are you telling me your incompetence had nothing to do with a murderer getting off scot-free?”

“Back off, Gage,” Marcus spoke again.

I looked into the camera. My mouth was dry and my pulse pounded in my ears. This maniac did not want interviews. He wanted me to relieve the worst moments of my life and the terror that went with them. And it was working. My hands were starting to shake. I placed them on my legs to hide it.

I chose my words carefully, conscious of both Gage’s instability and Marcus’s earlier comment about the truth being a safe place. “That’s not what I’m saying. Our team made a mistake. I made a mistake. It was horrible and unfortunate, but cops make mistakes too. I was doing the best I could.” I swallowed and looked up toward the ceiling, blinking back unexpected tears. I couldn’t afford to show emotion but I couldn’t stop it either. “There is no way I can ever get that family the justice they deserve. So yes. My mistake contributed to a guilty person not being locked up. But I will not make that mistake again.”

The room was silent as I wiped at my eye. A thought suddenly came to me. I tried to throw Gage off again. “I thought you said these interviews were going to be about how things used to be better?”

Gage lifted his eyes from the camera viewer. “Great point, Detective. Was your life not better before the Hudson case?”

“I mean… of course it was. That was a terrible moment in my life.”

Gage leaned toward the camera as if this was the moment he had been waiting for. In my peripheral vision, I noticed Marcus do the same.

“And would you prefer to return to your life before the Hudson case?”

I didn’t answer right away. I could argue both sides. My life and career and even self-confidence had taken hits since that case. It was unquestionably one of the worst years of my life. But… not all the changes were bad. People grow during mistakes and hard seasons. I wouldn’t take a million dollars to go through it again. But I wouldn’t take a million dollars to lose what I’d learned about life and myself either. So…

“No,” I said flatly. Gage didn’t deserve the explanation. “No, I would not.”

The atmosphere in the room had changed. The group at the table had remained quiet through most of my story. And though the silence continued, it felt different now. Like it was offered out of respect and resolution. Or maybe that feeling was just my own relief at telling the story.

Whatever it was, Gage must have felt it too. He stared at me with those colorless eyes for almost a full minute before clicking a button on the camera. He pointed the gun at my chair at the table. “Sit.”

I didn’t have to be told twice. I returned to my seat.

As I did, Marcus reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Thank you, Daniel. I know that was hard.”

I only nodded, not sure how to take the comment.

“That’s it?” Brett asked.

“I told him to sit, didn’t I?” Gage seemed more irritable now. It was as if his moods shifted with the minute.

“What if we refuse?” Brett asked.

“Brett.” Denise cautioned her husband.

“No. I want to talk this out.” He turned back to Gage. “What if we refuse?”

Gage stared at him. “Didn’t we just go over this? I’ll shoot you. Are you going to be a problem too?”

“You have one gun. There are eight of us and one of you. You can’t watch us all at the same time.”

“That’s why you are seated at the table all together. Are you dumb? Do you not understand how this works? Your son really did get his intelligence from his mother, didn’t he?”

I watched Brett’s face redden and silently prayed he wouldn’t stand up. We couldn’t afford to anger Gage any more.

Thankfully, Brett remained seated. But he spoke through gritted teeth. “There’s going to come a moment tonight when you have your guard down. When you’re not paying attention to every single thing every person is doing. And when it does, we’ll win.”

The words hung in the air, the challenge presented and unable to be taken back. I glanced around at the faces and saw the same tension I felt in myself. We might all have been thinking the same thing, but Brett’s words had possibly robbed us of the opportunity to catch Gage off guard.

Gage’s gray eyes stared at Brett for a long time before he exhaled. “Very well. I wasn’t going to introduce this plot twist until later, but let’s do it now.” Gage walked over to the backpack on the bar.

I dreaded whatever was coming next. Gage was unhinged. I wanted to punch Brett, but my hands had started shaking again.

“Remember when I told you that I’d had two careers in my life?” Gage lifted a device out of the backpack. It looked to be a square. Two feet by two feet, with a height of about six inches. It appeared to be made out of metal and I caught a glimpse of some colored wires and electrical workings on the inside. “One was being an investigative journalist. The other was making these. Any guesses?”

No one answered.

I had a guess, but I was desperately hoping I was wrong.

I wasn’t.

“This, ladies and gentlemen and very rude wet man, is a bomb. A live one. My other career was building bombs for the Army. Very thrilling, very exciting, very short life expectancy. Don’t worry though. I was quite good at it.”

He dropped the bomb on the counter. It hit with a loud bang and we all jumped.

“Oops.” Gage adjusted the bomb. “To answer the angry wet man’s arguments, this bomb is set to go off at 4am. There’s no significance to that, really. Just the time I thought things would wrap up. The only way to disarm the bomb is here.” He raised the hand with the gun and pointed to the smart watch on his other hand.

I secretly hoped he would accidentally blow his own hand off.

“There is a code for my watch that will disarm the bomb, provided it is entered before the set time. Of course you understand that I am not going to give that out. Furthermore, the watch monitors my pulse. If my pulse rises above a certain number, the watch will trigger the bomb, and it will explode and kill us all. So should anyone get any crazy ideas about attacking me–” he glared at Brett “–the bomb will go off before its intended time. It would be wise for all of you to keep me calm.”

I closed my eyes and wished for no more surprises. No more weapons. I wished the entire night away. I wished for 4am to be as far away as the next decade. When I opened my eyes, the bomb and Gage were both still there. The nightmare continued.

“You’re psychotic,” Brett whispered softly.

“Did you not get that from the trenchcoat?!” Gage raised his arms to spread the coat. “Now, if we could please get back to why we’re here.” He pointed the gun at Emily. “You’re up next, nurse.”

Emily stood, shaky at first, but then walked confidently to the barstool. “I’m a paramedic,” she clarified.

“Whatever.” Gage hit the button on his camera again.

Emily had given me her full attention during my interview and I intended to do the same with hers. It was a small way to offer encouragement in this madness. But I kept being distracted by that metal box on the bar, whether Gage was telling the truth about it, and the deepening fear that this night might be my last one.

© 2020 Andy Brodrick