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Billy. The guy they want is gone. We had to let him go about two hours ago. Two feds showed up with extradition papers and we had to ship him back east on a homicide charge.”
    The last sentence dropped several octaves down as things slowed down again. I’d heard people describe the LSD experience, and that’s what this felt like. Spaulding’s words were terrible slow globs and his face looked like a Cubist painting. I couldn’t remember how to breathe.
    Captain Spaulding slapped my face. It hurt a lot. Normal time returned.
    “You okay, Billy?”
    “No, sir,” I said. “I’m not okay at all.” I concentrated on getting some air in and felt it steady me. I turned to look at the flop. “I’m going in there.”
    His fingers gripped me tight enough to break the skin. “No you’re not, son. Listen to me. Lesley Bishop is already on the line with these guys. She says she’s getting somewhere and I’m going to let her run with it for now. Lieutenant Mendez has his SWAT guys all lined up and you know they’re good. We can do this, Billy, you know that. We can take care of this with our own people and do it right. We take care of our own.”
    It was true. Lesley Bishop was our negotiator and she really believed she could sell shit to a dog. The SWAT guys were top-notch too—the whole crisis team was. Most often the precinct cops are better at these situations than the feds or anybody else that might get thrown in.
    There are two simple reasons for that. First, the precinct knows its own turf. Second, its people get more practice. There are more snatches, stand-offs, blow-ups and fuck-ups every day in every precinct in L.A. than the FBI’s local office handles in a year.
    That also explained why there was nobody from the press here yet. If the TV cameras showed up, so would the FBI; and about two dozen more county, state, and federal agencies. Captain Spaulding was keeping it quiet. He’d even made sure the call I got wouldn’t tip anybody monitoring that something newsworthy was going down. By keeping the press away he kept control. It was my wife and my daughter, and I was one of Spaulding’s men. Every guy on the watch would drop whatever he had going and come help if it was necessary. Like the captain said, we take care of our own.
    One side of me could appreciate that. The other side wanted to grab a twelve-gauge and kick down the door.
    Of course, Spaulding knew that. That’s why he was meeting me personally, clamping his steel-spring hand on my elbow, leading me back to his improvised command center, and sitting me down in the front seat of his car. “This is going to work out fine, Billy,” he said. “It’s going very well.”
    “Very well,” agreed Lesley Bishop. She had a cellular phone beside her and one of those electronic travel alarms. She used the phone to talk to the perps and the clock to time herself, so when she said she’d call back in five minutes, she’d watch the clock, wait carefully for ten minutes to pass, and call back. It was her favorite negotiating technique.
    “Where are we, Lesley?” Captain Spaulding asked her, clearly for my benefit.
    She smiled. She was obviously pleased with herself, but that didn’t mean much. She usually was. “Right on target, Captain. Nothing oddball about any of this, straight out of the book. They want their buddy released, half a million bucks, and a chopper to LAX. We have to have a jet waiting to take them all to Mexico.” Her smile got bigger. “I got them going on the money. I told them we could do it but that much took time.” She nodded at me. “It’s one of my tricks. I get them thinking just about the money. That gets their greed going and they start mentally counting the haul. They forget about everything else.”
    I just looked at her. She looked briefly puzzled that I didn’t congratulate her on her brilliance, then looked very startled as she realized why. “Oh!” she said. The smile returned. “Your wife and daughter