“Oh, yeah,” said Theo. “You are so screwed.”

“I can’t believe this is happening. All over a stupid shopping bag.”

“What?” Theo had heard it all as a bartender, but this was one story that not even a psychologist/mixologist could have been expected to endure without being tied down-literally. It seemed that the weatherman’s teenage daughter needed to return a pair of jeans that she’d borrowed from a friend at school. Stupid husband put the jeans in a regular old grocery bag. Angry wife nearly had a stroke. “You can’t use a bag from Winn-Dixie!” she shrieked as she ran off to the closet. Moments later, she returned, the jeans wrapped in packing tissue and tucked neatly into a signature powder blue shopping bag from Tiffany.

“She was ready to kill me over a shopping bag,” he told Theo, “all because she doesn’t want some rich girl’s mother to find out that we shop at Winn-Dixie. So I look at her and say, ‘When did the funny and sexy woman I married turn into such a pretentious bitch?’”

“Ouch.”

“Was I wrong?”

“You’re always wrong,” said Theo. “It’s in the contract. Read the fine print.”

“You think I should have apologized?”

“Hmmm. Apologize or run out the door and hire yourself a couple of teenage hookers? Let’s call Dr. Phil about that one.”

The weatherman breathed a hopeless sigh, as if hearing it from Theo made things even worse. “What should I do now?”

“You do whatever it takes to get out of here alive.”

“Then what?”

“You do the honorable thing.”

“Which is what?”

“Shoot yourself.”

“Shoot myself?”

“Yes. But not on her duvet cover. She’ll hate you for that. You don’t mess with a woman’s duvet cover.”

The guy nodded, as if it all made sense. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The toilet flushed, and out with Falcon’s waste went the last liter of water left in the hotel room. “All right, smart guy,” Falcon said to Theo. “You’re first.”

The weatherman whispered, “Please, I can’t get on that phone.”

“Don’t worry,” said Theo, “he ain’t gonna get to you.”

Falcon dialed the number, waited for an answer, and dispensed with all pleasantries. Theo couldn’t even tell if he was speaking to Jack or the cops. “Here’s your roll call,” said Falcon, speaking into the phone. He held the gun in his right hand, the phone in his left. “Ten seconds,” he told Theo. “Your name and a contact.”

As soon as the phone was in place, Theo blurted out Falcon’s secret in rapid-fire fashion. “He’s wired with explosives under his coat and-”

“Asshole!” Falcon yanked away the phone and kicked Theo in the belly with the force of an angry mule.

Theo slid to the floor, unable to breathe. He hadn’t been one-hundred-percent certain about the explosives, but he’d felt something earlier when they wrestled on the floor, and Falcon’s refusal to remove his winter coat despite the rising heat only fueled Theo’s suspicions.

Falcon kicked him again, and with all the cursing, Theo knew he was right. The guy was definitely wired.

“I make this promise,” Falcon said, seething as he put the gun to Theo’s head. “No matter what happens, you are not walking out of here.”

chapter 34

E xplosives changed everything-especially for Vince Paulo.

Since losing his sight, Vince had heard all the amazing stories. The guy who blew his nose so violently that his eye popped out. The firefighter whose eye was left hanging by the optic nerve after a blast from a fire hose. The child who ruptured her eye on a bedpost while bouncing on the mattress. Metalworkers with steel shards embedded near the optic disc or with splashes of molten lead on the eyeball. A soldier shot at arm’s length, the projectile entering the inner canthus of the right eye and lodging under the skin of the opposite side. What made these cases remarkable was that in each instance, the ultimate visual impairment was nonexistent or negligible, or so the tales of medical miracles went. On the other side of the spectrum were patients who seemed to suffer only minor ocular trauma, the globe still intact, but whose vision was lost forever. They were the unlucky ones, the Vince Paulos of the world.

“Bomb squad is standing by, Sergeant.”

Vince heard the message over his earpiece, but he didn’t answer right away. Theo Knight’s mere mention of explosives had Vince seeing that pockmarked door again, the opening at the end of the hallway to his personal and permanent tunnel of darkness.

“Vince?” said Alicia. She was standing at his side.

“Yeah, I heard. I was just thinking for a minute.” It was a lie, of course-at least the part about “a minute.” Vince had been thinking and rethinking for months, imagining how different things might have been if he just hadn’t pushed open that door. He keyed his mike and told the bomb-squad leader to stand down until he made one more attempt to reestablish contact with Falcon.

Alicia said, “Just because this Theo says there’s a bomb doesn’t mean Falcon has one.”

“We have to assume the worst.”

“Do you really think he has the know-how to make one?”

“He had two hundred thousand dollars in a Bahamian safe deposit box. He’s packing a nine-millimeter pistol with plenty of ammunition. He shot two officers in a gunfight in the dark, and now he’s more than holding his own in a hostage standoff against the entire City of Miami. I think it’s time we all erase from our minds the image of a hapless homeless guy atop a bridge and focus more on the sick bastard who for no apparent reason beat a defenseless woman to death with a lead pipe.”

“I was just asking, Vince.”

He could hear the change in Alicia’s tone, and he realized that his own intensity was getting the best of him. It was time to get control over those feelings that lingered just below the surface and never really went away, time to quell the useless anger over a risk he should never have taken. “Sorry,” he said. “Guess I should just catch my breath and chill a little, huh?”

He felt the gentle touch of her hand on his forearm. She said, “This is a different ballgame than the one Chief Renfro and I invited you to. Are you okay with it?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. Too much like the last one, maybe.”

“No, you’re wrong. It’s nothing like the last one. This time I have a warning. I can see what’s coming.” The unintentional pun drew a mirthless chuckle from somewhere inside him, like a reflex.

The phone rang, but it wasn’t on the dedicated line to the hotel room. It was Vince’s cell. The call was from Detective Barber, the lead homicide investigator. “Got an update for you on the body in Falcon’s car,” he said.

“Good. Alicia Mendoza is right here with me. Let me put my cell on speaker.”

“I’d rather you didn’t do that,” said Barber.

Vince wasn’t sure how to interpret the detective’s concern, but he obliged. “Okay, no speaker.”

Barber said, “In fact, I’d prefer that this information and everything you say in response to it be just between us. It might be important to your negotiations.”

“All right.” He covered the phone and said, “Alicia, could you excuse me for a minute?”

He sensed some confusion on her part-just a vibe that he picked up from her hesitation-but it was only for a moment.

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll get some coffee.”

Vince waited for the door to open, then close. “I’m back,” he said into the phone.

“I have an eyewitness who claims to have seen a well-dressed, twentysomething-year-old man, either light-skinned black or dark-skinned Hispanic, speaking to Falcon two nights ago by the river.”

“What time?”

“Just after dark. If I tie that in with the medical examiner’s report, it’s not long before our Jane Doe ended up dead and stuffed inside the trunk of Falcon’s car-Er, home.”