Authors: Stephen Frey
“Let me talk to Mr. Frasier,” the officer requests.
I hold the receiver out toward Slammer. “They want to talk to you.”
“Not a chance,” he says, pointing the gun at the receiver and taking a step back. “You talk.”
“Mr. Frasier doesn’t want to speak to you,” I reply. “I’ll be the spokesman during this, and he wants Mr. Seaver on the line now.”
“I told you, we’re looking for him,” the officer says. “It’s going to take time to find him. Mr. Frasier is going to have to be patient. Now tell me who else is back there with you and Mr. Frasier.”
I look over at Slammer. “They want to know who’s back here,” I relay to him, trying to build a psychological bridge. “Should I tell them?”
“No!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t give you that information.”
“Has anyone been hurt?” Grant asks.
“Everyone in here is fine,” I answer calmly.
Slammer nods his approval as he listens. I was right. He doesn’t want them to know about Daniel, which may mean he’s trying to get himself out of this thing alive. At least he isn’t planning some murder-suicide situation where he’s going to take all of us with him, then turn the gun on himself as the police are breaking down the door. Not yet, anyway.
A couple of minutes later Seaver comes onto the line. He’s being connected from somewhere downstairs, the officer informs me.
“Hello.”
“Seaver?”
“Yes?”
“This is Augustus McKnight.” I can hear the officer breathing heavily into the phone.
“Are you all right?” he asks, his voice shaky.
“I’m fine.”
“Is that Seaver?” Slammer demands.
I nod.
“Tell him I want all my money back in fifteen minutes or Mary takes a bullet to the head. It comes to fifty grand. All the money I’ve lost to this rip-off operation he runs. I swear I’ll kill her if he doesn’t do exactly what I say.”
At Slammer’s direction, Mary has taken a seat beside Roger on the floor, and I can hear her whimper at Slammer’s threat. “Did you hear the demand, Seaver?” I ask.
“I heard it,” he replies grimly. “But I can’t get fifty thousand dollars together in fifteen minutes. That’s simply impossible.”
“He says it’s going to take some time,” I relay.
“Then the woman’s going to die,” Slammer shouts, leaning close to the mouthpiece so Seaver can hear. He raises the gun and shoots at the ceiling, and I dive to the floor, dropping the phone. “You motherfuckers!”
I grab the phone again as I lie prone on the floor, and Roger and Mary hold on tightly to each other. “Did you hear that?” I gasp.
“Is everyone all right?” the officer yells. “Jesus!”
“I can get some of the money quickly!” Seaver promises. “Maybe ten thousand.”
“He says he can get ten thousand right away, Max.”
“No! It’s fifty right away or she dies.” Slammer leans down and grabs the phone from me. “Listen to me, you slimy son of a bitch! You get me that money. You go to your bank and get me the money, or I’m going to kill this woman and throw her body out the window so all of those people down on the street can watch. You get me fifty thousand dollars. No, make it a hundred grand to make up for all the pain and suffering you and your damn day trading firm have put me through. Do you understand? A hundred thousand. Send one person in here with it in a bag. They knock on the conference room door, then they leave it outside and run! Got it? Fifteen minutes, Seaver, or you’ll see her body come flying out the window!” With that, he holds the receiver out away from his body, aims the gun at it, and pulls the trigger. Instantly the phone disintegrates into a hundred tiny pieces. “Think he got the message?” Slammer asks, staring down at me wild-eyed with what’s left of the phone still shaking in his hand.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “I think he got it.”
“Please don’t kill me, Max,” Mary whines. “Please.”
Slammer pays no attention to her. “Get back over there with the others, Gus.”
Slowly I pick myself up off the floor and move to Roger and Mary. I kneel down beside her, taking her shaking hand in mine. “It’s all right. Calm down. Everything will be fine.”
“He’s going to kill me,” Mary sobs. “I’ve never done anything to him. Why is he going to do this to me?”
I shake my head and smile. “He isn’t going to do anything to you, Mary. He isn’t going to do anything to anybody.”
After I say this I stand up again. “What are you doing? Be careful, Augustus,” she warns.
“Sit down!” Slammer shouts.
I turn toward him. “Give me the gun, Slammer.”
He laughs incredulously. “Shut up.”
“Give me the gun,” I repeat calmly.
“Go to hell.”
“It’s over, Max.”
“It’s far from over,” he snaps angrily. “In a few minutes they’re going to bring me a hundred thousand dollars, and I’m going to walk out of here with a human shield around me.”
“No,” I say, taking a step toward him, “you’re not.”
He raises the gun and points it at my face. “Take one more step and I’ll kill you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“God help me, I will.”
“Then do it,” I dare him, taking another deliberate step toward him and holding my arms out to my sides. “Come on.”
“Don’t tempt me, Gus. I’ve already killed one man. I won’t hesitate to kill you.”
As I take another step forward, he aims the gun directly at my chest, but I keep going.
“No, Augustus!” Mary screams.
Slammer pulls the trigger and the hammer falls. But there’s only a sharp metallic click. Nothing else.
I lunge the last few feet between us, grab him, and pull him to the ground, beating his wrist mercilessly against the floor until the gun flies from his hand. Instantly Mary scrambles to her feet and bolts for the door, followed a split second later by Roger.
Slammer lands a nice right cross to my jaw that stuns me momentarily and he’s able to push me away. As he tries to make it to his feet, I grab his lower leg and trip him, sending him hard to the floor. Mary and Roger are racing toward the lobby and in seconds this place will be crawling with cops. He must realize it’s over. He must realize that his freedom can now be measured in seconds.
Slammer makes it to his feet again, but instead of chasing after Mary and Roger, he turns and stares intently at me for several seconds. Then he spins to his left, runs toward the window at a full sprint, and leaps, crashing through the glass and plunging toward the cement nine floors down.
CHAPTER 15
It’s been six hours and what seems like an ocean of scotch since Slammer committed suicide by crashing through the Bedford window. Nine stories down with nothing but unforgiving pavement below. I heard from another Bedford trader who saw the whole thing from the street that it was a gruesome sight when his body hit the sidewalk. The guy started to describe the bloody impact once more for one of several television crews who had flocked to the scene, but I turned away when the red light above the camera lit up and the reporter began firing questions. I couldn’t listen to the horrible details.
Slammer was never my friend, but I couldn’t help thinking that I was the one who had set him off. If I hadn’t charged into his cubicle and challenged him the way I did, he wouldn’t have pulled the gun, wouldn’t have murdered Daniel, and wouldn’t have taken his own life. I can try to make myself feel better by thinking about how people have to accept accountability for their own actions. I know that Slammer was ultimately responsible for everything that happened this morning, but I was the match that lit the fuse. That single fact is indisputable, and it torments me.
After all these drinks it still seems like it was only minutes ago that Slammer took one last look at me—a look equal parts desperation and terror—and hurtled through the window. Desperation because he felt there was no other choice. Terror, I believe, not of the mind-numbing plunge and that momentary physical suffering he was about to endure, but of what lay beyond. As we locked eyes for that split second, it seemed to me that he was petrified of what he might find. He hadn’t made peace with himself, which must be a terrible way to go.
The ice cubes in my glass rattle as I lift them to my lips. My hands are still shaking, and I plan on drinking until they stop. Maybe the police will pull me over on the way home and force me to spend the night behind bars, but I won’t care. In fact, I may ask them to lock me up.
“You were so brave, Augustus,” Mary says, sipping her fourth glass of white wine. She sits beside me in a comfortable booth at a dark bar a few miles from Bedford where she, Roger, and I have taken refuge to try to deal with what’s happened. Mary and I are alone for the moment while Roger visits the men’s room. “I couldn’t believe it when you walked straight at Max while he was pointing the gun at you.” One of her hands is resting on my leg. “For the first time in my life I really thought I was going to die. You saved my life, Augustus.”
“I wasn’t that brave,” I mutter. “That was a six-shot revolver, and I knew when I approached him that he was out of bullets. He’d fired all six rounds. The one that killed Daniel, three at me, one into the ceiling, and one that blew up the phone.” I recount the shots as if by rote, my voice a low monotone.
I must be in shock, or maybe I’m just exhausted, because I haven’t been able to show much emotion—except for my trembling hands—since moving slowly to the window to gaze nine stories down at Slammer’s body lying crumpled on the pavement. While I watched, the people on the ground rushed to where he lay, forming an ever-expanding circle around his body. As I stood there and looked down through the shattered window, its broken blind hanging limply by one bolt, a warm wind rushing past my face, I wondered what Melanie was thinking as she lay in that alley, her throat slashed wide open, her life ebbing away. She was probably conscious for twenty or thirty seconds after the attack, unable to move or speak as her blood pressure plummeted. I wondered if she experienced any kind of freedom as the physical pain subsided and the inevitable overtook her. Freedom from the day-to-day concerns and insecurities that rule us all, and sometimes make our lives hell, whether we admit it or not. I’ve often wondered whether there is that final freedom.
I actually placed one foot up on the windowsill as I looked down at Slammer’s body so far below me. I was about to pull the other leg up, but then the police poured into the room, guns drawn, and they were all over me, guiding me to a chair to make certain I was unharmed.
I don’t know why I stepped up onto the sill like that. I’ve never come close to committing suicide, never even considered it. But suddenly it seemed like I was standing in the middle of a railroad track in the dead of night as a speeding train bore down on me, whistle blaring and brakes shrieking as the engineer tried to stop it. I was frozen in its headlight until an unseen force pushed me out of the way at the last second, and the train raced past. That’s what it was like this morning. I could feel the rush of wind as death swept right past me. Then there were cops all around me, asking me where the gun was, and I couldn’t tell them.
I wonder if I would have taken that last step if they hadn’t burst into the room when they did. For the first time in my life I was ready for that final freedom.
“And you didn’t even go right at Slammer after he fired the last time,” Mary continues.
“I knew I could get to him before he had a chance to reload,” I explain. “There was no reason to rush.”
“You are
so
brave,” she says for the tenth time. “How in the world did you have the presence of mind to count the number of shots? I couldn’t have even told you my name, I was so scared in there.”
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly. It wasn’t as if I was counting all along. The fact that Slammer was out of bullets hit me out of nowhere when the phone blew apart in his hand. Something snapped, and I realized it was over. “I just wish there could have been another way,” I murmur.
The strange thing about the whole ordeal was that I never felt like I was in any real physical danger, even when Slammer first leveled the gun at me in his cubicle. I thought about how it might feel if the bullet tore into me, but I wasn’t frightened.
“Max Frasier was an evil man,” Mary says with conviction. “The world is better off without him. He murdered poor Daniel.”
“Maybe we are better off without him,” I agree, “but the thing is, if I hadn’t reacted the way I did, going into his cubicle and confronting him, Daniel wouldn’t be dead. He’d be sitting right here with us, looking forward to his senior year at Georgetown. Looking forward to the rest of his life.”
“You can’t blame yourself for that.” Mary takes her hand off my thigh. “Slammer was a time bomb. Anything could have set him off. I feel bad for Daniel, but on another day it could have been any one of us. Next week Slammer might have walked into Bedford and tried to kill everyone on the entire floor. You just don’t know.”
I finish what’s left of my scotch. “Maybe,” I agree quietly, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “But that doesn’t make what happened any easier to deal with.”
Roger returns from the men’s room and slides onto the bench seat across from Mary and me. For a few moments he says nothing, silently contemplating his glass, then he looks up. “I still can’t believe what happened this morning, can you? I mean, we could all be dead right now.”
I found out during the ordeal that Roger is a complete coward. He’s a spineless jellyfish, which, I suppose, a lot of sarcastic people are. I learned something else too. He’s a liar. Maybe there’s nothing significant to the fact that the life he’s portrayed is a sham, but I’m going to find out just to be on the safe side.
“Without Augustus, who knows what would have happened?” Mary says. “We might all be dead. He’s our hero.”
“Yeah, right.” Roger rolls his eyes and picks up his glass of beer. “Sure he is,” he scoffs.
“What’s your problem?” she asks.
“Augustus said it himself,” Roger answers, glancing at me. “He knew Slammer was out of bullets. Augustus wasn’t looking death in the eye when he went for the gun.”
The waitress appears at the table with our next round of drinks. Before she has a chance to serve us, I grab my fresh glass from her tray and bring it straight to my lips. Roger’s acting like what I did in the conference room was nothing, and I know why. All cowards act that way. They try to convince themselves after the fact that they weren’t scared, and that what another person did wasn’t any big deal. I’m not upset that Roger isn’t kissing my ass for saving him. That’s not it at all. I just hate it when people try to fool themselves. Even more than when they try to fool others.