Boston Noir - By Dennis Lehane Page 0,2

her ear. These things were never meant to be worn for five straight hours.

"Talk to me, Sloan. What's going on up there?"

She wishes she could see her hostage negotiator, but she doesn't know where he is. He can somehow see her, though. She's sure of it. Thinking about him watching over her makes her feel calmer, but he has the frustrating habit of asking the same questions over and over.

"I think you know, Officer Tarbox, that what's--"

"When did we switch back to Officer Tarbox?"

"What's going on in here, Jimmy, is the same thing that's been going on for the past five hours, and you promised me another half hour ten minutes ago."

"I'll keep my word. You know I will. Have I let you down any? Have I lied to you even once? No. I'm just checking in to see how you are. I want to know that you're okay and that everything's still on track. If we're not talkin', I don't know what's goin' on."

"You just want to know how Beck is."

"How is Beck?"

She glances over at Cornelius Beckwith Nash III, graduate of Exeter, Yale School of Drama, and Harvard Business School; Olympic rowing team alternate and scratch golfer; lead manager on the biggest portfolio of the growth team at Crowninshield Investment Management Company. Yet as impressive as he is, she's not sure any of those experiences have prepared him for being lashed to a chair for five hours with a telephone cord and computer cables. He's also sitting in his own sewage, which can't be comfortable, but it was his own fault for coming into the office to investigate instead of running the other way. He'd soiled his pants almost the second he'd walked in. Between that and Trevor's brains on the wall, the room smells worse than any paddock she's ever been in. But you can put up with anything, Sloan has learned, if you have to. You just can't put up with it forever.

"Beck is fine."

"Good. That's good. Can I talk to him?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Because she doesn't want to hear any more about little Max and littler Ian and if she takes off Beck's gag, all he'll do is cry about how his sons need him and how they'll miss him, and she already knows everything she needs to know about little Max and littler Ian. They go to Fessenden, spend summers on Nantucket eating watermelon, and will one day grow up to be strapping blond boys of privilege from the finest business schools who, given the chance, will pass her by. Just as their father had. But she doesn't like it when Officer Jimmy is not happy with her, so she gets up from the floor keeping her knees closed and turned gracefully to the side, heads over to Beck, takes off the earpiece, and holds it in front of him.

"Make some kind of noise."

The corners of Beck's mouth are split and caked with blood and dried spit where his $200 Zegna tie-gag is pinching. She knows he can moan--he's been doing it on and off for hours--but right now he seems comatose, frozen with his eyes open.

She shakes the earpiece. "Do it." But he doesn't and now she has to figure out how to make him. She hates the idea of touching him. The gun would be good for that. It's too heavy to carry around, so she keeps putting it down. Right now it's on Trevor's desk. But Beck is reading her mind. Before she even moves, he rolls out a few dry croaks and she wonders if the back of his throat is somehow pasted to the front.

"See?" She fits the earpiece back on her ear. "He's fine."

"All right," says Jimmy the officer. "That's good. Now we need to start talkin' about how to resolve this thing. We're at this five...going on six hours here, and you still haven't told me what you want."

"I was supposed to have half an hour to think about it and you only gave me ten minutes."

"You know we can't let this thing drag on forever." Only he says forevah. For all the things she likes about Jimmy Tarbox, the one thing that grates is his accent. "Let's talk about how to get you and Beck out of there without anyone else getting hurt. Let's figure this out together."

Sloan's stomach has settled, which means she can fall back into pacing the comfortable loop that runs between the conference table and the bookshelves, past the leather couch, the grandfather clock,