Chapter One

It was the cicadas that pushed everything into critical mass.

The cicadas and a paranoid schizophrenic.

The cicadas, a paranoid schizophrenic, and a hat made of defective aluminum foil.

But mostly, it was the cicadas.

St. Louis in the summer is miserable enough. Hot, humid and suffocatingly still, it resembles an anteroom to hell. Tempers shorten. Frustrations sharpen. What would be annoying any other time, becomes unbearable.

But that summer was even worse. A cicada population of Biblical proportions had awakened from two separate periods of dormancy to drive every person in the bi-state region to violence. Breeding and eating at a ferocious rate in their hurry to mate and die, the insects whined out a satanic symphony of grinding dissonance that could incite a saint to suicide.

Within days, minor car accidents escalated to hostage situations, suburban soccer moms were arrested on felony weapons violations, and sporting events saw more action in the stands than the field. The recently declining violent crime numbers swept right back up, police ran double shifts, and emergency departments started stockpiling antipsychotic drugs like nuclear arms.

Which meant that nobody was really surprised when the disturbance call went out at 11:32 AM on a late July morning for the four hundred block of Ohio Avenue on the city's south side. A bare-bones kind of street, Ohio boasted faded brick multiple family dwellings that housed the substrata of people hanging onto the fringes by their fingertips; new immigrants, ex-project inhabitants, chronic defaulters. In a word, the kind of block where disturbance calls were as common as bill collectors.

Usually, though, the calls came long after lunch, when the avenue's less wholesome tenants woke from their nightly revelries. Eleven-thirty was a little early, even on this kind of hot, still, muggy day.

But then, the cicadas were out.

The responding unit arrived on the scene at precisely 11:53AM to be met by a young black woman up to her elbows in toddlers, and one teary-eyed ten-year-old in a pom pom skirt. A baby on one hip and a hand on the other, the mother didn't bother to wait for the cops to get all the way out of the car before she started in on them.

"He crazy!" she shrieked, waving her free hand at the undersized cheerleader who slumped next to her. "He tried to boil my baby, say she a devil, and all she done was try and sell him some damn candy bars. You get in there and drag his skinny white ass down here 'fore I boil it myself, you hear? My Sherees, she gotta sell forty bars by tomorrow, and he got the whole box in there, that crazy fucker."

Busy slipping batons into belts and caps onto heads, the cops, a rare two-person ride that consisted of a young white male and a more mature black woman, nodded like synchronized swimmers.

"You know this man?" the female officer asked.

"He jus' moved in a coupla weeks ago," the mother said, following them up the sidewalk, the kids orbiting in place. "He in there with squirrels and bats and shit. I saw it when I grabbed my baby. Motherfucker's crazy!"

After a few more pertinent questions, the officers left the woman in the street and ambled into the unremarkable square brick building whose only ornamentation was a bouquet of blue plastic flowers stuck into the address, atop which several of the ubiquitous cicadas were mating.

Back on the street, the young mother raised her voice above the noise to regale gathering neighbors with her eyebrow-raised, neck-snapping rendition of Sherees's run-in with the new neighbor. She'd gotten to the point where she'd grabbed little Sherees out of the crazy motherfucker's arms when two quick pops brought the group to sudden silence.

Gunshots.

From the second floor of the apartment building.

Everybody turned that way. Little Sherees, her tears dried, looked up at her stunned mother. "Mama, you tell them 'bout the gun that man stuck up his pants?"

Which was about the time the crazy motherfucker started yelling about hostages.

* * *

Maggie O'Brien was still securing her medic vest when she opened the door to the command trailer at the corner of Ohio and Wyoming. A normally unprepossessing hundred-twenty pounds over a five-foot-five inch frame, Maggie looked instead like an extra from a Chuck Norris movie. Her thick umber hair was tucked up under a blue kerchief, and her rather normal figure was rigged out in blue-dyed urban cammos, elbow and knee pads, jump boots, Alice pack, Camelback canteen, body armor, overloaded medic vest and gas mask. She carried her helmet under her arm and her gloves in her helmet. SWATBabe, as her friends had dubbed her, was on duty.

The four hundred block of Ohio had been evacuated of all but police equipment and personnel. Two perimeters had been established, the interior perimeter two apartment houses wide, the exterior taking up the entire block. Strobes flashed, radios crackled, uniforms cluttered the street, and a smaller knot of like-camouflaged men clustered near the midnight blue trailer Maggie approached just beyond the interior perimeter.

Maggie had been beeped no more than fifty minutes earlier and had joined the rest of newly minted St. Louis City\County Cooperative Special Weapons and Training Team only moments before. It was her third call as the team's Tactical Emergency Medic, the first that was still active by the time the team arrived. The very first in which she'd been called into the trailer. She hoped nobody noticed that her hands were shaking.

"You want me, Lieu?" she asked, stepping up into a tiny space containing way too many bodies and an overworked air conditioner.

"Other side of the trailer, Mags," the scene commander said from where he was bent over a grease-pencil-marked schematic of the block. "We have a medical situation inside the negotiators need you to help with."

Maggie nodded and backed out. It was standard operating procedure that the command center stayed separate from the hostage negotiators. The negotiators needed to establish a positive relationship with the hostage taker, something that could be jeopardized if that negotiator looked up to see the commander sending in the troops on a "shoot to kill" order. The way the St. Louis team had set it up, a third person stationed himself with the negotiators to relay news to command by headset. When a hostage situation involved a possible medical problem, the medics were trained to evaluate and assist along with the negotiators.

So Maggie knocked on the back door of the divided trailer and waited for one of the extraneous personnel to decamp before climbing aboard.

"We've got a medical person coming to talk to you, Bob," one of the negotiators was saying into the phone, his voice low and calm and soothing. The kind of voice you'd use with a jittery horse or a crazy person. "...yeah, sure, sit back a second. Let me fill her in and I'll let her talk to you."

The negotiator was a middle-aged, medium-sized black guy with old, soft eyes and fidgety hands who looked oddly out of place in jump boots and high tech gear. Surreptitiously putting the caller on hold, he turned Maggie's way.

"Well, don't you look fine," he greeted her with a smile.

She grinned back. "I look like a clicker beetle on steroids." It wouldn't do to give her father's old partner the kiss she usually greeted him with. "Hi, Uncle John."

"Tommy would be so proud."

Maggie held onto her smile by force of will. She didn't need to know how proud her father would be right now.