Triple Point

Chapter 6: Falling Hard

Three years ago

March 9, 30 AE

It was the worst day of Elsie's life. On the bright side, it was unlikely that her future would be any worse because she was six inches away from it also being the last day of her life.

At least, she thought she was six inches away from the edge of the building. She wasn't about to look down at her feet to check, as much as she was tempted to.

"There's still a chance we can fix this," the police negotiator said, her voice probably soothing in any other possible scenario. She held her hands above her head in an attempt to look non-threatening, but her bullet-proof vest only reminded Elsie of the gravity of her predicament. (Heh. Gravity.) "Please, Richard, we can work this out."

Elsie felt Richard's arm around her neck tighten and the point of the blade at her back shifted. Obviously, the negotiator's voice wasn't cutting it for him either. Hah. Cutting it. At this rate, that voice would get Elsie cut instead.

"Get... the hell... away from us!" he bellowed, almost struggling to get the words out.

Elsie was tempted to say she didn't want to be grouped in with that "us," but a sliver of her remaining sanity voted against it.

"Richard..." the negotiator tried again.

"Just leave us alone!"

The negotiator furrowed her eyebrows a bit, and it didn't make Elsie feel any better about her predicament.

"I can't do that, Richard," she said, trying her best to sound apologetic. "But if you help me understand then maybe I can help you."

The only part of Richard that Elsie could see was his muscular arm wrapped tightly around her neck, but, after a brief pause, she felt him nod, his chin brushing roughly against her head.

"Is there a reason you're up here?" the negotiator continued. "I don't know about you, but I don't think Miss Bates really likes heights."

Thirty minutes ago, Elsie didn't really have a problem with heights, but she supposed she had spent enough time hovering five hundred feet above the streets of Downtown Los Angeles to develop a new fear.

"I'm sorry, babe," Richard whispered in her ear, before saying to the negotiator, "we just needed a chance to talk. I tried calling her a thousand times, but I kept getting sent to voicemail. I needed to talk to her in person. Where we couldn't be disturbed."

So he was the reason she had to change her number. Elsie's bitterness was strong, but not enough to completely distract herself from the increasing possibility of death.

"There's space in here," the negotiator said, gesturing slightly with a raised hand to the room she came from earlier. "I'll clear it out and give you two a chance to talk."

Elsie had nothing to say to Richard, a man she didn't even know, but she wasn't going to advertise that. Plus, she would much rather be inside with solid footing, rather than out there, forty stories up, standing on a ledge that was definitely supposed to be purely decorative.

The offer of going inside was supposed to be comforting, Elsie figured, but all she could do was compare the two settings of where she was and where she could've been. And by doing her comparison, all she succeeded in doing was overanalyzing all of the very, very bad reasons about her current situation and how she saw no way of getting out of it and her fate was in the hands of some overly obsessed fan and how holy shit she was going to fall, or she was going to get stabbed in the back and then fall, or she was going to get shot by one of the police snipers and then fall, or something was going to happen, but regardless of what happened, the end result was going to be her dead in the middle of the street below.