The Preying Doctor by Nadia Siddiqui (most recommended books .TXT) 📗

police cars can be easily seen, one of the break room, one of the office and one that is totally dark. No doubt the last one is the view from inside of the closed safe. They might not have even gotten around to unlocking it for the day. It is highly likely that they don’t handle enough cash on any given day to keep it open for the duration. A branch this small isn’t likely to have an abundance of additional features like many safe boxes or anything of the sort, which makes it all the more strange that the man chose to rob the place today.

However, greed doesn’t always pair with brains. The police are going to be tied up here for hours. They are going to need to be dedicating the majority of their resources to this event and Nathan is all ready to slowly sneak away and venture further into town, perhaps steal one of the parked cars belonging to anybody in that small crowd that has formed on the other end of the police brocade, all idiots hoping to see some kind of carnage; all wanting to break up their otherwise boring, monotonous lives.

Denzel starts conferring with the surrounding officers asking them what their normal protocol would be for this sort of situation and comparing and correcting it with his military tactics as they quickly start to form a plan. Another officer is assigned to pick up the phone and call the bank, hoping to get a list of demands or at least some semblance of wants that this idiot was hoping to achieve for the day before he failed horribly and ended up keeping a bunch of hostages against their will. Nathan’s attention snaps back to the same hostages shown clearly on the screen. A mother and her child, the child is as tucked up underneath its mother as it can be, no doubt terrified beyond its comprehension and scarred for life. The mother seems stoic, Nathan assumes that is also in an effort to keep her child from understanding just how fucked they are. A man in a medical coat is seated next to another man in scrubs and then another woman is seated a few chairs down from the others, though it is the man in the medical coat who catches Nathan’s attention. Could be any doctor … he can’t be seeing what he thinks he is. It takes a special kind of arrogance to walk around outside of the hospital in your medical coat. That is the sort of arrogance that comes from being a man who doesn’t care about the mountains of crippling medical debt that he has accrued. From his file, Nathan would have known his face anywhere, but the footage is too blurry to make a positive identification from the image alone. He is the only one of the hostages who looks openly irritated that he’s being detained. That much is obvious.

“He’s not answering, there isn’t anybody picking up the line. What do we do?” a younger officer says, hanging up the phone in his old patrol car. No doubt he was given that as part of his initiation for some sort of “homage to the old days” type of hazing. Not that the young man seems at all fazed by the situation.

Denzel swears. “How many men do you have around back?”

“A few, I think I’ve got two cars back there with two officers a piece.”

Denzel appears to do some quick mental calculations before turning to his team, he seems to mentally confirm with William that the pair of them are already thinking the same thing and they nod in unison. “Alright then, it’s settled, William and I will get up on the roof for access and see if we can get in through the ducts that way, while Locke and Logan will go around back to see if they can finesse their way into the building through the employee entrance and then, when the four of us are in position, we will signal you lot to get in through that front shop window. It seems like there’s only one of him and we can see he’s armed, but there’s no way of telling how much more he might have in there because their cameras don’t record, it’s live footage only, which isn't super helpful as you can see. A few broken windows are going to be the least of their problems. I can tell you right now that man in there is scared, he wants a way out, they always want a way out because they will do anything to keep living. We don’t know why he woke up this morning and decided that theft was a good idea, but that’s a person in there y'all and we will remember that before shooting. Everybody agreed?”

Nobody breathes a word but everybody nods their head, Nathan even finds himself nodding along with the rest of them. Just that quickly, he has been folded into the honorary ranks of the Smiths, one of them, for however long he needs. It will be for the best that he is going to get into the building before the others. Doctor Cox is in there, and that is exactly where he needs to be too. An officer finds a bullhorn and starts to speak through the small end, projecting his soothing voice into the building.

“By now, you will realize that you are surrounded. We have attempted to contact you for negotiations, please answer the phone and we will do everything in our power…”

Nathan mentally shuts out the man speaking as Logan tugs on the shoulder of his vest and takes off into a jog to make his way around the end of the strip center and then to the police barricade around the back of the building where they will start to work on getting that door open. William and Denzel have already jogged three