1
The Negotiator
Summer was always the busiest time for Dallas police. The heat would declare itself at sunrise and grow unbearable by noon, working on patience and nerves. People’s will to hold things together would fail. There would be a betrayal or grudge or heartbreak, and someone would start waving a gun or climb to some precipice.
That’s when Senior Cpl. Larry Gordon, a negotiator on the Dallas police SWAT team, would get a call. He’d be headed along one of the city’s looping highways, toward some air-conditioned assignment, and learn that another poor soul had let go of the rope, abandoning the notion that everything was okay or ever would be again. Gordon would turn the wheel and head toward another unraveling.
Over the years, he’d grown used to meeting people on their worst days. A call early in his negotiating career, one that would stick with him for years, took him downtown to one of the city’s oldest skyscrapers, a stone-paneled, 1920s-era former bank building. A young woman had climbed to its highest ledge, twenty stories above Main Street. Police barricaded a city block, and Gordon made his way to the roof. A crowd from Jason’s Deli gathered on the sidewalk, heads tilted back.
Gordon cut an imposing figure in his navy-blue uniform, at six feet two and 230 pounds, with bulging muscles. Although his body implied sheer force, he moved with the agility of a high school quarterback, which he had been, and the coiled readiness of a kid who’d grown up in a rough neighborhood.
From the building’s roof, Gordon took in the immense blue Texas sky. It was surprisingly noisy; the wind whipped, and the sounds of traffic echoed. The knot of fear inside his chest was partly caused, he knew, by being up so high, but also because he still, at that point in his career, believed outcomes depended on whether he could find the right words.
One of Gordon’s teammates held a rope and looked around for a place to tie it. He settled on a large metal pole. Gordon fastened the rope to his harness and studied his teammate’s knot. That ain’t gonna hold me, he thought. The teammate was black, like him. Gordon would have preferred one of his white partners tying him off—someone who’d grown up around boats and Boy Scouts. Most brothers, he thought, had not been schooled in the varieties of hitch knots.
He gave the rope a tug and hoped for the best. The men walked toward the edge of the roof, the rope unspooling as they went. Gordon stopped at a waist-high concrete wall, steadied his hands on it, and peered over the ledge. About six feet below sat the young woman, her delicate frame perched at the edge of the building. The sight made Gordon’s hands sweat. Any tiny nudge, shift of weight, or gust of wind could send her on a three-hundred-foot free fall.
The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties, with her knees pressed together girlishly, as if she were on a playground swing. She wore a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. Her brown hair fell across her face as she looked down. A pack of cigarettes and a wallet rested on the ledge beside her. The serious jumpers often emptied their pockets to leave identification behind.
Gordon called out to the woman, trying to sound friendly, casual. “I’m Officer Gordon with the Dallas Police. What’s going on today?” No response. He called out again, raising his voice. Still nothing. The woman was making what Gordon called “target glances” toward the street, as if she were thinking, Where am I going to jump? How am I going to miss that tree? Am I going to fall on that car? Gordon made his own plan for when she jumped. He knew his instinct would be to grab her. But she was too far away to safely catch. If he lost his balance, he’d fall until the rope caught him, probably about ten feet, provided the knot held. Then he’d slam into the concrete building, maybe breaking a leg or his back. So he steeled himself. If the woman jumped, he’d let her go. He didn’t want to watch her fall or see what happened when her body hit the pavement. Just turn around and walk away.
Several long minutes dragged by as he kept shouting to the woman while she ignored him. Finally, in frustration, he shouted, “Why won’t you talk to me?”
That’s when he saw her lips move. He leaned in closer, straining to hear her over the wind. “Say it again?”
“I don’t want to live anymore,” she said.
“Why?” Gordon asked.
“He took my daughter.”
“Who is ‘he’?”
Finally, Gordon had something to work with. He kept her talking and learned she’d lost custody of her child. Gordon told his partner to get the cops below to find the baby. He kept her talking about her daughter, about the man who’d betrayed her, about what she’d miss if she slipped off the ledge. They talked for what felt like an eternity, until a squad car arrived and parked a block away. “Your child is here,” Gordon told her. “I don’t want her to see you fall.”
He watched the woman’s every move. Now she began to fidget. She had her palms on the ledge and quickly pushed up, raising herself into a standing position. Fuck, here she goes, Gordon thought. He held his breath as the woman stood still for a moment, her back turned, her body swaying at the ledge.
Then she rotated and faced Gordon, lifting her arms into the air. It took Gordon a second to understand what was happening. She wanted to come up. He stretched his upper body over the wall as far as he could and reached toward her wrists. If she changed her mind and resisted, tried to pull him down, he’d overpower her. He was also nervous he would drop her. Once his grip was secure, he pulled as hard and fast as he could, fueled by a surge of adrenaline. He lifted her small body into the air and over the wall. The momentum sent them tumbling backward onto the roof, Gordon still clenching her wrists as she fell on top of him. Another police officer grabbed the sobbing woman as Gordon lay there on his back, breathing hard.
* * *
He never knew exactly who he needed to be until he got there. Hard or soft, commanding or gentle, deferential or aggressive. Every call was a new riddle. Sometimes he had hours to work, but often only minutes to decide what piece of himself to summon at the crucial moment, when someone had become the focus of a couple dozen heavily armed men dressed in black. Most of these troubled souls would emerge alive but some would not. If they let him, Larry Gordon would bring them out safe. Who did they need him to be?
Sometimes it was Larry from the hood, the black kid who grew up with holes in his sneakers and had to sift through his Sugar Smacks to make sure he didn’t eat a roach. Other times he needed to be middle-class Larry, a professional with a college degree. He could spend hours discussing Bible passages, debating social influence theory, detailing the weaknesses of the Cowboys’ defensive line. He could be athlete Larry, husband Larry, father-of-three Larry, funny Larry, big mean Larry, or a soft teddy bear. Usually Shrink Larry showed up at some point and called out one of his favorite lines: “Right now it’s a question of, how much do you love yourself?” Cheesy, but he found it resonated. Most people did love themselves. Most did not want to die. He said it again and again, even though every single time it made his SWAT partners stifle laughter as they stared down the barrels of their M4s. Most days he was just rolling the dice, hoping his would not be the last voice in a stranger’s ear.
Gordon had joined Dallas SWAT in 2004, after nine years on the force. He took a typical path to the unit—a couple of years on patrol, then to narcotics, where he’d battled the crack trade, the same one that during his childhood had taken over his neighborhood and sent two older brothers to prison. He’d wanted to join SWAT for the same reason as most other officers, because men on the team were held in prestige as the city’s toughest. He was not the team’s fiercest warrior, nor its fastest runner, nor its best marksman. Gordon’s gift, the skill that made him indispensable, was that he could talk.
Each SWAT officer was assigned a specialty. The more cerebral were drawn to sniping. The more energetic liked busting through doors with steel rams and blasting through walls with explosives. Supervisors assigned Gordon to the crisis and hostage negotiating team, one of the less desirable posts. While others got to rush in with M4s, negotiators sat back in command posts, sipping coffee and talking into headsets. They had to be compassionate and empathetic. One officer begged his supervisors to assign him any job but negotiating. As he put it: “I don’t want to spend all day talking to shitheads on the phone.”
But Gordon did. He loved to talk. About politics and religion, children and wives, nothing and everything. About the Mavericks or Big Bang Theory or race in America. Most of the cops Gordon knew were Republicans. He was the rare Democrat; he’d voted for Barack Obama. Teammates called him “Liberal Larry.”
Gordon once read a quote from a Hollywood actress who said she fell in love a little with each of her costars. That’s how he felt about the people he negotiated with. They were smart, Gordon thought, and could tell if you really cared about them. He called it “the music behind the words,” a concern that was genuine. Negotiating wasn’t like other jobs in the police department, where officers were expected to be dispassionate behind their badges and shields. Good negotiators had to lean in and connect.
This came naturally to Gordon. He’d grown up in one world and crossed over into another. He knew people were more than their worst moments. Everybody, when you got down to it, was a complicated mess of one sort or another. But inside every person was a relatable piece of humanity, Gordon believed, and his job on every call was to find it.
Copyright © 2020 by Jamie Thompson
