Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  That made sense. It took some of the edge off Nicki’s concern. “Don’t you wonder about fingerprints?”

  He planted his fists on his hips. “Do you think we could talk about this later? What are you eating?”

  “I want something salty.”

  “Up front,” he said, pointing the way with a nod. “Opposite the register.”

  She started that way.

  “Oh,” Brad said, stopping her in her tracks.

  She turned.

  “Try not to look at the camera, okay?” He smiled, knowing that that was exactly what she was likely to do.

  The Doritos called out to her. She hated the orange fingers and the rancid breath, but oh, boy, did she love Doritos. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had them. This dying thing was a hell of a cure for an eating disorder.

  Outside, just beyond the doors, she saw movement. The suddenness of it startled her, causing her to whip her head around, fearful before she knew why. A man dressed in black pants and a red shirt approached the front door from the parking lot. His gait frightened her, the way he pivoted his head from side to side, as if worried that he might be seen. When the guy yanked down the front of a winter ski mask to conceal his face, she understood why. His other hand held a pistol. Before a scream could form in her throat, the door exploded open and the man brought his gun up and leveled it at Mr. Star Wars’s face.

  Nicki turned to run, but the assailant stiff-armed her, planting the heel of his hand into her breastbone, and sending her tumbling back into the Twinkies and Ho Hos.

  “Stay the hell away from me!” he barked. The hand with the gun appeared to be trembling.

  The clerk behind the counter didn’t move. His jaw dropped to his chest and his face paled as his eyes focused on the barrel of the gun.

  “Don’t look at me, you fucking moron,” the robber growled. “Give me the cash from the drawer. You want to die?”

  The clerk jumped as if poked with a cattle prod, dropping his novel to the floor and putting his hands in the air, high over his head, a parody of an old Western.

  “Money,” the attacker repeated. “Put your hands down and give me the fucking money.”

  “W-we don’t have much,” the clerk stammered. He looked scared to death.

  “Stick your hand in the drawer, asshole. Grab what you’ve got, put it in a bag, and get down on the ground. If you even think of tripping an alarm I’ll blow your head off.”

  Nicki had never been so terrified. She’d never seen the business end of a gun before, and she’d never seen anyone willing to commit murder. When she tried to get up from the mess of collapsed shelving and scattered groceries, the masked man unleashed a kick that nailed her in the ribs.

  “I told you to stay the fuck where you are!” he spat.

  The pain exploded through Nicki’s chest, making her wonder if maybe he’d shot her anyway.

  “Please don’t,” she sobbed. “Please don’t hurt me.”

  But the robber had already turned his attention back to the clerk, who was frantically scooping money out of the drawer and stuffing it into a plastic shopping bag.

  She’d forgotten all about Brad, thoughts of survival pushing everything else out of the way. So when she saw him moving up behind her assailant, it was all she could do to keep from yelling out his name. He moved like those ninja warriors she’d seen on television, slowly closing the distance.

  The assailant sensed it, though. When Brad was still five feet away—a good two feet farther than he needed to be for a decisive strike—the gunman turned. Nicki screamed.

  Brad rushed the attacker like a linebacker, hitting hard, somewhere in the midsection. An explosion rocked the Quik Mart as the gun discharged, triggering another scream from Nicki. She tried to roll out of the way of the fight, but the driving force of Brad’s tackle sent both men hurling straight for her. She covered her head with her arms, and grunted as they fell on her hard.

  Brad was yelling, too, and like Nicki’s, his words didn’t make sense. It was a roar of frenzied anger, and after the first two seconds, it became clear that the robber didn’t have a chance.

  Brad cocked his fist and fired it into the gunman’s face. Nicki could feel the impact reverberate all the way down to her. “Drop the gun!” Brad commanded, and he leveled another bone-crushing blow to the face.

  The gunman made a high-pitched squealing sound as the blows found their marks, and as he rolled away, across the white linoleum floor, Nicki noticed that he left a bloody smear. The gun clattered to the floor and Brad made a dive for it, executing a shoulder roll to come back to his knee, with the gun leveled at the attacker, who himself had found his feet.

  “Freeze or you’re dead,” Brad commanded.

  The attacker stood there, saying nothing, drooling blood through the tight weave of his woolen mask.

  “Hands,” Brad commanded. “I want to see hands.” The gun looked different in Brad’s hands than it did in the robber’s.

  The attacker made that high-pitched squeal again, then without a word, he spun and ran for the door, not even slowing as he charged out into the steadily darkening day.

  “Stop, goddammit!” Brad yelled, and he threw the weapon at the door.

  “What are you doing?” Nicki said. “Shoot him!”

  “The goddamn thing is empty. He was robbing the place with an unloaded gun.”

  But it wasn’t unloaded. She’d heard it fire. Her ears still rang from the noise of it. Movies and television couldn’t come close to capturing the heavy percussion of a gunshot up close. Even firecrackers couldn’t touch it, and she’d detonated some hellacious firecrackers in her time.

  As her hearing returned, she watched Brad struggle with his temptation to chase after the gunman to get even with him. The look she saw in his face—in his eyes—was one that she’d never seen before, not in him, and not in anyone else. It was a look of sheer rage, the emotion raw and unfiltered. She saw it in the set of his jaw, too, and the way the ridge over his eye was bleeding, but he clearly had not yet noticed.

  “Are you okay, Brad?”

  “Son of a bitch is out of his mind. What the hell was he thinking? I shoulda broken his neck when I had a chance. I went for the gun instead. Goddammit!”

  The new Brad frightened her a little, and as he brought his gaze around to her, he seemed to realize it. “Oh, Jesus, Nicki, are you all right?” He hurried over to help her stand.

  “I’m fine, I think,” she said.

  “I’m going after him,” Brad said. He started for the door.

  “No, don’t. Please,” Nicki said. “Just let it go. Nobody’s hurt, so just—”

  What was that?

  It was an odd sound, a hissing, gurgling sound that made her skin pucker. Brad heard it too, and together they turned toward the cash register, where the young kid with the paperback was nowhere to be seen.

  “Oh, shit,” Brad breathed.

  “What?”

  He pulled on her arm. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  She jerked away. “No. What is it?” She moved closer to the counter, frightened of what she might see, even as she knew that it could be nothing else.

  “We don’t have time for this,” Brad said.

  When she got close enough to the counter to see the horrors it concealed, she clapped a hand over her mouth to contain her scream.

  The clerk—she could see now from his name tag that his name was Chas—lay sprawled on the white linoleum floor, half-sitting against the far wall of the clerk’s space, a human island in a lake of blood that continued to spread at a horrifying rate from a gaping wound in his throat. “Oh, my God!” Nicki gasped. “Oh, Jesus, he’s dead.”

  As if to prove her wrong, Chas tried to lift his hands to his wound, only to find that his arms were too heavy.

  “Oh, Brad, what are we going to do?”

  Brad pulled on her arm again. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “We can’t,” she said
, again pulling away. “He’s hurt. We have to call an ambulance.”

  “He’s not hurt, Nicki, he’s dead. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Nicki couldn’t believe he said that. She moved around the end of the counter to enter the clerk’s space and get closer. The metallic smell of his blood—redder and thicker than any blood she’d ever seen before—turned her stomach. She ignored the pain in her swollen knees as she leaned in close to him.

  The boy’s eyes—a brilliant green—were windows to his terror. “Brad, call 911,” Nicki said.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he hissed. “We can’t do that.”

  “We have to. Look at him.”

  From a wound somewhere near Chas’s collar, blood spewed in an irregular fan with each beat of his heart, cascading down his already-soaked shirt to get lost in the mess that was his pants. His eyes locked with Nicki’s, even as the light in them faded. He reached for her, but again, the effort was just too much. His hand made a slapping sound when it landed in the lake of accumulating gore.

  Without thinking, Nicki reached for it, enfolded it in her own. “I’m here, Chas,” she said.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d watched someone die. In a strange, twisted way, it was easier to watch her mother slip away. At least then, the owner of the hand she held knew that it was a gesture of love. Here, Chas seemed to know that it was a gesture of pity, and that made all the difference in the world. His eyes begged for her to do something—anything—that would make things better.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nicki said. “I’m so, so sorry.” She fought the urge to tell him that everything would be all right. It was what people who knew better liked to say, and she knew how much it pissed her off when people did it to her.

  Panic sparked in those green eyes. Tears welled up.

  Nicki found herself back in the hospital room with her mother—or the emaciated shell that pretended to be her mother—begging her to stay, even as the electronic monitors and the gentle whispers from the nurses and doctors all told her that that was impossible. She remembered the uselessness of her mother’s fight to stay with Nicki, to answer her prayers.

  “It’s a better place,” she said softly to Chas. “There’s no pain, and people are always nice to you. Just let yourself—”

  “All y’all freeze right where you are!”

  Nicki and Brad both jumped at the sound of the new voice and looked up to see an old man—probably all of eighty years old—staring down at her from the back of the counter, a huge automatic pistol gripped tightly in his fist.

  “Leave that boy alone.” Then he saw the carnage. “Oh, sweet mother of Jesus—”

  This time, there was nothing stealthy or quiet about Brad’s move. He just launched at the old man, pushing him hard with his left hand and then dropping him with a single punch to his face. Nicki yelled at the suddenness of it, the viciousness of it. “Brad! My God!”

  Brad bent over and came up with the old man’s gun, which he stuffed into the waistband of his chinos. “Come on, we gotta get outta here.”

  It was all happening too fast. Nicki didn’t know what to do, what to think. All she knew was the panic welling up from somewhere deep inside.

  “We’ve got to go now. He’s probably already called the cops. Maybe set off an alarm.”

  “Where did he come from?”

  Brad rolled his eyes, which were growing hotter by the second. “Who the hell cares? He came from the back room, okay? He must have been back there the whole time. Now, let’s get out of here.”

  “But what about him?” she asked, pointing to Chas.

  “Look at him,” Brad said.

  She did. The light in those green eyes had extinguished. They were dolls’ eyes now, staring at forever.

  “He’s dead,” Brad said. This time, his tone was softer.

  “And him?” She gestured toward the old man, who lay somewhere out of her sight on the other side of the counter.

  “I didn’t hit him that hard. He’ll be okay. Now, come on.”

  It was as if she were frozen in place. Should she stay or go?

  “The cameras saw it all, Nicki,” Brad said, reading her thoughts. “You’ve got no reason to stay. Nothing you say can add anything to what they’ll be able to see on the tape. Decide now. Yes or no. I can’t stay.” He seemed to vibrate with anxiety to get the hell out of there.

  It was too much. There were too many sides to consider all at once. This wasn’t the kind of decision that you just made and walked away from. The ramifications were enormous. A boy was killed, for God’s sake. This was all wrong. Wrong with a capital W. She’d somehow wandered through Alice’s looking glass, and the whole world as she’d come to know it was all twisted and distorted.

  Brad started for the door. “Bye, Nicki,” he said. “I love you.”

  “Wait!” she called after him. “I’m coming!”

  June 25

  Honest to God, I’m going to kill Chaney. Even if I die trying, I’m going to kill him. I’ve got a plan. I know a way to get a knife past the metal detectors. I’ve tried it twice—once leaving the kitchen and then on the way back in. Killing him will be the easy part. Living for more than thirty seconds afterward is a little tricky. That’s okay, though, as long as Chaney’s dead.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Darla Sweet was still a block away from the Quik Mart when she marked on the scene, speaking quickly and then tossing the mike onto the passenger seat. Heavy raindrops began to spatter the windshield of her cruiser.

  Without dropping a beat, the dispatcher acknowledged, “On the scene, Unit six-oh-four at fourteen thirteen hours. Give us a situation report first chance you get.”

  No, I’m going to keep all the details to myself, Darla didn’t say. A shooting! Part of her didn’t believe it. Shootings didn’t happen in Essex, at least not like this. Not in a robbery. Occasionally, a couple of goobers would get into an argument that blew out of proportion, but an armed robbery? That just didn’t happen here.

  Besides, this was old Ben Maestri’s place. A nicer old man never walked the face of the planet. It was beyond her imagination that anyone would want to do him any harm. An alcoholic and a gambler, he’d fallen on hard times, Darla had been told, but even when the folks in town gossiped about that, it was always with a tone of pity, not disgust. She prayed silently that she wouldn’t find him dead on the floor.

  As she slid her cruiser to a halt outside the windows of the Quik Mart, she imagined the voices of her instructors at the academy. She knew all about waiting for backup and about tactical approaches, but this was Essex, where the nearest backup might be ten minutes away, and the nearest tactical unit was easily an hour beyond that. As her right hand threw the transmission into Park, she threw the door open with her left, leaving it gaping as she pulled her revolver and ran full-speed through the front doors.

  “Sheriff’s Office!” she yelled, her weapon extended at arm’s length.

  “Here!” someone yelled. “Oh, God, here, behind the counter!”

  Her senses buzzing with premonitions of a trap, Darla eased forward far enough to peek over the counter to see the bloody mess on the floor behind. An old man and a teenager both sat on the linoleum, smeared with blood.

  “Please help,” the old man said. He seemed to be crying, even as his face showed emptiness of both color and expression. Besides the blood that coated the floor, another thin stream flowed from a gash just below the old man’s eye.

  Darla holstered her weapon and hurried around to the open end of the counter, nearly losing her balance when she hit the blood slick. She thumbed the mike on her epaulette. “Six-oh-four to Central, we have a confirmed critical GSW and another unidentified injury. Start two rescue units this way, and expedite backup. I’ll be ten-seven rendering aid.” Then, to the old man, she said, “Where are you hit?”

  Old Ben just looked at her, uncomprehending. “How could they do something like this?” The odor of booze wafted off him.

&
nbsp; “I said, where are you hit?” Feeling for a pulse on Chas’s neck, she found the gaping hole and realized instantly the seriousness of the boy’s wound. It didn’t matter what was wrong with the old man; the kid was worse off, and therefore first on her list. Pulling the kid away from the wall by his feet, she caused him to slip backward onto the floor, where his head impacted with a terrible thud. Darla keyed the mike one more time. “Six-oh-four to central, I’m beginning CPR.”

  With Chas now supine and staring, Darla lifted his jaw toward the ceiling, further exposing the gristly wound that gaped just above his collar. She pinched his nose shut while pressing her opened mouth onto his and blew. She’d recertified on this procedure six times now, and she still couldn’t remember the sequence of events. She blew four quick breaths into his mouth, producing a terrible gurgling sound from the wound. At that instant, she realized that it was all a lost cause. With the trachea punctured, the air she blew would only make it as far as the hole, uselessly blowing a bloody fog against her cheek, but never reaching his lungs. Still, she had to try.

  If she kept going, his chances rose to some tiny sliver of a percent above zero; if she stopped, he wouldn’t even have that. Either way, she sensed that the taste of his blood would never go away.

  Darla crossed her palms the way she’d been instructed, found the kid’s xiphoid process, where the ribs came together just below the breastbone, and she started chest compressions. One-and, two-and, three-and . . . All the way to fifteen, and then she moved back up for another mouthful of blood. She didn’t realize that a person could have so much blood.

  “Do you think you can help me here?” she asked the old man, but he just continued to stare.

  “I don’t believe it,” he whispered. “I just don’t believe this is happening.”

  He was useless. Where the hell was the ambulance?

  As the cycle switched from ventilations to compressions for the tenth or maybe fifteenth time, Darla paused long enough to vomit up the burger she’d had for lunch, adding a bit of herself to the unspeakable mess on the linoleum. It went like that forever, maybe minutes, maybe the better part of an hour. Ventilations, compressions, ventilations, compressions, puke.