Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  “What was I going to do? I couldn’t put my hands on a school transcript if I had to, so I can’t even qualify as a high school graduate. If you pick the right street corner, you can get double minimum wage, and you don’t have to clean baby vomit off the fast food booth.”

  “What about your dignity?”

  This time, the smile erupted into a laugh. “Okay, well, there are early casualties to certain lifestyles. My dignity stopped being important around the time when my mother started screwing strangers in our living room.”

  “God, that’s awful. So, how did the prison thing happen?”

  “I was stupid. Begging bored me. It might keep food in my belly, and a buzz in my head from time to time, but I gotta tell you: It’s really freaking boring. I needed a business to get into. Something I knew how to do.” He glanced over at Nicki and waited for her to connect the dots for herself.

  “Drugs?”

  “Bingo. The family business. You know what they say. Do what you know. So, I did.”

  “You’re lucky you weren’t killed.”

  “I was in the game for precisely one day.”

  “You’re kidding. Why?”

  “My very first customer was a cop.”

  “No way.”

  “I swear. I walked right up to this guy, offered him a nickel bag, took his money, and then every cop on the planet swooped down on me.”

  “You were in Michigan then?”

  “No, that was in New York. Rikers country. Anyway, I didn’t have to do much time. A few months, and then a long probation, which I promptly ducked, but nobody seemed to care.”

  “Getting away seems to be another one of your special gifts.”

  “Well, I certainly hope so. I never want to do anybody harm. I never really want to get in trouble. It’s just that whenever I see an opportunity, I somehow get involved only on the dark side of it. Everybody dreams of being an entrepreneur, right? I just chose a bad product.”

  “That happened to be illegal.”

  His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Look who’s sounding like a prosecutor.”

  Nicki blushed.

  “All the really profitable stuff is either already taken, or it’s illegal. And I didn’t have a lot of seed capital, as they say.”

  “You don’t even sound repentant,” Nicki said. Her tone was leaden with accusation.

  “About what? Surviving?”

  “About being irresponsible.”

  Brad laughed. “Oh, responsibility. And who are we supposed to be responsible for? Do you think that old Chas back there felt responsible for earning money for college or for a new car, and then ended up bleeding to death on a cold floor? Life isn’t about responsibility, Nicki. Life is about living, and doing whatever it takes to make sure you end the day the way you want to end it. It’s why I’ll never go back to prison. You own nothing in that place, not even your life. Every day in prison is just another routine, highlighted by psychos who want to stick you with either a knife or a dick.”

  Nicki listened to his rant, mesmerized not so much by his message as by his commitment to it. It’s what she liked most about him; loved most about him. He lived in a world where there was no doubt. You decided what you were going to do, and then you did it; if that pissed people off, then too bad for the pissed-off people. She marveled how anyone could talk about things that were so clearly wrong, yet make them sound so right. Every time she tried to form an argument in her head, it ended up sounding like an empty platitude.

  “So, now you know what an asshole I am,” Brad said, breaking yet another thoughtful silence. “You still up for the weird adventure?”

  She looked at him long and hard, searching for the hint that he was something other than what he portrayed himself to be. What she saw was a little boy in a man’s body, a kid who never discovered his own childhood and instead constructed a world where breaking laws was fine so long as you broke them for the right reason. He was Robin Hood meets Peter Pan. She had no business staying here with him. This was the road to ruin, the road to hell.

  “I’m up for it all,” she said.

  But she was looking sicker and sicker. Maybe not so bad that strangers would notice, but Brad could see it around her eyes.

  Chapter Twenty

  Carter didn’t even slow his stride as he showed his badge to the cop out front and ducked under the crime-scene tape. The name tag over the deputy’s pocket read Ryan, and he seemed to be pissed that he’d drawn guard duty.

  “Whoa,” Ryan said. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m with the district attorney’s office,” he said.

  The deputy scowled and took a closer look at the badge. “That says you’re from New York.”

  Carter didn’t argue. “That’s right. My daughter was allegedly involved in this crime, and I understand that you people think she killed someone.” On the other side of the door, Carter could just barely make out the sounds of an ongoing argument.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Carter Janssen. I’m Nicolette Janssen’s father.” In his first stroke of positive luck, Carter had been only thirty-five minutes away when he’d gotten the call from Michaels.

  “I see.” Jackson Ryan looked at the identification wallet one more time, as if to assure himself that he was talking to the right guy. “You’ll need to speak with Sheriff Hines.”

  “I’d love to. Is that him there?” He nodded to the thickset man in the khaki uniform.

  “Yes, but he’s busy.”

  “Don’t you think he’d want to talk to me?”

  Deputy Ryan considered that. “Wait here.”

  “Thank you.”

  The deputy walked through the front doors. Carter followed two steps behind.

  The old man locked in verbal combat with the sheriff looked like hell, red-faced and madder than a hornet. His left eye was black and swollen. Spittle flew from the old man’s mouth as he spoke. “I swear to God, Frank, if you accuse me of being senile one more time, I’m gonna punch you in the nose.”

  Sheriff Hines seemed amused as he held out his palms to ward off the old man’s attack. “I’m not saying you’re senile, Ben. I’m saying you’re drunk.”

  “And I’m telling you there was a tape in that machine this morning!”

  “Okay, then. What happened to it?”

  “I don’t know!”

  Another uniformed officer, this one a woman in her twenties who hadn’t quite found the right combination of macho and feminine to really be attractive, joined the conversation. “Mr. Maestri,” she said.

  The old man turned away from the sheriff to face the deputy.

  “Is it possible that the robbers went back there and took the tape?”

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’d have seen that. The only person who could’ve taken the tape is the sheriff here.”

  Behind the old man, a team of four uniformed cops sifted through debris and photographed the scene. They all stopped working at Ben Maestri’s comment and looked up, clearly expecting an emotional show from the sheriff. Carter thought he saw the cop’s back stiffen, but otherwise, he seemed to take it in stride.

  Carter asked, “Is there a back door?”

  All eyes turned toward the newcomer. “Who the hell is this?” the sheriff demanded.

  Deputy Ryan jumped a little. “Oh. Uh, excuse me, Sheriff, but this man here says that he’s the father of one of the perpetrators.”

  “Alleged perpetrators,” Carter corrected. “There’s no way she did any of this.”

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “I can speak for myself,” Carter said. He produced his badge again, and handed it to Hines. “I’m Assistant District Attorney Carter Janssen, from Pitcairn County, New York.”

  The lady cop tried to get a look at the credentials, but Hines snapped the case shut before she had a chance, and handed it back to Carter. “What are you doing here?”

  Carter passed the badge case to Darla Sweet. �
�My daughter is a runaway,” he explained. “I was on my way south when I got a call from a colleague in Virginia that you had put out a multistate BOLO for her.”

  “So, you just happened to be in the neighborhood?” Hines asked, looking skeptical.

  “Something like that. But I’m here to tell you that you’re barking up the wrong tree.” He accepted Darla’s return of his badge case.

  “And why is that?” Hines asked.

  “She’d never hurt a soul, Sheriff. She’s a model student.” Carter recognized how naïve that sounded, but it was the truth.

  “A model student and a runaway?” the sheriff baited. “Unusual combination.”

  Carter had been expecting a little professional deference here, or at least a moderate show of sympathy, but he got none of it from Sheriff Hines. The temper regulator in the back of his brain began to twitch. “There are extenuating circumstances,” he said.

  “Extenuating enough to justify murder?” There was a hardness to Hines’s eyes that boiled Carter’s blood. He’d dealt with dozens of these God-complex cops over the years, and there wasn’t a single one of them he didn’t hate.

  Carter didn’t rise to the bait. “You have a witness?”

  “Right here,” said the old man.

  Carter offered his hand. “Carter Janssen.”

  “Ben Maestri.” He smelled like a dirty rug.

  “Tell me what you saw,” Carter said. His tone carried an implied “please.”

  “The hell are you doing?” the sheriff said. “This ain’t New York, Counselor. You got no jurisdiction here.”

  “And if this is your only witness, you’ve got no case. I heard you say yourself that he’s drunk.”

  “That don’t mean I didn’t see what I saw,” Ben said. “There’s a videotape of it, too, ’cept Barney Fife here lost it.”

  Hines ignored Ben, while Darla touched the old man’s arm. The gesture said that this was neither the time nor the place for aggression.

  Carter’s stomach flipped at the thought. “You’ve got a video of my daughter shooting the clerk?” It was beyond rationality that such could be the case.

  “Apparently he never loaded the machine,” Darla said.

  “Don’t you start, too!” Ben yelled.

  Everyone ignored him. The sheriff said, “Mr. Janssen, I know this is difficult for you, and you know that you have no right to be here. You’re interfering. Still, you need to know that it’s more than what Ben saw or didn’t see. I’ve also got fingerprints belonging to Nicolette Janssen and to Bradley Ward—”

  “You can’t possibly have fingerprints on Nicki. She’s never been fingerprinted.”

  The sheriff glanced to Darla, who opened the plastic cover on her clipboard and found the applicable notation. “Big Top Elementary School. Looks like she was in the sixth grade.”

  That was ridiculous. Nicki had never been involved in the justice system. Then he remembered. He’d had her fingerprinted as part of the frenzy a few years back about kids being kidnapped. The police sold the program to the community as a way to keep kids safe, when in fact its real purpose was to facilitate identification of human remains. It had been Jenny’s idea; Carter had never been comfortable with the whole notion. “Those records aren’t in any database.”

  Darla answered this one. “No, sir, they’re not. But since we already had word to be on the lookout for these two in particular, and since I already got a positive ID on the photos that went out on the wire this morning, it was merely a matter of confirming.”

  It just was not possible. “Maybe they just stopped in for a soda or something, and they left their prints,” Carter offered. “There must be thousands of fingerprints in a place like this.”

  “The fingerprints were in blood, Mr. Janssen.” Darla delivered the news softly.

  Carter opened his mouth to argue, but he had nothing to say. He just stared, his mind unable to grasp it all.

  “I’ll have to ask you to step outside now, sir,” Hines said, and he motioned to Deputy Ryan.

  The deputy from outside put his hand on Carter’s arm. Carter didn’t resist, but he didn’t move, either. He looked around the ravaged room at the toppled racks and the blood on the floor. Mercifully, the body had already been removed. “Nicki could not have done this,” he said. “She’s not capable of this kind of violence.”

  “We don’t suspect otherwise, sir,” Hines said. Carter’s eyes lit up at what he thought might be a glimmer of hope, but it snuffed itself when the sheriff said, “But she’s an accessory for sure. In an aggravated capital murder. If you have any idea where she is, you’d be wise to help us find her before this really spirals out of control.”

  Carter knew the implications. For the difference in penalty between capital murder and accessory before the fact, Nicki might have pulled the trigger herself.

  “Sheriff,” he said, “if I knew where she was, none of this would have happened.”

  * * *

  “This isn’t good,” Brad said.

  Nicki stirred at the sound of his words, unaware that she had fallen asleep. They’d just rounded a sand dune and were approaching the Matoaka Fishing Pier when they got a good look at what was causing the traffic backup. A hundred yards ahead, a frenetic display of blue lights blocked the roadway.

  “An accident?” Nicki asked.

  Brad squinted to see. “I don’t know. Looks more like a roadblock to me.”

  “Searching for us?”

  “What do you think?” That sharpness had returned to his voice. Brad slapped the turn signal and turned into the parking lot of the fishing pier. The wind-ravaged sign boasted the best crab cakes and onion rings in the Outer Banks.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Ask me what we’re not going to do. I have a better answer for that.”

  Attached to the fishing pier was modern-looking video rental store. Not a national chain, but the neon sign announced that tourists were welcome.

  “We need current information,” Brad said. “I’m gonna chat up the folks inside. You still hungry?”

  It was nearly four o’clock by Nicki’s watch, and at the mention of food, she remembered how famished she’d been before the incident at the Quik Mart. “I’m starving,” she said, and then she felt guilty for even thinking about something as mundane as food.

  As they walked up the ramp to the front door of the fishing pier restaurant, Nicki couldn’t decide if the combined aromas of salt air and fish were appetizing or repulsive. The rain drenched her clothing, but without the capacity to run, she just endured. Brad made no comment as he matched her slow gait.

  The floor tiles popped under their feet as they crossed the sagging lobby, past the ancient Pac-Man machine in the corner on the right, and the racks of fishing supplies on the left, toward the door with the sign, EAT HERE.

  Ceiling fans churned in a futile attempt to draw cooler air into the dingy dining room. Given the hour, precious few people were eating. In fact, of the half-dozen patrons bellied up to the bar, not a single one was munching anything but alcohol.

  A busty woman in a BEAT ARMY T-shirt shot them a snaggletoothed grin as they entered. “You gonna want food?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” Nicki said. She added a smile as an afterthought.

  “I’m Mandy,” the woman said. “Just sit anywhere and I’ll be out to take your order in a shake.”

  The walk and the stress had taken a worse toll than Nicki had feared. She felt utterly wiped by the time they got to the first table, but Brad didn’t want to sit there. “Let’s go where we can watch out the front window,” he said. Now that they were inside, he moved quickly, leaving Nicki to fend for herself.

  By the time she joined him, fifteen seconds later, he was watching the traffic. “This is gonna be tough,” he said. “They’re gonna have pictures of me, and with the traffic moving this slow, they must be looking inside every vehicle. I don’t know how—”

  He clipped off
his words as Mandy approached with two menus. “That’s some storm, ain’t it?” she said. Between the water on the outside of the windows and the condensation on the inside, it was tough to see anything out there.

  “That’s some traffic,” Brad countered. “Looks like there’s a big accident up the road.”

  Mandy flipped the menus on the table as if she were dealing a couple of cards. “That ain’t an accident. That’s a roadblock. We got us a manhunt for a couple of killers. Robbed a convenience store up in Essex, killed the clerk. Terrible thing.”

  Nicki gasped before she could stop it. What about the videotape?

  The gasp brought a look from Brad, but Mandy didn’t seem to notice. “I heard they was looking for two kids. A couple. A boy and a girl.” She paused and her eyes narrowed. “Couldn’t be you two, could it?”

  The inside of Nicki’s mouth turned to chalk.

  Brad smiled. He rubbed his chin dramatically and pretended to think it through. “Let’s see, what’s today, Saturday? The kidnapping was on Monday, the arson on Tuesday, the bank robbery on Wednesday . . . Nope, we’re not scheduled to rob the convenience store till next Thursday.”

  If Mandy saw the horror in Nicki’s eyes, she didn’t show it. What she did show was genuine amusement. “Okay, smarty, do you know what you want?”

  “Are they really the best crab cakes in the Outer Banks?”

  The waitress winked. “Guaranteed to be the best in the restaurant, anyway.”

  “Sold,” Brad said.

  The waitress wrote something on her pad, then turned to Nicki. “Are you all right, missy? You don’t look so good.”

  Nicki forced a smile. “Summer flu,” she said. She’d never been any good at lying and she knew that Mandy must have seen right through her. “How about just a Diet Coke and an extra fork for his crab cakes?”

  Mandy shook her head. “They’re not big enough to share,” she said.

  “That’s okay. I’m not very hungry.”

  The waitress made a clucking sound. “Missy, a girl your size needs to eat. With the winds that are comin’, your boyfriend’s gonna have to tie a string to your ankle and fly you like a kite.” She waited for Nicki to change her mind.