If they’d been even more frightened, Scotty never would have risked going for the gun.
If there were, in fact, rules, no one in Brad’s universe played by them. Wasn’t there a rule, for example, that you don’t get chased down for crimes you didn’t commit? The irony made him dizzy. It wasn’t even his real crimes that were going to bring him down; it was the one accusation that wasn’t true that was going to kill him.
For the first time since this whole adventure began, he felt a tug of panic. There’d been stress and fear before, certainly a sense of danger, but over the past few years, he’d gotten used to that. He’d come to live with it as surely as a wounded veteran lives with his limp. Sometimes he told himself that a pervasive sense of danger was what kept him sharp, prevented him from becoming complacent.
But this panic thing was new to him. He’d subsisted for so long on hope and luck that he’d allowed himself to believe he had some measure of control. What an idiot.
He and Nicki were screwed: stuck in the middle of nowhere, without wheels, and neither one of them in any condition to walk. What the hell were they supposed to do now? When he glanced to Nicki for advice, all he got in return was that expectant look. She was counting on him to have the answers.
“Are you all right?” Nicki asked.
Brad realized that he’d been completely lost in his thoughts. “Huh?”
“You’re bleeding pretty badly. Are you all right?”
He forced a smile. “I guess that question pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it?” It was a weeping wound, not a pumping one, but leaking enough volume to soak the lower part of his T-shirt and the upper part of his trousers.
“What are we going to do, Brad?” Maybe she thought that asking enough times would produce an answer.
He heard the fear in her voice, saw it in her eyes. “We could always take a nap,” he said.
“How long before they come?”
Brad looked out the window. “Out here? Hard to say. Ten minutes, maybe. I wouldn’t think any more than twenty. They won’t storm the place as long as we’ve got her with us.” He nodded toward Gramma.
“Let’s let her go,” Nicki said.
“What?”
“Look at her.” As Nicki spoke, Gramma seemed to grow older in her chair. “She didn’t do anything.”
Brad dismissed the notion out of hand. “No way. She’s the only insurance we’ve got.”
“Against what?”
Brad gave her a look.
“I don’t want hostages,” Nicki said. “I don’t want anybody getting hurt for me. All I want is peace. I want all of this to end happily.”
Brad scowled. “Do you really think that’s possible? With the way our luck’s been running, you can’t possibly think there’s a happy end.”
Nicki offered up a wan smile. “I guess it all depends on what makes you happy. If getting out of here is key, then no, probably not.”
Brad didn’t get it. Actually, he feared that he did, but didn’t want to jump to conclusions. “What are you talking about?”
“You said it yourself,” Nicki said. “Sometimes it’s just a matter of setting your own terms.” A wave of pain surged through her chest, and Nicki winced. Brad saw the deep furrows in her brow as she fought off whatever was attacking her insides. The sound of her breathing reminded him incongruously of someone petting a piece of sandpaper. It hurt to listen.
When he turned back to Gramma, he saw her watching, an expectant look in her face. “You’re not going anywhere,” Brad said. Just to make sure, he rose from his chair and checked to make sure that she was still securely bound. Gramma asked if he could loosen the rope a little, but Brad didn’t bother to answer.
When he was done, he offered the .22 to Nicki. “Keep an eye on her,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
“To piss.” Ask a direct question and you get a direct answer.
“I don’t want the gun,” Nicki said.
“Look, we can’t afford—”
“I don’t want it.”
He let the pistol hover, then shoved it back into his bloody waistband. “Fine.”
Things inside his gut didn’t feel right at all. The pain was a constant, a dull ache that stabbed him every time he moved, and sometimes when he didn’t, but it wasn’t crippling. No worse than the aftermath of most of his beatings in prison, and not nearly as bad as some.
When he pissed a solid stream of blood, though, Brad knew that he’d been kidding himself. This wasn’t that pink-tinged stream that he’d come to expect after a night with the boys in the joint, the gift of pummeled kidneys; this was a dark crimson that turned the toilet water scarlet. So, being gut-shot wasn’t about unspeakable pain after all.
It was about bleeding to death on the inside.
In the distance, through the frosted open window, he could hear the sound of approaching sirens. Taking a long pull of air through his nose, he held it then let it go through pursed lips. So this was it. They were coming. Now was the time for all the tough choices.
He had to get ready. Once the cops heard that this was a hostage situation, the first thing they’d do was call in a tactical unit. Out here in the boonies, that might mean just a couple of good old boys with shotguns, but the one constant to tactical units everywhere was a sniper with a long gun and the temperament to use it. Starting with what was closest, he shut the bathroom window and locked it. The frosted glass would obscure them enough to keep the shooter from getting a good view.
Nicki called from the other room, her voice trembling. “Brad, I hear sirens!”
He flushed the toilet and opened the door. “They’re faster than I had hoped,” he said. The next stop was the living room, where he pulled the draperies closed. “Listen to me,” he said to Nicki. “This is very important. Stay away from the windows. If they see you, they’re likely to shoot.”
“Oh, my God,” she gasped.
His belly hurt. He was feeling light-headed, too. The cops’ first steps when they got on the scene would be driven by whatever the kid had told him. If the responding officer came to the door, Brad would have no choice but to shoot. In his current condition, he couldn’t fend anyone off in a fight.
He needed to stop the cops from leading off with the wrong move. His brain wasn’t working all that well right now, but in the seconds he had to plow through his available options, he came up with only one, and it righteously sucked.
He limped to the phone and picked up the receiver.
Then he dialed 911.
* * *
Carter cowered behind a tree, trying to make himself invisible. Where the hell was the shooter?
“Show yourself,” a voice said from the woods. It was a young voice, and stress made it crack.
Carter didn’t respond. The gun changed everything. It wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
“I could shoot you now if I wanted you dead,” the voice said. “I can see you.”
Carter’s skin crawled as if covered with ants. Laying on his belly in the saturated mulch of the forest floor, he was shivering.
Two more shots shattered the afternoon and chips flew from his tree, just inches above his head.
“The next ones will kill you,” the voice said. “Now, stand up where I can see you.”
Carter’s mind raced. What were his options here? He could stand and be shot, or he could lie on his belly and be shot. He decided to go for the greater dignity and he raised himself to his knees. When he wasn’t shot down immediately, he thought that he might actually have a chance.
“Okay,” Carter said to the forest. “Now it’s your turn.”
“Put your hands where I can see them,” the kid said.
Carter made a shrugging gesture. “They are where you can see them. I’m not armed.”
“Put them up in the air, then.”
Carter thought about that. It was time to piss on a new fire hydrant. Someone was going to be in control of this situation, and in a perfect w
orld, that person was never the one with the gun. “No,” he said.
“Excuse me?” The incredulity in his voice nearly made Carter laugh.
“I said no,” Carter repeated. “Not until you show yourself.”
Some bushes rustled up ahead. Out stepped Jeremy Hines, a pistol clutched in both hands. It looked like a World War Two–vintage .45, with a muzzle the size of a manhole.
“You can put that down,” Carter said. “I’m not armed. I’m not here to hurt you.”
The boy looked confused. As he cocked his head to think, a stream of rainwater dripped from his nose.
“Why’d you shoot Chas Delphin, Jeremy?”
“Who said I did? I thought you were looking for Peter Banks on that.”
“We got Peter Banks,” Carter said. “But then we got more evidence. It was you. You were wearing a red jersey, and you nearly got away with it, except someone else startled you and beat the shit out of you.”
Jeremy’s jaw dropped. “You don’t know that.”
“Come on, Jeremy,” Carter snorted. “You left evidence all over the place.” That last part was a lie, of course. He wanted the boy to feel as if everything from this moment forward led to his inevitable confession.
“What kind of evidence?”
Carter’s eyes narrowed as he pretended to formulate an answer, but ultimately, he just shook his head. “No, I don’t think I’ll share that with you. Not just now. All I want to know is why you did it. How did you think you could get away with it?”
Jeremy’s eyes darted some more, scanning the woods for any reinforcements. “If you’re talking about your daughter and her friend—if you’re talking about the real murderers—nobody’s gonna believe a word they say.”
“Oh, I think they will,” Carter said. He took a step forward but stopped when Jeremy raised the pistol higher. He showed the boy his palms as a peace offering. “This doesn’t help.”
“Nobody will believe them,” Jeremy repeated.
Carter decided to probe a little deeper. “I’ve got the security video,” he bluffed.
“You couldn’t!” The kid knew his mistake as soon as he heard himself.
Carter smiled. “Couldn’t? And how would you know that?”
Jeremy trembled. “Y-you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, I do,” Carter said. “And so do you. Let’s drop the charade and set the record straight, okay?”
The boy raised the gun higher again. “I could shoot you.”
For an instant, Carter thought that was exactly what he was going to do. He flinched, but he didn’t back off. “Who would you blame that one on? There’s no hiding secrets like this, Jeremy. People try all the time, but murder is just too big a crime.”
“I didn’t murder anyone.” His voice broke again.
“I believe you,” Carter said. Clearly, it wasn’t what Jeremy was expecting to hear. “I think you believed that the gun was empty.”
The kid’s eyes got huge and he nodded enthusiastically. “Yes!” he said. He nearly shouted it. “That’s right. I didn’t think it was loaded. I just wanted to scare him.” He paused as the inevitability of it all settled in on him. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “If that guy hadn’t hit me, the gun never would have gone off. It wasn’t my fault.”
Carter said nothing. What was the sense in pointing out the fallacy of his reasoning now? As the world closed in on him, legal technicalities would be of little interest. “Can you answer my question, though?” he asked.
Jeremy looked confused.
“How did you think that you’d get away with it in a town this small?”
“He didn’t think he’d get away with it.” The voice from Carter’s right startled him. He turned to see Frank Hines emerging from a line of trees. He half expected to see a weapon drawn, but both of the sheriff’s hands were empty. “He was punishing me.”
Jeremy’s fear turned to panic, and he became a little boy. “I-I’m sorry, Dad,” he said. “He came back to the house, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Frank Hines waved off his son’s whimpering with a shooing flip of his hand. “I know,” he said. “Your mother called me.” To Carter, he said, “You must be proud of yourself.”
“Not especially,” Carter said. What was there to be proud of?
“You broke your big case,” Hines said. “Ruined a bunch of lives. That’s all in a day’s work for you, isn’t it?”
Something in the sheriff’s tone put Carter on edge. He kept watching those hands, realizing that he’d been a fool to come out here alone. “I’m just trying to prevent an injustice.”
Hines snorted a bitter laugh. “Preventing injustice. Funny, that’s what I thought I was doing.”
Carter recoiled. “By framing innocent kids?”
“Is that how you see Brad Dougherty, Counselor? You see him as an innocent? He’s killed two people that we know of, and he’s escaped from prison. If that’s your definition of innocent, then I shudder to think what guilty must look like to you.”
Carter pointed at Jeremy. “There it is, Sheriff. That’s what guilty looks like.”
Hines followed Carter’s finger and looked long and hard at the boy with the gun. “No,” he said. “That’s what stupid looks like. He made a mistake, for Christ’s sake. He never intended to shoot anyone.”
“There’s a dead boy and his family to whom that makes no difference at all,” Carter said.
Hines’s eyes shifted back to Carter, and he smiled at a joke that only he could hear. He mocked, “To whom that makes no difference, huh?” The smile turned to a laugh. “Think you’ve got the high ground, do you? The high and mighty ground? Your daughter’s hanging out with a murderer, and you think—”
“Brad Ward—or Dougherty, or whatever the hell his name is—didn’t commit this murder, Sheriff. And neither did my daughter.”
“Yes, he did,” Hines said. “The way I see it, if they’d just stayed out of it—if Dougherty hadn’t tackled my boy—there’d have been no shooting.”
The point was a ridiculous one, and Carter sensed that the sheriff understood that. Carter chose not to pursue it. “Just tell me why,” he said. “How could you begin to justify this charade?” He turned his head from father to son and back again. He’d take the answer from either one.
“A year from now, it would all have been over and done with,” Hines said. “Everybody would have come out a winner. Dougherty would be back in prison, your daughter would be back at home, and my boy wouldn’t have to pay for his stupidity with the rest of his life.”
Carter was confused. “So, you never intended to arrest Nicki?”
“Of course I intended to arrest her. I had to arrest her, but the charges never would have stuck. You know as well as I do that the evidence never would have held up in court.”
“It would have been plenty for an indictment,” Carter said. “And with that would come thousands in legal bills, and probably imprisonment.”
Hines looked unmoved. “But ultimately, she’d have walked free with a clean record.”
“And Chas Delphin? You were just going to let his murder go unavenged?”
Another shrug. “He’d be dead either way. A hundred years from now, he’ll still be dead. Nothing any of us can do will change that.”
Carter turned to Jeremy. “Why?”
The boy looked up long enough to glance at his father, and then looked down again.
“Go ahead, Jeremy,” Hines growled. “Tell him how this is my fault. How you did it because I’m a terrible father.” When the boy was too embarrassed to answer, the sheriff went ahead on his behalf. “I’m such an asshole that I wanted him to have a baseball scholarship. Here he is, the best pitcher that this county has seen in years—hell, maybe the best pitcher they’ve ever seen—and I was such a miserable son of a bitch that I wanted him to put it to good use. Have you ever heard such cruelty?”
Carter was lost, but he sensed that it would be dangerous to interru
pt.
“It worked, too. I pulled what few strings I have to pull and I got a scout to come out here and take a look at him. Jeremy got a full scholarship to UNC to pitch on their varsity team. The scout said that he might be good enough for the pros one day.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Jeremy said. His voice was barely audible above the rain.
“Don’t stop there, boy,” Hines said. “Tell him all of it. Tell him about the part where you were gonna punish me.”
“I didn’t want your damn scholarship, Dad!” the boy shouted. “I don’t want to play baseball. I hate baseball!”
Hines erupted. “Bullshit! That’s Peter Banks talking, not you.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. That’s Peter Banks.” He turned to Carter. “Ask him who the last great baseball star of Essex was.” He laughed bitterly. “Ask him about how he could have been a pro if he hadn’t blown out his knee. He’ll talk to you about that for hours. Won’t you, Dad?”
“Maybe we should step in out of the rain to discuss this,” Carter offered.
“Maybe you should mind your own goddamn business,” Hines said.
Jeremy kept going. “Better yet, ask him how he owns this town. Get him talking about the way everybody respects him because he knew how to raise the perfect kid, and turned him into the baseball player that he could never be.”
Now Carter understood Darla Sweet’s fears. He watched the anger boil up into the sheriff’s neck.
“You pissed on all my friends, you kicked my ass for everything I ever did wrong, and then you beat the shit out of the one friend who wasn’t afraid to hang out with me.”
Carter figured that had to be Peter Banks.
“That criminal was going to cost you everything.”
“No, Dad! You cost me everything.”
Hines threw his head back and launched a guffaw. “I didn’t make you stupid. I didn’t send you into that store.”
Carter thought he might understand what was happening here. The robbery was about getting a rise out of his father. Before he had a chance to stitch too much of it together in his head, Jeremy laid it out:
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