Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  “I understand that, sir, and I’ve passed that along to my supervisor, but there’s just no way—”

  “Okay then,” Carter said, surrendering to the inevitable. “Take this down. One of the people in that standoff in Lincolntown is my daughter. The commander thinks that she is guilty of a murder this afternoon, but she in fact is not. We’ve just found confirmation of that.”

  “We?”

  “Deputy Darla Sweet with the Essex Sheriff’s Department. She and I. The real perpetrator of the robbery at the Quik Mart was Jeremy Hines, Sheriff Frank Hines’s son. He just confessed to it. So, this standoff is unnecessary.”

  The operator conferred with someone on her end of the line, her microphone covered. “Um, sir, we’ve just received news about Sheriff Hines . . .”

  “That he’s dead. Yes, I know. His son shot him. Terrible thing. I was there.” As the words spilled out of him, Carter realized that he must sound crazy. “Look, it’s a long story. All I need from the incident commander is for him to tell my daughter—Nicolette Janssen—that she’s no longer a suspect in that crime.”

  “Sir, I can’t—”

  “Goddammit, that’s why I need to talk to him!” It was a trait of law enforcement people everywhere to never give the impression of urgency. They were to be calm and reasonable at all times, and it was annoying as hell.

  A beep in his ear alerted him to another call trying to come through. He pulled the phone away from his face far enough to see a familiar New York area code. Shit, he’d forgotten to call Dr. Cavanaugh. “I have to take this,” he said to the call-taker. Without waiting for a response, he pressed the Send button and waited for the click. “Dr. Cavanaugh?”

  “You’re pissing me off, Mr. Janssen,” he said. Carter could tell from the anger in the doctor’s voice that he was finished.

  “Doctor, I need more time,” he said. “Not a lot, just another hour.”

  “Absolutely not. I’m moving to the next name on the list.”

  “Please don’t do that.” The finality of the doctor’s tone felt like broken glass in Carter’s chest.

  “I don’t know what kind of a game you think you’re playing, or what makes you think you have the right to play it, but I’ve been very clear with you from the very beginning—”

  “Listen to me,” Carter said. “I’ve been through hell here—”

  “Save it,” Cavanaugh said. “I was as clear with you as I know how to be. I won’t go through this again with you. I’m moving on to the next name on the list. I’m sorry. For both your daughter and you.”

  “Wait!” he yelled, but the line was already dead. “Shit!” He yelled the word so loudly that in the confines of the car it hurt his own ears. After all he’d gone through, he was going to lose Nicki anyway.

  No. That was too simple. The stakes were too high and too many lives had already been ruined for him to fall back on fatalistic cynicism.

  He’d come too far to lose the battle now. There had to be a way.

  If only he could let Nicki know that she was off the hook, then she could just walk away. She could be back home tomorrow.

  He needed to talk with her, one on one. But how? Even if he could get the number from directory assistance, the police would have already locked it up for negotiations. That was standard procedure in any barricade situation: the phones become a single-line connect to the command post, making it impossible for the hostage-takers to call in favors from their friends, or even to call for a pizza delivery. You had to make the bad guys one hundred percent dependent upon the good guys. Hostage negotiation was a high-stakes game that was as much mind manipulation as it was sharpshooting.

  Carter had to find a way to put the transplant business behind him. What’s done was done; there’d be time later to fret about the injustice. Putting the best face on it, he told himself that the negotiators now had all the time in the world, and that he himself had time to show the prosecutors that the two young people in their sights had nothing to do with the Quik Mart murders. Maybe that would take some of the itch out of the police officers’ trigger fingers.

  Of course, there were still the matters of the hostage-taking itself, and the outstanding warrants on Brad Ward, and the inevitable aiding and abetting charges that faced Nicolette when this was all over, but these were things that could be handled. Nicki would be alive long enough to retake her position at the end of the organ recipient list. There’d be jail time, no doubt, but with luck, Carter would be able to talk the judge into letting her receive the intravenous prostacyclin while they worked out all the details.

  Nicki would be pissed, but at least she’d be alive.

  The wild card here was Brad Ward. He was a desperate man with nothing to lose. Beyond the original sentence and the added time for breaking out of prison, he faced an inevitable death sentence—or, given a lenient jury, life without parole—for the killing of his fellow inmate in the joint. He had nothing to gain by surrender; faced no benefit by allowing himself to be taken alive.

  It was a thought that had been nagging at Carter ever since Jeremy Hines had tried to manipulate the police into shooting him: Brad Dougherty was likely doing the exact same thing. And why not? If conditions in prison had been bad enough to commit murder and then risk death by escaping, then they were bad enough to be avoided at all costs.

  With nothing left to live for, there was little room for negotiation. At the end of all the talk, it would boil down to one thing: a stranger with a badge and a gun telling a desperate kid not to die here, so he could be put to death later.

  “Just kill yourself and get it over with,” Carter said aloud. “Save everybody the trouble.”

  He felt guilty for even thinking such a thing, but then, out of nowhere, his mind grabbed on to an even more disgraceful thought.

  His foot urged the accelerator even closer to the floor as he dialed a new number into his cell phone.

  * * *

  Matt Hayes wanted a cigarette. He needed a cigarette. Honest to God, he thought he’d quit for real this time, but something about the impossible tightness of the crawlspace under the house made him realize that life was too damn short and too damn dangerous to deny yourself the simple pleasures.

  He lay on his back in the sand, trying his best to ignore the flies, ants, sand fleas, and God only knew what other creatures gnawed at him. As it turned out, Scotty Boyd was the smartest person in the room when it came to the wisdom of crawling under the house.

  Matt had darted across the yard and approached from the living room side of the building—side two in the parlance of the police, in which the front door is always side one the others are assigned in a clockwise pattern, with side three typically being the rear. The windows were a concern, but only a minor one. The perps had closed the curtains and that cut both ways. The drapes denied snipers a view from their nest, but they likewise denied the occupants a view of what the police were doing.

  On paper, his mission was a simple one. Using a powerful yet slow-turning carbide-tipped drill, Matt was to make a hole in the floor large enough to insert a tiny fiber-optic camera into the living room. He’d use the tiny monitor to position the camera, which would then beam a picture to the command post. The camera was the newest toy donated by taxpayers to the police department. A year from now, barring any unforeseen budget cuts, they expected to have an equally small microphone for audio surveillance.

  Trooper Hayes had attended training for both the audio and video, but this was the first opportunity anyone from their barracks had had to use the camera in a no-shit tactical situation.

  It had seemed a lot simpler in concept than it was turning out to be in practice. The biggest problem was the thickness of the flooring versus the speed of the drill. He was making progress, but it was so slow that he was beginning to feel exposed. The longer he lay here, the greater his chance of being discovered, yet he didn’t dare drill any faster.

  The nightmare that Matt had constructed for himself was that he would manage t
o drill straight into Dougherty’s foot. The pissed-off gunman would then shoot through the floor, and then the folks in the command post would argue among themselves about who was man enough to climb into this dank nastiness to retrieve his bullet-riddled body.

  After twenty minutes, the drill broke through. Withdrawing the bit from the hole, he unsnaked the coiled fiber-optic cable from his pocket and connected it to the transmitter box, locking it in place with a quarter turn. He rested the box in the sand and turned his head to watch the tiny monitor.

  If all was right with the world, the command post would be able to see exactly what he was seeing in real time. Moving with impossible slowness and deliberation, he snaked the lens through the hole he’d drilled, praying that no one inside would glance in the wrong direction and see it.

  From here on out, it was all about patience. And a little bit of luck.

  * * *

  Scotty jumped out of his seat, grunting against the pain in his head. “That’s it!” he yelled, pointing. “That’s her. That’s Gramma.”

  Donnelly motioned for the boy to settle down, and they all leaned in closer to the little television monitor on the kitchen table. The angle on the picture was an odd one, and the panoramic lens distorted everything, but they clearly were looking at the inside of a small house. They could see three people. An older woman—Scotty’s Gramma—sat stiff and tall in a chair on the left. Her posture suggested that her wrists might be bound to the arms of her seat.

  “They tied up my gramma,” Scotty said, his voice dripping with contempt.

  No one seemed particularly bothered.

  “Is that Nicolette Janssen there on the couch?” someone asked, pointing to the woman on the right-hand side of the screen.

  Eyes turned to Scotty. “That’s the sick girl,” he said. “The guy is Brad. He’s the one I shot.”

  From this worm’s-eye view, they could see not only the two women, but also the short hallway that led to the bedrooms beyond them, and the edge of the door to the kitchen.

  “You dictated a pretty good picture, Scotty,” Donnelly said. Scotty felt himself blush.

  A cop touched the dark spot on the front of Brad’s T-shirt. “Looks like he’s bleeding.”

  “I knew it,” Scotty said.

  Donnelly seemed annoyed. “If he believes he’s finished, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble here,” he said. “There’s not an animal in the world that’s not most dangerous when it’s cornered and hurt.” He turned to a young dark-skinned cop that everyone called Muhammad. “Call the teams and verify that all assets are in position.”

  Muhammad talked into his radio. A moment later, he reported, “When Hayes gets back to his post, they’ll be all set. Two three-man entry teams, two sniper teams.”

  “Good,” Donnelly said. “Tell them to get comfortable. We’re in no hurry.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  A soaked trooper—his name tag read P. EVANOW—stood at Carter’s car window against a backdrop of yellow barricade tape that blocked all access to the beach road. “You have to turn around, sir. There’s a hostage situation in progress.”

  Carter showed his badge and credentials. “I am a district attorney, and I have information that the incident commander needs to know.”

  Trooper Evanow was unimpressed. “I’m sure that badge means something in New York, but right here, it means that you still have to move along.”

  Carter felt his face flush as his mind raced. How could—

  His cell phone rang, and Carter snatched it from the seat where he’d left it. “Janssen,” he said.

  A familiar voice said, “Carter, this is Warren Michaels. You were right, June Parker does have a cell phone. I have the number right here.”

  * * *

  Brad gave in to the need to sit. His belly was getting hotter all the time.

  “How are you feeling?” Nicki asked him.

  “Like somebody’s barbecuing chicken in my gut.”

  Between the thick clouds, the setting sun, and the pulled drapes, it could have been midnight inside the Parker home. Out there somewhere, people were planning their deaths.

  “Do you keep hearing noises?” Nicki asked.

  “There’s a friggin’ army out there,” Brad said. “But we’ve got time. I don’t think they’ll make their move till the wee hours. They’ll hold out as long as they can.” He tried to sound like the authority. Certainly, that’s how it went down when they arrested him before. Then, they waited till four in the morning and took him out of a sound sleep.

  “Why prolong the inevitable?” Gramma asked.

  “You’re a hundred years old,” Brad snapped. “Why do you prolong the inevitable by getting up in the morning?”

  “Brad!” Nicki gasped.

  Gramma’s tone was smooth as cream. “I need to be alive for that little boy you brutalized.”

  Brad’s laugh came with a lot of pain. “Yeah, I brutalized him. He’s got a boo-boo on his head and I’ve got a hole drilled through me.”

  Nicki decided to try again. “Brad?”

  “I’m not letting her go,” he said for the thousandth time.

  “But she didn’t—”

  “—do anything to deserve this.” Brad finished the sentence for her.

  “But you can’t be willing for her to get hurt.” Nicki said this as a statement of fact. “Think how you’d feel if that happened.”

  “That won’t be a problem if she does what she’s told and keeps her head down at the end.”

  “But—”

  “Nicki, please. I don’t want to go through all of this again. I’m tired and I hurt. I know what I’m doing, okay?” He added with a smile, “Not that you can tell by looking.”

  “If I get killed,” Gramma said, “you’ll both be the murderers that you claim not to be.”

  Brad shifted in his chair, wincing against the belly spikes. “I already am the murderer that Nicki claims not to be. She’s innocent of everything but hanging around with me.”

  “Unless you count kidnapping,” Nicki said.

  “You had nothing to do with that, either,” Brad snapped. “You hear that, Granny?”

  The new tone to his voice seemed to startle Gramma.

  “You remember that, okay? All of this—everything bad that has happened here—has been my doing. Nicki wanted to call the police from the very beginning. None of this is what she’d signed on for.”

  “Then let her go, too,” Gramma said. “If she’s innocent, it’s the thing to do. It’s the reasonable—”

  A high-pitched synthesized Bach fugue cut her off. The sound startled them all.

  “Cell phone,” Nicki said.

  They shifted their eyes to Gramma. She nodded toward the bag perched on top of the television. “In my purse.”

  “You expecting a phone call?” Brad asked.

  “I only have it for emergencies,” Gramma said. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a call on it.”

  “Gee, who do you think it’s for?” Brad asked, clearly knowing the answer. The arms of the kitchen chair popped as he pressed against them to raise himself to his feet. He hobbled over to the purse, pulled out a cheap featureless cell phone, and pressed the Send button. “Yeah?”

  * * *

  Donnelly jumped as if someone had nailed him with a cattle prod. “What the hell’s he doing?” A second later, it was obvious. “Cell phone! Where the hell did he get a cell phone? Goddammit, why didn’t someone think to jam that!”

  * * *

  Carter’s heart froze as a man’s voice answered, “Yeah?” He worked hard to keep his voice soft. “Is this Brad?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “This is Carter Janssen. Nicolette’s father.”

  “She hates to be called that.”

  “I know,” Carter said, holding his head just so, thankful for the good signal and not wanting to risk it. “I rarely call her that, actually. Usually it’s Nicki. Is she there?”

  “Yeah, she’s her
e. I don’t know that she’ll want to talk to you.”

  “How about you, Brad?” Carter said. “Are you willing to talk to me?” Carter imagined himself as a fisherman, luring his prey oh-so-gently toward the hook. If he pushed too hard, he’d lose him before he had a chance to present his proposal.

  “She’s here of her own free will,” Brad said. The words sounded rehearsed.

  “I know. But things have changed, Brad. They know who the real killer is from the Quik Mart. It’s a kid named Jeremy Hines, the sheriff’s boy, and he’s in custody.” He decided not to mention the sheriff’s murder.

  “So?”

  Carter scowled. It was obvious, wasn’t it? “So Nicki has nothing to run from anymore.” He paused to let the words sink in. “She needs to know that. Will you let me speak to her?”

  Brad’s tone got softer as he said, “Maybe she doesn’t want to.”

  “Give her the chance. Please. Just let me talk to her for a few minutes.”

  “How do I know this isn’t some sort of a trap? You could be making all of this up.”

  “You’re not getting it, Brad. Nicki doesn’t have to worry about traps. She’s free and clear, and she needs to know that.” Another pause, just a second or two. “There’s also a way out for you, Brad. There’s a way to turn all of this into something good.”

  Carter could hear voices on the other end of the phone, but they were not directed at him. One of them belonged to Nicki. “Brad?” Carter said. “Are you there?”

  * * *

  “Who is it?” Nicki asked.

  “The police want to talk to you,” Brad lied, holding out the phone to Nicki. “I told them I didn’t think you’d want to.”

  “What do they want?”

  “To talk you into giving up and leaving me here.”

  “Tell them to forget it. I’m staying.”

  * * *

  Commander Donnelly pounded the table with his fist, making everyone jump. Suddenly, Scotty didn’t want to be there anymore. “Can we trace that call?” he asked the room.

  “Once we know the number for the cell phone, we can.”

  “Find it,” Donnelly barked. He turned to Scotty. “How about you? Do you know your grandmother’s cell phone number?”