He tried to ignore the cramp under his ribs as he pressed on. If he lost sight of Darla, he could be lost out here forever.
The muddy ground sucked at his loafers as he charged through the underbrush.
Up ahead, he saw that Darla had stopped. He closed the distance in seconds.
“Why are you waiting for me?” he gasped. “He’s getting away.”
Darla held up her hand, gesturing for silence. “Be quiet,” she hissed, and Carter pulled up short. “I don’t think he’s running anymore,” she whispered. “I think he’s hiding.”
Without thinking, Carter lowered himself into a crouch, and the deputy followed suit. How could he be so stupid to fall for the same trick twice? “How does he disappear like that?” he whispered.
“He’s a hunter,” Darla replied. “Everybody around here is a hunter. You learn to blend in.”
Carter craned his neck to take in all compass points.
“Be still,” Darla hissed.
“Well, what are we supposed to do? Just wait for him to shoot first?”
“We wait for him to show himself,” Darla said. “Or we just wait for the backup units to arrive.”
“He likes to shoot,” Carter said. He relayed the ambush the kid had set up when Carter had first started chasing him.
“He’s a notoriously good shot,” Darla said. “You’re lucky you’re here to tell the story.”
Lucky, indeed. Soaked to the skin in the middle of the woods, waiting for a lunatic high schooler to take a shot at him. By that standard, what was bad luck?
If it weren’t for his pounding heart and churning stomach, Carter might almost have felt sorry for Jeremy Hines. Carter had seen it a thousand times: Some kids on a prank break into a house or steal a car, only to have things go wrong and suddenly there’s blood in the street. Nobody meant for it to happen, but intentions didn’t matter anymore. There were some steps forward from which there was no step back. Prisons across the world were filled with people who had learned that lesson the hard way.
“Do you see anything?” Darla asked.
Carter shook his head. “Not a thing. The rain’ll cover a lot of sounds.”
“He’s here,” Darla said. “The woods become a big clearing and a construction site about fifty yards ahead. From there, it’s wide open spaces. He’s either got to stop here or double back.”
Carter felt the skin on his chest and his neck prickle. This was crazy. His job was done; he had what he needed to keep Nicki free. If he had a brain in his head, he’d be on his way to the state police or the county prosecutor to get this all cleared up, not that it would help Nicki much. Her transplant clock had ticked to zero. Jesus, when would it end?
The echoes of Jeremy’s last shots still had not left his head. With his father dead, the teenager had nothing to lose by killing two more. “How good a shot is this kid?” he whispered.
Darla rose from her knees to a half-crouch, her pistol extended at arm’s length, searching for a target. Carter considered it foolishly brazen to grant a larger target like that. “Good enough to compete in the junior state semifinals last year. He can part the hair on a bumblebee.”
“I wonder why he didn’t kill me when he had the chance,” Carter mused aloud.
“How’s that?”
“When I was first chasing him, he had me dead to rights, but he missed, and not by a little bit. Then, when he had me in his sights, just standing there with my fear hanging out, he didn’t shoot then, either.”
“I guess you’re not on his list,” Darla said. He could tell by her tone that she would rather watch the woods than listen to him. She was as frightened as he.
Carter didn’t think that was it. Why shoot at all if you don’t intend to hurt your target? He remembered the efficiency with which Jeremy dispatched his father.
Movement up ahead and to the left caught both Carter’s and Darla’s attention, and their heads pivoted to catch it. Jeremy Hines was making his move. He jumped from his hiding place, his throat issuing a terrible yell—a high-pitched squeal that sounded more like a wounded pig than a terrified teenager. He charged, the .45 clutched in his fist, pointed straight at them.
Darla’s posture changed to a shooting stance, in which she pivoted on the balls of her feet, swinging her body in alignment with her hands. “Jeremy, freeze!” she shouted.
The boy did nothing of the sort. He raised his weapon even higher and locked his elbow.
Darla had no time to make a decision. She had to shoot now if she was going to save either one of them. “No!” she cried.
Carter understood. The kid’s plan crystallized in his brain when he realized that Jeremy wasn’t shooting at them—at the very millisecond that Darla Sweet’s finger tightened on her trigger. Carter shoved her to the side as her weapon fired.
“Are you out of your mind?” she shrieked. She recovered her target and prepared to fire again.
She didn’t understand, and Carter had no time to explain. He lunged at Jeremy, putting himself between the teenager and the deputy who would kill him.
“Janssen!” Darla yelled. “Get down! Get out of the way!”
Jeremy kept charging, shifting his aim to Carter’s head. “I’ll kill you!” he yelled.
Carter didn’t move. If he turned out to be wrong, he was living his last five seconds on the planet.
Jeremy didn’t shoot. He pulled up short, stopping mere feet before a bone-breaking collision. He whipped the gun up to eye level, to where Carter Janssen’s entire worldview was limited to a half-inch muzzle in which he could see the initial lands and grooves of the rifling.
“I’ll kill you!” Jeremy yelled. He was hysterical.
“Put it down!” Darla yelled. She was on her feet now, moving around to Carter’s left to get an angle on the boy. “Drop that gun or I’ll shoot!”
“Darla, no!” Carter shouted. “Don’t do it!”
Jeremy pivoted his weapon to Deputy Sweet, again leaving her no choice, and again driving Carter into action. This time, he tackled Jeremy, driving his shoulder into the kid’s gut, and as they fell to the ground, he swore to God that he could hear the crack of Darla’s bullet—not the gunshot, which came an instant later, but the crack of the bullet itself in the air—passing within inches of his head.
Jeremy hit the ground hard, and Carter landed on top of him, trying to keep control of boy’s gun hand, gripping it tightly in both of his own.
“Get off me!” Jeremy grunted.
“Give me the gun,” Carter demanded. “Let go!”
Darla cussed randomly, furious that there was no decent shot to take. Over and over again, she yelled, “You’re crazy! You’re out of your mind!”
Carter couldn’t remember the last fight he’d been in, but he had a vague memory of losing it. This kid was strong, and he wriggled like a fish to get away, punching and kicking to get free. Jeremy snorted like a bull from the effort and spat out bitter curses as Carter focused every effort on keeping his gun hand under control.
Above and behind, he could hear Darla shouting at him. She screamed at him to get out of the way. She wanted to make her arrest, and if that meant killing the boy, then that was the way it would have to be.
Carter couldn’t let that happen. Jeremy Hines hadn’t earned death, and if this struggle ever stopped, he’d be able to explain it all to the deputy.
The fight ended when Carter’s groin erupted in agony. Whether from a foot or a knee or a fist, he didn’t know, but the kid had scored big time. A lightning bolt of pain launched deep into his belly, and he was useless. Before he knew what was happening, he was facedown on the forest floor with a mouthful of sand.
“I’m not telling you again!” Darla screamed. “Put that weapon down or I’ll shoot.”
From the ground, Carter shouted, “His gun is unloaded! Don’t shoot!”
“Put it down!”
Christ, could she hear him? “Darla! He’s unarmed! Don’t shoot him!”
She was staring do
wn the barrel of a .45. If she hesitated, she’d die. Yet, she was hearing—
“Don’t listen to him!” Jeremy yelled. “This gun is loaded, and I swear to God I will shoot you. I reloaded back there. I swear to God I reloaded.”
Carter saw from Darla’s expression that she was beginning to see the same picture as he. “If it were true, he’d have shot you,” Carter said, modulating his voice to something as close to soothing as he could muster with his guts seizing. “He left that magazine for you to find, Deputy. He wants you to think that he reloaded.”
“I swear to God I’ll kill you!” Jeremy screamed.
“He was never about killing anybody,” Carter said. “Certainly not you or me. He could have killed me with his first shot if that’s what he’d wanted to do.”
Darla scowled. “But the sheriff . . .”
“Pure anger. Frustration. Terrible dumb luck.” Carter let the words hang in the air. He turned his eyes toward Jeremy. “That’s right, isn’t it, son? You never did want to kill anyone, did you?”
Jeremy was trapped and he knew it. His face sagged and his shoulders slumped. With the pistol still in his fist, he covered his face with his hands and sobbed, “Please kill me. Just kill me, please . . .” His words disappeared in noises of pure anguish.
“Oh, my God,” Darla breathed. “He wanted me to kill him.” Jeremy didn’t resist as she cuffed his hands behind his back.
Carter said, “Maybe that was the plan the whole time when he left the house to go charging into the woods. Maybe he just wanted a quiet place to kill himself.”
“So when he shot at me, he assumed that I would shoot back.”
“Suicide by cop.”
“Have a seat,” Darla said as she assisted her young prisoner to the ground. After he was in place, she backpedaled a few steps and sat down on a dead fall. She looked . . . stunned.
“I didn’t figure it out till the very end,” Carter said, as if to soften the blow. “Are you okay?”
She indicated yes, but a part of her seemed not yet to have recovered from the shock.
“Can you help me get the word out about Nicki? The clock’s ticking, and—”
Darla’s eyes grew huge as she remembered. “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “It was the reason I first came to the house looking for you. I know where she is.”
Chapter Five
The pain in Brad’s belly was a red-hot corset, ever tightening its grip. His head swam from the blood loss, and the energy consumed simply by pacing the front room left him sweaty and exhausted. Fever raged inside of him. He could feel it building like a bonfire deep in his gut and his head, and the hotter it grew, the more aware he became of the steady ache of the bullet wound.
So where the hell were the cops? In his mind, he saw them surrounding the house, gathering for the assault. The drapes were pulled and the doors were locked. Beyond that, Brad couldn’t think of another thing to do.
He was resigned to dying. He only hoped they’d take him out with a head shot. That was the preference of snipers, he knew. In a perfect world, snipers loved the spot over their targets’ right eyebrow. An instant kill, even if it left a hell of a mess. It surprised him that the thought of never seeing another dawn brought him such a sense of peace.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t so surprising. He’d seen plenty of dawns as it was, and of those he’d witnessed, precious few were the stuff of poetry. Too many mornings had bloomed sunless for him, with a view of a concrete wall. Even more had begun in homes of strangers who seemed more afraid of him than he was of them.
In the silence of the front room, he’d twice assumed Nicki to be asleep, but both times when he looked at her, she was able to offer a wan smile. “Why don’t you sit down?” she asked.
“Because it hurts too much to get up again.” He shook his head. “Hell of a getaway I arranged, isn’t it?”
“It’s been different,” she said. She let a moment pass before asking, “So, what happens when they come to the door?”
“You stay low,” he said. “The rest is up to them.”
“Is there a way in the world that we can win?”
Brad looked at her and winced against a stab of pain. “By leaving now,” he said. “I was hoping for a tidal wave or an asteroid hit to distract them, but the chances really aren’t in our favor.”
She didn’t laugh.
“You sure you don’t want a gun?” Brad asked, offering her the .22 from his waistband. The grip was smeared with blood now.
Nicki waved him off. “I won’t leave, but I won’t shoot, either.”
“Can I ask a question?” Gramma asked from across the room.
Brad started to say no, but Nicki answered first. “Sure,” she said.
“How did you end up with him?” Gramma said. “You’re not violent. You’re clearly sick. Did he brainwash you or something?”
Nicki took her time analyzing the vibes she was getting from Gramma. The hardness that had defined the old woman a few minutes ago was gone now. In its place was the look of a concerned grandmother. “We’re just old friends,” Nicki said. “I know you don’t believe it, but we haven’t done anything to deserve all of this.” She paused as she heard her own words, then blushed. “Well, you know. Until this, with you and Scotty. He’s not going to hurt you. You saw that he couldn’t hurt your grandson.”
The concern deepened in Gramma’s eyes. “You know you can’t get out of this alive, don’t you?”
Brad and Nicki shared a look. “Neither one of us had much left to live for anyway,” Brad said.
Everyone jumped when the phone rang. Brad shot a look to Gramma, who shrugged.
Brad picked up the receiver on the third ring and brought it to his ear. “Hello?” His tone betrayed nothing. It was nearly cheerful, in fact, as if he owned the place and this were any other day.
The voice on the other end, however, was all business. “Brad Ward?”
Brad made his voice just as serious. “Who’s asking?”
“This is Commander Maury Donnelly with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. I want you to release your hostage and surrender yourselves before more people get hurt.”
Brad arched his eyebrows. “Well, I want world peace. Who do you think will get their wish first?”
“What’s the condition of the people in there?”
“Everybody’s healthy and happy,” Brad said.
“I heard reports that your companion, Nicolette Janssen, is very ill and that you’ve been shot.”
The guy was fishing for information. Clearly, they’d talked to Scotty, and now they were weighing the wisdom of believing a twelve-year-old. “It’s amazing how those rumors get started, isn’t it?” he said.
“Is it true or isn’t it?” Donnelly pressed.
“Why don’t you come on up to the front door and find out?”
“We will,” Donnelly said. “Sooner or later, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. You can’t possibly win this.”
Brad laughed. “Dude, where did you get your hostage negotiation training, correspondence school? You’re supposed to be telling me how we can work this out. You know, you and me. You’re supposed to tell me how I can trust you. And don’t forget the part where everybody else out there has an itchy trigger finger, but you can keep them calm if I just step out and give myself up.”
“Sounds like you’ve been here before,” the cop said.
“You know I have,” Brad said. “Last time, I did it your way and really didn’t like the outcome. This time around, I’m going for something different.”
“And what is that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, I do.”
Brad enjoyed this game too much sometimes. “I guess you’re right. My bad. How’s this: I don’t want to tell you.”
“Don’t be foolish, Brad,” For the first time, Brad could hear anger in the cop’s voice. “You’re talking suicide. There’s no need for violence.”
; “I couldn’t agree more. Just stay the hell away, and there won’t be any.”
“Listen, Brad—”
“No, you listen, Maury. Let’s understand each other, okay? I don’t have any demands, at least not yet. I don’t want a million dollars or a helicopter or the release of terrorists. All I want is a few unmolested hours to think things through. Do you think you can arrange that?”
The cop fell silent for long enough for Brad to wonder if he’d hung up. When he spoke, he sounded sad. “We’re not going to let you leave, son,” he said. “You have to understand that. One way or another, we’re going to win.”
“You go ahead and think that,” Brad taunted. “What would be the fun of getting away if you let me do it? I’d rather escape out from under your nose, like I did back in prison. In the meantime, if I see any face I don’t recognize, I’m going to shoot it.”
“Are you telling—”
“Have a nice day.” Brad hung up the phone and yanked the plug from the wall. That should keep them guessing. There was no escape plan, of course. But if he understood anything about cops, it was the fact that they were born paranoid and stayed that way. If they thought he had a plan, it could only work to his benefit.
“What kind of foolishness was that?” Gramma asked. “Are you trying to die?”
“I’m not trying to, no,” he said. “But I’m not afraid of it, either.”
“I am,” she said. “It’s the thing I worry about most. I’ve watched two husbands, a daughter, and a son-in-law all die, and I’m all that Scotty has left.”
The honesty of her words caught him unprepared, and the hardness of his façade faltered. “Then keep your head down when the shooting starts,” he said.
“Brad,” Nicki said. He could hear her breathing now, the rattling moisture in the deepest reaches of her lungs. “Let her go,” she said.
He refused. “Can’t do it. Won’t. If I do that, there’s nothing to keep the cops from blowing the house off of its foundation.”
“She doesn’t deserve this,” Nicki said.
For the second time in thirty seconds, Brad felt a pang of real emotion. It thickened his throat and prompted him to turn away from both of them. “I don’t deserve this, either,” he said.
Time to Live: Part Five Page 4