Time to Hide

by John Gilstrap

  So, how did they get out?

  This Ward character was resourceful and street smart; he’d proven that already, if not through his actions today, then through his ability to stay a fugitive these past months. There was a certain brazenness to his actions, too, which Carter found disturbing. On the one hand, bold moves increased the likelihood of his making a mistake, but on the other, they showed that he had a plan in mind if mistakes happened. Armed and extremely dangerous. He was not a man to be cornered.

  But he was cornered, wasn’t he? Sure, there were hundreds of rooms and thousands of hiding places, but sooner or later they would have to be found. Carter knew for a fact that all the exits were covered.

  Unless, of course, they learned to fly.

  Or exit on another floor.

  Carter’s eyes snapped open. Holy shit, that was it! Right there, seven, maybe eight floors below, there was the skyway that connected the hotel to the Galleria. It connected at the second floor, and from there, they’d have access to the rest of the world. They wouldn’t get caught at the exits to the hotel, because they’d never pass through the exits of the hotel!

  Pushing himself away from the window, Carter dashed back to the hallway, where the police were still mopping up their operation, and two other guests had gathered sleepily outside their doors to watch. From here, Carter could see Warren Michaels standing in the foyer of the suite, talking on his radio.

  “Lieutenant Michaels!” Carter boomed.

  Warren’s head snapped around.

  “I’ve got something.”

  Warren raised a finger to beg for a moment, and then went back to his radio.

  “Screw this,” Carter hissed. He could explain, or he could catch them himself. The clock was ticking. He waited a second longer, to see if Michaels would pay attention, and then he was off, sprinting directly toward the cops. The quick movement made the gawkers gasp, and at the suddenness of it, Warren Michaels instinctively reached for his weapon.

  Carter made the sharp turn to the right and crashed through the stairwell door. As it rebounded off of the concrete wall, Carter yelled, “Mall!” hoping that they might figure out what he’d already deduced.

  He kept a tight grip on the tubular railing as his feet flew down the steel-edged concrete steps, jumping the last three stairs of every flight and the top three of the one that followed.

  Man-size numerals painted in orange boldly announced every floor number. Eight. Seven.

  Carter wasn’t sure why, exactly, but he was confident that the skyway ran off of the second floor. Perhaps he’d noticed the button on the elevator panel, or perhaps he subconsciously counted floors while he was looking out the window, but somehow he knew. And the longer he ran, the farther away the second floor seemed to get.

  Six. Five.

  Finally, he hit the second floor. The stairwell reverberated from the sound of his feet hitting the landing. He barely slowed as he wrapped his hand around the doorknob and pulled.

  It slipped right out of his hand. “Oh, no,” he moaned. The goddamn thing was locked!

  “Dammit!” The word rumbled as an echo. He should have waited for the elevator.

  He should have listened more to Nicki when she was complaining.

  He should have been a better father.

  Later. Next time. Right now, he had to get her, wrestle her away from the clutches of a murderer.

  He didn’t wait an instant more. He had two more flights ahead of him.

  * * *

  Brad half-pushed, half-carried Nicki across the second-floor lobby, one flight above the main reception lobby, on the way to the double doors that would release them to the Galleria. He wanted to run, but he knew better. He needed to be as aware of his surroundings as possible, and he’d learned that it’s impossible to run and think at the same time.

  The door to the Galleria lay straight ahead: ornate wooden sculptures with intricately carved glass in the top halves. Off to the left, he made casual notice of the Couture Shoppe that had so kindly donated to his cause.

  “Why no guards here?” Nicki asked, struggling to keep up.

  “They’re locked,” Brad said. “They close these doors at twelve-thirty.”

  She shot him a panicked look.

  When they stopped, Brad threw a look over his shoulder. So far, so good. “They’re not locked-locked. They’re just designed to keep people from wandering in from the mall after midnight.”

  “So how—”

  Brad pointed to the sign that had been slipped into a mahogany-framed plaque on the strip of wood near the seam where the doors joined. EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.

  “They can’t actually lock an exit,” Brad explained. “In case of fire. They alarm them instead.” He produced his Leatherman from his belt. “So, you just disconnect the alarm box.” He folded out a pair of needle-nose pliers with wire cutters built into the jaws. “Best forty bucks I ever spent.” Standing on tiptoe, he clipped two wires leading from the alarm box. “Voila.”

  “Are you sure it will work?”

  “No,” he said, and he pushed the right-hand door open. No alarm. He smiled. “But I was pretty sure.”

  Dimly lit and massive in its proportions, the inside of the Galleria was silent, save for the staccato slapping of their flip-flops as they hurried across the sky bridge toward the second-level entrance to the parking garage.

  “Now we really need to hurry,” Brad said. “We’re probably on a lot of security cameras right now.” Noticing the deep furrows of concern in Nicki’s forehead, he smiled. “Like you said. Different.”

  Nicki didn’t know how to respond.

  “Relax,” Brad said. “We’ll do fine. I’ve come too far too fast to be stopped by some rent-a-cop.”

  At the doors, Brad pulled them to a stop, then scanned the edges of the doors themselves. “You see any alarm contacts?”

  “I don’t even know what an alarm contact looks like.”

  Brad crossed his fingers. “Here goes.” He pushed the door open, and then they were outside, where the humid night air embraced them in a wet hug.

  “Wait here,” Brad said, grabbing Nicki by her shoulders and planting her on the curb. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I can keep up,” Nicki said, with barely enough air to manufacture a sound.

  “I know you can, but there’s no sense wearing you out. I’ve got to get some wheels.”

  Nicki scowled. “But our car is at the hotel.” His look told her everything. “Oh,” she said.

  With the skills he’d honed over the years, he could grab any car that he wanted. It’d be slim pickings, though. At this hour, there were precious few to be borrowed from a mall parking lot. Still, Brad took off as if he knew what he was doing, running full tilt across the largely empty upper deck and disappearing down a ramp.

  The night seemed awfully quiet. Sitting there on the curb, all alone, she felt vulnerable, and the ceaseless hammering of her heart didn’t help. In her mind, she could see countless thousands of blood cells log-jamming in the hardened vessels of her lungs, waiting their turn to supply her ever-increasing demand for oxygen. Already, she could feel the swelling in her ankles. In a few more minutes, she’d be able to see it, too.

  It was still too soon to take any more meds, but it wouldn’t be long; just an hour or so. Meanwhile, she could just wait out the episode.

  The irony of it all made her so angry: After seventeen years on the planet, without any semblance of a life to speak of, why did real living begin at the very time when her body was least able to handle it? She’d had enough trauma in her life for God’s sake. Why couldn’t someone else take a turn?

  Nicki leaned back against a light post and scanned the concrete horizon, resisting the urge to close her eyes. With so little time left, she found herself begrudging every second that her eyes were closed. There was just too much to see.

  But until today, the vistas had never changed. Classrooms. Hospital rooms. Bedrooms. The same neighborhood wi
th the same houses and the same cars and the same people she’d seen every day of her life. It was all so boring.

  So terribly normal. That’s not how Nicolette Janssen wanted to be remembered. She wanted people to think of her as anything but normal. As better than normal, whatever that meant. She knew it was stupid to think such thoughts, but when she died, she wanted it to be an event on the news.

  Her shrink had told her that it was destructive to concentrate on the finality of her disease. “Quality of life,” he’d said, “is more about what one feels in one’s mind than what attacks one’s heart.” He’d looked proud when he’d said it.

  “Let’s trade places,” Nicki had suggested. “I’ll sit there saying important junk for two hundred bucks an hour, and you climb over here and handle a ticking bomb of your own.”

  Nicki understood the doctor’s point. Intellectually, she understood everything the doctor told her. Who the hell wouldn’t understand it? But knowing how you’re supposed to think about something is a whole world away from ignoring the fact that you’re sliding toward a big rectangular hole in the ground.

  Now, though, for the first time, she thought she might have a handle on how to make intentions meet reality. The trick was to walk away from everyone who attempted to tell you what to do with your life, and to take a chance for once.

  Look at where she was now: She thought she was heading off to hang out with a sweet guy, and now they were running from the cops. It was scary—scary as hell—but it was real. It was different, a surprise. Besides, Nicki hadn’t done anything wrong. If the cops caught them, she’d go back to same ol’ same ol’, and that would stink, but man, the trip to get there would be epic.

  She smiled as she thought about the look on Brad’s face when he told her about the killing stuff and the jail stuff. He thought she was going to freak out, but when she just took it all in, he was surprised. She liked that look on him. That superconfident Mr. God mask had to be peeled away from time to time.

  And she’d been the one to do it.

  She could hear her father already, ranting on about the danger she’d caused herself by hanging out with a felon. She could see his red face and the distended veins at his collar. He wouldn’t care that Brad had never hurt anyone, just as he’d never cared about what Nicki wanted for herself. In Daddy’s mind, her worst offense of all would be her defiance of him.

  But without the defiance, there’d be no living. That’s what he couldn’t see. It’s why she could never go back, either.

  Somewhere down below, the silence of the night rumbled with the sound of an engine turning over.

  * * *

  The stairwell door to the lobby was also locked.

  “Goddammit!”

  So what the hell were people supposed to do in the event of a fire? Just pile up in the stairwells like ice floes in April?

  Carter pounded with his fist on the locked door. “Let me in!”

  No one answered. And then he understood. This was an emergency exit. If the building was burning, they’d want people to go all the way outside, not to cluster in the lobby. If it were any more obvious, it would have smacked him in the face: down another half-flight, the sign on another door read EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY/ALARM WILL SOUND.

  He should have taken the elevator.

  Carter charged at the door, hitting the panic bar with his hip and slamming the door open against the brick façade of the hotel. As promised, an alarm squealed, and he couldn’t have cared less. Even the exit chutes were decorative, sporting colorful plants and bushes. He could see the portico circle at the top of the hill on the right. He took off at a run.

  If his sense of direction did not betray him, the skyway to the mall was past the main entrance, on the other side of the hotel. It occurred to Carter as he ran up the hill that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a quick step. Not exactly out of shape, he wasn’t exactly in shape, either, and as sweat soaked his clothes, he could feel every one of his forty-five years.

  Two uniformed police officers stood sentry at the front doors of the hotel, clearly stationed to watch anyone who might try to leave. The sight of a middle-aged man running straight at them put them on edge. In unison, their hands moved from behind their backs to rest on their Sam Browne belts.

  “Come with me!” Carter yelled. “I know where they are!”

  The cops exchanged glances that betrayed their assessment of Carter’s mental stability. When Carter closed to within a few yards, the cop on the right shifted his hand from his belt to his weapon, holding the other hand out in a gesture that stopped Carter in his tracks. “Okay, mister,” said the cop on the right. “Don’t be stupid.”

  Carter knew what they must be thinking. “My name’s Carter Janssen,” he said breathlessly. “My daughter is with the man you’re looking for—Brad Ward. They’re not in the hotel anymore. They’ve fled to the mall over there. If we move fast, I think we can catch them.”

  The cop scowled. “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  “Of course you haven’t. They don’t know in there. But I’m telling you now.”

  The cop shook his head. “Sorry, sir, but I’ve got orders. If the lieutenant thought—”

  Carter didn’t wait for the rest. This was a waste of time. The officers did in fact have their orders, and they were not going to violate them on the whim of a complete stranger. His guys back in Pitcairn County, New York, would have done the same thing.

  Without another word, he spun away from the cops and headed for the Galleria parking garage. The two minutes it took for him to run the distance made his legs feel as if they’d hammered out a marathon.

  He surveyed the layout of the garage with a single glance. It had been built into the side of a hill, with the mall itself blocking a second side. Nicki and Brad would face two options for escape: they could exit from the bottom level of the four-story parking structure, thus bringing them straight at him, or they could exit from the top level, which, thanks to the rolling hills of the surrounding countryside, was actually at ground level, with easiest access to the freeway.

  Upstairs was it. The humidity pressed in on him as he paused to look up the seemingly endless flights, and then got down to business, taking them two at a time.

  He was nearly to the third level when he skidded to a stop so abruptly that his momentum pitched him forward on the steps.

  Off to his left, from somewhere in the middle of the dimly lit expanse of concrete, a starter switch ground, and an engine caught. From where he stood at the landing between parking levels, he couldn’t tell if it came from the second floor or the third.

  Then, from the floor above—the third—headlight beams swept the walls of the stairwell.

  Carter dashed up the half-flight to the next level in time to see taillights disappearing up the ramp to the fourth floor.

  * * *

  This time, it was a Honda Accord.

  Nicki stood as she saw the headlights painting the far wall, shocked at how much the effort took out of her.

  The engine roared as Brad piloted the car around the curve, through a stop sign without slowing, finally skidding to a stop with the front passenger door positioned three feet in front of her. The window lowered itself, revealing a beaming Brad on the far side of the center console, leaning low over the steering wheel to make eye contact.

  “Hey, good-lookin’, want a ride?” he asked.

  Nicki smiled in spite of it all. The guy never knew a serious moment. She lifted the handle and pulled the door open.

  “Nicolette!”

  Her head jerked up, not believing what she’d heard. Sure enough, there stood her father, fifty yards away, illuminated by the wash of a streetlight. He waved his arms over his head as if to divert an approaching aircraft. His chest heaved from the effort of his run.

  “Nicolette Janssen, don’t get in that car!”

  She froze—having no idea what to do. Looking back through the window, she saw Brad’s gaze shift from the front,
where he could see and hear her father, and then back to her.

  “Nicolette, please!” Carter yelled.

  Nicki pleaded silently for Brad to tell her what to do.

  “You’ve got to call this one yourself, hon,” he said. “But do me a favor and do it fast.”

  “Do you want me to come along?” she asked him.

  Up ahead, her father started walking quickly toward them. “Nicolette Janssen, I forbid you to get into that car!”

  “Stay there!” she yelled back at him. She hated the airy sound of her voice, but there was enough emotion there to freeze her dad. She returned her gaze to Brad.

  He looked back at her, his face showing nothing. “Nicki, you know what I want you to do, but that’s not a reason to come, any more than what he wants you to do is a reason to stay. You decide.”

  “Nicolette, please don’t go,” Carter said. There was a new tone to his voice. A pleading tone. He sounded as if he might be ready to cry. “He’s a killer, sweetheart. I don’t know what he’s told you, but I guarantee you that much is true. Please don’t get into that car with him. Don’t leave me.”

  Why did her father have to do this? Why couldn’t he have just stayed away? Why did it have to be about staying with him or leaving him?

  The clock had ticked down to nothing, and the whole world seemed to pause, waiting for her to make up her mind. In the end, the decision wasn’t all that complicated. She could choose something new and alive, or something old and dying.

  “My name is Nicki,” she said.

  She slipped into the seat, barely getting the door closed before Brad peeled rubber clearing the parking lot.

  To be continued . . .

  Watch for the next exciting episode of Nick of Time:

  TIME TO STEAL

  Available now from Lyrical Underground!

  Bonus for fans of John Gilstrap’s

  Jonathan Grave thrillers!

  Keep reading to enjoy a preview excerpt from

  Friendly Fire

  Coming from Kensington Publishing Corp.

  in July 2016.