Time to Steal

by John Gilstrap

  “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 Six

  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 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 fro
m 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.

  “Bring a second order for her,” Brad said.

  He waited till Mandy walked away then leaned into the table and hissed, “Jesus, Nicki, that was . . . not smart.” He stumbled over the word stupid, knowing that it would piss her off. “Now she has a reason to remember you.”

  “Me!” She knew it was too loud, and she cranked it down. “What about you? Talking about the traffic, getting her to ask if we’re the ones.”

  “Now she thinks we’re not. At least not until they start flashing pictures around.”

  Fear and anger turned Nicki’s face into an unsettling mask. She lowered her voice even further. “What happened? I thought the video was going to show that we’re innocent.”

  She was getting better at reading his eyes, and despite his calm façade, she saw the fear. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the tape didn’t work. Maybe the cops are running false rumors so people will be scared enough to look for us. I just don’t know.”

  “Well, now’s a pretty shitty time to be ignorant,” Nicki snapped. “When I wanted to stay at the scene, you were a hundred percent positive that there was no reason. What are we supposed to do now?”

  Brad shot a glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching them. “Will you please settle down?” he hissed. “We’re good for now. For the next few minutes. That gives us time to plan for the next few minutes. I’ll think of something.”

  “What?”

  “Nicki, are you deaf? I don’t know, okay? Give me some time.”

  Nicki threw herself into the back of her chair and crossed her arms. It was the same gesture of pouty frustration that she’d perfected when she was three years old. “I don’t believe this is happening,” she groused.

  “Hey. You can just walk away any time you want, remember?” He turned away from her and looked out the window again.


  Nicki pushed away from the table and stood.

  “Where are you going?” There was an edge of panic to his voice.

  “To the bathroom. Is that okay?”

  Brad hesitated. “Okay.” As she walked away, he said her name and she turned again. “Don’t be too long. If I see an opportunity, it’ll probably happen fast. We can’t stay here long.”

  Nicki turned and headed off to find the ladies room. She made eye contact with Mandy, who read her mind and pointed to the back corner. “Over there, dear. Be sure to hook the door because the latch doesn’t work.”

  Nicki felt her chest tightening. Her heart was pounding at 140 beats per minute, and that was too fast. When you had this kind of condition, you became very adept at counting your pulse at a subconscious level. Without her meds, the stress was going to trigger an episode for sure.

  In the galaxy of people who suffered from primary pulmonary hypertension, Nicki had been one of the luckier ones. She remained largely asymptomatic, even as the disease progressed with alarming speed. Fatigue was the chief complaint, which likewise rendered the disease difficult to diagnose before too much damage was done.

  When the disease did flare up for her—Nicki called them her episodes—the telltale sign was the fluttery feeling in her chest, not entirely different than the feeling brought on by routine anxiety. Without quick intervention, the fluids would back up in her bloodstream, and then the real problems would start. Coumadin kept the backed-up fluids from clotting, while the Digoxin got rid of the fluid altogether.

  The restroom had to be a hundred degrees, a hundred ten maybe. Stifling. And it reeked of sweat and fish guts. Nicki slipped the door hook into the eye that would keep it from drifting open, did her business, flushed, and washed her hands. She started to reach into her bag for her pills, but stopped herself. How could she have left them behind?

  She tried to settle her heart down with a deep breath. “You can’t think about the bad stuff,” she whispered. “You can’t panic.”