Nick of Time (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

D
arla slowed her cruiser and checked house numbers on the mailboxes. In the seat next to her, Carter stewed over the story he'd just heard. “So you think this is all about a guy named Peter Banks?” he said.

“I'm saying that if the sheriff is involved, it's all about an election year. If Peter Banks is our shooter and he's arrested, he's going to go public with the bit about smoking dope with Hines's kid. In a county like this, that's plenty to get you thrown out of office.”

“So he suborns
murder
? Jesus, what kind of animal is this guy?”

Darla took her time answering. “Let's just say the sheriff likes his job.”

Carter rubbed his forehead as he ran all the facts. “And to keep his badge, you honestly believe he'd send my daughter to prison on bogus charges?”

“I've been thinking about that,” Darla said. “Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that I'm right in his motivation. Even in the best of circumstances, he has to know that his case against Nicki is purely circumstantial, and weak as hell. She'd never be convicted. Maybe he thinks that he can have it all ways. In the worst case, he's recaptured a fugitive from out of state—a Yankee state, no less. That'll give him bragging rights and front-page coverage.”

Carter thought about it, trying to find holes. “I like it,” he said.

“I don't like it at all,” Darla countered. “It's ugly and it's frightening, and it would put this town on its ear. But it's not that far from what people like you do every day.”

“People like me?”

“Prosecutors. You pile on dubious charges all the time in hopes of leveraging testimony.”

The characterization pissed him off. “There's a difference when you're working with the certifiable bad guys.”

“Which you can't
really
know until after they're tried and convicted,” Darla said. “I don't mean to be insulting. I'm just showing that it's not that far of a stretch in logic.” She slowed the cruiser nearly to a stop, trying to make out the house numbers.

“You don't know which house is his?” Carter asked.

“He's my boss, not my buddy,” she replied, squinting to read the numbers. “We're looking for four-seventeen.”

The houses in the Sea Pines neighborhood were at least thirty years old. All of them bore that self-consciously woodsy look that was so popular in the 1970s—appropriate, Carter thought, given their location in the middle of a forest. They were bigger than the houses in the Maestris' neighborhood, and no doubt more expensive. The woodland setting gave the feeling of a place where laundry left outside would mildew before it dried.

“There it is,” Darla said, pointing. She pulled into the driveway. Clearly, someone in the house was a gardener—not just the kind who plants a few flowers in the spring and keeps them watered, but a
real
gardener, whose creative eye saw a patch of land the way a sculptor sees a lump of clay. Carter saw grasses and flowers and bushes, none of whose names he cared to know, but which nonetheless turned an otherwise unremarkable yard into a work of art. A meandering trail of crushed seashells doubled for a front walk, leading all the way to the front door. As they hurried from the car to the shelter of the tiny front porch, Carter smiled at the little statues of frogs and bunny rabbits mingled among the flowers.

As before, Darla led the way. From the top of the porch, they could hear muffled conversation on the other side of the door, which stopped the instant she rapped with her knuckle. Fifteen seconds later, the door opened to reveal an attractive Latina woman clad in jeans and a red-and-white-striped shirt. Call it paranoia, but Carter could have sworn from her posture that she was trying to block their view of the inside.

“Hello, Mrs. Hines,” Darla said. Carter noted that there was no extension of a friendly hand in greeting.

The woman nodded. “Deputy. Is there a problem?” Her voice quavered a bit as she spoke.

“This is Carter Janssen. Is Jeremy home?”

“What do you want to speak to him about?”

Without making too big a deal, Carter craned his neck to see past the gatekeeper. Behind her, a spiderweb of imploded Sheetrock spoke of recent violence.

“Can we come in?” Carter asked. As the words left his mouth, he slid past Gisela into the foyer.

“Hey!” she protested.

“Carter, what are you doing?” Darla demanded. Once the door was all the way open, she saw the fractured wall, too. To Gisela, she said, “Is everyone okay in here?”

“Everyone is fine, and you have no right to be in my house.”

Carter would have none of it. “Actually, once you opened the door and I saw the damage to the wall there, I think we had probable cause.”

“And who are you?” Gisela's accent wasn't one that Carter had heard before. Hispanic in origin, it had a softness that would have been sexy on a different day.

“I'm a prosecutor from New York,” he explained. He fought the urge to produce his business card. “Deputy Sweet and I are investigating the murder down at the Quik Mart this afternoon.”

Gisela's eyes burned white-hot as they bored through Darla's head. “Does my husband know that you're here?”

Darla returned the glare. “That's really not relevant. May we see Jeremy, please?”

“Is he a suspect?”

“We need to speak with
him,
” Darla stressed, “not with you.”

“He's not here.”

Darla exchanged glances with Carter. “We heard you talking as we knocked on the door, ma'am. Please don't make this difficult.”

“It's okay, Mom,” said a voice from off to their left. They all turned to see the lanky form of Jeremy Hines standing in the open door to his bedroom. His left eye was a purple mass, and nearly swollen shut.

“Oh, my God,” Darla said, moving a step closer to him. “What happened?”

Jeremy forced a smile. “I fell,” he said.

Darla's jaw set as she put the hole in the wall together with the bruise on the teenager's face. “Your father did that to you, didn't he?” she said. “My God, you said he would and then it happened.” She turned to Gisela. “Did your husband do this?”

Gisela stood frozen in place, her arms folded across her chest, staring at the floor. “You heard him,” she said. “Jeremy fell.”

“Against what?”

Jeremy looked at Gisela as best he could through the wounded eye, his face a blank. “It's not against the law to slip and fall, is it?”

“You don't have to tolerate this kind of abuse, Jeremy. All you have to do is say the word, and I can get you out of this.” She turned again to Gisela. “You should be ashamed.”

This time, when Gisela looked up, her eyes were again fierce. “You don't know what you're talking about,” she said.

“He's your
son,
for God's sake,” Darla shouted. “Your only child! How can you allow this to happen?”

Carter watched the eruption as one might watch a tennis match. “Excuse me,” he said, interrupting them. “Can I remind you that we have a murder to solve?”

“We'll get to that,” Darla spat. “There's a more immediate concern.”

Jeremy zeroed in on Carter's comment. “I thought they caught the people who did the murder.”

“No,” Carter said, “they haven't.”

“We're following up on some loose ends,” Darla said. “Mr. Janssen here is the father of one of the kids who Ben Maestri identified as a killer.”

Carter sensed that there was nothing accidental in Darla's misstatement of the facts.

“What do you want from Jeremy?” Gisela asked.

“I need to know where to find Peter Banks,” Darla said.

Jeremy flinched. “Why?”

“Do you know where he is?”

“It's not my turn to watch him,” Jeremy said. The old defiance had returned.

Each tick of the clock was a liability, and now they were engaging in verbal swordplay. “Look,” Carter said. “This is way too complicated to go into right now, but we think that this Peter Banks might have had something to do with that killing. We just need to ask him a few questions. You either know where he is or you don't.”

“So you can get your kid off the hook,” Jeremy said.

Carter surrendered the point. “Yes. So I can get my daughter off the hook for a crime she didn't commit.”

Darla said, “Tell me about the fight Peter Banks had with Chas Delphin.”

Jeremy blanched. “What fight?”

They waited.

“It wasn't a fight,” he said, caving to the silence. “It was a little yelling.”

“About shoplifting.”

Jeremy's eyes shifted to his mother and then back. “I didn't steal anything,” he said.

“I didn't say you did,” Darla said. “I just want to know where we might find Peter so we can talk to him.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

S
cotty stood, startling them all. “I'm hungry,” he said for the fourth time, and he walked toward the kitchen.

Brad jumped to his feet to stop him, then pulled back. What the hell? They were all hungry. Maybe with food in their bellies, everybody would feel less edgy. He followed. “Don't even think about pulling a knife on me,” Brad said.

Scotty didn't bother to acknowledge him; he just kept on into the kitchen. That's when Brad thought of the back door. “Wait!” he commanded, his booming voice making everybody jump. He quickstepped past the boy into the kitchen.

“What's wrong?” Scotty asked.

Brad checked out the door in the back. Only the storm door was closed, the solid wooden door wide open and inviting. “Nice try,” Brad said. He walked past Scotty and pushed the door shut, leaning on it until he heard the tongue find its keeper.

“I wasn't going to run away,” Scotty said.

Brad rolled his eyes and turned the key in the dead bolt above the knob, double-locking the door. He placed the key itself on top of the refrigerator, out of reach. “Not now, anyway,” he said. He watched as Scotty dragged his chair from the table over to the sink. “What are you doing now?”

“Getting the bread,” Scotty said. “I want to make a sandwich.”

Brad pointed to the open loaf that was already on the table. “What's wrong with that?”

The boy seemed startled by the sight of the open package. “I don't like that bread,” he said. He climbed up on the chair. “We've got fresher stuff up here.” He opened the cabinet.

Brad stepped up to join him. “Here, then, let me get it for you.”

“I can do it myself!” Scotty barked.

Gramma appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “What on earth are you two doing?”

Brad whirled at the sound of her voice, leading with his weapon. “I thought I told you to stay in the living room.”

Gramma blanched at the sight of the gun and took a step back, warding him off with her hands. “Put that down,” she said. “If I was going to run off, I'd have done it. Your friend is in there sound asleep. She's getting worse, you know.”

Brad didn't like the way people had stopped obeying his commands. If the tide didn't turn, he was going to have to hurt someone just to restore order. He needed to keep them
scared
.

“I know she is,” Brad said. “You don't have to tell me. Now, please go back into the other room.”

“Don't you want to look at her?” Gramma asked.

With that question Brad knew something was up; he knew that he was at a disadvantage, even if he didn't know the specifics. He raised his weapon higher. “Let's go, Gramma, I don't want to have to tell you again.”

The old woman's eyes shifted a little, focusing on Scotty just long enough for Brad to understand. Goddammit, they'd hidden something in the cabinet. He turned in time to see the pistol clutched in Scotty's hand.

Brad lunged for the weapon, but not before he saw the tiny muzzle flash.

* * *

Scotty had been thinking about the pistol since they'd been in the car. Gramma didn't think he knew about it, hidden the way it was, in the cabinet he was never to open, but he'd known about it for a week.

It was a little .22 revolver—a piece of shit that no one in his old neighborhood would dream of carrying—but it was loaded. All he needed was an excuse to climb up into the cupboard and get it. That's when he came up with the gambit of being hungry. Truth be told, he'd never even thought about dashing out the back door.

He thought he was dead in the water, though, the instant he saw Gramma in the doorway. He expected her to blow a gasket seeing him reaching into the Forbidden Cabinet. For the longest time, he just stood there on the chair, frozen in place, waiting for the tirade. Then he realized that she was actually
helping
him, running interference, distracting the kidnapper so he could snatch the gun out and shoot.

They were talking about Nicki, about her illness, and Scotty could tell that Brad was pissed that Gramma hadn't done exactly what he had told her to do.

Even standing on the chair, he had to raise himself on tiptoe to reach far enough in to find the weapon. Usually, it was right there near the front, and when he couldn't feel it on his first try, he wondered if maybe Gramma had moved it.

Then the tip of his middle finger—his bird-flipping finger—touched the hard plastic of the grip, and he knew he was home free.

His heart pounded hard enough for him to hear it as he wrapped his fist around the grip and pulled it from the cabinet.

There was no time to look or to think, no time to check to see if it was loaded. There was only time to turn, aim, and fire. In that second when he was turning, he caught a glimpse of Brad's gun coming around—a cannon compared to his. Scotty didn't know much about guns, but he knew the monster in Brad's hand would blow him apart if the kidnapper fired first.

There was no time for hesitation. No time for a mistake. He pointed the .22 at Brad's midsection and pulled the trigger.

* * *

The water on Shore Road was ankle-deep, and Trooper Matt Hayes was ready to move on. They'd been at this for nearly four and a half hours, and the north end roadblock hadn't turned up anymore than his at the south end. When the word came from the duty commander, Maury Donnelly, to stand down and let traffic pass, he was thrilled. Back at the barracks, a hot shower and dry uniform were calling his name.

All things considered, Matt admired the drivers' patience. Once they understood the stakes, they mostly tucked their frustrations away and went with the flow.

Even though they had failed to capture the killers, Matt felt confident that they'd trapped them. By reopening the road, though, they were about to lose their edge. Didn't it make sense that once the bad guys saw the stopped traffic, they'd hole up someplace? That's certainly what Matt would have done.

Matt took a last look at the road, drearier than ever under the gray skies. His was not to reason why, his was but to stand in the middle of a friggin' rainstorm and catch pneumonia. They had cops in white shirts to devise strategy.

Slogging his way back to his cruiser, he smiled as he thought back on the number of drivers who'd assumed that he was running a sobriety checkpoint and had contorted themselves accordingly to keep him from smelling their breath. As the faces flashed through his mind, he couldn't help but wonder if he'd somehow missed the big catch. How difficult would it be, he wondered, to sneak through the line? If they'd hijacked a car and driver, all they'd have had to do was crouch low in the backseat.

Trooper Hayes had just turned the ignition of his cruiser when he thought of the old lady in the big old Ford. He remembered that odd look in her face as she was talking with him. Why was that?

Oh, that's right. She was the one with the outstanding warrants. She had a grandson in the car with her, and was jumpy about being discovered. He remembered the kid's smile, and the way his soaked hair and clothing stuck to him as he confessed to messing around with his grandmother's purse. Jeez, if Matt had done that with his own mother's purse at the same age, there'd have been ten kinds of hell to pay. Matt's wife was the same way about her purse. It was as if all the secrets in the world—

A thought formed out of nowhere that made him freeze.

The kid was wet.

The boy had made a point of explaining that he'd been killing time searching though his grandmother's purse while she shopped for the videos, but if that had been the case, how did he get soaked? Besides, no kid that age would wait in the car while his grandmother chose videos.

Wait a second! If the kid had the purse, then how did Granny pay for the movies in the first place?

Holy crap, that was them. He'd been
this close
.

If only he could remember the woman's name. He could see her clearly enough in his head, and he could certainly make out the big green Ford, but what the hell was her name? He'd threatened to arrest her for unpaid summonses. It had been a bluff, so he hadn't written the name down.

They had an odd address. Lincolntown, as he recalled, down on the numbered lots. The old fishing community. He remembered because he used to spend time in one of those little shanties as a kid, back when his uncle would invite him down for a week in the summer. Very little to do, but lots of adventures to be found. Only a couple of hundred feet from water's edge during high tide, those were the first places to be evacuated when a hurricane blasted through.

What the heck were those people's names? Peters? Parnell? Something like that. Something that began with a
P
. Parker! That was it. June Parker. Don't ask him how he remembered that sort of detail, but it was the way his mind worked; the quirk to his personality that he hoped would one day earn him a detective's badge.

June Parker from Lincolntown. That should be easy enough to find. Pivoting the computer screen in his patrol car till he could see it better, Trooper Matt Hayes started typing.

* * *

Brad knew he was dead the instant he saw the gun. He lunged at Scotty without thinking, the instant the tiny gun fired. It popped twice and miraculously, impossibly, he missed! Brad didn't know how, not at point-blank range like this, but sometimes God just steps in on your side at exactly the right time.

Brad grabbed the revolver with his left hand and lurched it up and back, doubling Scotty over at the waist, while his right hand brought the barrel of the Sig down in a glancing blow across the top of the boy's head. Scotty yelled as a gout of blood burst from his scalp. The kid wouldn't let go of the gun. His forearm flexed and the tiny revolver fired again, this time launching a bullet within inches of Brad's eye on its way to drill into the ceiling.

Scotty's strength surprised Brad. He fought like an animal, wriggling and kicking and cussing as he tried to break free and finish the job he'd started. To break the boy's grip, Brad brought the heel of the Sig down hard on Scotty's knuckles.

Then the real screaming started. Gramma launched herself into the fray, her eyes red and wild. It was an animal sound, pure rage. She hit Brad with stunning force, leading with the heel of her hand into the tip of his nose. He heard a crunch, and his vision disappeared in a fog of tears and blood. There was another pained shriek as all three of them tumbled to the linoleum floor. He heard a clatter, and as he blinked his vision clear, he saw the little .22 skitter across the floor toward the locked back door.

“Run, Scotty!” Gramma yelled. “Run as fast as you can!”

The boy found his feet and Brad saw him staggering toward the door that led to the living room. “Stop!” he yelled, but the words only seemed to make the boy move faster.

Gramma clawed at Brad's face, her fingernails digging into the flesh of his cheeks as they searched for his eyes. He pushed her away with his gun hand, and delivered a half-powered punch with his left. Gramma grunted and rolled off him onto the crimson-smeared floor.

He had to stop the boy. Their only chance of survival was to stop him from running for help. Pausing long enough to snatch the .22 off the floor, Brad struggled to his feet and dashed for the living room. As he stepped over Gramma, she caught his ankle with her hand, and brought him hard back onto the floor.

“Leave him alone!” she shouted. “If you hurt him, I swear to God I'll kill you!”

Brad rolled to his side, avoiding the anemic punch she tried to throw, and scrambled through the entryway into the living room, where Nicki was struggling to rise from the sofa.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped. “What happened?”

Brad didn't stop to explain. He ran to the door, where he saw Scotty lingering in the front yard. When he saw Brad at the door, he ran.

“Scotty, stop!” Brad commanded, and for an instant, Scotty did just that. He stopped and stared, his chest heaving from the effort, his face a crimson mask from the cut on his head. He listed a little to one side and holding his right arm as if it hurt, he looked to be all of eight years old. “Don't make me shoot you,” Brad said. “I don't want to have to do that. Come on inside.”

“Scotty, run!” Gramma yelled.

Brad turned to see the old woman approaching from behind, and he raised the .22 in his left hand to point at her, even as he aimed the cannon in his right at the boy. “You stay right where you are,” Brad said to Gramma. “Don't move, or I'll kill you both.”

Gramma stopped, but there was no fear left in her face; it was all anger now. Her eyes never left Brad as she yelled, “Run, Scotty! Run now!”

Brad spat a curse as his head whipped around in time to see the boy inching backward. “I'll kill you, kid,” he said. “I promise, I will.” He raised the pistol higher. He whipped his head back to his left to keep tabs on Gramma, and then returned his gaze to the boy, who again seemed frozen in place. “Come on back inside, kid.”

Something touched Brad's shoulder, causing him to jump. It was Nicki. She looked exhausted after her trek to the front door. “Let him go,” she whispered.

“Leave me alone,” he growled. “I don't want to do this.”

“Then don't,” she said.

“I don't have a choice.”

“Sure you do. Just lower the gun and let him go.”

Behind them, Gramma yelled again, “Please, Scotty, run!”

“Do you
want
me to kill him?” Brad boomed. “Do you
want
me to blow a hole through your boy?”

“He doesn't belong here,” Gramma said. “He's not part of this. You've still got me. Look, I'll go and sit down if you'd like.”