Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  Finally, in the distance, she heard the approach of sirens. The sound peaked, and then she heard the ping of the front door opening and the squeal of feedback as Sheriff Hines spoke into his radio. “Six-oh-one’s on the scene.”

  “Sheriff!” Darla called. “Give me a hand!”

  “What the hell are you doing, Deputy?”

  The tone of the sheriff’s voice startled her. She’d expecting something more urgent, something more congratulatory, perhaps. “CPR,” she said. Like this wasn’t obvious?

  “Stop,” Hines commanded.

  Darla assumed she’d heard wrong and kept going. You don’t stop CPR until you’re exhausted or until the patient is pronounced dead. They’d said that a hundred times in the class.

  “I said stop, goddammit,” Hines growled. “Jesus, look what you’re doing to the crime scene. What, did you miss the lecture on preserving evidence?”

  Was he out of his mind? Darla stared at the sheriff in disbelief. “I’m supposed to let him die?”

  “He’s dead. Look at him. He’s purple. He’s got a huge hole in his throat and he’s bled out a gallon of blood. How dead do you want him to be?”

  Darla understood the words, but the message eluded her. Why was the sheriff angry when he should have been writing up a citation for her heroic efforts?

  “Come on, Deputy, enough already! Now! Stop.”

  She stopped. And for the first time, she got a good look at what the sheriff was seeing. Chas’s mouth and nose were purple under the smear of gore, as were the tips of his fingers. She’d been so focused on saving his life that she’d lost sight of the fact that there was no life left to save. The futility of it all brought tears to her eyes.

  The sheriff looked at her as if she smelled bad. He planted his fists on his hips and gestured toward the door with a jerk of his head. “Go on, get outta there. Step outside and get some air. Try not to step on more evidence than you have to.” Outside, they could hear the approach of more sirens, and the distinctive rattle of a fire truck’s Jake brake. Hines triggered another squeal of feedback as he told the dispatcher to put fire and rescue back in service. “We have a confirmed DOA here.”

  “What about him?” Darla asked, pointing to the mouse that was growing under Ben Maestri’s eye.

  “You need an ambulance, Ben?” the sheriff asked.

  The old man shook his head. Neither his eyes nor his mind seemed able to focus.

  “Bad day to be drunk, Ben,” Hines said, his tone dripping with disgust. “Darla, take him out with you and see if you can get some information from him. I’ll see what I can put together in here.”

  “They’ve got cameras,” Darla said.

  “Is that what those are? Come on, take custody of him.”

  Darla helped the old man to his feet and led him back around the corner. She was nearly to the door when the sheriff called her name.

  “You are functional, aren’t you?”

  She took the question as an insult. “I assure you that I am fully functional.” She leaned on the word to demonstrate her annoyance.

  “Don’t say yes if you mean no, Deputy. Tell me if you’re too shaken up to do your job.”

  “I’m fine.”

  The sheriff seemed satisfied. “Okay, then I’ve got an order for you. I want you to keep everybody out of this place unless I say specifically that they can come in, you understand? The crime scene is already a mess, and I don’t need any more tourists.”

  Anger boiled in her gut, causing her cheeks to flush. “What about the crime scene detectives from the State PD, can I let them in?”

  Sheriff Hines’s jaw set. “Don’t be a wiseass, Deputy. You know what I meant. Now, get Ben the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  Once outside, in the fresh air, the old man seemed to find himself again. They sat on the hood of Darla’s cruiser, trying their best to ignore the bustle around them. Deputy Jackson Ryan arrived from the south end of town and made himself busy stretching crime-scene tape around the entire perimeter of the building.

  The state boys had announced their interest in the case, and had promised to respond to the scene as soon as they had personnel available, but it was a pretty good bet that they’d take their sweet time. It was a robbery, after all, not a serial killing, and given the tumultuous nature of Sheriff Hines’s past dealings with the North Carolina State Police, Darla didn’t expect anyone in that organization to put themselves out too much on behalf of the Essex Sheriff’s Department.

  “Sheriff Hines won’t be askin’ nobody for nothin’,” Ryan said as he listened to the radio traffic. “If he does, you’d best check to see how deep the snow is in hell.”

  Ryan was a good man to have around if you needed to arrest a drunken football player, but for anything requiring more brain than brawn, he was the perfect choice for stretching crime-scene tape.

  “It was two kids,” Ben repeated, sounding annoyed as Darla kept pushing him for details. “That much I’m sure of.”

  “You saw them?”

  “I was as close to them as I am to you. I tried to stop them, but they took my gun.” He explained his encounter as well as he could, clearly trying to avoid the mental image of the wounded boy.

  “Did they say anything?” Darla asked.

  “Honey, he coldcocked me the second he saw me. If they said anything, I didn’t hear it. Leastways, I didn’t pay attention.” As he spoke, he rubbed the spot on his cheek where the blood had already begun to scab over.

  “But you actually saw them shoot your clerk.”

  “His name was Chas,” Ben said. “He was a fine young man. Wanted to go to Chapel Hill.”

  “That was the clerk?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And did you actually see these robbers shoot him?”

  Ben hesitated before answering. “Yes, ma’am, I as much as saw them rob the store.”

  Darla cocked her head. “What does that mean, you as much as saw them? Did you see them or not?”

  “I saw them going through his pockets, trying to rob him, too.”

  The deputy tried to settle the wave of frustration. “Can you try not to get ahead of me, please, and just answer the question I’ve asked?”

  “I’m trying to, Deputy.” The old man looked close to tears.

  She settled herself. “I know you are. Try not to think about what happened after the shots were fired. Tell me what happened before that.”

  Ben Maestri’s gaze shifted again. He looked embarrassed.

  “What’s wrong?” Darla pressed.

  “I was in the back room,” he said. “I was in the restroom.”

  “Going to the bathroom?” Ordinarily, Darla would not have asked that as a follow-up, but the old man’s hesitation told her that the location was about more than standard bodily functions.

  “Life’s been kinda stressful,” Ben said. “The store’s not doing so well, and even with a really terrific summer, I’m not sure that we can pull everything out.”

  Darla waited a couple of seconds for the rest of it, but he seemed to think that he was done. “Ben? What are you telling me?”

  He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the detail that he hated to admit. “Sometimes, when life is just too much for me, I treat myself to a couple of drinks back there.”

  Darla wasn’t sure she understood. “In the bathroom?”

  “I’m supposed to be on the wagon,” he said. His posture demonstrated his shame.

  “You were in the bathroom so no one could see you.”

  He nodded. “Exactly.”

  “And how much have you treated yourself today?” Darla worked to stifle her smile. The way he smelled, everyone within a block of the old man would know that he’d been hitting the bottle. She’d been expecting something far more dramatic.

  Another sigh. “More than I should have. Four drinks, maybe five.”

  “Whiskey?”

  “Bourbon. I can handle it, though. I got a liver made of steel.”r />
  Soon to be concrete, she didn’t say. This was disappointing news. Not because old Ben Maestri had fallen off the wagon, or even that he hadn’t witnessed the shooting, but because every word of his testimony would be second-guessed later in a courtroom.

  “So, what did you see?” Darla asked.

  “I heard the gunshot,” Ben said, “and I knew right away what was happening. I called 911 from the desk in the back room, and I grabbed my Sig from the drawer, and I went out there. I was surprised as hell to see that the robber was a little bitty thing of a girl. I told her to move away, and then bam! I got blindsided by the other one. A guy, but don’t ask me what he looked like. Most of what I saw of him looked like a fist.”

  Ben’s eyes drifted off again. “How can people do things like that? He was so young. Such a nice young man.”

  Darla agreed. Such a waste. The cash drawer was already open, for heaven’s sake. Why did they have to kill the kid, too?

  “Did you keep a gun out there at the register, Ben?” she asked. “Do you think maybe Chas tried to defend himself?”

  Ben shook his head. “That boy never harmed a soul in his whole life. God bless it, if I’d known that there was even a remote chance that something like this might happen, I’d have never—”

  “Wait!” Darla exclaimed. Holy shit, could it be this easy? “Two teenagers, right? A boy and a girl?”

  “I already told you, I didn’t hear—”

  Darla didn’t wait for him to finish the thought. It didn’t matter. She dashed around to the front seat of her cruiser and reached in for the clipboard that was forever propped in the center console. She had it in her hand when she came back to Ben. “We got word this morning on a couple of runaways,” she explained. “Now I’m going to show you a picture, and I want you to look at it carefully. If you—”

  “That’s them!” Ben declared. He could see it already from his oblique angle on the clipboard. “That’s them, I swear to God. Oh, Jesus, that’s the two I saw.”

  The old man’s outburst startled her. “I know you’re anxious for the killers to be caught,” she said, hoping to settle him down, “but it’s important for you to take your time with this.”

  “I don’t have to take my goddamn time, missy. I know who I saw, and this is them.”

  Darla thought of asking him one more time, but the look of exasperation told her that he was as sure as anyone could be.

  “We got this on the wire this morning,” Darla explained. “We’re halfway home.” As she spoke, she walked toward the front doors.

  Jackson Ryan yelled, “Hey! You can’t go in there!” But she’d already pulled it open.

  The door pinged as she walked through, and she was surprised to see the sheriff leaning against the counter, his expression vacant, clearly unnerved. He looked up at the sound of the bell and growled, “I thought I told you to stay out of here.”

  “Are you okay, Sheriff?”

  He glared at her. “Don’t try to mother me, Deputy. Even my mother didn’t enjoy the experience.”

  “You just look kinda—”

  “There’s no videotape in the recorder, okay?” It sounded as if he’d intended to shout the words, but couldn’t muster the energy. “I got a dead boy on my hands, and the one good shot we had at catching his killer was screwed up because a drunk old man was too lazy to load his damn security machine.”

  “We won’t need it.” Darla started to take a step closer as she announced the news, but stopped as Chas Delphin’s corpse came into view. “I got a positive ID from Ben. It’s those runaway kids who came over the wire this morning.” She checked the clipboard again. “Brad Ward, aka Brad Dougherty, and Nicolette Janssen. She’s from upstate New York, he’s from Michigan.”

  Sheriff Hines looked confused as he processed the information through his head. “That’s awfully fast, Deputy. Are you sure that Ben knows what he’s talking about?”

  “I showed him the pictures, and he was certain. Aggressively certain. I think these are our perps, Sheriff.”

  Hines still did not seem convinced. In fact, he seemed kind of lost, as if he’d checked out of reality.

  Darla continued, “Ben told me that the killers were rifling through Chas’s pockets. Maybe they left some prints behind. If we can get a positive hit from that, then we’re home free. We don’t even need the video.”

  Sheriff Hines considered that, and a smile blossomed on his face. “You’re right,” he said. “If we can put some known fugitives here on the scene, then we’ve got all the evidence we need, don’t we?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s really very good, isn’t it? That’s excellent, in fact.” The smile became a grin. “Okay, Darla, here’s what I want you to do. Get the information out on the net that these escapees are murderers and that they’re expected to be in the area. Have Deputy Jackson bring me the fingerprint kit out of the trunk of my cruiser and we’ll get to work on that part of it.”

  “You want me to put in a request for the State PD crime lab?”

  Hines gave her a look. “This one’s ours, Deputy,” he said. “Even a hick backwoods sheriff like me knows how to lift a fingerprint.”

  Darla understood the subtext: This was an election year, and given the events of the past couple of days—not to mention the faltering economy, the drop-off in tourist dollars, and all the other crap that led voters to seek changes in November—it wouldn’t harm Sheriff Frank Hines one bit to have a solid success on his record.

  “Okay,” Darla said. “I figure they’ve got a twenty-, thirty-minute head start at best. There’s a good chance we can close this one today.”

  The sheriff smiled. “Good work, Deputy,” he said. “Damn good work.”

  Those were words that Darla Sweet never thought she’d hear, uttered by a man who did not speak them easily. The warmth they brought surprised her. “Oh, and listen, Sheriff,” she said, stopping when she was halfway to the door and turning to face him. “I spoke to your wife this morning—”

  Hines waved her off. “I’m sorry about that. It never should have happened.”

  “That’s okay, really. I just wanted you to know that there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  The sheriff gave a tired smile. “Darla, I’ve got a son experimenting with drugs in an election year. He’s been gifted with a pitching arm that he’s not interested in using, and he’s solidly on the path that’s going to keep him from ever escaping this little burg. I’ve got plenty to worry about. But it’s my problem, not yours. I just panicked a little, is all.”

  She didn’t know what to say. Suddenly, she’d become one of the sheriff’s confidants. “I think anyone would, under the circumstances. I put myself in your circumstance and—”

  “Don’t,” he interrupted. “Don’t put yourself in my head, Deputy. I don’t want you there. What I want is for you to get your ass out on the street and find the bastards who did this.”

  She’d pushed too hard. “You got it,” she said. “I’ll get right on it.” She ignored the urge to apologize.

  “And Deputy? Make it clear that these are heartless killers, okay? Make it clear that they shot and killed an unarmed teenager just to get a few dollars out of the till. Make sure that responding officers react accordingly.”

  Darla scowled. “Accordingly?”

  “If there’s more blood to be spilled, I want it to be theirs.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  On its best day, Interstate 95 was ugly. Parts of it were less ugly than others, but from origin to terminus, it was thousands of miles of monotony broken only by the occasional view of open road. In this weather, with the rain falling in sheets, it was an exercise in white-knuckle driving. The worst problem was the spray from the tractor trailers, which rendered Carter’s windshield nearly opaque.

  Carter hoped he wasn’t being foolish driving all this distance without knowing where he was going. How did he know he wasn’t heading in exactly the wrong direction? Sure, t
he smart money said that Brad and Nicki were probably heading for the beach, but who was to say that the terrible weather hadn’t scared them off toward an entirely different compass point? Who was to say that they weren’t still hanging around Brookfield, waiting for the heat to disappear?

  No one could say anything for sure, but motion was better than sitting still. Carter wondered when the pressure would make him implode.

  When he was a younger man, Carter harbored dreams of suburban contentment. Unlike so many in the office of the district attorney, he had no designs on wealth or fame or political advancement. He was what he’d come to realize was the last of a dying breed—a public servant whose chief sense of gratification came from serving the public. He took pride in putting bad guys behind bars.

  The whole idea was to have a plain vanilla life, sweet but ordinary. The linchpin, though, was always the family. God knew he loved Jenny, and Jenny knew it, too. In retrospect, he wasn’t at all sure that he could say the same about Nicki. He’d left far too many of the child-rearing chores to her mother, always promising to make it right just as soon as he crossed the next hurdle.

  But the hurdles never ended. Somehow, in mere moments, seventeen years had passed, and he was all alone, struggling to temper bonds with his daughter that should have been forged when she was a toddler.

  Every time he thought that life had gotten as bad as it possibly could, he discovered that there was no bottom to the well of badness. Honest to God, he just didn’t know how much more of this he could take.

  “Get a grip,” he told himself, embarrassed that he’d spoken aloud. Who was he to feel sorry for himself, when Nicki was staring down the tunnel at her own death? It was terrible, he knew, but more and more he’d come to think of Jenny and Nicki as the lucky ones. For them, the pain had stopped, or soon would. For Carter, the misery and loneliness had no foreseeable expiration date.

  The bungled transplant call was the end of the line for Carter. It was the goal for which he and Nicki had focused everything for so long, and when the call finally came, he’d allowed himself to smile.