Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  “All the more reason for you to tell her to come on in,” Darla observed.

  “You mean if I speak to her?”

  “Of course. Let her stand trial and humiliate us all.”

  Carter had learned a long time ago to trust his instincts about people, and he liked something about Deputy Sweet. She had the look of an idealist. On a different day, he’d have called it naïveté, but not on a day when he needed her help. “Suppose I did talk to her,” he said. “Hypothetically, of course, and suppose she told me that she and her friend only witnessed the killing, and tried to help the victim after he was shot? Suppose all those fingerprints were as a result of that?”

  “Then I think that she’d need to step up and say so.”

  Carter wondered how much he should share with her. “Like I said, it’s not that simple. Not for Nicki. I don’t give a shit about the guy she’s with. If I had spoken with her, I think she would have said that the robbery was committed by someone else, a man wearing a red jersey of some sort. A sports jersey. I think she might tell you that Brad Ward—”

  “Dougherty.”

  “Whatever. I’m guessing that she might tell you that he actually tried to stop the robbery, but couldn’t before shots were fired. She might tell you that given Brad’s record, and her desire to stay on the run, they’d panicked and left the scene only after they’d seen that the victim was already dead.”

  “That would be after they’d disarmed Ben Maestri.”

  “Who approached them with a gun and threatened to shoot.”

  Darla said, “We keep coming back to the strong argument in favor of them turning themselves in and letting the justice system grind its gears. It is a pretty good system, you know.”

  “Not for my daughter, it’s not. In the amount of time it would take for the case to come to trial, she’d already be dead. That’s not how I want her to spend her last months.”

  Darla looked confused. “Mr. Janssen, prison is not an easy place, but it is certainly survivable.”

  “It’s not the prison,” Carter said. “She’s sick.” He explained the nature of the disease. “I need to find the exculpatory evidence before you arrest her. I need to find the real bad guy. And you need to keep your crime scene open and operating until I do.”

  Darla seemed moved by Carter’s predicament. “Don’t you understand how dangerous it is out there for her if she doesn’t turn herself in? The whole state of North Carolina is on the lookout for a pair of murderers. That’s a lot of guns.”

  “Of course I know that.” Christ, how could she think that he didn’t know that? “That means my clock is ticking. My question to you is, are you going to help, or am I going to go this alone?”

  Darla recoiled. “We’ve done our investigation. I don’t see how—”

  “I don’t see how it could hurt to take a look at the other side of the equation,” he interrupted. “Assume for the sake of argument that I’m right. You can prevent a terrible miscarriage of justice. If I’m wrong, you might actually strengthen your case. It’s a win-win.”

  Darla smiled as if he’d just told a joke. “I’ll run it by the sheriff and see what he thinks.”

  It wasn’t what Carter wanted to hear. “You really think there’s a chance that he might go along with that?” he asked. The sheriff was a hard-ass through and through. He wouldn’t take kindly to being second-guessed.

  Darla gave an incredulous chuckle. “What, are you suggesting that I open up a separate investigation without telling him?”

  “It’s not a separate investigation,” Carter said. “It’s a different angle on the same investigation.”

  Darla looked at him as if he’d suggested that the earth was flat. “You’re talking career suicide,” she said. “The sheriff’s very excited about closing this case. He’s got elections coming up soon.”

  “So, to hell with justice?”

  Darla didn’t sniff the bait. “Justice and windmill jousting are two entirely different things.”

  Carter felt his face flush. “You heard the old man. What’s his name, Ben? You heard him swear that he put a tape in the machine.”

  “Ben Maestri is a drunk,” she said. “He’s been a drunk for as long as anyone can remember.”

  “Yet, he’s the eyewitness on whom you want to hang your entire case,” Carter said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

  “So, what are you suggesting happened to the tape?”

  “You tell me,” Carter said. “Let’s find out. It’s not wrong, is it, to actually test the theory that you hold so dear?”

  Darla scowled. She seemed to be debating whether or not to say what was on her mind.

  “Do you want me to ask him?” Carter pressed.

  She said, “If you had talked to your daughter—”

  “Nicolette,” Carter said quickly. It was always best to put a name on a suspect. Even better when the suspect was young. “She prefers Nicki.”

  “If you had talked to Nicki and she had offered the details you passed along, I confess that I would be intrigued. Frankly, between you and me, the fingerprints in the blood have been troubling me.”

  Carter waited for it.

  Darla watched the investigators as she spoke. “Why would they check his pulse if they were the shooters? Why would they care? You pull the trigger, somebody dies. It’s the way it works.”

  Carter allowed himself a smile. “Deputy Sweet, I think I might like you after all.”

  “Don’t,” Darla snapped. “I don’t give a shit about your daughter. I’d arrest her in a heartbeat. And I’d sure as hell take down her boyfriend.”

  “I already told you I don’t care about him.”

  “And I don’t care that you don’t care.”

  He acknowledged her with a nod.

  “And then there’s the gun itself,” Darla went on.

  “You’ve got the murder weapon?”

  “We think so. It’s the right caliber, but we have to do the ballistics tests to be sure. Problem is, there are no prints and there are no bullets. It was freshly fired, but with evidence of only one bullet expended.”

  Carter’s eyes narrowed as he tried to see where she was going. “What are you saying?”

  For the first time Darla seemed sympathetic. “I don’t think the shooter intended to shoot.”

  Carter didn’t understand.

  “The weapon we recovered is a Glock,” she explained. “I was thinking—”

  He saw the answer for himself. “There was a round in the chamber,” Carter said, finishing the thought for her. The Glock was respected the world over as a weapon for law enforcers, but it had a well-known downside in the hands of amateurs: it remained forever cocked. Even after the magazine was dropped out of the grip, a bullet remained in the chamber, and from there, it was a matter of a slight trigger pull and the thing would fire.

  “Exactly,” Darla said. She seemed impressed that he could catch on so fast. “I figure he got a little anxious and squeezed too hard.”

  “Or, he was tackled by an innocent bystander,” Carter offered.

  “One who happened to be wanted for murder in Michigan?”

  Carter let her connect her own dots.

  “It’s a hell of a coincidence,” Darla said. “But it holds up.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot more believable than a shooter who pulls off his gloves to check a pulse,” Carter said. “And what about those tipped-over racks and stuff in front of the counter? What are your investigators hypothesizing about that?”

  “Ben said that they were already tipped over when he came out.”

  Carter’s stomach tightened. Eyewitness testimony was hard as hell to beat in court. “Did Ben actually say that he saw Nicki and Brad shoot the boy? I mean, did he ever say something as direct as, ‘I saw them pull the trigger’?”

  Darla started to answer then stopped herself. “Actually, no. In fact, he said he was in the back room when the shots were fired.”

  “Shot,” Carter correc
ted. “Singular. So that adds even more credence to Nicki’s version of events.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Darla said. “Gives you a barrelful of reasonable doubt, but it’s non-data; doesn’t support your theory any more than it supports ours.”

  Carter felt his frustration mount. “Justice, Deputy. It’s not your theory versus mine. It’s about justice.”

  “Sounds to me like it’s about protecting your daughter,” Darla said. The words might have sounded harsh coming from someone else, but from her, they sounded nearly sympathetic.

  The rain continued to pound. “Fair enough,” he said, “so long as you remember that she’s an innocent.”

  “Despite the company she keeps.”

  Carter did not respond. What could he say?

  “Maybe we could speak with Ben again,” Darla mused. “We sent him home, but I have his address.”

  Carter felt something jump inside of him as he realized that he might have an ally here. “I’d like to come along.”

  Darla scowled. Clearly, it was as inappropriate in Essex, North Carolina, as it would have been in Pitcairn County, New York. “I’ll drive,” she said.

  * * *

  Nicki had never seen so much rain. It fell in torrents, flooding the parking lot and transforming the afternoon into perpetual dusk. As they sat waiting in the Sebring, the radio informed them that a developing low pressure system was stalled off the Carolina coast. If the winds picked up another ten miles an hour, the unnamed tropical depression would become Tropical Storm Carlena.

  “Are you going to tell me what we’re up to?” Nicki asked.

  “Not yet. Soon.” They’d been watching the cars in the parking lot for ten minutes. Nicki had figured that Brad planned to hot-wire one of the diners’ vehicles, but he’d ruled that out on the outset. “We wouldn’t get a half mile before someone reported it,” he’d said.

  When she pressed for more, he ignored her. Now they sat in silence. It was all Nicki could do to keep her eyes open.

  When a well-traveled Ford Bronco pulled into the parking lot on the video store side, Brad sat up straighter in his seat. “Okay,” he said. “I think this one might be it.”

  Nicki pulled herself closer to the windshield to see through the distortion of the cascading water. She watched as a woman and a boy exited the truck. Clearly the grandmother, the woman opened an umbrella in a vain attempt to deflect the pelting rain, while the boy basked in the downpour and made a point of stomping in every puddle.

  “This is it,” Brad said. “Are you ready?”

  Before she could even open her mouth to respond, he’d already opened his door.

  * * *

  At Gramma’s insistence, Scotty Boyd pulled off his sneakers and socks and left them outside the door of the video store. It was a compromise to not being allowed to enter at all. Good boys didn’t soak themselves in rain puddles.

  Come to think of it, good boys didn’t do any of the things that Scotty liked to do. They didn’t drink milk out of the carton, they didn’t watch cartoons, they didn’t piss in the grass, and they didn’t shoot at anthills with BB guns. And that was just today. What good boys did do was behave themselves twenty-four hours a day without ever complaining.

  Living with Gramma brought a lot of rules into the twelve-year-old’s life; certainly a lot more than he’d had to live with before Mama died. Still, even though Gramma smelled funny and went to bed at nine o’clock, she was good on her word. He’d finished picking up the front yard, and she hadn’t let a little rain keep her away from the video store. The deal was, after he’d picked up the blown-in trash from the front yard and swept the sand off the front and rear decks, he could get one movie and one video game. And here they were.

  The game was a no-brainer: Spiderman. His real first choice would have been Grand Theft Auto, but Gramma would have had a stroke if she saw it. She wasn’t all that wild about his Xbox in the first place; between GTA’s whores and the exploding blood, she’d have had him sweeping the porches with a toothbrush. No, Spidey was a fine compromise.

  Compromise. Funny how many times that word came up in his life these days. Two months ago, he didn’t even know what the word meant. Now, since his address had changed, it ran his life.

  With the game chosen, he was left with the conundrum of choosing a movie. (Conundrum was another new word; Scotty liked the way it sounded.) It was hard to find the compromise between the singing-animal Disney crap that Gramma wanted him to watch and the Bruce Willis flick he was hoping for. Gramma wouldn’t even let him watch a PG-13 movie until he was actually thirteen years old, to hell with the fact that he’d been watching Rs for as long as he could remember.

  Still, it wasn’t worth the fight. Singing fish were the price he had to pay to get his game.

  As they approached the checkout counter, the teenage clerk looked at Scotty and laughed. “You look like a drowned rat,” he said.

  Scotty caught Gramma’s don’t-you-dare glare before he had a chance to form his reply. Good thing, too. Pizza-faces should think twice before calling someone a drowned rat. Of all the adjustments the last eight weeks had brought into his life, the language thing had been the hardest. In the end, the boy just smiled.

  “Try to stay dry,” the clerk said.

  Gramma carried the plastic bag with the goodies and held the door for the boy. “I don’t like him,” Scotty mumbled as he passed.

  “You don’t even know him,” Gramma scolded. “You can’t dislike people you don’t know.”

  With Gramma, life was a lot simpler when you just went along. Slipups brought a thousand extra chores followed by solitary confinement in his bedroom. Scotty had thought about breaking out a couple of times—just climbing out the window and taking off—but out where they lived, there was no place to run to.

  Back in Richmond, before the Big Move, there’d been plenty of places to visit after he’d sneaked out of the window, but here in Buttscratch, North Carolina—that’s what his mama had liked to call it—there was nothing but sand and bugs and water. Lots and lots of water, enough to make him wish that he’d spent those afternoons at the YMCA learning how to swim instead of perfecting moves on a basketball court that he’d probably never see again.

  On his way back out to the truck, Scotty stopped to pick up his footwear, pointing out gleefully that his socks now weighed more than his shoes, thanks to the water.

  Gramma made a huffing noise and snatched the shoes away from him. “You’ll get these back when you learn to appreciate owning good things,” she said.

  Fine, he thought. I didn’t want to wear the dumb things anyway.

  “Hurry now and buckle in,” Gramma called from under her umbrella. “I want to be back at the house before the roads flood.”

  Scotty stopped near the front fender. “Can I sit in the front?” he asked.

  “You may not.”

  “Please, Gramma? We don’t even have an air bag. That’s what kills people, not the seat itself.”

  “It’s hardly worth the risk, do you think?” Gramma replied.

  Scotty rolled his eyes. How was he going to get through six years of this? That’s what the judge had told him: he’d be stuck with Gramma until he was eighteen. God help me.

  “I don’t think it’s so dangerous,” he muttered, just loudly enough to be heard, but not enough for her to make out the words.

  “You have something to say, young man, you just say it right out where I can hear it.”

  Scotty didn’t bother to reply. He climbed behind the death-inducing passenger seat into the back of the truck, reaching forward again to close the heavy door.

  “Remember your—”

  “—seat belt.” He finished the sentence for her. He saw the stranger in the back, in the cargo bed behind the backseat, the instant he turned around, and he yelled. It was an involuntary thing, a loud “Ooooh!” Gramma whirled in her seat.

  “Now, darn it, Scotty—” She saw him, too. The man had a gun.

  Brad l
eveled Ben Maestri’s pistol at Gramma. “Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything, and nobody’ll get hurt, okay?”

  A young woman popped up out of the back as well. She looked as terrified as Scotty felt. “Brad, don’t—”

  As the man with the gun scaled the seat next to Scotty, the boy considered diving for the door and bailing out, but a hand planted in his chest, accompanied by a hard glare, convinced him otherwise.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Brad warned. “Buckle up like your grandmother told you.”

  Scotty did exactly that, his hands trembling. Suddenly, there was a very good chance that he might throw up.

  Brad redirected his attention toward Gramma. “I want you to start the car and back out of this place just as if it were an ordinary day. Honest, nobody needs to get hurt.”

  “W-what are you going to do?” Gramma stammered. “I don’t have any money. Not enough to be worth stealing.”

  Brad beckoned with the muzzle of his gun. “I’ll take that purse, please,” he said.

  Scotty shifted his eyes to the girl, who looked as if she might throw up, too. There were tears in her eyes. She tried to say something. “Brad—”

  But the guy cut her off. “Not now, Nicki,” he said. Then to Gramma, “The purse, please.”

  “There’s nothing in it,” Gramma whined.

  “Hand it to me, anyway,” Brad insisted. There was a growl in his voice that reminded Scotty of an animal. The boy fought off tears of his own.

  The girl with the boy’s name put her hand on his shoulder. “You’ll be just fine,” she said. “He won’t hurt anyone.”

  “I’ll kill him if he does,” Scotty heard himself say.

  The comment drew a swift response. Brad brought the muzzle to within an inch of the boy’s eye. “Don’t push me, kid.”

  Gramma lifted her purse from the seat and handed it back to Brad. “Here,” she said. “Take it. Take whatever you want.”

  “I’m not interested in your money, lady,” Brad said. He handed the bag over to Nicki. “Search through there and find her driver’s license,” he said. “I need her address.”

  “Why?” Nicki asked.

  “Just do it,” he said. After that, he leaned in close to Gramma and whispered in her ear. Scotty couldn’t hear the words, but he knew it was about him just from the way Gramma stole glances his way.