“The end of the line,” Brad said.
Scotty correctly interpreted her confused look. “This is where we live,” he said.
Nicki wondered if they were playing a joke on her. The place wasn’t even a house, at least not in the classic sense of the word. Roofing shingles doubled for siding on all the vertical surfaces, separated from the roof itself only by a difference in color. The wall tiles were gray, the roof brown. The driveway brought them in on an angle, and on the side of the house closest to them, the most prominent feature was a red-stained heating oil tank listing on rusted legs. Next to it rose a twenty-foot steel tower, capped at the top by an elaborate antenna of some sort. The place had the feel of a wartime military outpost erected in a hurry and designed to last only a day or two. Most remarkable of all were the heavy steel bars over all the windows.
“What is this,” Nicki asked, “a converted jail?”
“Shitty neighborhood,” Scotty mumbled, just loudly enough for Nicki to hear. When she looked at him, the boy rolled his eyes, clearly embarrassed to call this place home.
She was about to say something vapid like “Be it ever so humble,” but Brad interrupted her thoughts with a command: “Nicki, I want you to get out with Scotty and make sure he doesn’t run off.”
“Where would I go?” the boy protested. “We’re in the middle of freakin’ nowhere.” He offered the comment as bait to his Gramma, but when she didn’t rise to it, he realized again how frightened she was.
The boy opened the door of the Bronco and they climbed out into the rain. Nicki’s legs and ankles were swollen and throbbing. After only a few steps, she was ready to go back to sleep.
The rain had let up a little, settling into a steady mist. “What is this place?” she asked. “Where are we?”
“We’re off the road,” Brad explained. “I don’t know how you slept through the ride.” His face darkened. “You look awful.”
Nicki forced a smile. “I feel worse.” She worried that she’d passed the point of no return.
“Are you going to be okay?”
She looked at him. What could she say?
“We’ll get you some meds,” Brad said. “That’s the very next thing on the agenda.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Scotty wanted to know.
Brad changed back to badass. “Mind your own business and get inside,” he said. He gave the kid a little shove, and when he did, Scotty jerked away and whirled on Brad, who met him with the pistol pointed at his face. “You think you’re tough, kid, but do yourself a favor and don’t mess with me.”
Gramma looked horrified. “Please don’t hurt him.”
“It’s his choice,” Brad said. “Pain or kindness. It’s all up to Scotty.” He let the words settle on the boy, who’d already taken two giant steps backward. “Let’s get inside.”
Gramma led, with Scotty close behind and Brad helping Nicki.
The inside of the house belied the destitute appearance of the exterior. The furniture—a chair and a sofa, arranged in front of a television—was worn but not worn out, and the television and DVD player couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old. There was a faint old-person odor to the place, but on balance it seemed clean enough.
“How long have you lived here?” Nicki asked.
Gramma gave her a contemptuous look. When Scotty opened his mouth to speak, her withering glare froze his words in his throat.
Brad gestured with his gun toward the chair. “Have a seat, Gramma.”
“Let the boy go,” she said. “He’s got nothing to offer you. I can be your hostage.”
Brad gestured one more time. “I don’t do hostages,” he said. “And if I did, I guarantee that two is always better than one.” He turned to Scotty. “Okay, kid, you take a seat on the floor next to your grandmother.”
The boy did as he was told as Brad helped Nicki onto the sofa. “We’re going to stick around here long enough for the weather to break.”
“I’m hungry,” Scotty said. He sat Indian style on the floor to the side of Gramma’s chair.
“Suck it up,” Brad snapped.
Nicki had had enough. “Why are you being such a shit to them? They’re doing everything you tell them to do.”
He ignored Nicki and asked Gramma, “How far away is your nearest neighbor?”
“The Mellings,” Gramma said, pleasing Brad by answering right away. That was why he was being such a shit. “They’re about a quarter mile south of here. We passed them on the way here.”
“They friends of yours?”
Gramma made a noncommittal motion with her head. “I suppose.”
“Cathy Melling is hot,” Scotty said. “She showed me her father’s Playboy collection.”
Gramma’s jaw dropped at that, and her head whipped around. “She did what?”
“Day before yesterday,” Scotty said. “Out on their dune.”
Gramma swatted the boy on the back of the head.
Scotty smiled and bounced his eyebrows. To Nicki’s eye, he looked small for twelve, but she had always been a bad judge of boys’ ages. Handsome and lean and capped with a mop of brown hair that hadn’t seen a comb in way too long, he had struck her as the kind of boy who mercilessly teased girls like her.
Gramma caught the expression and swatted him again.
“Ow! You can’t do that! You’re not my mother!”
“Hey!” Brad boomed, startling everyone. He leveled a finger at Scotty. “You show some respect.”
“Tell her,” Scotty snapped.
“I’m telling you.” The silence that followed made Brad uncomfortable. “Sorry,” he said.
Gramma rubbed Scotty’s hair. “You’re just fine,” she cooed. “You’re a good boy. Don’t listen to him.”
The boy jerked his head free. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked with a nod toward Nicki. Her face had lost most of its color. “She looks like crap.”
Brad growled, “Shut up.”
“I’ve got a bad heart,” Nicki said.
“So, you’re dying?”
“Scotty!” Gramma couldn’t believe he’d just said that.
Nicki allowed herself a smile. “Yes, I am. Not today, though. At least, I hope not.”
“Nobody’s dying today,” Brad snapped. “Or tomorrow or the next day. We’re getting out of here, we’re getting you your medicine, and we’re letting these people get their lives back.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Darla 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.”
“Peop
le 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
Scotty 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.
Nick of Time Page 27
