“I didn’t murder anyone.” His voice broke again.
“I believe you,” Carter said. Clearly, it wasn’t what Jeremy was expecting to hear. “I think you believed that the gun was empty.”
The kid’s eyes got huge and he nodded enthusiastically. “Yes!” he said. He nearly shouted it. “That’s right. I didn’t think it was loaded. I just wanted to scare him.” He paused as the inevitability of it all settled in on him. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “If that guy hadn’t hit me, the gun never would have gone off. It wasn’t my fault.”
Carter said nothing. What was the sense in pointing out the fallacy of his reasoning now? As the world closed in on him, legal technicalities would be of little interest. “Can you answer my question, though?” he asked.
Jeremy looked confused.
“How did you think that you’d get away with it in a town this small?”
“He didn’t think he’d get away with it.” The voice from Carter’s right startled him. He turned to see Frank Hines emerging from a line of trees. He half expected to see a weapon drawn, but both of the sheriff’s hands were empty. “He was punishing me.”
Jeremy’s fear turned to panic, and he became a little boy. “I-I’m sorry, Dad,” he said. “He came back to the house, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Frank Hines waved off his son’s whimpering with a shooing flip of his hand. “I know,” he said. “Your mother called me.” To Carter, he said, “You must be proud of yourself.”
“Not especially,” Carter said. What was there to be proud of?
“You broke your big case,” Hines said. “Ruined a bunch of lives. That’s all in a day’s work for you, isn’t it?”
Something in the sheriff’s tone put Carter on edge. He kept watching those hands, realizing that he’d been a fool to come out here alone. “I’m just trying to prevent an injustice.”
Hines snorted a bitter laugh. “Preventing injustice. Funny, that’s what I thought I was doing.”
Carter recoiled. “By framing innocent kids?”
“Is that how you see Brad Dougherty, Counselor? You see him as an innocent? He’s killed two people that we know of, and he’s escaped from prison. If that’s your definition of innocent, then I shudder to think what guilty must look like to you.”
Carter pointed at Jeremy. “There it is, Sheriff. That’s what guilty looks like.”
Hines followed Carter’s finger and looked long and hard at the boy with the gun. “No,” he said. “That’s what stupid looks like. He made a mistake, for Christ’s sake. He never intended to shoot anyone.”
“There’s a dead boy and his family to whom that makes no difference at all,” Carter said.
Hines’s eyes shifted back to Carter, and he smiled at a joke that only he could hear. He mocked, “To whom that makes no difference, huh?” The smile turned to a laugh. “Think you’ve got the high ground, do you? The high and mighty ground? Your daughter’s hanging out with a murderer, and you think—”
“Brad Ward—or Dougherty, or whatever the hell his name is—didn’t commit this murder, Sheriff. And neither did my daughter.”
“Yes, he did,” Hines said. “The way I see it, if they’d just stayed out of it—if Dougherty hadn’t tackled my boy—there’d have been no shooting.”
The point was a ridiculous one, and Carter sensed that the sheriff understood that. Carter chose not to pursue it. “Just tell me why,” he said. “How could you begin to justify this charade?” He turned his head from father to son and back again. He’d take the answer from either one.
“A year from now, it would all have been over and done with,” Hines said. “Everybody would have come out a winner. Dougherty would be back in prison, your daughter would be back at home, and my boy wouldn’t have to pay for his stupidity with the rest of his life.”
Carter was confused. “So, you never intended to arrest Nicki?”
“Of course I intended to arrest her. I had to arrest her, but the charges never would have stuck. You know as well as I do that the evidence never would have held up in court.”
“It would have been plenty for an indictment,” Carter said. “And with that would come thousands in legal bills, and probably imprisonment.”
Hines looked unmoved. “But ultimately, she’d have walked free with a clean record.”
“And Chas Delphin? You were just going to let his murder go unavenged?”
Another shrug. “He’d be dead either way. A hundred years from now, he’ll still be dead. Nothing any of us can do will change that.”
Carter turned to Jeremy. “Why?”
The boy looked up long enough to glance at his father, and then looked down again.
“Go ahead, Jeremy,” Hines growled. “Tell him how this is my fault. How you did it because I’m a terrible father.” When the boy was too embarrassed to answer, the sheriff went ahead on his behalf. “I’m such an asshole that I wanted him to have a baseball scholarship. Here he is, the best pitcher that this county has seen in years—hell, maybe the best pitcher they’ve ever seen—and I was such a miserable son of a bitch that I wanted him to put it to good use. Have you ever heard such cruelty?”
Carter was lost, but he sensed that it would be dangerous to interrupt.
“It worked, too. I pulled what few strings I have to pull and I got a scout to come out here and take a look at him. Jeremy got a full scholarship to UNC to pitch on their varsity team. The scout said that he might be good enough for the pros one day.”
“I didn’t want to go,” Jeremy said. His voice was barely audible above the rain.
“Don’t stop there, boy,” Hines said. “Tell him all of it. Tell him about the part where you were gonna punish me.”
“I didn’t want your damn scholarship, Dad!” the boy shouted. “I don’t want to play baseball. I hate baseball!”
Hines erupted. “Bullshit! That’s Peter Banks talking, not you.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right. That’s Peter Banks.” He turned to Carter. “Ask him who the last great baseball star of Essex was.” He laughed bitterly. “Ask him about how he could have been a pro if he hadn’t blown out his knee. He’ll talk to you about that for hours. Won’t you, Dad?”
“Maybe we should step in out of the rain to discuss this,” Carter offered.
“Maybe you should mind your own goddamn business,” Hines said.
Jeremy kept going. “Better yet, ask him how he owns this town. Get him talking about the way everybody respects him because he knew how to raise the perfect kid, and turned him into the baseball player that he could never be.”
Now Carter understood Darla Sweet’s fears. He watched the anger boil up into the sheriff’s neck.
“You pissed on all my friends, you kicked my ass for everything I ever did wrong, and then you beat the shit out of the one friend who wasn’t afraid to hang out with me.”
Carter figured that had to be Peter Banks.
“That criminal was going to cost you everything.”
“No, Dad! You cost me everything.”
Hines threw his head back and launched a guffaw. “I didn’t make you stupid. I didn’t send you into that store.”
Carter thought he might understand what was happening here. The robbery was about getting a rise out of his father. Before he had a chance to stitch too much of it together in his head, Jeremy laid it out:
“I wanted you to hurt, okay? And I wanted to be the one to hurt you.”
So, he smoked pot with a friend, just days before he knew he had to pass a drug test. It was the one restriction on his scholarship. He smoked the weed to fail the test. In a twisted way, it made perfect sense.
Now, the wreckage inside the Hines house started to make sense, too.
“It wasn’t enough to ruin his own life,” Hines said. “He had to ruin mine, too.”
“Boo hoo, Dad. How does it feel to be a real Hines?”
Carter took a tentative step forward. This had the feel of a confrontation a
bout to spin out of control.
“You and your precious goddamn badge,” Jeremy taunted. “Let’s see how tough you are when people vote you out of office. Let’s see how much of that respect is about you.” Jeremy turned to Carter. “Do you see the beauty of it?” he asked. “I knew goddamn well that he would recognize the shirt I wore in that robbery. It was his old jersey. He had it framed, hanging in my bedroom for inspiration. And if he didn’t recognize the shirt, I sure as hell knew that he would recognize my voice on the tape. And when he did, there’d be nothing he could do about it.” Jeremy laughed. “In a town this size, who’s gonna reelect a sheriff whose own kid robs a store? Nobody! Get it?”
Carter thought he got it, but he wanted to hear it from the kid.
“He’d never be able to arrest me. Not and keep his badge. I’d have him by the balls forever. Just by keeping my secret, he’d be a criminal himself. And with that kind of a secret over his head, I could finally get him off my back. It was beautiful. Just freaking beautiful.”
“Jesus,” Carter breathed.
“You disgust me,” Hines said to his son.
“But not when I throw a no-hitter, right? Not when my fastball tops a hundred miles an hour and you can go hang around in the coffee shop and tell all your loser friends how I’m a chip off the old block. I only disgust you when I think for myself.”
“And look what thinking for yourself gets you,” Hines taunted. “Feeling smart now?”
“It would have worked!” Jeremy shouted. His voice and his face both showed desperation. “If the Quik Mart had been empty—I thought it was empty!—it would have worked. Hell, if it had been anybody else in there, it would have worked.” He pointed the muzzle of the .45 at Carter, who took two steps back. “It’s his fault it didn’t work. He’s the one who kept digging. ”
Hines boomed, “Jeremy!”
The boy pivoted, now pointing the pistol at his father. “It’s all your fault!” He was crying now.
As Carter watched, his heart pounding, Sheriff Hines seemed to swell, to grow taller. “You’d better use that thing, boy, or it’s gonna take three hours to dig it out of your ass.”
“Is that what you want?” Jeremy sobbed. “You want me to shoot you? I will, you know. I got nothing left to live for. I’ll do it. I’m going to death row anyway, right? Maybe I should just shoot you both and take my chances getting away.”
Carter felt the panic building in his belly. If he didn’t do something to defuse all of this, someone was going to get hurt. Badly.
Hines extended his arms out to his sides, creating the largest possible target. “Then do it. Punk. Do it now. And take your time, because I sure as hell don’t want you to miss your chance.”
“You think I won’t?” Jeremy sobbed. As his father advanced, the boy retreated, step for step.
“I think you’d better,” the sheriff said, quickening his steps. “If you don’t I swear to God I’ll beat you to death with it.”
“Stop it!” Carter shouted. This was insane. “Both of you stop it!”
But the sheriff didn’t even slow down.
“Is it too late, boy? Can you do it? Do you have the guts?”
Carter found himself shadowing these two as they faced each other down. “This is madness,” he said, intentionally modulating his voice. There was way too much shouting going on as it was, way too much emotion.
“Come on, boy, shoot,” Hines taunted.
“I will!”
“Then do it! Now, do it!” Only fifteen feet separated the two combatants now. If Jeremy fired, his father would die.
A voice from behind Carter startled all of them. “Police officer!” Darla Sweet shouted. “Everybody freeze!”
As heads turned, Hines made his move. He lunged at his son, amid a growling roar.
Jeremy pulled the trigger and a gunshot rocked the forest. He pulled it again. With that second shot, the sheriff’s brains blasted out the back of his skull. As Carter dropped to a defensive crouch, Sheriff Hines fell face-first into the sandy mulch.
Deputy Sweet yelled something, but Carter didn’t catch what it was.
Jeremy didn’t give her a chance to repeat it. The instant his father hit the ground, he pivoted and fired two rounds toward Darla. She dropped from sight, but Carter couldn’t tell if she was hit or merely taking cover. The boy didn’t waste a second putting the confusion to good use. He rocketed into the woods.
“Shit!” Carter spat. “Deputy Sweet! The sheriff’s dead! Are you all right?”
She answered by bolting off into the woods after her quarry. Before he had a chance to wonder why, Carter was sprinting with her. She pointed to something on the ground, but they were past it before Carter could see what she was pointing to. “What is it?” he panted.
“His empty magazine,” she said. “He reloaded.”
Chapter Four
Matt Hayes couldn’t escape the feeling that he’d betrayed Scotty Boyd. The look in the kid’s face as Matt handed him over to the EMTs was one of pure fear. He wanted to go back to his grandmother. He was terrified that something might happen to her. Through the rapid-fire monologue, Matt had picked up that it was just Gramma and he living alone in the little house in the numbered streets. Scotty made it clear that Gramma was all he had left, and he was terrified of losing her. It was all Matt needed to know.
According to the radio reports, the next-closest police unit was nearly on the scene—he could hear the siren approaching in the distance—but the ones to follow that were a good ten to fifteen minutes away. It might not sound like a long time, but when you’re in the hostage seat with a gun pointed to your head, it was an eternity.
Matt decided not to wait. The kid’s story got to him.
He drove without his lights or siren. No sense upsetting people before it was necessary. He wanted to look around, get the lay of the land, so that when the cavalry did arrive, he’d have some good intel for them. He was nearly on the scene when he heard his radio call sign on the air: “Control to Trooper one two zero.”
“One two zero.”
“One two zero, be advised that we’ve received a call from number fifteen Seventh Road, claiming to be a man with two hostages. He says that if he sees any sign of a police officer, he’s going to start shooting.”
Matt felt his stomach muscles tighten. The stakes had just gone up a thousand percent. “One two zero’s direct. I’m requesting a tac frequency for this incident.” This was going to be a long operation, and unless they obtained a secondary radio channel for tactical operations, there would be so much chatter that no one would know what the hell was going on.
“Ten-four, one two zero, stand by.”
Clearly, the perp was trying to establish himself as the party in control. Big mistake. Hostage-takers never gained control. What they never seemed to understand was no matter how long negotiations dragged on, there was only one hard and fast reality: that bad guys left the fight either in handcuffs or in body bags. There was no third option. You worked like hell to save the hostages, and you prayed that they’d get a new lease on life, but at the end of the day losing a current hostage was the preferred outcome over allowing the bad guys to snare another one.
Matt pulled his cruiser to a stop on the far side of the dune surrounding number seventeen, the house adjacent to Scotty’s, taking care to stay out of sight. This part of the state was the waterside equivalent of hillbilly country. Years ago, the people who settled out here mostly made their livings as fishermen. More recently, as fishing became more difficult, the area had become a haven for people who enjoyed solitude for any number of reasons, both legal and ill. Despite having whiled away a few good summers down here, Matt couldn’t imagine what attraction it held for the residents.
Daily hardships and inconveniences did instill a certain independence in people, which in turn bred intolerance for most laws that told people what they could and couldn’t do in the privacy of their homes. Or stills. Or cannabis crops.
Over th
e past decade, thanks to raids by the FBI, DEA, and ATF, law enforcement agencies had ceded the public relations battle to the bad guys. When a badge showed up around these parts, blood pressures skyrocketed.
As Matt closed and locked his door to begin the fifty-yard trek to the dune that concealed number fifteen, he considered bringing the shotgun that stood sentry in its bracket in the front seat, or the Remington 700 .30-06 rifle that he kept in the trunk, but opted against both of them. Those were tactical weapons, and he had no intention of storming the place yet. For now, he just wanted to take a look around.
He also wanted to stay out of sight. Trenches in the sand doubled as a driveway, marking the route to the front. After a hard turn, they disappeared behind the dune. To round that corner would be to step out into the only firing lane that the perps could readily see.
Instead, Matt chose to climb the near side of the dune to get an elevated view of the property. What he saw made him smile. The shingle and tar paper shack with its steel security bars sat in the middle of two sheltering dunes that ran roughly north and south on the east and west sides of the building. Without the dunes, the tiny home would no doubt have floated away or been blown down over the years. Ironically, the same dunes that protected the property presented a huge tactical disadvantage to the people inside. They were the low point in the center of nothing but high ground, with only one avenue of escape—through that break in the dune on the westernmost side. If the perps hadn’t fled already, surrender was their only viable option.
Since Brad Ward was probably shot—Scotty Boyd had been adamant that there was no way he could have missed—and the girl was reportedly so weak that she could hardly lift her head, Matt Hayes was ready to bet a month’s pay that they were still inside.
* * *
Jeremy Hines had disappeared again.
For the first hundred yards, Carter had been able to keep up with Darla as they charged through the woods. Up ahead, he’d seen flashes of the boy darting in and out of their sight line. Soon, though, Carter’s years behind desks began to take their toll, and Darla pulled ahead of him. As the gap widened, he lost sight of Jeremy, and now found himself struggling just to keep an eye on the uniformed deputy.
Time to Live: Part Five Page 3
