Time to Live: Part Five

by John Gilstrap

  * * *

  Carter jumped as he heard five, then six, then seven sharp reports. “No,” he breathed. He took off, sprinting toward Nicki and Brad, leaving their victims behind.

  * * *

  Even in the reduced visibility, Brad could see the bullets chewing the woodwork around the doorknob. In the close confines of the tiny kitchen, the noise of the gunshots was stunning, each of them carrying a percussive force that he could feel in his chest. After the first two shots, his eardrums caved in to the assault and the shots became bolts of pain masked by a thick silence.

  He’d deafened himself and he didn’t care.

  He fired seven shots before he kicked at the door with the sole of his foot. It flew open, and then was sucked closed again as the voracious blaze gulped at the new supply of fresh air and doubled in intensity. Brad dropped to the floor in a futile attempt to escape the excruciating heat.

  He rolled to his back and kicked at the door again. This time, it stayed open. He grabbed Nicki’s hand and pulled her toward the door. Just five or six feet more, and it would be all over.

  * * *

  Trooper Hayes watched the back door fly open not once, but twice. To his left, Luis announced on the radio that the perps were on their way out the back door, and down below, he could see assault team three readying for battle.

  Matt gripped his rifle tighter to his shoulder and got ready.

  Then, there they were: the boy dragging the girl, who might as well have been dead for all she was moving. And the boy had a gun.

  “Freeze!” The chorus arose from eight armed men positioned all around the perimeter of the back of the house. “Put the gun down! Now! Drop that weapon, and get on the ground!”

  At first, the boy didn’t respond. He just stumbled out of the door and into the brightly lit night, dragging the girl behind him. Then he saw the police.

  Through his ten-power scope, Matt could see the panic when it arrived on the boy’s face.

  “I said, put your weapon down!” someone yelled again.

  Instead, the boy hoisted the girl up by her armpits as a shield and pressed his gun to her temple. The moment he denied a shot to the ground team, Matt Hayes knew that it would all come down to him.

  And at that moment, he knew that the boy would die.

  * * *

  The air smelled and tasted even better than Brad had hoped. They’d made it! No other thought fluttered in his mind. He was alive, and Nicki was alive, and that was all that mattered.

  Crouching in the doorway, still agonized by the radiating heat of the fire, he looked down at Nicki and gave her one of the smiles he knew she loved so much.

  She didn’t smile back. Instead, her face was all twisted in a mask of emotion. She looked as if she were shouting something at him, but he couldn’t make out any words.

  When he saw the cops, all the relief and all the happiness evaporated, leaving only the certainty that they were going to gun him down. Seeing the skirmish line in front of him, and the half-dozen rifle barrels pointed at his chest, he knew that he’d entered the final minute of his life. One way or the other, they were taking him down.

  Confused, but oddly calm, his mind replayed the words of Carter Janssen. There really was a way to make this whole disaster something more meaningful. But with all those guns, he had to make sure they hit the right target.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to Nicki, and then he hoisted her up by her armpits to use her as a human shield.

  Leaving only a head shot.

  * * *

  Nicki couldn’t move. Paralyzed by fear and unable to breathe, her screams sounded like moans, raspy, throaty, inaudible trifles that were swallowed by the cacophony of the fire and the confusion. When he smiled at her, clearly proud of himself for making the rescue, and relieved to be safe once again, she tried to manufacture words that would tell him to put his gun down. “The gun!” she rasped. “They’ll see the gun! They’ll shoot you!”

  Brad didn’t seem to get it.

  And then he did. Nicki saw him reach a decision, saw his expression change when he settled on a plan. When he apologized and then hauled her up, she knew what the plan was.

  “No! No, please don’t!” Tapping a reservoir of strength somewhere deep in her soul, beyond the limits of her scorched and tortured lungs, she lashed out at him, kicking and wriggling and doing everything she could to make it impossible for the police to shoot. “Don’t shoot!” she wheezed.

  “Nicki, stop it!” Brad grunted. “Let me do this.”

  She felt his grip slipping.

  * * *

  Trooper Hayes waited for an opportunity. The girl was screaming for mercy, screaming to get away from the asshole who held her, but in all her frantic movement, the sight picture became so scrambled that he couldn’t take a shot.

  “Take him out,” Luis whispered. “Jesus, take a shot.”

  “I don’t have a shot,” Matt hissed.

  But then he did. Just like that, out of nowhere, the girl dropped out of the sight picture, and there was Brad Dougherty, a perfect target.

  Matt centered the reticle and squeezed the trigger.

  * * *

  Nicki saw the bullet tear a hole in Brad’s chest. He made a barking sound as he shuffled a little two-step backward before somebody unplugged the power cord that kept him standing and he sat down hard, his legs folding beneath him.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, and he fell sideways onto her, his shoulders and head landing on her lap.

  “Brad!” she cried. “Oh, my God, Brad!” His blood flowed hot and with impossible speed, soaking her legs and her shorts and her shirt as she hugged him tightly to her breast. “Don’t die,” she begged.

  Brad lifted his arms in an effort to return the embrace, but they didn’t work. “It hurts, Nicki,” he said. “Oh, Jesus, it really hurts bad.” As he spoke, bloody bubbles formed at his nose and mouth. Nicki wiped them away, leaving crimson smears on his face.

  Behind her, she was aware of a lot of shouting, and of people running toward her, but she didn’t care what they were saying.

  “I’m so sorry,” Brad said. “Please don’t hate me.”

  “I love you!” she sobbed. “I’ll always love you.”

  Somebody placed their hands on Nicki’s shoulders and she shook them away. “Keep your hands off of me!” she shrieked. There, she’d found her voice again.

  “You’re under arrest,” the voice said, and hands gripped her forearms, trying to pull them behind her back. But they were slick with blood and the officer had a hard time keeping hold. In the background, she heard somebody discussing a helluva lung shot.

  Nicki pulled Brad tighter. “Wait for me, okay?” she sobbed. “Promise you’ll wait.”

  Brad managed a smile. For just an instant, the mask of agony dissolved away and he shined brightly for her one more time.

  Then the light in his eyes turned dark.

  When they yanked Nicki to her feet, Brad spun away from her and landed face-first in the sand.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was one of those springs when the grass never got a chance to dry. Despite the brilliant blue sky, the sod was so waterlogged it felt freshly planted. The time was long gone when Carter worried about the wetness seeping through the stitching of his Italian loafers. There were a lot of things he didn’t worry about anymore. So much had changed.

  Cemeteries, for example. Until a couple of years ago, he’d thought of these vast gardens of the dead as grisly, awful places. Now, he took a certain solace in visiting them.

  He’d purposely parked a good distance away from the row he was looking for. He’d discovered that the walk gave him time to prepare himself for the meeting, and to decompress afterward. As always, he dressed as if the funeral were today.

  On this April day, Carter marveled at the paradox of so much life teeming in a place set aside for the dead. Birds had rediscovered their voices after the long, bleak winter, and the flowers seemed somehow more vibrant here. The beaut
y of the place made it all the more comforting.

  It was a beautiful gravesite, nestled into the shadow of a stout oak, and just a few feet away from a thicket of honeysuckle that filled the air with the perfume that for Carter defined the arrival of spring. He was pleased to see that the scar of the new grave had largely grown over, and delighted that someone had recently filled the little flower pot with freshly cut tulips, Nicki’s favorite flower.

  As he stooped to brush grass clippings away from the nameplate, a wave of emotion sneaked up on him and he had to clench his jaw to fight it away.

  “Don’t you miss headstones?” a lady’s voice asked.

  Carter jerked his head up to see Gisela Hines sitting on a concrete bench, watching. She wore a flower-print dress that screamed springtime. “Mrs. Hines,” Carter said, rising to his feet. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Her expression betrayed neither cheer nor sadness. “A graveyard looks too much like a golf course without the stones,” she said.

  Carter had never thought of that. “I don’t know. Without the headstones, it’s a more peaceful place to visit. Less intimidating.”

  “I just wish we could have written a final message to him,” Gisela said. She looked and sounded like a woman who had wept until there were no tears left. “I could have told him one more time that we loved him.”

  Carter resisted the urge to offer up a platitude. Instead, he went back to the task of sweeping the grass clippings off of Jeremy Hines’s marker. Silence was probably best now anyway. Words did not exist that could console her loss.

  As Carter dug a blade of grass out of the carved dates on the plaque, he prayed that Jeremy’s young soul had found the peace he’d sought in taking his own life. The deputies swore that they’d left him alone for only a couple of minutes, but it was all he’d needed to hang himself in his cell.

  “How are you holding up?” Carter asked. He eyed the spot on the bench next to Gisela, and she moved to make room for him.

  “I’m lonely,” she said. “It’s sweet of you to visit.”

  Carter blushed. He didn’t know how to respond.

  “Do you ever wonder how you could have made things different?” Gisela asked. “I lay awake some nights—every night, really—wondering if things would have been different if I’d left Frank before Jeremy became so angry. I wonder if there weren’t signs that I could have read, or if maybe there were signs I did read but chose to ignore. Do you do that?”

  “I try not to,” he said. “I think that’s a road to insanity. The clock only spins forward, you know? If you don’t move on when a chapter closes, I think you’re doomed.”

  Gisela weighed that. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t thought of on her own. “It’s hard to do.”

  “There’s nothing harder in the world.”

  Gisela said softly, “How is Nicolette?”

  Carter’s expression softened. “She’s doing okay,” he said. “The antirejection drugs seem to be working well, and there’s no sign that the disease has returned.” He turned to look at Gisela and waited for their gazes to meet. “Jeremy’s heart and lungs are strong.” His voice caught and he cleared his throat. “I can’t tell you how grateful—”

  Gisela placed her hand on Carter’s leg and squeezed. “You already have,” she said. “Many, many times over. He simply didn’t need them anymore, and under the circumstances, well . . .” She drilled a look straight through Carter. “They’re not Jeremy’s anymore. They belong to Nicolette, and please don’t ever refer to them that way again.”

  Carter’s eyes reddened as the wave of emotion sucker punched him again. He dared not attempt to speak.

  A quarter mile away as the crow flies, Nicki stood in the shade of a dogwood looking at the marker her father had bought as a peace offering. At her request, it read,

  BRAD WARD DOUGHERTY

  His Smile Lit My World

  “You hate it, don’t you?” she said. “It’s way too corny and it would have pissed you off.” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “Well, tough. I’m making the decisions now.”

  In another month, it would be a year since their trip together into hell, yet this was the first chance she’d had to visit and see his grave. It was as pretty as a place like this could be, peaceful and spooky all at the same time. Having spoken to Brad daily in her head, she felt silly speaking aloud to a patch of grass.

  He knew all about her long stay in the hospital after the fire, and he knew that she’d sold him out by signing papers laying all of the blame for the carjacking and kidnapping at his feet. By doing so, and with the help of testimony from Scotty and his grandmother, all the charges against her had been dropped. That would have made Brad happy.

  Then came the transplants, out of the blue. She’d just recovered from her fire-related injuries when word came that she was being leapfrogged up the recipient list. She didn’t understand all the details, but she got the sense that her dad knew who the donor was. He wouldn’t tell, of course, and even if he would, she didn’t think she wanted to hear. The procedure went flawlessly. The difference to her health was immeasurable. She felt young again. She still had drugs to take—they would be a part of her life forever—but the frequency of visits to the hospital was decreasing, and for the first time since she could remember, the doctors were smiling and delivering good news.

  Secretly, Nicki suspected that Brad had pulled some strings in Heaven to make it all happen. If anyone in the world could charm the likes of Saint Peter, it would be him.

  “I brought you a present,” she said to Brad. Stooping low and balancing herself to keep from kneeling in the wet grass, she pulled the little vase from the marker and set it upright. “No, they’re not flowers. Sorry about that, but you never were much of a flower type. I brought you something to read instead.”

  She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a carefully folded page from the Michigan City News.

  “I can’t take any credit for this,” she explained. “This one is all Daddy. The journal you told Mrs. Parker about was still there. He won’t let me read it, but he said that he had you pegged wrong. Those were his words: pegged wrong. That’s the equivalent of God admitting that gnats were a mistake.

  “Whatever you wrote pissed off the right people. Daddy leaned on the prosecutor out there to file charges for what happened to you. They didn’t want to at first because you weren’t there to testify, and they were worried that prisoners would be too scared to testify against each other. Then Daddy suggested that they forget about the inmates, and go after that one guard, Lucas somebody.” She looked at the article, trying to find the name.

  “Lucas Georgen,” said her father’s voice from behind.

  She jumped and put her hand on her heart, a gesture that first startled him and then made him smile. “What are you doing, Daddy?”

  “Sorry. I haven’t been listening, I promise. Just that last part. Lucas Georgen, rapist scumbag. We had no trouble at all getting people to spill their guts about him.”

  Nicki was shocked to see that he was talking to the grave, too. “Anyway,” she said, “he got twenty years.”

  Carter paid silent respects to Brad, then he turned his gaze to Nicki. “How are you holding up?”

  Nicki took a deep breath and blew it out with a dramatic flair. “Everything’s working fine.”

  “That’s not really what I meant,” he said. He nodded toward the grave. “How are you holding up?”

  That answer took some thought. “Okay, I think. I only cried once.” Nicki spindled the newspaper article and tapped it into the vase. “I try to tell myself that this is the only time he’s ever really been happy.”

  “I tell myself that about you, sometimes,” Carter mused.

  Nicki didn’t reply. What was there to say?

  “Well, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Carter said, stepping back. “Take your time. I’ll be—”

  “It was the sweetest thing,” Nicki said, interrupting. She saw his look of confusion. �
�What you did. The marker, the stuff with the prosecution in Michigan, all of it. It was sweet.”

  Her words disarmed him. He looked at the ground. “I thought I’d try being a good father for a change,” he mumbled.

  “It’s hard to do when you’ve got a crappy kid to deal with,” she said.

  Overhead, a cloud passed in front of the sun, blurring the edges of shadows. Carter cleared his throat again. “Well, I’ll give you some time alone with Brad.”

  “I don’t need it,” she said, standing and brushing her pants legs straight. “He’s not here. Not really.” She tapped her chest with her finger. “He’s here.”

  Carter cocked his head. “You sure? It’s likely to be a long time before we come back this way.”

  “This is all the past,” Nicki said. “I’m tired of the past. Now that I’ve got a future, I thought I’d try living for it.”

  As Nicki reached out to hold her father’s hand, the sun emerged in a breathtaking starburst of light. The entire universe seemed to be smiling.

  Bonus for fans of John Gilstrap’s

  Jonathan Grave thrillers!

  Keep reading to enjoy a preview excerpt from

  Friendly Fire

  Coming from Kensington Publishing Corp. in July 2016.

  * * *

  In part four, Time to Die, the fourth chapter of Friendly Fire was previewed. As a special treat for readers of the Nick of Time series, the preview that follows picks up where that excerpt ended . . .

  Chapter Five

  Of all the Northern Virginia police jurisdictions, German P. Culligan respected Braddock County the most. Of all the prosecutors, however, theirs resided on the bottom of the list. J. Daniel Petrelli could not stand in front of enough television cameras, couldn’t spout enough crush-the-criminals rhetoric, and couldn’t play hardball any more aggressively in the courtroom. Elected in the standard four-year voting cycle, he’d wormed his way into office six times now.