Time to Run

by John Gilstrap

  “You mean break a few laws.”

  Brad paused, correctly reading the signs that he hadn’t run her off. He smiled. “It’s hard to tell sometimes. They don’t actually make a snapping noise or anything.”

  Nicki laughed. It was her nervous laugh, a little breathless, reflecting the fluttering of her stomach, the rush of adrenaline. Part of her was thrilled, but another part wished that she’d never asked her question. An even larger part of her worried about the other 999 untold stories.

  This was decision time. As they sat there in the grocery store parking lot, invisible in the crowd of shoppers, Brad’s eyes never left her, never eased the burden of her making a commitment one way or the other—a commitment for at least the time being.

  Everything he said ran counter to everything she knew. Despite her adolescent attitude—yes, she knew she had it, and yes, she flaunted it every time she thought she could get a rise out of her father—she’d never broken any law, and now Brad was talking about a potential crime spree. She was riding in a stolen car for crying out loud!

  For all the potential danger, Brad was offering real living—real on-the-edge adventure. Maybe if somebody else had been sitting there with a better offer—someone else who liked her for who she was, and countered Brad’s plan with a law-abiding alternative—then maybe she would have chosen differently. How could she know? But for the time being, the only alternative plan offered hospitals and doctors and the smell of disinfectant; a lifetime—literally—of worried looks and temperature-controlled environments and warnings to be careful.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

  Brad beamed. “Outstanding.” He pulled the transmission back into gear and headed for the exit from the parking lot.

  “No violence, though,” Nicki said.

  He looked hurt. “We’re not doing a Bonnie and Clyde thing, Nicki. We’re not even doing a Thelma and Louise thing. This isn’t about breaking the law, okay? That’s not the point. The point is to have a good time. As it is, I’ve got plenty of cash to last for a while, and you brought some, too, right?”

  “I could only get $500.”

  “That’s fine. That’s plenty.” Suddenly, excitement returned to his voice, nudging aside that morose edge that had unnerved her before. He was once again the Brad whom she’d come to know so well in cyberspace. “And quit worrying about me being a sicko, okay? Because I’m not.”

  “I wasn’t worrying about any such thing,” she protested.

  “You were too,” he said, and he did the eyebrow thing again.

  Nicki smiled at the windshield. “Maybe I thought about it a little.”

  “These days, you’d be nuts not to,” he agreed.

  “It’s my dad. He keeps harping on me about all the crimes that he prosecutes—”

  “Nicki?”

  She stopped talking and turned to face him.

  “Do me one favor, okay? Let’s not talk about your father anymore.”

  His words hurt her feelings somehow, and he sensed it.

  “He’s the past,” Brad explained. “He’s what was. What used to be. Now, you and I, we’re all about the future. We’re all about finally having some fun!”

  He punctuated that last sentence with a shot to the gas pedal that launched them back into traffic. “Can I see your cell phone?” he asked.

  “Who are you going to call?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Nicki hesitated, but didn’t really know why. Then she reached into her pocket and slid out her Nokia phone. She handed it to him.

  “Thanks,” he said. And then he threw it out of the car into traffic.

  Nicki whirled in her seat. “What did you do? That was my phone!”

  “It’s cheap and old-fashioned,” Brad said. “Motorola’s Startac is way cooler.”

  “Brad! We have—”

  “That’s your old life, Nicki. That phone is your father and the doctors and everything else that sucks the life out of you. If you need a phone, we’ll buy you a new one.”

  Nicki watched him for a long time while he continued to drive. God, he was hot.

  Five minutes later, he slowed and pulled into another driveway. “There it is,” he said. “Your fantasy castle.”

  Nicki saw it, but she didn’t believe it. “Oh, my God,” she breathed. It came out as a giggle. “Are you kidding?”

  The smile blazed on Brad’s face. No, he wasn’t kidding.

  To be continued . . .

  Watch for the next exciting episode of Nick of Time:

  TIME TO HIDE

  Coming soon from Lyrical Underground!

  Special 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.

  Chapter One

  Ethan Falk recognized the monster’s voice before he saw his face. Actually, the voice by itself wouldn’t have done it. It was the voice in combination with the phraseology. “Be quick about it, if you don’t mind.”

  Be quick about it.

  With lightning speed—the speed of imagination—Ethan was once again eleven years old, his ankles shackled by a chain that barely allowed for a full step, that prevented him from climbing a ladder without hopping. The pain was all there. The humiliation and the fear were all there.

  Without the voice, he probably would not have recognized the face. It had been eleven years, after all. The monster’s hair had turned gray at the temples, and hugged his head more closely. The features had sagged some and his jaw had softened, but the hook in the nose was the same, as was the slightly cross-toothed overbite. There was a way he carried himself, too—a square set to his shoulders that a decade had done nothing to diminish.

  Ethan felt his face flush as something horrible stirred deep in his gut, a putrid, malignant stew of bile and hate and shame. “Look at me,” he whispered. He needed the confirmation.

  An old woman’s voice startled him. “Are you even listening to me, young man?”

  No, he wasn’t listening to her. She stood there, a silver thermos extended in the air, dangling from two fingers. “You’re out of half-and-half,” she said. Her clipped tone told him that she’d said it before.

  Because reality had morphed into the past with such sudden violence, the request registered as a non sequitur. “Huh?”

  “My God, are you deaf? I said—”

  The monster turned. Raven, Ethan’s nominal girlfriend and fellow barista, handed the man his drip coffee, and as the monster turned, Ethan caught a glimpse of him, full-face. His heart skipped. It might have stopped.

  The lady with the thermos continued to yammer.

  Please need cream or sugar, Ethan pleaded silently. That would put him face to face with the man who’d ruined so much. The man who’d beaten him, torn him.

  But apparently the monster preferred his coffee black. He headed straight to the door, not casting a look toward anyone. Whatever his thoughts, they had nothing to do with the sins of his past.

  Perhaps they had only to do with the sins of his future.

  “. . . speak to your supervisor. I have never—”

  “No,” Ethan said. The monster could not be allowed to leave. He could not be allowed to torture others.

  He could not be allowed to dominate Ethan’s life anymore through recalled horrors.

  Another customer said something to him, but the words—if they were words at all—could not penetrate the wall of rage.

  Ethan needed to stop him. Stop the monster. Kill the monster.

  He dropped the stuff he’d been holding—a tiny pitcher for the steamed milk and the spoon through which to sift it—and was deaf to the sound of them hitting the floor. People looked at him, though. Raven at first looked confused, and then she looked frightened.

  “My God, Ethan, what’s wrong?”

  Ethan said nothing. There wasn’t
time. The monster was on the loose, out in the world, preying on other people. On other children.

  Raven tried to step out in front of him to stop him—how could she know?—but he shouldered past her. He moved fast, not quite a run, but close to it. Fast enough to catch the attention of every pair of eyes in the shop.

  As he passed the pastry case, he snagged the knife they used to cut bagels. It had always been the wrong style for slicing bread, with a straight edge instead of a serrated one, but they’d learned as a crew that if you kept a straight edge sharp enough, it will cut anything.

  The whole rhythm of the shop changed as he emerged from behind the counter with the knife. The old lady with the thermos put it down on the counter and collapsed into a fetal ball on the floor, covering her head and yelling, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  In a distant part of his brain, Ethan felt bad that he’d scared the poor lady—all she’d wanted was a little customer service—but in the readily accessible portion of his brain, he didn’t give a shit. Maybe next time she wouldn’t be such a bitch.

  The crowd parted as Ethan approached the door with his knife. He didn’t slow as he reached the glass door, choosing instead to power through it as if it weren’t there. The blast of autumn air felt refreshing after the stuffiness of the coffee shop. Invigorating. Head-clearing.

  Where is he?

  The shop lay in a suburban strip mall. There weren’t many people milling about, but this was lunch time, so there were more than a few. The monster could only have gone but so far. He had to be here somewhere.

  He saw a guy from a Subway sandwich shop chatting on the corner with a hot girl from the quick-quack medical place next store. She wore a checkerboard scrub suit that strained in all the right places. Ahead and to the left, a lady in a red jacket carried a take-out order from the ribs joint. (“You bring your appetite, we’ll bring the bib.”) Beyond that lady, taillights flashed on the back end of a pickup truck, followed by the backup lights.

  Shit, he’s getting away.

  He stopped himself from chasing, though, because he knew that the monster wouldn’t be in the pickup. It was too far away. He wouldn’t have time to get that far.

  Ethan pivoted to look the other way. He stepped around the corner of the coffee shop to look past the drive-through traffic.

  There he was.

  The monster walked easily, as if not a care in the world, on his way to the rest of his day.

  Ethan took off at a run. He’d changed a lot, too, in the past eleven years. His shoulders had broadened, and he’d grown to six-two. The monster no longer had a chance of holding him down with a hand on his chest and a knee in his belly.

  The monster had no chance of winning this fight.

  Ethan ran at a full sprint, closing the distance in just a few seconds. When he was only ten or fifteen feet away, the monster seemed to awaken to the danger and he turned.

  Good, Ethan thought. Get a good look at me you son of a—

  The monster led with a punch that came from nowhere and caught Ethan with withering force just in front of his ear. Light flashed behind his eyes.

  But Ethan still had the momentum, and the collision took both of them to the ground between parked cars. The monster’s head sheared a side view mirror from its mounts, and then pounded hard against the pavement.

  They landed in a tangle, with Ethan on top, in the command position. As his vision swam from the punch and the fall, he knew that survival meant acting quickly. The monster bucked beneath him, trying to throw him off. The guy didn’t seem scared at all. He seemed angry. If he got free—

  Be quick about it.

  Despite all the squirming and writhing on the ground, Ethan’s right hand was still free, and it still grasped the knife. He raised it high.

  In that instant, the monster seemed to understand what was going to happen.

  In the next, Ethan drove the blade through the monster’s left eye and into his brain.

  * * *

  “All units in the vicinity of the Antebellum Shopping Center, respond to the report of an assault in progress. Code three.”

  Detective Pam Hastings pulled her microphone from its clamp on the dash and brought it to her lips, keying the mike. “Detective One-four-three responding.” With the white mike still in her grasp, she used the first three fingers of her right hand on the rocker switches to light up the grill lights and their counterparts in her back window. She cranked the siren switch all the way to the right—to the Wail setting.

  Known throughout the Braddock County Police Department as a lead-foot (with the Internal Affairs reports in her record to show it), she didn’t think about the future paperwork as she mashed the accelerator to the floor and let herself be thrown into her seat back as the 305-horsepower Ford Police Interceptor accelerated from cruising to holy-shit-fast in zero-point-few seconds. In that same amount of time, at least four other units likewise marked responding. Nothing drew a crowd of cops quite like violence in progress.

  Pam didn’t know where the other units were coming from, but she knew that she was only a quarter-mile away, and that almost certainly meant that she would be first on the scene.

  “Units responding be advised that we’ve received multiple calls on this. Callers report a man in the parking lot next to the Caf-Fiend Coffee House with a knife in his hand. One victim appears to be down.”

  That raised the stakes. If the callers were right—and when multiple callers had the same story, the situation was almost always as reported—Pam was at best cruising into the middle of an attempted murder in progress. At worst, well, there was no ceiling on what the worst might be. She used her right thumb to release the snap on her thumb-break holster. If she was going to need her weapon, she was going to need it quickly. Milliseconds counted.

  Peripheral vision became a blur as Pam pushed the speedometer to its limit down Little Creek Turnpike, switching the siren to Yelp as she approached intersections. She’d learned over her thirteen years on the job that if you move with enough conviction—whether on foot or in a vehicle—people will get out of your way.

  As Fair Haven Shopping Center whizzed past her on the left—a blur of colorful signage and logos—she lifted her foot off the gas to prepare for the hard left onto Pickett Lane, named after a Civil War loser who led thousands of his men to slaughter at the Battle of Gettysburg. She couldn’t live with the irony of dying on a road named after such a man. She tapped the brakes, but didn’t jam them, taking the turn twenty miles an hour faster than the intersection was designed for, but a solid fifteen miles an hour slower than her tires could handle. Her seat belt kept her from being launched into the passenger seat.

  The ass end of her cruiser tried to kick out from her, but Pam wrestled it back in line with gentle pressure on the wheel. The casual observer wouldn’t have seen even the slightest fishtail.

  Straightaway. The engine growled as she pressed the accelerator to the floor. Up ahead, as far as she could see, the traffic somehow knew to pull over. She saw cars in the median, a truck up on the curb on the right. This was the part of the job that she loved more than any other.

  The Antebellum Shopping Center was now in sight, ahead and on the right, and she slowed. It was one thing to get to the scene quickly; it was something else to rush into an ambush. Because weapons were involved, county protocols required that she wait for backup. But because someone was in the process of being murdered, she decided to disobey the rules. The fact that the murderer had a knife and she had both a .40 caliber handgun and a 12 gauge shotgun within easy reach made the decision a little easier.

  Pam cut her siren and slowed to twenty miles an hour as she turned into the shopping center. She pulled the mike from its clamp again and keyed it. “Detective One-four-three on the scene.”

  “Four-four-seven. Hold what you’ve got. I’m ninety seconds out.” That would be Josh Levine, a cool kid with a big heart and a bigger crush.

  Pam opted not to respond. A crowd had gath
ered in the parking lot outside the Caf-Fiend Coffee House, naturally forming the kind of semicircle that directed Pam’s eye to the threat. The closest gawkers beckoned her forward, while the ones who were farther away continued to stare and point at the hazard.

  “The situation is critical,” Pam said into the radio. Translation: I’m triggering the protocol’s exception clause. “Other units expedite.” Translation: Run over anybody in your way if you want a piece of the fun.

  She threw the transmission into Park, kept the engine running, and stepped out of the cruiser.

  “He’s up there!” a lady yelled. “Shoot him!”

  Pam ignored her. In fact, she ignored everything but the events she saw play out before her. With her Glock 23 at low-ready, she approached carefully yet steadily, sweeping her eyes left and right, vigilant for an unseen threat, perhaps an accomplice. She tried to focus on her tactical breathing—four seconds in, four seconds held, then four seconds to exhale. It made all the sense in the world when she learned about it in the classroom, but it was pretty damned hard to do in real life. The combined energy from all the people watching her seemed to create its own form of heat.

  Crime scene gawkers were a funny lot. Roughly a third of them thought you were a God, a second third thought you were Satan incarnate, and the rest didn’t give a shit. They were the ones with the cell phone cameras. She saw three on her periphery, one of which hovered in the air at the end of a selfie stick. Of the thirty or so people who had gathered, none of them had pressed forward to help the victim or to confront the attacker. That was her job. The crowd’s job was to film it and to offer criticism after the fact.

  She’d nearly made it to the front when she caught her first glimpse of the gore. Two cars were painted with it, as was a nice-looking, terrified young man in the apron of a Caf-Fiend barista. The kid seemed confused. He looked at the knife in his hands as if it belonged to someone else.

  Pam raised her Glock to high ready and rested the front sight at the center of the attacker’s chest. “Police officer!” she yelled. Her voice cracked a little. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to anyone else that she was in way over her head. “Put the knife down or I will shoot you!”