Keeping Caroline

by Vickie Taylor

  Matt’s heart fluttered. His chest rose and fell heavily, but he didn’t seem to be getting enough oxygen. “Me,” he said breathlessly. “You want to hurt me, not them.”

  “I want to take from you what you took from me. Family.”

  J.J. resumed his pacing. His choppy steps echoed from the speaker in front of Matt like the tick of a clock. Time was ticking away. Life. He shook his head to clear it.

  “You want justice,” he told J.J.

  “Yeah.”

  “Killing innocent people for someone else’s crimes, is that just?”

  J.J. stopped. His brows pulled together; his lip curled. “You killed my father. He didn’t do nothing. Didn’t hurt nobody.”

  Matt gave himself three seconds to quiet his rioting heart. To clear the guilt he felt over James Hampton Senior’s death from his conscience. Guilt would only lend credence to J.J.’s claim. “You saw what happened to your father. He rushed those cops, knowing he didn’t have a chance. He wanted to die. They even have a name for the technique he used—Suicide by Cop.”

  “I saw you trick him!” J.J. screeched like a bird of prey on the swoop. “You backed him into a corner. You made him think he had no other choice.”

  “I stopped him from hurting anyone. I stopped him from hurting you!” Defensive, Matt thought immediately. Bad tactic.

  Calmer, he said, “He killed himself, J.J. No one forced him to do it.”

  “He didn’t kill himself.” Radio in one hand, gun in the other, J.J. stormed around the kitchen, sent the empty chair at the table sailing with a kick. He wiped his nose with the back of his gun hand. He marched past Caroline and her shoulders jerked. Hailey wailed and Caroline curled her body over the baby protectively, but J.J. passed on by.

  “He wouldn’t!” J.J. continued. “Why would he?”

  “Because he’d messed up, and he didn’t know how to fix it.”

  “That’s crazy. He wouldn’t kill himself because of that. He had…problems. But he wasn’t crazy.”

  “No, he was just hurting.”

  “Lots of people hurt. They don’t kill themselves. My father wouldn’t kill himself unless you tricked him. You made him feel like an animal. You made him feel guilty and he hadn’t even done anything!”

  Matt ignored the taunt and tried to make J.J. understand. “It’s a different kind of hurt when you lose your kids. It’s a deeper, sharper pain. I knew that about your father. I felt for him. I wanted to help him—”

  J.J. turned on his heels, his arms stiff at his sides. “You don’t understand nothin’. Don’t tell me you know how my father felt. You couldn’t know.”

  Speechless, Matt stood a moment with his mouth half open. J.J. didn’t think he knew how it felt to lose a child? He didn’t think Matt knew about hurt?

  Matt could tell J.J. Hampton about hurt. But he wouldn’t. Hurt was private, suffered behind impenetrable walls so the rest of the world would never see, endured in silence. Alone.

  Which was exactly what he’d be if J.J. hurt Caroline and Hailey.

  Suddenly the walls Matt had erected around his pain swayed, crumbled some. His life—what was left of it—was caving in around him. The weight nearly buckled his knees. He put a hand on the hood of his car to steady himself.

  As the dizziness passed, everything became clear to him. Sixteen-year-old J.J. Hampton was going to kill Matt’s family, and there wasn’t a damn thing Matt could do about it. No amount of strength, no will, could stop the boy.

  But maybe his weakness could.

  Somehow, Matt had to make J.J. understand more about pain than anyone his age should know. He had to demolish the walls inside him once and for all and expose his wounds for the world—or at least for J.J., Caroline and the two dozen cops surrounding the farmhouse—to see.

  He picked up the radio, pressed the button and tried to speak. Somehow Matt had to find a way to cut through the darkness. To shine light on the truths he buried in that dark long ago, so that he wouldn’t have to face them, and hope that light would lead J.J. to his own truths, as well. It took several seconds to find his voice.

  “J.J., I know you don’t believe I could understand how your father felt about losing you, or that it could have hurt so much that he wanted to die, but I do know.” He cleared his throat, prepared to open a vein and bleed onto the air-waves.

  “Because I’ve been there. I’ve wanted the same thing.”

  Chapter 16

  “You must have done your homework to track me here. To find my wife and my daughter.”

  “I asked around. People told me what I needed to know.”

  “Did they tell you I had a son, too?”

  “You the big man, aren’t you, cop? You got everything.”

  “No,” Matt said. “Not anymore. When my son was eleven, he was diagnosed with leukemia. When he was twelve he died.”

  J.J. stopped, stared at the radio as if it had grown horns and a tail, but said nothing.

  No matter. Matt would do the talking for now. He needed to do the talking, even if his jaw was so tight that moving it felt like cracking dry wood. He’d held his feelings too tightly for too long. The time had come to let them go. Let them scatter, like ashes in the wind.

  “His name was Brad,” he said. “He played first base for his Little League team, the Hornets, but he really wanted to be a pitcher. He was good at math, but he couldn’t spell to save his life.”

  Matt flinched at his choice of words. All the proper spelling in the world couldn’t have saved Brad’s life. Nothing could have saved Brad’s life. Not even Brad’s father.

  And there was the essence of Matt’s pain.

  Matt watched as the boy started pacing again. Three steps forward. Turn by the pantry. Three steps back. Stare at the radio again. Wipe the sweat from his forehead with the tail of his shirt. Pace some more, now in quick, agitated steps.

  Matt didn’t seem to be getting through to J.J. But he’d definitely gotten through to Caroline. Her eyelids drooped shut, Brad’s image almost certainly conjured in her mind, the way it had been in his own at the mention of their son’s name.

  How many times had Matt conjured that same image over the past few years? How many times had he used it to sharpen the edge on his pain?

  But Caroline’s face on the monitor wasn’t one of pain. Some of the tension had eased from her face, the crevices entrenched at the corners of her mouth, and her now-open eyes softened. If he had to classify it, Matt would call it…contentment. And watching her, something amazing happened. The knife edge of pain he expected, the one that sliced him whenever he thought too much about Brad, never came. A feeling similar to what he saw on Caroline’s face pulsed slowly through him like warm, sweet honey in his veins.

  For the first time he was able to cherish his memories of his son, not bleed over them. He was able to talk about them. It felt good to talk about them.

  “He wasn’t a perfect kid. He was grumpy as hell when he didn’t get enough sleep, and he hated to lose at anything,” he said, his mind drifting on the thick flow of memories. “But he had a good heart. Anything he did, he gave his best.”

  Including fighting cancer.

  But it hadn’t been enough.

  Determined to not follow that path back into the darkness, Matt continued. He was supposed to be helping J.J. Hampton understand how a man could lose so much that he would want to die, not recounting his personal failures.

  But how did one put words to a loss so great? A depth of emotion so great?

  “When someone you love that much is taken from you,” he managed to say, still struggling to find the right words, “it’s like the whole world turns gray. And time stops. All those plans you had for the future are gone, and the past hurts too much to think about. It’s like you’re stuck living the same dull day over and over again.”

  J.J.’s lips curled. Anger seethed close to the surface. Did he see the truth in Matt’s words? Had J.J. been living in a monochrome world since his father’s death?
>
  “What, am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”

  “No. I don’t need your sympathy.”

  “Your kid died because he was sick. Wasn’t anybody’s fault.”

  It wasn’t anybody’s fault. How many times had Matt heard that over the past couple of years without believing it?

  J.J. rattled on without stopping for breath. Spittle bubbled at the corner of his mouth. “My father died because of you.”

  “Your father died because he didn’t want to live. That’s what happens when you lose everything—sometimes you lose yourself, too.”

  “You don’t know!” J.J. held the radio as if he might crush it.

  “I do know! I’ve been there, J.J.”

  “You—” J.J.’s eyes darted quickly, menacingly, over to Caroline. “You didn’t lose everything. You still had them.”

  “No,” Matt said quickly. Evenly. If J.J. believed nothing else, he had to believe this. “I lost them, too. I pushed them away. Just like your father pushed you and your mother and sister away.”

  “He…he didn’t push us away. We left him. My mother made us leave him.”

  “To protect you. And to protect him. Just like my wife left to protect me.” Matt wasn’t sure when he’d realized that Caroline had left him—the first time—to protect him. The knowledge was just…there. And as certain as his own name. “She left because she knew it would tear me up to bring another child into the world when all I could think about was the one I’d lost. I didn’t think I deserved another child. Just like your father didn’t think he deserved you.”

  “But I don’t—” J.J. gulped down a breath. “Why? Why would he—you—think that?”

  “Because that’s what a man thinks sometimes, when he loses too much that’s important to him. He thinks he doesn’t deserve the things he has left, like a wife and children to love. He sure doesn’t think he deserves to be loved back.”

  “I loved my father.”

  “I know you did. And in his way, he loved you, too.”

  “He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “No.”

  The first note of uncertainty sang in J.J.’s voice. Alongside a note of guilt. “We—Jasmine and me—we just wanted things to be like they used to be. We wanted us to be together. No one was supposed to get hurt.”

  A warning buzzed in Matt’s gut, in the vicinity of his cop’s intuition. “Your father made his choice.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. It’s not so hard to understand if you think about it. Even if you don’t agree with it. He didn’t think he had a future, just like I didn’t think I had a future, for a while. The past hurt too much to think about. You heard him—he said he was ‘living in limbo.”’

  “No! You don’t understand.”

  “I do understand. I already told you why. And I think you understand, too, don’t you? More than you ought to at your age.”

  “No,” J.J. said, but the cry held more plea than denial.

  “You’re close enough to a man to know what love is. To feel the kind of loss I’m talking about. You’re feeling it now. But you’re not responsible for your father’s choices.”

  J.J.’s chest shuddered. The cords in his neck pulled tight. “Yes, yes I am! My father didn’t choose to come to Texas. I made him come. I told him…I told him it was bad. He came because I called him!”

  That alarm inside Matt whooped like a Texas tornado siren. With some effort, he shifted the noise to the background in his mind. James Hampton had come to Texas because he thought his children needed him—and died because of it. God, the guilt J.J. must feel, even if he wasn’t really to blame.

  “Maybe your father came to Texas because you called him, J.J., but that wasn’t the choice I was talking about.”

  J.J. looked confused. For a second he stared right at the camera mounted on the windowsill. His dark, tortured eyes locked on to Matt’s.

  “Your father chose to die, J.J.” J.J. opened his mouth as if to object, but Matt cut him off.

  “He took you hostage hoping the police would do the deed for him. But I talked him into letting you go. Once he didn’t have any hostages, he knew it wasn’t going to happen unless he did something drastic, so he rushed the cops. But it was his choice. It was not your fault. Or mine,” he added with some difficulty. It still felt like his fault.

  J.J.’s face contorted. “I—I—” The boy sobbed. He tried to swallow, but nothing seemed to go down. “I should have been able to save him!” he finally croaked.

  “And I should have been able to save my son,” Matt said. He held the radio so tight his hand shook. “But sometimes it’s just not in our power.”

  A tear left a damp trail down Matt’s cheek, followed by another, then another. The banks of his control overflowed, and a stream flowed over his face unchecked.

  “Sometimes it’s bigger than us. Sometimes it’s more than we can control, and we can’t stop what’s going to happen, no matter how much we want to. Sometimes—”

  His voice shook as if his whole being was about to shatter. Hell, his whole being was about to shatter.

  “Sometimes we have to stop blaming ourselves, and others, and God, and just accept what’s gone. And focus on what we have left.”

  On the last word, Matt’s voice broke altogether. His next breath shuddered uncontrollably. A sudden movement on the video monitor snapped his head back down. J.J. hurled the radio against the wall, where it hit with a thunk and clattered to the floor in pieces. He lunged toward Caroline and dragged her, holding Hailey, out of her chair by one arm.

  For a moment they were out of Matt’s sight, out of range of the cameras. But it didn’t take long to figure out where they’d gone. The front door flew open, slapping against the inside wall. J.J. stood in the entrance, shielded by Caroline, just a few inches of his head and the gun pointed at Caroline’s neck in view, and yelled, “I ain’t got nothing left, now. Nothing.”

  Matt’s heart hardened, refused to beat. Time, that bitch time that had passed impossibly slowly since Brad’s death, rushed by like a gale force wind, carrying away what might be his last seconds with his wife and his daughter.

  Matt’s black-and-white blurry vision became all too clear. Colorful. He saw the honey-gold of Caroline’s hair, lustrous in the light from the halogen lamps illuminating the scene. The peach-and-rose complexion on Hailey’s cheek.

  The red rage in J.J.’s eyes.

  Without hesitation, he did the only thing he could do to stop the devastation about to occur. He stepped from behind his vehicle—behind cover—into J.J.’s sight. The gun came away from Caroline’s neck.

  Pointed at Matt’s face.

  Thank God.

  As long as the gun was aimed at him, the boy couldn’t shoot Caroline.

  The earpiece he still wore buzzed with police chatter. The sheriff barked for everyone to shut up, then yelled, “What the hell are you doing, Burkett?”

  Matt didn’t look back, didn’t stop. He took another slow, measured step toward the house. “I’m getting that kid out of there. What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “It looks like you’re trying to get yourself goddamn dead!”

  J.J. disappeared from the doorway, taking Caroline and Hailey with him. That stopped Matt. “No.”

  “Then what was all that shit about no future and not deservin’ ta live? You telling me all that was just negotiating?”

  “No.”

  “Damn!” the sheriff muttered. “Snipers, what’s your status?”

  “Shooter one, ready.”

  “Shooter two, ready.”

  Matt held the earpiece tight in his ear and bent his head closer to the microphone clipped to his shirt so that everyone would be sure to hear him. “Hold your fire. Hold your fire, damn it. The hostages are too close! It’s too risky.”

  He didn’t know these sharpshooters, their ability to make a difficult shot. If it had been the Port Kingston squad behind him…

  But no, that wasn’t the real reaso
n he gave them the red light. No one was going to die here today. Not Caroline, not Hailey, not even J.J. Hampton. The cycle of death and guilt and more death stopped here. Now.

  For all of them.

  What was he doing? Caroline’s gaze locked on her husband’s as he approached them in the open, hands up. The negotiator never put himself in the H.T.’s line of fire. Even she knew that. Rule number one in negotiator school: never get killed. Rule number two: never give the H.T. another hostage—especially the negotiator himself. Matt was about to break one rule or the other.

  Which was anyone’s guess.

  Behind her, J.J. radiated tension. He was like a lamp with a bad bulb. One flick of the switch and he would explode. “Get back. Get away,” he ordered.

  “You don’t want me to get away,” Matt said, taking another careful step toward them. “I’m the reason you came here.”

  “They’re the reason I came here.” J.J. shoved the gun harder into Caroline’s flesh.

  Matt’s eyes met his wife’s. For a second the old connection flowed between them. Then she realized his eyes were wet. Teary.

  He was crying.

  Her big, bad cop husband was crying.

  “Then we have something in common,” he said to J.J. He was only a couple of steps from the porch now. “Because they’re the reason I came here, too.”

  J.J.’s face contorted in confusion.

  “We have something else in common, too, don’t we?” Matt continued. “Your father and you and me. We know what it’s like to lose so much that we forget what we have.”

  “I ain’t got nothing now. Because of you.”

  “You’ve got a mother and a sister.”

  Matt nodded to the cops behind him and a woman Caroline assumed to be Mrs. Hampton stepped from behind a police car.

  “J.J., honey,” she shouted. “Please put the gun down.” J.J. turned away from her. Shook his head. “They’re better off without me.”

  “That’s fear talking.”

  He shoved the gun harder against Caroline. “I ain’t afraid of dying.”