Nathan's Run (1996)

by John Gilstrap

  Aces didn't even sniff the hook. "If you heard he was an asshole, then you don't have to ask."

  "Fair enough."

  They all sat in silence for a long, awkward moment until Michaels broke the tension.

  "Thank you for your time, Aces," Warren said, rising from his chair. "You've been very . . . tolerant. I hope your time goes smoothly." Jed rose with him and they walked to the door.

  "Yo, cops," Aces said as Warren's hand touched the knob. They both turned. "Bailey's a pussy. That fuckwad Harris had it in for him, but I don't know why. It's good Bailey got out o' here. This place was gonna kill 'im."

  Warren nodded respectfully toward the prisoner. "Why, thank you, Aces."

  "I didn't say nothin'."

  Chapter 20

  Trendra and Steve Nicholson hadn't spoken to each other in the last hundred miles. It had been Steve's idea to drive straight through for their return from Disney World, thinking it better to get the driving-and the attendant whining from the kids-out of the way in one endless marathon, rather than prolonging the agony over several days, the way they usually managed their longer trips. Even after thirteen years of parenthood, he was surprised at just how miserable kids could become during an eighteen-hour drive.

  Somewhere in South Carolina, Kendra had reached the end of her rope, and had begun lobbying for a stopover for the night. Steve talked her into going just another hundred miles, and once that was done, another hundred didn't seem so unreasonable. But as Norfolk disappeared in the rearview mirror and Richmond remained a distant gdal, Kendra reached her breaking point and just stopped talking.

  Steve was on a quest now. And even though he knew that the drive home would in all likelihood be the only part of the trip that Kendra would remember five years hence, he had made a commitment to drive straight through, and by God, he was going to do it, even if it killed them all. As morning approached afternoon and the misery of the dark hours faded from memory, Steve sensed that the tension was easing a bit. And now, as they got within a mile of the house, Kendra would start warming up again. He was sure of it. He hoped.

  "There it is!" he announced to the family as their house came into sight. "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

  The kids-Jamie and Amy-bolted upright in their seats and cheered as they saw their house.

  Steve playfully squeezed Kendra's knee. "There. Now aren't you glad we're not still somewhere in South Carolina with five hundred miles left to go?"

  Kendra's response was a blistering glare. Okay. So he'd pushed too hard. She'd come around.

  Steve piloted the Range Rover into the driveway and pressed the visor-mounted garage door opener. Even as the weather seal parted from the concrete floor, he recognized that something was wrong. Curiously, the first thing he noted was the cover shroud on the floor. I didn't leave that there, he thought. It all crystallized for him an instant later, but it was Kendra who spoke his thoughts.

  "Where's the car?" she gasped.

  Harry Thompkins actually watched the digital display on his wrist count up the last sixty seconds to ten o'clock. Just four more hours of agony until his meeting with Lieutenant Michaels, at which time he was certain that the career at which he had worked so hard to excel would come to a disgraceful end. With only 240 minutes left in his professional life, he had all but given up on the Divine assistance that might somehow salvage his job; or at the very least, a tiny shred of his dignity.

  His assignment until further notice was to sit in an unmarked car out in front of Mark Bailey's house, waiting for someone to arrive. Harry prayed that that someone might miraculously turn out to be Nathan Bailey, but such things didn't happen outside of the movies. He'd be lucky if he could get a glimpse of the elusive Uncle Mark, whom no one had seen since his nephew's disappearance. It certainly was interesting how both Baileys disappeared at the same time, Harry thought. As he sat alone and bored in his car, Harry began to wonder if perhaps they hadn't disappeared together. If he got the chance before he was fired, he'd mention it to Lieutenant Michaels.

  Harry closed his eyes and read the description sheet on Mark Bailey without looking at it. White male, 175 pounds, with blond hair, blue eyes and a mustache. Drives a late-model red Bronco, license plate WLDMAN. Wanted for questioning. Not a suspect at this time. He opened his eyes to check his recall and smiled. He had missed a few words, but the essentials were all there.

  And so was Mark. Or at least the red Bronco. Harry watched as it nosed into the driveway and parked. Out of the car came a white male, about 175 pounds with blond hair and a huge bandage on his hand. The man moved as though he were in considerable pain, every movement slow and deliberate.

  Harry slipped out of the car and jogged across the street. "Excuse me!" he called. "Mr. Bailey!"

  Mark turned at the sound of his name, then quickened his pace toward his front door. Before he could take three steps, Harry was next to him.

  "Excuse me, sir," Harry said. His voice was polite, but his eyes were not. "You are Mark Bailey, aren't you?"

  Mark tried to look bored as his mind raced to figure out what the cop could possibly know. "Yeah. What do you want?"

  "I want to ask you a few questions. Why are you trying to run away from me?"

  Mark glanced down at his arm, and hefted it up as if making an awkward toast. "Do I look like a man who could do much running, away or otherwise?"

  Harry knew right away that he was hiding something. Perhaps it was a boy? "Maybe I was mistaken," he conceded, preferring to discuss the real issues at hand. "It looked like you might be trying to avoid me. Where have you been all night, sir?"

  "Have I done something wrong, Officer?"

  "Could you answer my question, please?"

  "Is that a request or a demand?"

  Harry considered another officious exaggeration, but, remembering the beating he took on the radio, thought better of it. "It's merely a request, sir," he replied, adding the sweetest of insincere smiles.

  Mark smiled back. "In that case, Officer, I've been in the hospital all night." He again gestured delicately with his mangled hand. "I had a bit of an accident. A car fell on me while I was working on the brakes."

  Harry couldn't have cared less about how Mark had been injured, and his practiced caring nod showed it. "Are you aware that your nephew escaped from the Juvenile Detention Center night before last?"

  "I said I was in the hospital, not a cave. Yes, I'm aware." The realization of Harry's suspicions hit Mark suddenly, and felt better than a cool breeze on this blistering day. He smiled broadly. "Are you thinking that I might have Nathan here?"

  Harry raised an eyebrow. "Should I be thinking that?" he asked.

  Mark tossed back his head and laughed loudly, genuinely amused. "Not if you know anything about Nathan and me. Look, Officer . . . uh . . . "

  "Thompkins," Harry offered.

  "Thompkins. Yes, of course. I didn't even look at your name tag there. Officer Thompkins, my nephew and I hate each other. I sent him away-asked him to be jailed-mainly just to get rid of him. This is the last place Nathan would go." It was refreshing to tell the whole truth for a change, Mark thought. "And rest assured," he added, "if Nathan shows up here, he'll wish he hadn't."

  As they conversed, Harry edged toward the door. "Then you wouldn't mind letting me in to look around, would you?"

  "Actually, I would," Mark said coolly, the image of the broken TV and God only knows what else he had left behind flashing through his mind. "I would mind that very much."

  Harry looked as though no one had ever said that to him before. "But why?" he asked. "You said you have nothing to hide."

  Mark studied the policeman's face for a long moment. "No, we all have something to hide, don't we? Even you, I wager. What I said was I have nobody to hide. And that is the honest to God truth."

  "Then why won't you let me in?"

  "Because you don't have a warrant, and because I don't have to." Mark's tone was suddenly flat. "I spent some time in priso
n. When I was in the joint, I had to put up with you assholes searching my asshole, and anything else you wanted to peek into, night or day, whenever it floated your boat. I'm back in the world now, and you have to play by the rules."

  Harry smiled the way a poker player smiles when he's caught bluffing. "Fair enough, Mr. Bailey," he said, turning back toward the street. "You're a man who knows his civil rights. Thank you for your time." As he stepped onto the street, he heard the front door to the house open.

  "Mr. Bailey!" he called out, wheeling around again.

  Mark turned in the open doorway, leaning against the jamb. "Yeah?"

  "You said a car fell on your hand. Where did that happen?" "Right at the end of my arm." Mark disappeared inside the house, and the door closed behind him.

  Alone again in his car, Harry considered Mark's last flippant remark in the context of their entire discussion. He looked nervous as hell until he started talking about Nathan. Then he got cocky and talkative. When the subject of his injury came up, he got nervous again.

  Harry turned his head to face the house and the Bronco in the driveway. Had to hurt like hell to have a vehicle that size fall on your hand.

  Wait a minute! There's only one car here! If it fell off its blocks, who put it back together for him to drive to the hospital?

  No doubt about it, Mark Bailey was guilty of something. Whatever it was, it had something to do with his injury.

  Harry checked his watch again, and was relieved to see he still had three and a half hours left in his career. He thought he'd spend part of it down at the hospital. Maybe one of the ER docs would know something helpful.

  Michaels was the first investigator to arrive at the Nicholsons' house, just behind the satellite van from a local television station.

  My, but word travels fast, he thought. Neighbors and assorted onlookers-children and their mothers, mostly-had begun to gather in tight clumps in the street, drawn to the scene either by word of mouth or by the presence of the barricade tape whose sole purpose, ironically, was to keep people away.

  According to the dispatcher, officers were originally sent to the house in response to a burglary call, but when they arrived on the scene, they radioed back for a senior presence.

  As Warren approached the front door, he recognized a familiar face from the first night at the JDC. "Good afternoon, Officer Borsuch," he said as he approached. "Got you working days now?"

  The cop guarding the door looked proud that he'd been recognized. "Nah," he said with a smile. "Workin' double shift. I need the money. Tryin' to buy a boat."

  Warren clapped him on the shoulder. "Boat, huh? Haven't you heard that there's only two happy days in a boat owner's life?" "What's that?"

  "The day he buys it and the day he sells it."

  Officer Borsuch had heard the saying a hundred times but laughed anyway as he stepped aside to usher Michaels through the front door into the enormous foyer. "Quite a place, huh?"

  "I'll say," Warren agreed. "So, what makes you think the Bailey kid was here?"

  "Well, I wish I could say it was brilliant detective work, Lieutenant," Borsuch said good-naturedly as he led Michaels down the main hallway. "But it really was pretty easy." He pulled open the door to the bathroom to display the pile of bloody clothes left where Nathan had dropped them.

  Warren laughed. "I guess there are different levels of deductive reasoning, aren't there? Did he take anything?"

  "Yes, sir. He took some clothes belonging to one of the Nicholson kids, ate a bunch of their food, and drove off with their BMW."

  Warren's eyebrows arched high on his forehead. "BMW, huh? Kid's got good taste. Didn't even think about him driving out of town. How do you suppose he got through the roadblocks?" he wondered aloud.

  "There's also this," Borsuch said, handing over a piece of lined notebook paper. The writing was done in the studied cursive of a child's hand.

  "He left a note?" Warren asked, incredulous. It took him less than fifteen seconds to read it. "I'll be damned," he said when he was finished. "Are we sure this isn't some red herring? Have we checked the facts?"

  Borsuch nodded. "From what we can tell so far, he's telling the truth. The most polite burglar in history."

  Warren read the note through again and shook his head. "Where's the family?" he asked, looking up.

  Borsuch gestured out to the yard, through the front door.

  "Looks to me like they're getting their fifteen minutes of fame."

  Warren's eyes followed Borsuch's arm. The random mingling of people by the curb had metamorphosed into press conference. Two more TV vans had arrived since Michaels had arrived on the scene, their transmitters elevated high into the air, ready to start beaming signals. Four people, two adults and two children, stood at the curb, their backs to the house. The press faced them, camera lenses glinting in the sun and handheld boom mikes dangling in the air like so many branches of a willow tree.

  "The way this case is shaping up in the press," Warren said, "I think the Nicholsons ought to get used to being on television."

  As he pulled his patrol car into one of the slots reserved for police officers, Harry Thompkins noted that the hospital parking lot was relatively empty. With luck, that meant he'd be able to talk to somebody right away.

  He took the short cut through the ambulance entrance, smiling politely to the triage nurse as he walked past her station and entered the Emergency Department. He was right. Only about half the beds were full, mostly with older people who looked to Harry's untrained eye like they needed a general practitioner more than they needed an emergency room.

  He stopped at the trauma desk, where a frighteningly young physician's assistant was filling out some paperwork.

  "Excuse me," Harry interrupted.

  The youngster held up a finger and finished the paragraph he was writing. Finally, he looked up. "Can I help you?"

  "Yes, you can. I need to speak to the doctor who treated a patient named Mark Bailey yesterday."

  "Is he in trouble?" The PA's enthusiasm made him look even younger.

  "Don't know yet. That's why I need to talk to the doc."

  The PA looked to the ceiling as he searched his memory. You could almost see the cartoon lightbulb go on over his head. "Hand injury, right?"

  Harry couldn't help but smile at the kid's enthusiasm. "Yeah, right. Hand injury."

  "That would be Dr. Baker."

  "Tad Baker?"

  "You know him?"

  Harry shrugged. "Everybody knows Dr. Tad. Us cops bring you a ton of business, you know. Plus Tad and I played each other in a tennis tournament a couple months ago."

  "Who won?"

  "Don't ask," Harry said and he turned away from the desk.

  Tad was in the far corner, putting stitches into the back of a patient's head.

  "Afternoon, Dr. Tad," Harry said as he approached.

  Tad looked up from his work and smiled. "Well, if it isn't Braddock County's finest." The patient-a teenage boy clad in swim trunks-tried to raise his head to see, but was gently kept in place by Tad's gloved hand. "Jeeze, Harry, I'm sorry, all the doughnuts are gone.

  Harry flipped him off.

  "What brings you to the Band-Aid barn?" Tad inquired, returning his eyes to his work.

  "Got some questions to ask you."

  "Official business?"

  "Yep."

  "All right, then, let me just finish up my needlepoint on Tyler here, and I'll be right with you."

  "Mind if I watch?" Harry asked. Unlike so many of his colleagues who could not stomach hospital scenes, Harry was fascinated by medical procedures. Maybe they'll hire me here after Michaels fires me this afternoon, he thought.

  "Not my call," Tad said. "It's really up to my patient here. Tyler, do you mind if my friend Harry watches me put you back together?"

  "Who is he?" Tyler asked, not trying a second time to see for himself.

  "He's a cop with a big gun."

  "If I let him watch, will he promise to give
me a warning instead of a ticket?"

  Tad laughed. "Harry?"

  Harry was laughing too. "Where do you live, Tyler?" "Fairfield."

  "Sure, no problem:' Harry promised. Fairfield was on the far end of the county from his patrol area.

  "Fine," Tyler said. "Let's throw a party."

  Harry wedged in close enough to see. Squarely on the back of the boy's head, an area about the size of an index card had been shaved bald, exposing a smile-shaped laceration about four inches long. By Harry's eye, it was sewn about half shut.

  "What happened?" the cop asked.

  Tad answered before Tyler had a chance. "Tyler does backflips off the diving board only slightly better than you play tennis."

  Ten minutes and as many stitches later, Tad was done. He advised the boy to take Tylenol for the pain, to take all of the antibiotics he had prescribed, and to stay out of the water for at least two weeks while the wound healed. That done, he walked with Harry into the privacy of an empty trauma room.

  "What's up?"

  "Did you work on a patient named Mark Bailey yesterday?" Harry asked. "He had a broken hand."

  "Yes, he certainly did," Tad confirmed, growing visibly uncomfortable. "Harry, you know I can't discuss the details of patient histories."

  "I just need a little help, that's all," Harry said hurriedly. "Did he tell you that he was injured when his car slipped a jack?"

  This was exactly the sort of legal pinch point that Tad worked so hard to avoid. Bailey was a scumbag, and everyone knew it. He was supposed to stay over for one more night in the hospital, but chose instead to check himself out against his doctor's advice. Those were the actions of a person with something to hide. And he bore the injuries of someone with evil friends.

  But the sad fact was that it was Harry's job to catch bad guys and throw them in jail, not Tad's. Conscience aside, the doctor wasn't going to put everything at risk just to help a friend.

  "I'm sorry, Harry, I can't help you. All of my conversations with patients are privileged."

  "I know, I know," Harry said. There was an edge of desperation to his voice. "But bear with me on this. My career might be riding on it. I just want to give you some opinions of mine. If you agree, you don't say anything. But if you don't agree, you can cough. When we're done, we can both swear under oath that you never gave me any information. Okay?"