Time to Die: Part Four Read online

  Carter didn’t understand.

  “The weapon we recovered is a Glock,” she explained. “I was thinking—”

  He saw the answer for himself. “There was a round in the chamber,” Carter said, finishing the thought for her. The Glock was respected the world over as a weapon for law enforcers, but it had a well-known downside in the hands of amateurs: it remained forever cocked. Even after the magazine was dropped out of the grip, a bullet remained in the chamber, and from there, it was a matter of a slight trigger pull and the thing would fire.

  “Exactly,” Darla said. She seemed impressed that he could catch on so fast. “I figure he got a little anxious and squeezed too hard.”

  “Or, he was tackled by an innocent bystander,” Carter offered.

  “One who happened to be wanted for murder in Michigan?”

  Carter let her connect her own dots.

  “It’s a hell of a coincidence,” Darla said. “But it holds up.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot more believable than a shooter who pulls off his gloves to check a pulse,” Carter said. “And what about those tipped-over racks and stuff in front of the counter? What are your investigators hypothesizing about that?”

  “Ben said that they were already tipped over when he came out.”

  Carter’s stomach tightened. Eyewitness testimony was hard as hell to beat in court. “Did Ben actually say that he saw Nicki and Brad shoot the boy? I mean, did he ever say something as direct as, ‘I saw them pull the trigger’?”

  Darla started to answer then stopped herself. “Actually, no. In fact, he said he was in the back room when the shots were fired.”

  “Shot,” Carter corrected. “Singular. So that adds even more credence to Nicki’s version of events.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Darla said. “Gives you a barrelful of reasonable doubt, but it’s non-data; doesn’t support your theory any more than it supports ours.”

  Carter felt his frustration mount. “Justice, Deputy. It’s not your theory versus mine. It’s about justice.”

  “Sounds to me like it’s about protecting your daughter,” Darla said. The words might have sounded harsh coming from someone else, but from her, they sounded nearly sympathetic.

  The rain continued to pound. “Fair enough,” he said, “so long as you remember that she’s an innocent.”

  “Despite the company she keeps.”

  Carter did not respond. What could he say?

  “Maybe we could speak with Ben again,” Darla mused. “We sent him home, but I have his address.”

  Carter felt something jump inside of him as he realized that he might have an ally here. “I’d like to come along.”

  Darla scowled. Clearly, it was as inappropriate in Essex, North Carolina, as it would have been in Pitcairn County, New York. “I’ll drive,” she said.

  * * *

  Nicki had never seen so much rain. It fell in torrents, flooding the parking lot and transforming the afternoon into perpetual dusk. As they sat waiting in the Sebring, the radio informed them that a developing low pressure system was stalled off the Carolina coast. If the winds picked up another ten miles an hour, the unnamed tropical depression would become Tropical Storm Carlena.

  “Are you going to tell me what we’re up to?” Nicki asked.

  “Not yet. Soon.” They’d been watching the cars in the parking lot for ten minutes. Nicki had figured that Brad planned to hot-wire one of the diners’ vehicles, but he’d ruled that out on the outset. “We wouldn’t get a half mile before someone reported it,” he’d said.

  When she pressed for more, he ignored her. Now they sat in silence. It was all Nicki could do to keep her eyes open.

  When a well-traveled Ford Bronco pulled into the parking lot on the video store side, Brad sat up straighter in his seat. “Okay,” he said. “I think this one might be it.”

  Nicki pulled herself closer to the windshield to see through the distortion of the cascading water. She watched as a woman and a boy exited the truck. Clearly the grandmother, the woman opened an umbrella in a vain attempt to deflect the pelting rain, while the boy basked in the downpour and made a point of stomping in every puddle.

  “This is it,” Brad said. “Are you ready?”

  Before she could even open her mouth to respond, he’d already opened his door.

  * * *

  At Gramma’s insistence, Scotty Boyd pulled off his sneakers and socks and left them outside the door of the video store. It was a compromise to not being allowed to enter at all. Good boys didn’t soak themselves in rain puddles.

  Come to think of it, good boys didn’t do any of the things that Scotty liked to do. They didn’t drink milk out of the carton, they didn’t watch cartoons, they didn’t piss in the grass, and they didn’t shoot at ant hills with BB guns. And that was just today. What good boys did do was behave themselves twenty-four hours a day without ever complaining.

  Living with Gramma brought a lot of rules into the twelve-year-old’s life; certainly a lot more than he’d had to live with before Mama died. Still, even though Gramma smelled funny and went to bed at nine o’clock, she was good on her word. He’d finished picking up the front yard, and she hadn’t let a little rain keep her away from the video store. The deal was, after he’d picked up the blown-in trash from the front yard and swept the sand off the front and rear decks, he could get one movie and one video game. And here they were.

  The game was a no-brainer: Spiderman. His real first choice would have been Grand Theft Auto, but Gramma would have had a stroke if she saw it. She wasn’t all that wild about his Xbox in the first place; between GTA’s whores and the exploding blood, she’d have had him sweeping the porches with a toothbrush. No, Spidey was a fine compromise.

  Compromise. Funny how many times that word came up in his life these days. Two months ago, he didn’t even know what the word meant. Now, since his address had changed, it ran his life.

  With the game chosen, he was left with the conundrum of choosing a movie. (Conundrum was another new word; Scotty liked the way it sounded.) It was hard to find the compromise between the singing-animal Disney crap that Gramma wanted him to watch and the Bruce Willis flick he was hoping for. Gramma wouldn’t even let him watch a PG-13 movie until he was actually thirteen years old, to hell with the fact that he’d been watching Rs for as long as he could remember.

  Still, it wasn’t worth the fight. Singing fish were the price he had to pay to get his game.

  As they approached the checkout counter, the teenage clerk looked at Scotty and laughed. “You look like a drowned rat,” he said.

  Scotty caught Gramma’s don’t-you-dare glare before he had a chance to form his reply. Good thing, too. Pizza-faces should think twice before calling someone a drowned rat. Of all the adjustments the last eight weeks had brought into his life, the language thing had been the hardest. In the end, the boy just smiled.

  “Try to stay dry,” the clerk said.

  Gramma carried the plastic bag with the goodies and held the door for the boy. “I don’t like him,” Scotty mumbled as he passed.

  “You don’t even know him,” Gramma scolded. “You can’t dislike people you don’t know.”

  With Gramma, life was a lot simpler when you just went along. Slipups brought a thousand extra chores followed by solitary confinement in his bedroom. Scotty had thought about breaking out a couple of times—just climbing out the window and taking off—but out where they lived, there was no place to run to.

  Back in Richmond, before the Big Move, there’d been plenty of places to visit after he’d sneaked out of the window, but here in Buttscratch, North Carolina—that’s what his mama had liked to call it—there was nothing but sand and bugs and water. Lots and lots of water, enough to make him wish that he’d spent those afternoons at the YMCA learning how to swim instead of perfecting moves on a basketball court that he’d probably never see again.

  On his way back out to the truck, Scotty stopped to pick up his footwear, pointing
out gleefully that his socks now weighed more than his shoes, thanks to the water.

  Gramma made a huffing noise and snatched the shoes away from him. “You’ll get these back when you learn to appreciate owning good things,” she said.

  Fine, he thought. I didn’t want to wear the dumb things anyway.

  “Hurry now and buckle in,” Gramma called from under her umbrella. “I want to be back at the house before the roads flood.”

  Scotty stopped near the front fender. “Can I sit in the front?” he asked.

  “You may not.”

  “Please, Gramma? We don’t even have an air bag. That’s what kills people, not the seat itself.”

  “It’s hardly worth the risk, do you think?” Gramma replied.

  Scotty rolled his eyes. How was he going to get through six years of this? That’s what the judge had told him: he’d be stuck with Gramma until he was eighteen. God help me.

  “I don’t think it’s so dangerous,” he muttered, just loudly enough to be heard, but not enough for her to make out the words.

  “You have something to say, young man, you just say it right out where I can hear it.”

  Scotty didn’t bother to reply. He climbed behind the death-inducing passenger seat into the back of the truck, reaching forward again to close the heavy door.

  “Remember your—”

  “—seat belt.” He finished the sentence for her. He saw the stranger in the back, in the cargo bed behind the backseat, the instant he turned around, and he yelled. It was an involuntary thing, a loud “Ooooh!” Gramma whirled in her seat.

  “Now, darn it, Scotty—” She saw him, too. The man had a gun.

  Brad leveled Ben Maestri’s pistol at Gramma. “Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything, and nobody’ll get hurt, okay?”

  A young woman popped up out of the back as well. She looked as terrified as Scotty felt. “Brad, don’t—”

  As the man with the gun scaled the seat next to Scotty, the boy considered diving for the door and bailing out, but a hand planted in his chest, accompanied by a hard glare, convinced him otherwise.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Brad warned. “Buckle up like your grandmother told you.”

  Scotty did exactly that, his hands trembling. Suddenly, there was a very good chance that he might throw up.

  Brad redirected his attention toward Gramma. “I want you to start the car and back out of this place just as if it were an ordinary day. Honest, nobody needs to get hurt.”

  “W-what are you going to do?” Gramma stammered. “I don’t have any money. Not enough to be worth stealing.”

  Brad beckoned with the muzzle of his gun. “I’ll take that purse, please,” he said.

  Scotty shifted his eyes to the girl, who looked as if she might throw up, too. There were tears in her eyes. She tried to say something. “Brad—”

  But the guy cut her off. “Not now, Nicki,” he said. Then to Gramma, “The purse, please.”

  “There’s nothing in it,” Gramma whined.

  “Hand it to me, anyway,” Brad insisted. There was a growl in his voice that reminded Scotty of an animal. The boy fought off tears of his own.

  The girl with the boy’s name put her hand on his shoulder. “You’ll be just fine,” she said. “He won’t hurt anyone.”

  “I’ll kill him if he does,” Scotty heard himself say.

  The comment drew a swift response. Brad brought the muzzle to within an inch of the boy’s eye. “Don’t push me, kid.”

  Gramma lifted her purse from the seat and handed it back to Brad. “Here,” she said. “Take it. Take whatever you want.”

  “I’m not interested in your money, lady,” Brad said. He handed the bag over to Nicki. “Search through there and find her driver’s license,” he said. “I need her address.”

  “Why?” Nicki asked.

  “Just do it,” he said. After that, he leaned in close to Gramma and whispered in her ear. Scotty couldn’t hear the words, but he knew it was about him just from the way Gramma stole glances his way.

  Gramma started to cry. Her hands trembled. “Please don’t do this,” she whimpered.

  “I have to,” Brad said. “I’m caught in a crack, and you happen to be my only way out. It sucks, but welcome to my world.”

  “I don’t think I can,” she whined.

  Scotty felt his face and ears turning red with rage. Who did this guy think he was, making Gramma cry?

  Brad said, “You think about it, Gramma. Ask yourself what you asked the kid: is it worth taking the chance?”

  “Please don’t,” she said again.

  Brad gave her a poisonous smile. “You’re in the driver’s seat. Get us out of here safely, and your troubles are nearly over.”

  Gramma made her decision. Scotty felt a surge of pride as he saw the sniveling weakness drain from her face, then to be replaced by the angry set of her jaw that Scotty had become so used to seeing. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Out of the parking lot and hang a right. Join that line of cars.” The rain had slackened a bit, but there was plenty left in the clouds.

  Gramma backed out of the parking space, then pulled the transmission into Drive and whirled the wheel to the left to clear the back of the car that had parked next to her. That done, she straightened the vehicle out and headed for the driveway, beyond which the traffic was barely moving.

  Brad climbed back over the seat to join Nicki in the back. “When they stop you, they’re going to ask if you’ve seen us, and that’s when you need to put in an Oscar-winning performance. If they want to know where you’re going or where you’ve been, you just tell them that you took your grandson out to get a movie.”

  “And a video game,” Scotty corrected. He shrank from the heat of Brad’s glare.

  “Just get us through this,” Brad continued, to Gramma, “and everything will be fine. Screw it up and you’ll regret it forever.” He faded farther back into the shadows, pausing to whisper in Scotty’s ear. “Listen here, little man, I’ll tell you what I told your grandmother. If something happens so these cops find out that we’re here, there’s going to be shooting. When that happens, the very first bullet kills your Gramma. The second one kills you. Think about that.”

  Brad turned to Nicki. “Did you find the driver’s license?”

  Actually, she’d forgotten completely about it. With trembling hands, she turned her attention to the mammoth purse. Glancing at the flashing lights of the roadblock, she asked, “Are you really going to shoot if we get stopped up there?” she asked.

  Brad gave her a hard look. “I told you that I’m not going back to prison. You just keep your head down.”

  “But Brad, what about them?” she asked with a sweeping gesture. “They didn’t do anything.”

  He turned away to face front again. “Not yet they haven’t,” he said.

  Chapter Two

  North Carolina State Trooper Matt Hayes would not have been more soaked if someone had stood on a ladder and poured buckets of water over his head. On typical wet days, his plastic rain slicker kept most of the rain out, but today he might as well not have worn it.

  He handed Hector Nunez back his license and waved him through the roadblock, beckoning the next in line to stop. He’d chosen this spot for the checkpoint because it was only a few hundred yards from the place where the road from Essex split in three. A similar checkpoint had been set up on the northern end of the same road, some thirty miles from here. Getting in and out of Essex required passage on this road, period. If the murderers were traveling by car, their escape route was sealed off. They were either holed up or trapped. Matt couldn’t see a third option.

  Now that he’d been here for three hours, though, things seemed a hell of a lot less sure.

  A battered green Bronco without hubcaps was next in line, complete with a little old lady behind the steering wheel. Matt whirled his fingers in the air to motion her to lower her window. The height of the vehicle allowed him to look her
straight in the eye rather than tilting his head and dumping a torrent of water from the wide flat rim of his plastic-covered hat. “Hello, ma’am,” he said. “Are you keeping dry?”

  The woman seemed nervous as she shot him only a cursory look and then returned her eyes to the road. “I’m trying,” she said. “I’m taking my grandson to get a video and a game.”

  Matt’s curiosity was piqued by her behavior. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You look nervous.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m fine. Just tired of the weather.”

  Matt wiped the cascade of water from his mouth. “Could I see your driver’s license, please?”

  This time, the look in the woman’s face was something close to panic.

  * * *

  Brad felt his insides seize. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Of course, they were going to want to see her license, but Nicki still held the bulky purse on her lap, hugging it to her chest and trying not to let her breathing run away from her. Up front, Gramma clearly didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” the cop repeated. “You don’t look so good.”

  In his mind, Brad could see the cop slipping his pistol out of its holster. His hand tightened around the grip of his own.

  “I’ve got your purse here, Gramma,” Scotty said, and he unhooked his seat belt. Reaching over the edge of his seat, he grabbed the bag from Nicki and lifted it over to his grandmother. “I was looking for some gum while you were inside getting the movie,” he explained. “Then you came back and I was scared that you might get mad about me going through your stuff.”

  * * *

  Corporal Hayes smiled as a waterlogged boy leaned forward with the purse gripped in his fist.

  The grandmother accepted her bag, and at the moment of the handoff they exchanged a significant glance that Matt didn’t quite know how to interpret. When the boy caught him watching, it grew awkward, and then the kid smiled at him.

  Gramma still avoided eye contact as she fished through the junk in her bag for her wallet, and from there she started fishing for her license. She riffled through all of the picture sleeves in the wallet—past a couple of credit cards and a photo of what could only be a younger version of the boy in the backseat.