Nick of Time (11 page)

“Hello, Warren, this is Carter Janssen. I'm sorry to have startled Nathan like that. This is nothing about him or those old problems. I need to talk to you about a favor.”

“Name it and it's yours,” Michaels said.

“Is there a place where we can meet, and where I can maybe get a bite to eat? I haven't had anything since lunch.”

“You bet. Where are you now?”

* * *

They decided on a twenty-four-hour breakfast place near the bus station. Warren Michaels hadn't changed much in four years. Maybe a little grayer around the temples, but he still had the easygoing athletic grace that Carter remembered.

Carter stood and they shook hands before Warren slid into the padded bench on the other side of the table. “It's great to see you again,” Warren said.

“I really am sorry about startling Nathan.”

“Don't give it a thought. Keeping him a little off balance keeps him from thinking he rules the world.”

“He sounds so old on the phone.”

Warren nodded. “Sixteen. He sings bass in the choir, and he's a head taller than me. Wears size twelve shoes. It's amazing.”

The small talk was killing Carter, but he understood that this was the way things were done in Virginia, and it only seemed polite. “So, is he living with you permanently?”

Warren explained, “He's officially my foster son, but it's as permanent an arrangement as you can get. After the . . .
incident
”—he leaned on the word—“I looked into adopting him, but what with his inheritance and all, it got too complicated. He knows where home is. He calls me his papa and I call him my son.”

The explanation had the rhythm of a stump speech, details explained so many times that they'd become automatic. Such was the price of fame, Carter supposed.

“But you're not here to talk about Nathan,” Warren said, reading the body language. “Still, before I turn over the floor, I want you to know yet again how much I appreciate everything you did to iron things out for him.”

Carter waved it off as if it were nothing, but Warren didn't know the half of it. As the bright light of Nathan's celebrity faded into memory, not everyone was so anxious to look the other way on the dozens of felonies the boy had racked up. It took some major league arm-twisting and more than a few official threats to get all the signatures he needed to make it happen.

“Let me tell you my problem,” Carter began. It took the better part of ten minutes to tell the story, and by the time he was done, Warren Michaels seemed moved. “What I need is shoe leather,” Carter concluded. “I can't do all the canvassing I need by myself, so I thought maybe you could get some of your guys on the street for me.”

“Consider it done. I'll make the calls right now. Meanwhile, you look like crap. Do you have a place to stay?”

Carter blushed. “I didn't think that far ahead.”

“You're staying with us.” The way he said it, there was no room for argument. “Chez Michaels isn't the fanciest B and B on the planet, but there's always a spare bed.”

Carter waved the offer away. “I can't take the time to sleep.”

“Actually, you can,” Warren countered. “This is my turf, not yours. Get some rest and I'll spin some wheels for you. If my guys turn up anything, I'll be the first to know, and you'll be next in line. Deal?”

Fact was, the vision of Brad Ward encountering dozens of police officers scared the shit out of Carter. “Just please be sure to make it clear to everyone that Nicki is an innocent in all of this.”

“You have my word.”

“And to be careful in any arrest. There's no telling what this Ward/Dougherty guy might do.”

Warren reached over and grasped Carter's hand. “Try to relax, Counselor. My cops are the best in the business. This isn't exactly new territory for me.”

Carter considered that, considered his options. Maybe it
was
time for him to lie down and get some rest.

They shook on it.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eleven

B
rad hated this shit. He hated the penguin suit, the uncomfortable shoes, the finger foods that wouldn't fill you up if you stood at the table for a week, and the snotty people who swarmed all around him. To think that these assholes paid hundreds of dollars apiece to be here curdled his stomach. What a ridiculous waste of money. For what? An evening of gyrations on the dance floor, driven by music from a band that didn't have any idea what it wanted to be. Thus far, he'd listened to bad covers of Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, and—God help us—Cher.

But a formal ball was one of Nicki's dreams. She'd spoken of it three or four times in their cyber correspondence, listing it as one of the things that she'd never be able to do, thanks to her disease. If all he had to do was hang out in uncomfortable clothes and pretend to be interested in President Clinton's dallyings with Monica Lewinsky, then that wasn't such a high price to pay.

Many of the items on Nicki's list were beyond his power to obtain for her—going to college and raising a bunch of kids—but this one was easy. And tomorrow would begin the dream of spending a week at the beach.

Honest to God, Brad didn't get Carter Janssen. He knew from firsthand experience that the man could be a prick if he wanted to be, but why would he want to piss off the only remaining relative he had? His wife was dead and his daughter was dying and Carter couldn't pop his head out of his ass long enough to see the world through her eyes. She wanted to
live
before she died. Why was that so impossible for him to understand?

The man was irrelevant now, and Brad would be lying if he didn't admit to a twinge of ironic pleasure. But for Janssen's paranoia that Brad was diddling his daughter (which he could have done at any time if a) he'd been interested in diddling twelve-year-old girls, or b) asked), everything in Brad's life would have been different. There would have been no ejection from the Benson house, no caroming from one homeless shelter to the next, no robbery, no murder, and no jail time. Brad knew how that sounded—knew how it made him look like a whiner who blamed others for his own problems—but he'd thought this all through a thousand times, and that was just how it was.

He leaned closer to Nicki, so she could hear him over the Barry Manilow cover. “You having a good time?”

She smiled, but her eyes looked tired. “It's wonderful.”

“You okay doing this? I don't want to wear you out.”

“We can stay a while longer. I just want to hang out long enough to make sure I remember everything. Do I want to know how you got this invitation?”

“I called this morning and made it. They asked for my membership number or some such, but I told them that I was on the road and didn't have it.”

Nicki couldn't believe it. This all came so naturally to him. “I suppose you charged this to the room, too?”

Brad shook his head. “Nah, I thought that might raise too much suspicion. So I charged it to his credit card.”

Nicki laughed. She wanted to be horrified, but admiration won out. “You're amazing,” she said.

Brad watched Nicki's eyes, and there was that look again: the one that said she adored him. Way back in the day, when she was just a little girl, that look was puppy love, but now it looked like the real thing, and it stirred some of the same in him.

“My father had something to do with you going away, didn't he?” Nicki asked, out of nowhere.

She'd brought it up before, during their cyber chats, but he'd always changed the subject—subtly, he'd thought, but apparently not. Despite being a creature who survived on his powers of deception, he couldn't bring himself to lie to her face. “Tell me what you know.”

“I have.”

Brad wouldn't let her get away with that. “If you'd told me everything you know, you wouldn't have just asked that question. Tell me
everything
you know.” Before, when they were just talking on the computer and Nicki was still resisting his overtures to join him on an adventure, it had seemed cruel to turn her against her dad. That seemed less of an issue now, but he didn't want to be the one who started it.

“I heard people talk about a burglary,” she said. “And I remember Daddy saying something about you being involved. We got in a big fight over it. Mom had to intervene. You never would have broken into a house.”

If he opened this door, there'd be no closing it. Brad spotted two overstuffed chairs in the corner behind the registration table and gestured to them. “Let's go have a seat,” he said.

Nicki's face fell. She understood that people only wanted you to sit down when there was bad news coming. Somehow, through some quirk of physics, the music was louder over here than closer to the dance floor. Brad moved his chair so he could sit knee to knee with Nicki.

He took her hand. “I promised you the truth,” he said. “This is your last chance to change the subject.”

Nicki refused. How could she do anything else?

“Okay,” he said. “I
did
break into that house.”

“Into the Premingers' house? He was a preacher!”

“He left his front door unlocked.” Brad said that as if it explained something. “But that wasn't why I was sent away. I felt bad about it, and when I confessed to Mr. Benson, he went and told your dad, and the four of us—Reverend Preminger included—worked out a deal where I'd give back the stuff I took and then work off my penance scraping and painting his gutters.”

“I remember that,” Nicki said. “That was your punishment? I thought you were getting paid for that.”

Brad scoffed, “There's not enough cash in the world to pay me for that kind of work. No, that was me coming to peace with God and the law. It was a done deal. Had nothing to do with me getting shipped off.”

“What, then?”

Brad didn't want to close the loop for her; he wanted her to do that for herself. “What would piss your dad off more than anything?”

It was Nicki's turn to scoff. “There's no end to the list of what pisses my dad off.”

“Think bigger,” Brad said. “What
fear
would piss him off so badly that he'd ruin a seventeen-year-old kid's life?”

Nicki knew her dad was a prick sometimes, and as square as a cinder block, but he wasn't vindictive. She couldn't imagine why he would
intentionally
make someone else's life difficult. Then she got it. Yes, she did know what would drive him to do just about anything. “Somebody told him our secret.”

Brad bounced his eyebrows. “Remember Joey Benson, the oldest of the Benson spawn? Well, the oldest until I got there. He fought me on any day with a
y
in it.”

“I remember you picking a few of those fights,” Nicki said, recalling the brawls that would occasionally spill out into the yard.

“Yeah, well, I had underestimated that ‘blood is thicker than water' thing. He knew that you and I used to talk a lot, and I made the mistake of telling him about the time you were feeling sorry for boys because they had to lift the toilet seat to sit on the pot.”

Nicki blushed. “Oh, God.” Naïveté did not come a lot more pure than hers back in those days. It had never occurred to her that boys could pee while standing.

“Anyway, he told your father that we talked about ‘dirty stuff' and just for good measure told him that I made you play with my dick.”

Nicki's jaw dropped. “He said
what
?” Her volume and tone drew looks from their fellow wallflowers, and she dialed it down. “I never did that.”

“Your father didn't want to take the chance. He drew a line connecting the burglary thing to me being some sort of pervert, and he gave the Bensons an ultimatum. They could get rid of me, or he could make their life miserable. I mean, it happened like
that.
” He punctuated the word with a finger snap.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“I didn't get a chance to. I'm serious about the speed. Your dad called, and I was shipped back to social services within hours. It's not like I had a vote.”

“But you didn't
do
anything.”

This time, Brad's smile bore a patronizing edge. “You really think that matters when you've got no father and your mother's in prison? Even if the pervert thing didn't stick, he'd have had the burglary to fall back on. I was in no position to negotiate.”

It all made sense, Nicki supposed. It wasn't entirely different than her own circumstances. She'd seen the futility of fighting her father, too. “So, why didn't you mention this before?”

Brad tossed off a shrug. “You'd already lost your mother. I didn't want you hating your father.”

“And now?”

He gave a rueful chuckle. “Well, now that I'm telling the story, I'm hating him myself, so I guess I don't care.” He didn't like the dejected look that invaded Nicki's face. “Do you want to talk about this anymore?”

“No.”

“Good.”

“You know what I would like to do?”

Something stirred in Brad's gut. “Tell me,” he said.

“I want to go back to the room and soak in that gorgeous bathtub.”

Brad had to be careful here.

Nicki squeezed his hand. “I had a wonderful time. But if I don't get some rest, there'll be hell to pay later. Really.”

Brad stood and offered his arm, hoping that his erection didn't show. “Shall we?”

He escorted her out of the ballroom, overdoing it a bit with standing straight and tall. “Ever feel like you're about to turn into a pumpkin?” he asked under his breath.

Nicki thrust the point of her hip into him playfully. “As long as I'm with my Prince Charming, it doesn't matter.”

* * *

Nicki had never seen so much polished marble. It was a deep rose color, with swirling veins of white and black.

She ran the water warm—just the other side of cool—and dumped in the contents of the tiny plastic bottle of bubble bath. She pressed the button that launched the Jacuzzi jets and thirty seconds later, the lather of thick bubbles was dense enough to walk on.

Nicki slipped out of her ball gown, draping it on the hook on the back of the door, and eased herself into the water. The hiss of the bubbles filled the room with white noise. One of the most disappointing complications of her disease was the need to avoid super-hot baths to keep her heart from racing too fast as it tried to slough off the heat. Keeping the heart rhythm normal was the rule of the day, every day. Don't get too excited, try not to exert too much, and the ever-thickening blood vessels in her lungs would be able to handle the load. For now, anyway.

The foam expanded all the way to her chin before she realized that she'd forgotten to take her rat poison. The thought made her groan aloud. The pills were all the way across the room, standing sentry next to the other prolonger-of-life, her Digoxin, a water pill that kept her tissues from absorbing the liquid from her blood and turning her into the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

The pills can wait,
she thought, and she closed her eyes. If there really was a just God, then heaven would have lots of really big bathtubs.

You've got to take your meds.
This was the part of her that bothered her the most: the part that wouldn't just let her relax. Ever.

There was no sense fighting it. Gathering herself, she rose out of the tub, quick-walking carefully on the marble floor over to the sink, where she snagged the two bottles and quick-walked back to the tub. The round-trip couldn't have taken more than ten seconds. She'd forgotten to grab a drinking glass, of course, but that wasn't such a big deal. She took her meds dry all the time. With her hands covered in white bubbly mittens, she expertly popped the caps off the pill bottles, dropped those little babies into her palm and tossed them back. They tasted a little like soap this time, but they went down. She laid the bottles on the wide edge of the tub, behind the Jacuzzi controls, so they couldn't fall into the bath, and she lay back and closed her eyes. She tried to imagine that the water was the way she used to like it, hot enough to make a good cup of tea.

The bubbles consumed her, concealed her, leaving her totally at ease. The day had been pure magic. To hell with the doctors. To hell with pagers and phone calls and disappointments. No schoolwork, no shrinks, no phone calls from supposed friends, no arguments with her dad. She'd just
lived.
Sure, the prom thing was hokey, and the room was over the top, and Brad was working too hard to impress her, but at least he was
trying.
And it all seemed so important to him. That she was
happy
was important to him. How could you not love someone who put you on such a pedestal?

She had to be careful, though, lest she think too much and start wondering why he was doing all of this for her. He
said
it was because he cared about her, and wanted her to be happy in her last months, and with all her heart, she wanted to believe that it really was that simple; but it was hard. Could it really be that he'd thought of her over the years as much as she'd thought of him? Was that even possible?

A brisk knock startled her off Memory Lane and back into the present. Before she could say anything, the bathroom door opened—first a crack and then all the way as Brad stepped inside, wearing only a pair of green paisley boxers.

Nicki made a squeaking sound and slipped farther under the bubbles. “What are you doing?” she demanded.

“I need a shower,” Brad said as he walked to the glassed-in shower stall and pulled on the knob.