Nick of Time (18 page)

“Are you okay, Brad?”

“Son of a bitch is out of his mind. What the hell was he thinking? I shoulda broken his neck when I had a chance. I went for the gun instead. God
dammit
!”

The new Brad frightened her a little, and as he brought his gaze around to her, he seemed to realize it. “Oh, Jesus, Nicki, are you all right?” He hurried over to help her stand.

“I'm fine, I think,” she said.

“I'm going after him,” Brad said. He started for the door.

“No, don't. Please,” Nicki said. “Just let it go. Nobody's hurt, so just—”

What was that?

It was an odd sound, a hissing, gurgling sound that made her skin pucker. Brad heard it too, and together they turned toward the cash register, where the young kid with the paperback was nowhere to be seen.

“Oh, shit,” Brad breathed.

“What?”

He pulled on her arm. “Come on, we've got to get out of here.”

She jerked away. “No. What is it?” She moved closer to the counter, frightened of what she might see, even as she knew that it could be nothing else.

“We don't have time for this,” Brad said.

When she got close enough to the counter to see the horrors it concealed, she clapped a hand over her mouth to contain her scream.

The clerk—she could see now from his name tag that his name was Chas—lay sprawled on the white linoleum floor, half-sitting against the far wall of the clerk's space, a human island in a lake of blood that continued to spread at a horrifying rate from a gaping wound in his throat. “Oh, my God!” Nicki gasped. “Oh, Jesus, he's dead.”

As if to prove her wrong, Chas tried to lift his hands to his wound, only to find that his arms were too heavy.

“Oh, Brad, what are we going to do?”

Brad pulled on her arm again. “We're getting the hell out of here.”

“We can't,” she said, again pulling away. “He's hurt. We have to call an ambulance.”

“He's not hurt, Nicki, he's dead. He just doesn't know it yet.”

Nicki couldn't believe he said that. She moved around the end of the counter to enter the clerk's space and get closer. The metallic smell of his blood—redder and thicker than any blood she'd ever seen before—turned her stomach. She ignored the pain in her swollen knees as she leaned in close to him.

The boy's eyes—a brilliant green—were windows to his terror. “Brad, call 911,” Nicki said.

“Are you out of your mind?” he hissed. “We can't do that.”

“We
have
to. Look at him.”

From a wound somewhere near Chas's collar, blood spewed in an irregular fan with each beat of his heart, cascading down his already-soaked shirt to get lost in the mess that was his pants. His eyes locked with Nicki's, even as the light in them faded. He reached for her, but again, the effort was just too much. His hand made a slapping sound when it landed in the lake of accumulating gore.

Without thinking, Nicki reached for it, enfolded it in her own. “I'm here, Chas,” she said.

It wasn't the first time she'd watched someone die. In a strange, twisted way, it was easier to watch her mother slip away. At least then, the owner of the hand she held knew that it was a gesture of love. Here, Chas seemed to know that it was a gesture of pity, and that made all the difference in the world. His eyes begged for her to do something—anything—that would make things better.

“I'm so sorry,” Nicki said. “I'm so, so sorry.” She fought the urge to tell him that everything would be all right. It was what people who knew better liked to say, and she knew how much it pissed her off when people did it to her.

Panic sparked in those green eyes. Tears welled up.

Nicki found herself back in the hospital room with her mother—or the emaciated shell that pretended to be her mother—begging her to stay, even as the electronic monitors and the gentle whispers from the nurses and doctors all told her that that was impossible. She remembered the uselessness of her mother's fight to stay with Nicki, to answer her prayers.

“It's a better place,” she said softly to Chas. “There's no pain, and people are always nice to you. Just let yourself—”

“All y'all freeze right where you are!”

Nicki and Brad both jumped at the sound of the new voice and looked up to see an old man—probably all of eighty years old—staring down at her from the back of the counter, a huge automatic pistol gripped tightly in his fist.

“Leave that boy alone.” Then he saw the carnage. “Oh, sweet mother of Jesus—”

This time, there was nothing stealthy or quiet about Brad's move. He just launched at the old man, pushing him hard with his left hand and then dropping him with a single punch to his face. Nicki yelled at the suddenness of it, the viciousness of it. “Brad! My God!”

Brad bent over and came up with the old man's gun, which he stuffed into the waistband of his chinos. “Come on, we gotta get outta here.”

It was all happening too fast. Nicki didn't know what to do, what to think. All she knew was the panic welling up from somewhere deep inside.

“We've got to go now. He's probably already called the cops. Maybe set off an alarm.”

“Where did he come from?”

Brad rolled his eyes, which were growing hotter by the second. “Who the hell cares? He came from the back room, okay? He must have been back there the whole time. Now, let's get out of here.”

“But what about him?” she asked, pointing to Chas.

“Look at him,” Brad said.

She did. The light in those green eyes had extinguished. They were dolls' eyes now, staring at forever.

“He's dead,” Brad said. This time, his tone was softer.

“And him?” She gestured toward the old man, who lay somewhere out of her sight on the other side of the counter.

“I didn't hit him that hard. He'll be okay. Now, come on.”

It was as if she were frozen in place. Should she stay or go?

“The cameras saw it all, Nicki,” Brad said, reading her thoughts. “You've got no reason to stay. Nothing you say can add anything to what they'll be able to see on the tape. Decide now. Yes or no. I
can't
stay.” He seemed to vibrate with anxiety to get the hell out of there.

It was too much. There were too many sides to consider all at once. This wasn't the kind of decision that you just made and walked away from. The ramifications were enormous. A boy was
killed,
for God's sake. This was all wrong. Wrong with a capital
W
. She'd somehow wandered through Alice's looking glass, and the whole world as she'd come to know it was all twisted and distorted.

Brad started for the door. “Bye, Nicki,” he said. “I love you.”

“Wait!” she called after him. “I'm coming!”

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eighteen

D
arla Sweet was still a block away from the Quik Mart when she marked on the scene, speaking quickly and then tossing the mike onto the passenger seat. Heavy raindrops began to spatter the windshield of her cruiser.

Without dropping a beat, the dispatcher acknowledged, “On the scene, Unit six-oh-four at fourteen thirteen hours. Give us a situation report first chance you get.”

No, I'm going to keep all the details to myself,
Darla didn't say. A shooting! Part of her didn't believe it. Shootings didn't happen in Essex, at least not like this. Not in a robbery. Occasionally, a couple of goobers would get into an argument that blew out of proportion, but an armed robbery? That just didn't happen here.

Besides, this was old Ben Maestri's place. A nicer old man never walked the face of the planet. It was beyond her imagination that anyone would want to do him any harm. An alcoholic and a gambler, he'd fallen on hard times, Darla had been told, but even when the folks in town gossiped about that, it was always with a tone of pity, not disgust. She prayed silently that she wouldn't find him dead on the floor.

As she slid her cruiser to a halt outside the windows of the Quik Mart, she imagined the voices of her instructors at the academy. She knew all about waiting for backup and about tactical approaches, but this was
Essex,
where the nearest backup might be ten minutes away, and the nearest tactical unit was easily an hour beyond that. As her right hand threw the transmission into Park, she threw the door open with her left, leaving it gaping as she pulled her revolver and ran full-speed through the front doors.

“Sheriff's Office!” she yelled, her weapon extended at arm's length.

“Here!” someone yelled. “Oh, God, here, behind the counter!”

Her senses buzzing with premonitions of a trap, Darla eased forward far enough to peek over the counter to see the bloody mess on the floor behind. An old man and a teenager both sat on the linoleum, smeared with blood.

“Please help,” the old man said. He seemed to be crying, even as his face showed emptiness of both color and expression. Besides the blood that coated the floor, another thin stream flowed from a gash just below the old man's eye.

Darla holstered her weapon and hurried around to the open end of the counter, nearly losing her balance when she hit the blood slick. She thumbed the mike on her epaulette. “Six-oh-four to Central, we have a confirmed critical GSW and another unidentified injury. Start two rescue units this way, and expedite backup. I'll be ten-seven rendering aid.” Then, to the old man, she said, “Where are you hit?”

Old Ben just looked at her, uncomprehending. “How could they do something like this?” The odor of booze wafted off him.

“I said, where are you hit?” Feeling for a pulse on Chas's neck, she found the gaping hole and realized instantly the seriousness of the boy's wound. It didn't matter what was wrong with the old man; the kid was worse off, and therefore first on her list. Pulling the kid away from the wall by his feet, she caused him to slip backward onto the floor, where his head impacted with a terrible thud. Darla keyed the mike one more time. “Six-oh-four to central, I'm beginning CPR.”

With Chas now supine and staring, Darla lifted his jaw toward the ceiling, further exposing the gristly wound that gaped just above his collar. She pinched his nose shut while pressing her opened mouth onto his and blew. She'd recertified on this procedure six times now, and she still couldn't remember the sequence of events. She blew four quick breaths into his mouth, producing a terrible gurgling sound from the wound. At that instant, she realized that it was all a lost cause. With the trachea punctured, the air she blew would only make it as far as the hole, uselessly blowing a bloody fog against her cheek, but never reaching his lungs. Still, she had to try.

If she kept going, his chances rose to some tiny sliver of a percent above zero; if she stopped, he wouldn't even have that. Either way, she sensed that the taste of his blood would never go away.

Darla crossed her palms the way she'd been instructed, found the kid's xiphoid process, where the ribs came together just below the breastbone, and she started chest compressions.
One-and, two-and, three-and . . .
All the way to fifteen, and then she moved back up for another mouthful of blood. She didn't realize that a person could have so much blood.

“Do you think you can help me here?” she asked the old man, but he just continued to stare.

“I don't believe it,” he whispered. “I just don't believe this is happening.”

He was useless. Where the hell was the ambulance?

As the cycle switched from ventilations to compressions for the tenth or maybe fifteenth time, Darla paused long enough to vomit up the burger she'd had for lunch, adding a bit of herself to the unspeakable mess on the linoleum. It went like that forever, maybe minutes, maybe the better part of an hour. Ventilations, compressions, ventilations, compressions, puke.

Finally, in the distance, she heard the approach of sirens. The sound peaked, and then she heard the ping of the front door opening and the squeal of feedback as Sheriff Hines spoke into his radio. “Six-oh-one's on the scene.”

“Sheriff!” Darla called. “Give me a hand!”

“What the hell are you doing, Deputy?”

The tone of the sheriff's voice startled her. She'd expecting something more urgent, something more congratulatory, perhaps. “CPR,” she said. Like this wasn't obvious?

“Stop,” Hines commanded.

Darla assumed she'd heard wrong and kept going. You don't stop CPR until you're exhausted or until the patient is pronounced dead. They'd said that a hundred times in the class.

“I said stop, goddammit,” Hines growled. “Jesus, look what you're doing to the crime scene. What, did you miss the lecture on preserving evidence?”

Was he out of his mind? Darla stared at the sheriff in disbelief. “I'm supposed to let him die?”

“He's dead. Look at him. He's purple. He's got a huge hole in his throat and he's bled out a gallon of blood. How dead do you want him to be?”

Darla understood the words, but the message eluded her. Why was the sheriff angry when he should have been writing up a citation for her heroic efforts?

“Come on, Deputy, enough already! Now! Stop.”

She stopped. And for the first time, she got a good look at what the sheriff was seeing. Chas's mouth and nose were purple under the smear of gore, as were the tips of his fingers. She'd been so focused on saving his life that she'd lost sight of the fact that there was no life left to save. The futility of it all brought tears to her eyes.

The sheriff looked at her as if she smelled bad. He planted his fists on his hips and gestured toward the door with a jerk of his head. “Go on, get outta there. Step outside and get some air. Try not to step on more evidence than you have to.” Outside, they could hear the approach of more sirens, and the distinctive rattle of a fire truck's Jake brake. Hines triggered another squeal of feedback as he told the dispatcher to put fire and rescue back in service. “We have a confirmed DOA here.”

“What about him?” Darla asked, pointing to the mouse that was growing under Ben Maestri's eye.

“You need an ambulance, Ben?” the sheriff asked.

The old man shook his head. Neither his eyes nor his mind seemed able to focus.

“Bad day to be drunk, Ben,” Hines said, his tone dripping with disgust. “Darla, take him out with you and see if you can get some information from him. I'll see what I can put together in here.”

“They've got cameras,” Darla said.

“Is that what those are? Come on, take custody of him.”

Darla helped the old man to his feet and led him back around the corner. She was nearly to the door when the sheriff called her name.

“You
are
functional, aren't you?”

She took the question as an insult. “I assure you that I am fully
functional
.” She leaned on the word to demonstrate her annoyance.

“Don't say yes if you mean no, Deputy. Tell me if you're too shaken up to do your job.”

“I'm
fine
.”

The sheriff seemed satisfied. “Okay, then I've got an order for you. I want you to keep
everybody
out of this place unless I say specifically that they can come in, you understand? The crime scene is already a mess, and I don't need any more tourists.”

Anger boiled in her gut, causing her cheeks to flush. “What about the crime scene detectives from the State PD, can I let them in?”

Sheriff Hines's jaw set. “Don't be a wiseass, Deputy. You know what I meant. Now, get Ben the hell out of here.”

* * *

Once outside, in the fresh air, the old man seemed to find himself again. They sat on the hood of Darla's cruiser, trying their best to ignore the bustle around them. Deputy Jackson Ryan arrived from the south end of town and made himself busy stretching crime-scene tape around the entire perimeter of the building.

The state boys had announced their interest in the case, and had promised to respond to the scene as soon as they had personnel available, but it was a pretty good bet that they'd take their sweet time. It was a robbery, after all, not a serial killing, and given the tumultuous nature of Sheriff Hines's past dealings with the North Carolina State Police, Darla didn't expect anyone in that organization to put themselves out too much on behalf of the Essex Sheriff's Department.

“Sheriff Hines won't be askin' nobody for nothin',” Ryan said as he listened to the radio traffic. “If he does, you'd best check to see how deep the snow is in hell.”

Ryan was a good man to have around if you needed to arrest a drunken football player, but for anything requiring more brain than brawn, he was the perfect choice for stretching crime-scene tape.

“It was two kids,” Ben repeated, sounding annoyed as Darla kept pushing him for details. “That much I'm sure of.”

“You saw them?”

“I was as close to them as I am to you. I tried to stop them, but they took my gun.” He explained his encounter as well as he could, clearly trying to avoid the mental image of the wounded boy.

“Did they say anything?” Darla asked.

“Honey, he coldcocked me the second he saw me. If they said anything, I didn't hear it. Leastways, I didn't pay attention.” As he spoke, he rubbed the spot on his cheek where the blood had already begun to scab over.

“But you actually saw them shoot your clerk.”

“His name was Chas,” Ben said. “He was a fine young man. Wanted to go to Chapel Hill.”

“That was the clerk?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And did you actually see these robbers shoot him?”

Ben hesitated before answering. “Yes, ma'am, I as much as saw them rob the store.”

Darla cocked her head. “What does that mean, you as much as saw them? Did you see them or not?”

“I saw them going through his pockets, trying to rob him, too.”

The deputy tried to settle the wave of frustration. “Can you try not to get ahead of me, please, and just answer the question I've asked?”

“I'm trying to, Deputy.” The old man looked close to tears.

She settled herself. “I know you are. Try not to think about what happened
after
the shots were fired. Tell me what happened
before
that.”

Ben Maestri's gaze shifted again. He looked embarrassed.

“What's wrong?” Darla pressed.

“I was in the back room,” he said. “I was in the restroom.”

“Going to the bathroom?” Ordinarily, Darla would not have asked that as a follow-up, but the old man's hesitation told her that the location was about more than standard bodily functions.

“Life's been kinda stressful,” Ben said. “The store's not doing so well, and even with a really terrific summer, I'm not sure that we can pull everything out.”

Darla waited a couple of seconds for the rest of it, but he seemed to think that he was done. “Ben? What are you telling me?”

He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the detail that he hated to admit. “Sometimes, when life is just too much for me, I treat myself to a couple of drinks back there.”

Darla wasn't sure she understood. “In the
bathroom
?”

“I'm supposed to be on the wagon,” he said. His posture demonstrated his shame.

“You were in the bathroom so no one could see you.”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“And how much have you treated yourself today?” Darla worked to stifle her smile. The way he smelled, everyone within a block of the old man would know that he'd been hitting the bottle. She'd been expecting something far more dramatic.

Another sigh. “More than I should have. Four drinks, maybe five.”

“Whiskey?”

“Bourbon. I can handle it, though. I got a liver made of steel.”

Soon to be concrete,
she didn't say. This was disappointing news. Not because old Ben Maestri had fallen off the wagon, or even that he hadn't witnessed the shooting, but because every word of his testimony would be second-guessed later in a courtroom.

“So, what
did
you see?” Darla asked.

“I heard the gunshot,” Ben said, “and I knew right away what was happening. I called 911 from the desk in the back room, and I grabbed my Sig from the drawer, and I went out there. I was surprised as hell to see that the robber was a little bitty thing of a girl. I told her to move away, and then
bam!
I got blindsided by the other one. A guy, but don't ask me what he looked like. Most of what I saw of him looked like a fist.”