Nick of Time (20 page)

“This is the dream,” she said. “Silly, huh?”

Brad didn't know what to say.

“Too much information?” Nicki ventured.

He answered, “No! I guess maybe I'm just not all that comfortable with the idea of being ‘gorgeous.' ”

They shared a laugh. “Your turn,” Nicki said. “What happened to your parents?” The question seemed to startle him, so she added, “I know your mother's in jail, but I don't know anything else.”

He quipped, “I guess that jail thing is the family business.”

“What did she do?”

“She sold drugs to the wrong guy. Sold a lot of them, in fact, got hit on a federal beef and sent up for like, forever.”

“Oh, that's awful.”

“Last time I saw her, I was eight. I never did know who my dad was. I don't think my mother did, either. At least she couldn't narrow it down to one paying customer.”

Nicki gasped. “You mean she was a pros . . .” She couldn't bring herself to say the word.

“Prostitute? No, she was a whore. A crack whore at that. I don't remember a single day when I could look in her face and not see her stoned. She decided to keep me around for the welfare money. She got a check every month to take care of me.” He scoffed. “Now, there was money well spent.”

“She spent it on drugs instead?”

“I don't know what the hell she spent it on.” As he mined deeper into the memories, Brad's tone hardened, and the muscles in his jaw flexed. “But it wasn't on dinners and birthday cakes, I can tell you that. Neighbors were the only reason I didn't starve to death. They fed me and the other stray cats. All of us alive because nobody got around to putting us in a sack and drowning us in the river.”

It was an image that hit Nicki hard. No wonder Brad had learned how to hot-wire cars. No wonder he could compartmentalize his thoughts so well.

“When they first arrested her, I was scared to death,” Brad continued. “I didn't know what would become of me. I didn't know where I would live, or how I was going to do anything. I mean, my mom wasn't good for anything useful, but at least she was
there,
you know? At least there was another heartbeat in the room at night. But then this nice social worker—her name was Alice—took me away from our apartment, and put me in this group home, just for one night. She actually stayed in the room with me.

“Alice settled me down by telling me how they'd get help for Mom, and how they'd get all the drugs out of her system so she could be healthy again. And in the meantime, I would be sent to live with some other really nice people. You know? Like, I was going to be taken in by the Brady Bunch or something. I had these images in my head—I mean, really, this is how I thought—I had these images in my head of me tossing a ball around in some front yard somewhere, hanging out in the neighborhoods where kids like me never had a chance in hell of living. It was like I'd get this really big jump start on my life. And then, after Mom was healthy again, she'd join us, and everything would be just like it was on television.

“Then I hit the first foster home. Nice enough people—I mean, they fed me and didn't scream at me—but they were both four hundred years old and smelled like dirty underwear. That's what I remember most about them, seriously. They smelled like dirty underwear.”

Nicki laughed. “How pleasant.”

“No, it wasn't. I stayed there for a few days, I guess, maybe a few weeks, they all run together after a while. They drove me to a new school where I'd never been before, with kids who only knew that I was somebody's foster. That meant I was fair game for anything anyone wanted to do. Who's gonna complain to the principal, right?”

“What, did they beat you up and stuff?”

“Only at the beginning. This ‘nobody cares' shit cuts both way, you know? It wasn't like I was gonna get in trouble at home if I got expelled from school. There's nothing like getting beat up a few times yourself to teach you how to beat the shit out of others. I was never in one school long enough to have any friends, so it was fine with me to have only enemies. Just so long as they were all scared shitless of me. In the long run, it's easiest to have one really nasty, nose-crushing, ball-busting fight at the beginning, so that everybody knows to stay the hell away from you. When you're the new kid and you're nice, people just think you're a pussy.”

“So, how many fights did you get into?”

Brad launched a bitter laugh. “Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. How many days are there in a school year? Times how many years in school. I was the baddest guy in the building, all the time. It was the way I survived.”

A station wagon on their left was pacing the Sebring as the traffic crept along, its turn signal blinking relentlessly. When Brad paused to let a space open up in front, the guy behind them blasted them with his horn. Nicki spun in her seat and gave the guy the finger.

“Way to go,” Brad laughed.

“Fastest finger in New York.” She let a moment pass before pressing for more. “What happened to you after you left the Bensons?”

Brad didn't want to go there. “You want the first day or the second?”

“There's a difference?”

Brad considered changing the subject, and then just went for it. What the hell. “The Bensons were fed up with me. All of the foster families got fed up with me. It's my special gift. But giving the devil his due, they did keep me for almost two years. That was, like, eight months longer than anyone else. Anyway, the burglary beef was the final straw, I guess, and your father's never-ending desire to make his house a convent. Since I was seventeen then, just a few months from official sorry-pal-you're-on-your-own emancipation, the social workers didn't want to endanger another family by putting me in with them, so they sent me to another group home.”

“A detention center?”

“Not really, but it might as well have been. Nasty-ass place. One thing for sure, I wasn't the baddest guy in the house anymore. There, I wasn't even in the top ten. So, after one night, I said screw it. I packed my stuff into my school backpack, walked out the door in the morning, and never checked back in. I lived on the streets after that.”

Nicki looked horrified.

“It's not that bad,” he said, shooting her a smile. Then he had to hit his brakes hard to keep from hitting that station wagon, whose driver had finally decided to move over.

“It has to be scary,” Nicki said.

Brad shrugged. “You learn who to stay away from, and who you can trust. I'll tell you what surprised the hell out of me is that there really is a homeless community. Just like you get to know people in your neighborhood because you go to the same clubs or the same church, us street bums do okay taking care of each other.”

“How did you live? On handouts?”

“I wish. You see, that's what the smart ones do. You can make a pretty decent living panhandling if you're not one of the drooling crazies. My age kinda worked against me there. People look at a homeless guy who's sixty and they feel sorry for him. Try that when you're a teenager, and you just get a lot of lectures about your work ethic.”

He intercepted the look that flashed across Nicki's face.

“You're one of them, aren't you?” He laughed. “You're one of the lecturers.”

“Well, why should you get handouts when you're perfectly capable of working?”

“What was I going to do? I couldn't put my hands on a school transcript if I had to, so I can't even qualify as a high school graduate. If you pick the right street corner, you can get double minimum wage, and you don't have to clean baby vomit off the fast food booth.”

“What about your dignity?”

This time, the smile erupted into a laugh. “Okay, well, there are early casualties to certain lifestyles. My dignity stopped being important around the time when my mother started screwing strangers in our living room.”

“God, that's awful. So, how did the prison thing happen?”

“I was stupid. Begging bored me. It might keep food in my belly, and a buzz in my head from time to time, but I gotta tell you: It's really freaking boring. I needed a business to get into. Something I knew how to do.” He glanced over at Nicki and waited for her to connect the dots for herself.

“Drugs?”

“Bingo. The family business. You know what they say. Do what you know. So, I did.”

“You're lucky you weren't killed.”

“I was in the game for precisely one day.”

“You're kidding. Why?”

“My very first customer was a cop.”

“No way.”

“I swear. I walked right up to this guy, offered him a nickel bag, took his money, and then every cop on the planet swooped down on me.”

“You were in Michigan then?”

“No, that was in New York. Rikers country. Anyway, I didn't have to do much time. A few months, and then a long probation, which I promptly ducked, but nobody seemed to care.”

“Getting away seems to be another one of your special gifts.”

“Well, I certainly hope so. I never want to do anybody harm. I never really want to get in trouble. It's just that whenever I see an opportunity, I somehow get involved only on the dark side of it. Everybody dreams of being an entrepreneur, right? I just chose a bad product.”

“That happened to be illegal.”

His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “Look who's sounding like a prosecutor.”

Nicki blushed.

“All the really profitable stuff is either already taken, or it's illegal. And I didn't have a lot of seed capital, as they say.”

“You don't even sound repentant,” Nicki said. Her tone was leaden with accusation.

“About what? Surviving?”

“About being irresponsible.”

Brad laughed. “Oh,
responsibility
. And who are we supposed to be responsible for? Do you think that old Chas back there felt responsible for earning money for college or for a new car, and then ended up bleeding to death on a cold floor? Life isn't about responsibility, Nicki. Life is about
living,
and doing whatever it takes to make sure you end the day the way you want to end it. It's why I'll never go back to prison. You own nothing in that place, not even your life. Every day in prison is just another routine, highlighted by psychos who want to stick you with either a knife or a dick.”

Nicki listened to his rant, mesmerized not so much by his message as by his commitment to it. It's what she liked most about him;
loved
most about him. He lived in a world where there was no doubt. You decided what you were going to do, and then you did it; if that pissed people off, then too bad for the pissed-off people. She marveled how anyone could talk about things that were so clearly wrong, yet make them sound so right. Every time she tried to form an argument in her head, it ended up sounding like an empty platitude.

“So, now you know what an asshole I am,” Brad said, breaking yet another thoughtful silence. “You still up for the weird adventure?”

She looked at him long and hard, searching for the hint that he was something other than what he portrayed himself to be. What she saw was a little boy in a man's body, a kid who never discovered his own childhood and instead constructed a world where breaking laws was fine so long as you broke them for the right reason. He was Robin Hood meets Peter Pan. She had no business staying here with him. This was the road to ruin, the road to hell.

“I'm up for it all,” she said.

But she was looking sicker and sicker. Maybe not so bad that strangers would notice, but Brad could see it around her eyes.

Chapter Twenty

C
arter didn't even slow his stride as he showed his badge to the cop out front and ducked under the crime-scene tape. The name tag over the deputy's pocket read Ryan, and he seemed to be pissed that he'd drawn guard duty.

“Whoa,” Ryan said. “Just where do you think you're going?”

“I'm with the district attorney's office,” he said.

The deputy scowled and took a closer look at the badge. “That says you're from New York.”

Carter didn't argue. “That's right. My daughter was allegedly involved in this crime, and I understand that you people think she killed someone.” On the other side of the door, Carter could just barely make out the sounds of an ongoing argument.

“What's your name?”

“Carter Janssen. I'm Nicolette Janssen's father.” In his first stroke of positive luck, Carter had been only thirty-five minutes away when he'd gotten the call from Michaels.

“I see.” Jackson Ryan looked at the identification wallet one more time, as if to assure himself that he was talking to the right guy. “You'll need to speak with Sheriff Hines.”

“I'd love to. Is that him there?” He nodded to the thickset man in the khaki uniform.

“Yes, but he's busy.”

“Don't you think he'd want to talk to me?”

Deputy Ryan considered that. “Wait here.”

“Thank you.”

The deputy walked through the front doors. Carter followed two steps behind.

The old man locked in verbal combat with the sheriff looked like hell, red-faced and madder than a hornet. His left eye was black and swollen. Spittle flew from the old man's mouth as he spoke. “I swear to God, Frank, if you accuse me of being senile one more time, I'm gonna punch you in the nose.”

Sheriff Hines seemed amused as he held out his palms to ward off the old man's attack. “I'm not saying you're senile, Ben. I'm saying you're drunk.”

“And I'm telling you there was a tape in that machine this morning!”

“Okay, then. What happened to it?”

“I don't know!”

Another uniformed officer, this one a woman in her twenties who hadn't quite found the right combination of macho and feminine to really be attractive, joined the conversation. “Mr. Maestri,” she said.

The old man turned away from the sheriff to face the deputy.

“Is it possible that the robbers went back there and took the tape?”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “I'd have seen that. The only person who could've taken the tape is the sheriff here.”

Behind the old man, a team of four uniformed cops sifted through debris and photographed the scene. They all stopped working at Ben Maestri's comment and looked up, clearly expecting an emotional show from the sheriff. Carter thought he saw the cop's back stiffen, but otherwise, he seemed to take it in stride.

Carter asked, “Is there a back door?”

All eyes turned toward the newcomer. “Who the hell is this?” the sheriff demanded.

Deputy Ryan jumped a little. “Oh. Uh, excuse me, Sheriff, but this man here says that he's the father of one of the perpetrators.”

“Alleged perpetrators,” Carter corrected. “There's no way she did any of this.”

“What's he doing here?”

“I can speak for myself,” Carter said. He produced his badge again, and handed it to Hines. “I'm Assistant District Attorney Carter Janssen, from Pitcairn County, New York.”

The lady cop tried to get a look at the credentials, but Hines snapped the case shut before she had a chance, and handed it back to Carter. “What are you doing here?”

Carter passed the badge case to Darla Sweet. “My daughter is a runaway,” he explained. “I was on my way south when I got a call from a colleague in Virginia that you had put out a multistate BOLO for her.”

“So, you just happened to be in the neighborhood?” Hines asked, looking skeptical.

“Something like that. But I'm here to tell you that you're barking up the wrong tree.” He accepted Darla's return of his badge case.

“And why is that?” Hines asked.

“She'd never hurt a soul, Sheriff. She's a model student.” Carter recognized how naïve that sounded, but it was the truth.

“A model student
and
a runaway?” the sheriff baited. “Unusual combination.”

Carter had been expecting a little professional deference here, or at least a moderate show of sympathy, but he got none of it from Sheriff Hines. The temper regulator in the back of his brain began to twitch. “There are extenuating circumstances,” he said.

“Extenuating enough to justify murder?” There was a hardness to Hines's eyes that boiled Carter's blood. He'd dealt with dozens of these God-complex cops over the years, and there wasn't a single one of them he didn't hate.

Carter didn't rise to the bait. “You have a witness?”

“Right here,” said the old man.

Carter offered his hand. “Carter Janssen.”

“Ben Maestri.” He smelled like a dirty rug.

“Tell me what you saw,” Carter said. His tone carried an implied “please.”

“The hell are you doing?” the sheriff said. “This ain't New York, Counselor. You got no jurisdiction here.”

“And if this is your only witness, you've got no case. I heard you say yourself that he's drunk.”

“That don't mean I didn't see what I saw,” Ben said. “There's a videotape of it, too, 'cept Barney Fife here lost it.”

Hines ignored Ben, while Darla touched the old man's arm. The gesture said that this was neither the time nor the place for aggression.

Carter's stomach flipped at the thought. “You've got a video of my daughter shooting the clerk?” It was beyond rationality that such could be the case.

“Apparently he never loaded the machine,” Darla said.

“Don't you start, too!” Ben yelled.

Everyone ignored him. The sheriff said, “Mr. Janssen, I know this is difficult for you, and you know that you have no right to be here. You're interfering. Still, you need to know that it's more than what Ben saw or didn't see. I've also got fingerprints belonging to Nicolette Janssen and to Bradley Ward—”

“You can't possibly have fingerprints on Nicki. She's never been fingerprinted.”

The sheriff glanced to Darla, who opened the plastic cover on her clipboard and found the applicable notation. “Big Top Elementary School. Looks like she was in the sixth grade.”

That was ridiculous. Nicki had never been involved in the justice system. Then he remembered. He'd had her fingerprinted as part of the frenzy a few years back about kids being kidnapped. The police sold the program to the community as a way to keep kids safe, when in fact its real purpose was to facilitate identification of human remains. It had been Jenny's idea; Carter had never been comfortable with the whole notion. “Those records aren't in any database.”

Darla answered this one. “No, sir, they're not. But since we already had word to be on the lookout for these two in particular, and since I already got a positive ID on the photos that went out on the wire this morning, it was merely a matter of confirming.”

It just was not possible. “Maybe they just stopped in for a soda or something, and they left their prints,” Carter offered. “There must be thousands of fingerprints in a place like this.”

“The fingerprints were in blood, Mr. Janssen.” Darla delivered the news softly.

Carter opened his mouth to argue, but he had nothing to say. He just stared, his mind unable to grasp it all.

“I'll have to ask you to step outside now, sir,” Hines said, and he motioned to Deputy Ryan.

The deputy from outside put his hand on Carter's arm. Carter didn't resist, but he didn't move, either. He looked around the ravaged room at the toppled racks and the blood on the floor. Mercifully, the body had already been removed. “Nicki could not have done this,” he said. “She's not capable of this kind of violence.”

“We don't suspect otherwise, sir,” Hines said. Carter's eyes lit up at what he thought might be a glimmer of hope, but it snuffed itself when the sheriff said, “But she's an accessory for sure. In an aggravated capital murder. If you have any idea where she is, you'd be wise to help us find her before this really spirals out of control.”

Carter knew the implications. For the difference in penalty between capital murder and accessory before the fact, Nicki might have pulled the trigger herself.

“Sheriff,” he said, “if I knew where she was, none of this would have happened.”

* * *

“This isn't good,” Brad said.

Nicki stirred at the sound of his words, unaware that she had fallen asleep. They'd just rounded a sand dune and were approaching the Matoaka Fishing Pier when they got a good look at what was causing the traffic backup. A hundred yards ahead, a frenetic display of blue lights blocked the roadway.

“An accident?” Nicki asked.

Brad squinted to see. “I don't know. Looks more like a roadblock to me.”

“Searching for us?”

“What do you think?” That sharpness had returned to his voice. Brad slapped the turn signal and turned into the parking lot of the fishing pier. The wind-ravaged sign boasted the best crab cakes and onion rings in the Outer Banks.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know. Something. Ask me what we're
not
going to do. I have a better answer for that.”

Attached to the fishing pier was modern-looking video rental store. Not a national chain, but the neon sign announced that tourists were welcome.

“We need current information,” Brad said. “I'm gonna chat up the folks inside. You still hungry?”

It was nearly four o'clock by Nicki's watch, and at the mention of food, she remembered how famished she'd been before the incident at the Quik Mart. “I'm starving,” she said, and then she felt guilty for even thinking about something as mundane as food.

As they walked up the ramp to the front door of the fishing pier restaurant, Nicki couldn't decide if the combined aromas of salt air and fish were appetizing or repulsive. The rain drenched her clothing, but without the capacity to run, she just endured. Brad made no comment as he matched her slow gait.

The floor tiles popped under their feet as they crossed the sagging lobby, past the ancient Pac-Man machine in the corner on the right, and the racks of fishing supplies on the left, toward the door with the sign,
EAT HERE
.

Ceiling fans churned in a futile attempt to draw cooler air into the dingy dining room. Given the hour, precious few people were eating. In fact, of the half-dozen patrons bellied up to the bar, not a single one was munching anything but alcohol.

A busty woman in a B
EAT
A
RMY
T-shirt shot them a snaggletoothed grin as they entered. “You gonna want food?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Nicki said. She added a smile as an afterthought.

“I'm Mandy,” the woman said. “Just sit anywhere and I'll be out to take your order in a shake.”

The walk and the stress had taken a worse toll than Nicki had feared. She felt utterly wiped by the time they got to the first table, but Brad didn't want to sit there. “Let's go where we can watch out the front window,” he said. Now that they were inside, he moved quickly, leaving Nicki to fend for herself.

By the time she joined him, fifteen seconds later, he was watching the traffic. “This is gonna be tough,” he said. “They're gonna have pictures of me, and with the traffic moving this slow, they must be looking inside every vehicle. I don't know how—”

He clipped off his words as Mandy approached with two menus. “That's some storm, ain't it?” she said. Between the water on the outside of the windows and the condensation on the inside, it was tough to see anything out there.

“That's some traffic,” Brad countered. “Looks like there's a big accident up the road.”

Mandy flipped the menus on the table as if she were dealing a couple of cards. “That ain't an accident. That's a roadblock. We got us a manhunt for a couple of killers. Robbed a convenience store up in Essex, killed the clerk. Terrible thing.”

Nicki gasped before she could stop it.
What about the videotape?

The gasp brought a look from Brad, but Mandy didn't seem to notice. “I heard they was looking for two kids. A couple. A boy and a girl.” She paused and her eyes narrowed. “Couldn't be you two, could it?”

The inside of Nicki's mouth turned to chalk.

Brad smiled. He rubbed his chin dramatically and pretended to think it through. “Let's see, what's today, Saturday? The kidnapping was on Monday, the arson on Tuesday, the bank robbery on Wednesday . . . Nope, we're not scheduled to rob the convenience store till next Thursday.”

If Mandy saw the horror in Nicki's eyes, she didn't show it. What she did show was genuine amusement. “Okay, smarty, do you know what you want?”

“Are they really the best crab cakes in the Outer Banks?”

The waitress winked. “Guaranteed to be the best in the restaurant, anyway.”

“Sold,” Brad said.

The waitress wrote something on her pad, then turned to Nicki. “Are you all right, missy? You don't look so good.”

Nicki forced a smile. “Summer flu,” she said. She'd never been any good at lying and she knew that Mandy must have seen right through her. “How about just a Diet Coke and an extra fork for his crab cakes?”