Nick of Time (36 page)

“I'm so sorry,” Brad choked, not lifting his head. “I'm so, so sorry.”

She petted his hair. “It's okay,” she whispered. “It will all be okay.”

Brad pushed himself away and swiped at his eyes. “Promise me you'll leave me here,” he said.

“Brad—”

“No. You don't understand. There's a way for you to live. There's a way for you to live for both of us.”

“What are you talking about?”

He paused long enough to control his breathing. “That wasn't the police on the phone,” he said. “It was your father.”

Nicki scowled. “But you said—”

“I know what I said. I'm sorry. I was pissed and I lied. But now I'm telling you. They've found the real killer from the Quik Mart. You don't have to hide anymore. You don't have to be a part of this at all. You can walk out of here and go right home.”

“Home to what?” She felt light-headed. The news he delivered seemed too large for her to process.

“Your future,” Brad said. “Any future. Whatever you've got. You don't need to be here anymore.”

“But you're here,” she said. How could there be anything more?

“Come on,” he said, holding out his hand. “I'll walk you out.”

Nicki pulled her hand away and retreated to the far end of the sofa. “And then what?”

“And then . . . whatever.”

Something was going unsaid and it scared her. Her father had done something. She could feel it. He'd worked some sort of a deal. “What did he say to you?”

“Huh?”

“My father. What did he say to you?”

“I just told you.”

Nicki was unconvinced. “No. No way. You said I could live for both of us. What did he tell you to do?”

Brad tried to settle her down. “Come on, Nicki, there's nothing—”

“I don't want them,” she said. “I don't want your lungs. Don't even consider it.” The thought sickened her.

He looked surprised that she'd put it together so quickly. “Look, Nicki, it's more complicated than you think.”

“No.”

“Listen to me, okay?”

“No.”

“I owe you this.”

She looked at him as if he'd grown a new head. “You
owe
me? God, what are we, vampires?”

Brad reached for her, but his gut snatched him back. “You don't understand,” he grunted. “It really is my fault. That's the rest of what your father told me. Another set of donor organs came available today, but because you're with me, they took them back. You lost another chance at life because of me.”

“No.”

“Yes. What, you think I'm making this up?”

Nicki took a deep breath. She had a lot to say. “It's not because of you. That's what I keep trying to tell you. It's because of me. I'm doing exactly what I chose to do. You gave me God only knows how many chances to walk away, and I said no to all of them. I won't let you shoulder the burden of this. It's not fair.”

Brad was close to begging. “But you're a better person than I am, Nicki. You're kinder. You care more. You deserve the chance.”

“You're not spare parts, Brad! I won't let you force them to shoot you down.”

“Then I'll do it myself,” Brad said. He raised the pistol to his temple and closed his eyes.

Chapter Thirty-eight

C
arter told the story of Nicki's innocence as quickly as he could, but Commander Donnelly seemed unmoved.

“We need official confirmation, you realize,” he said.

Carter understood. “Should be easy enough. Just a phone call away. But I need to get the information to my daughter, so she can know that she's off the hook for the murders.”

“I would if I could, but Dougherty yanked the phone out of the wall, and ever since your call, he's turned off the cell phone.”

Carter acknowledged the rebuke and let it go. “How about a loudspeaker?” he asked.

“So you
were
the one on the phone,” Donnelly said. That had been a test, apparently. “What did you talk about?”

“I told him what I just told you. But he wouldn't let me speak with Nicki.”

“I don't buy it,” Donnelly said. “We were watching it all right here. He got pretty damned agitated.”

Carter was too ashamed of himself to repeat the suggested suicide. “He's a volatile guy, I suppose. Plus, I probably wasn't as diplomatic as I might have been.”

Donnelly's scowl said he wasn't buying, but as he opened his mouth to say more, the crowd around the kitchen table erupted with excitement.

“Uh-oh,” someone said. “This doesn't look good.”

Carter followed the commander to the peer at the monitor. Nicki and Brad were yelling at each other.

“They were just sitting and hugging and this happened,” a cop explained.

They watched as Brad struggled to his feet and became even more animated, gesticulating wildly. He looked like he might be crying.

Donnelly said, “Muhammad, tell all units to stand ready. Looks like things are getting emotional.”

The radio operator did as he was told.

Carter couldn't take his eyes off the screen. His stomach churned from anxiety, and he wanted to look away, but he couldn't. “Please don't let anything happen to her,” he prayed.

Things seemed to settle down again, and then Brad made them all jump when he raised the pistol from his lap and pressed it against his head.

* * *

Nicki lunged from the sofa. “No!”

Brad stiff-armed her and spun away, landing on his knees on the floor. His stomach muscles tightened to compensate, launching a spear of agony that shot all the way up to his jaw. He hoped that Nicki wouldn't watch.

“Brad, don't! Please, please don't do this!”

Brad clamped his eyes tighter and willed his finger to find the trigger. Just a little pressure. Not much at all. He could make this work, and when he was done, nothing else would ever matter again.

It was a
good
thing, he told himself. It was the
right
thing.

“Brad,
please,
” Nicki begged. She dropped to the floor to be closer to him. “Not today. Not here. You can always do it later if things get too bad.”

He heard the words, but he tried to push them from his brain. They were meaningless. Nicki didn't understand the stakes. She didn't understand that this was the one time when he could do this and it would actually
mean
something. Sure, she could talk about turning down the donation of his organs—she could say that to his face, and maybe even mean it in her heart as she was saying it, but when it was all done, she'd come to her senses. He knew she would.

Just a little bit of pressure. That's all it would take. His hand trembled, and he felt tears on his cheeks. Just a little more . . .

Nicki kissed him. With his eyes closed, he didn't see it coming, but at the instant a bullet should have been leaving the muzzle of his pistol, he felt her lips on his.

“Then take me, too,” she said. “One bullet and we'll go together.”

Brad opened his eyes. Nicki's face was too close for him to see it clearly, but he recognized the look in her eyes. It was her kind look, her loving look. The look that made his stomach flip even before there'd been a hole drilled through it.

“I love you,” she whispered.

Brad closed his eyes again. He didn't want to hear those words. He wanted to do this and get it over with. If she didn't have the good sense to get out of the way, then that wasn't his problem.

“I love you,” she repeated, and kissed him again. A surge of energy shot through his body; it was a feeling he'd never experienced. A chill, maybe, but something better. Something more intimate.

Pulling the pistol away from his ear, he wrapped his arms around Nicki and gave himself up to her kiss. A new passion welled from his soul, filling his chest and then his head. It was a wonderful feeling, a liberating feeling. It was as if the darkness parted and revealed for him a glimpse of what the world was supposed to be. He let the pistol slide to the floor.

Grasping her face in his hands, he looked into her eyes, and all the pain and the fear were gone.

Then something on the floor behind her caught his attention.

Nicki sensed that something was wrong. “What is it?” she asked, following his eye line.

Brad scowled as he tried to make sense of a piece of black spaghetti on the floor. Snatching the gun back into his hand, he rose to his knees and moved in for a closer look. He had to get within two feet before he understood. “It's a goddamn camera,” he said, his voice leaden with disbelief. “They've been watching everything we do!”

* * *

The Mellings' kitchen erupted in noise. “Oh shit!” someone shouted. “We're made. He sees the camera.”

The last thing they saw in the television screen before it went blank was the enormous muzzle of Brad's pistol.

* * *

To his left, Trooper Matt Hayes saw Luis fumbling for the transmit button on his portable radio. Before he could get to it, someone else on the channel yelled, “Shots fired! Shots fired! All units report status.”

While Luis announced to the world that the side-three sniper team was unhurt, Matt settled in behind his scope to do business. It wouldn't be long now.

* * *

Nicki screamed, thinking Brad had gone through with the suicide. Even when her brain had reconciled with her eyes, and she realized that Brad was still alive, she didn't comprehend what had just happened.

Brad's fury had returned. “Those bastards!” he yelled. “They've been
watching
us!” He thought of the cops who'd been standing outside when he opened the door to release Gramma, and now he understood how they knew to be there; why they seemed so calm when the door opened up.

“Goddammit!” he yelled, and he fired a shot into the ceiling.

Nicki rose to settle him down, but as she tried, the room tilted sideways. “Come on, baby, don't—”

A new sound from outside startled them, and as they turned, the curtains jumped as the front window broke. A smoking canister sailed into the room, skipping across the floor in two quick hops before settling against the wall closest to them. Nicki felt her lungs close, and she had the sensation that someone had poured ground glass into her eyes.

Just like that, someone had stolen all the air.

“Tear gas,” Brad growled, and despite his wound, he darted to the corner where the smoking canister lay, picked it up, and hurled it back toward the window. The canister was hot—like a pot on the stove is hot—and he yelled and cursed as the skin on his palm blistered. “Shit!”

The hole in his belly made his throw an awkward, ugly thing. The canister barely made it as far as the window before it got hung up in the curtains and fell to the floor.

“Close your eyes!” he yelled. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and off, handing it to Nicki. “Breathe through this,” he said, and he pressed it against her face.

Nicki didn't respond, couldn't respond as the gas inflamed her sinuses and throat. She felt consciousness slipping. They needed to get out of there. To stay was to die, if not by the onslaught of bullets, then by suffocation. She remembered her doctor telling her to be careful around cigarette smoke and other pollutants. He told her that she'd be more sensitive than others.

Brad knew they had to go. The siege was over now. He'd never even considered the use of tear gas as the first wave of their assault. It had never even occurred to him that he wouldn't have a chance to shoot it out with a team of armed men swarming in through the front and back doors simultaneously. How foolish he'd been for
not
thinking about it. From the cops' perspective, it was immeasurably safer to have their prey come to them than the other way around.

But Nicki wasn't walking anywhere. She wasn't
crawling
anywhere. With barely enough strength to stand a few minutes ago, she looked hardly alive now, every breath an exercise in torture. He knew how bad it was for himself; he couldn't imagine the agony she was having to endure.

“We're getting you out of here,” he said.

Blood spilled from his belly wound now, cascading down his leg under his trousers, painting a meandering crimson line down onto the carpet. He dreaded the thought of what was coming as he kneeled in front of Nicki, preparing to hoist her onto his shoulder to carry her outside. “Just a little more,” he said, and to give himself the use of both hands, he let Ben Maestri's pistol fall to the carpet.

The front wall erupted in flame. Brad guessed that the tear gas canister had heated the fabric of the drapes to its ignition point, and once ignited, the fire spread as if fed by gasoline. Flames leaped from the floor to the ceiling in the front of the room, and from there, they spread across the ceiling, igniting everything in their path.

Brad had never seen anything like it. In the time it took for him to wonder at the speed of the fire's spread, the temperature in the room shot from merely stifling in the summer heat to untenable, radiating from the front wall and the ceiling. Brad pulled Nicki down onto the floor, where the temperature was survivable, but the concentration of gas the greatest.

Sputtering and choking to grab a breath of air, Brad vomited, but paid it no mind. They had to get out of the house. Now. And the front door was no longer an option.

Nicki had gone completely limp, as inanimate as a dress-up doll, incapable of aiding her own rescue. Brad tied his T-shirt around her nose and mouth, hoping to filter out some of the rancid atmosphere, and then wrapped his right arm around her chest, under her arms—a hold that he vaguely remembered from a YMCA water rescue course. Crawling on his wounded side, he began to drag her across the carpet toward the kitchen and its door to freedom. It was an agonizing, impossibly slow journey.

After fifteen seconds yielded only a few feet of distance, it occurred to him that he faced a far more gruesome death than he'd ever imagined.

* * *

Carter felt his sanity slipping. They'd been
so close
to a peaceful resolution. Brad had put his gun down, for God's sake! Now that the command post had been blinded, a violent outcome was guaranteed. Through the garbled mess of the radio traffic, he heard excited cries of shots fired, and here in the tiny kitchen, everyone was shouting orders at once.

One urgent cry cut through the commotion like a torpedo through water: “Team one to command, we've got heavy fire showing in the front of the building.”

Carter jumped at the words. “What does that mean?” he asked the room. When no one answered, he grabbed Donnelly's arm. “What kind of fire? Are people shooting?”

“No,” Donnelly said. “The building's on fire.” He turned back to his team at the table. “Alert fire and rescue. Have them start units this way.”

“Wait.” Carter pulled him back. “Nicki's lungs can't take that kind of assault. Are you getting them out?”

Donnelly's look was cold and unreadable. “We'll do what we can if they surrender, but we're cops, not firefighters. I'm sorry.”

“But they'll die in there.”

* * *

Trooper Hayes couldn't believe the speed with which the fire grew. At first, there was only the white mist of the gas canister, but then, out of nowhere, it seemed, the smoke turned black and started to roll out of the far side of the building. After he heard the sound of breaking glass, all hell broke loose. Literally. A fireball rolled out of the front of the building and into the air, igniting the roof in the process.

All in less than a minute.

His earpiece popped as someone broke squelch. “Team one to team three, the front of the building is impassible. If they make a move, it'll be on your side. Keep your eyes open.”

“Shouldn't we at least try and rescue them?” Luis asked.

“They promised to shoot anyone they saw,” Matt said. “They're the ones who set the rules, not us.”
They're dead,
Matt thought. Or if they weren't, they would be in another couple of minutes. At least the old woman and the boy were safe.

* * *

Brad moved like an inchworm on his side, each cycle of arms and knees taking him only a foot and a half and lighting an even hotter fire in his belly. He yelled out against the pain, if only to fight off his own approaching wave of unconsciousness.

Finally, he reached the kitchen. He kicked open the swinging door and heaved himself and Nicki across the threshold onto the cool tile floor. The atmosphere in here was better than it had been in the front room, at least a hundred degrees cooler, and the air was nearly breathable.

But it was getting bad quickly. Looking back toward the living room, he saw the roiling cloud of black smoke pushing through the opened kitchen door. He kicked it shut again, but it was too late. Through swollen, teary eyes, he watched in horror as the killing cloud rolled across the ceiling and banked toward the floor. Beside him, Nicki stirred, barking out a horrid, pain-racked cough.