Nathan’s Run

Chapter 16

Nathan sat impassively on the sofa in the family room, using the nuclear-powered remote to thumb endlessly through the channels—all 153 of them. How on earth did these people ever decide on what to watch? Half of what he found was old crap that he’d already seen a dozen times before, and the rest was a collection of infomercials, foreign-language variety shows, news and the “life sucks” shows hosted by Phil, Oprah, Geraldo, Jenny, Sally and anybody else who could convince a group of weirdos to go on television. Even the news about him had gotten boring, with sad-faced anchor people saying the same things over and over. He did note, however, much to his relief, that at least one of the stations had found a better picture of him, the one out of his fifth-grade yearbook.

Partly because he had been raised right, as his dad used to say, but mostly out of sheer boredom, he’d laundered the sheets from the master bedroom. It wasn’t right to leave a place without making the bed. Especially if you broke a window to get in while your hosts were on vacation. He was also careful to clean up during his ongoing eating binge. He was almost sorry he’d found the Pepperidge Farm Cookies and vanilla ice cream in the freezer. Absent anyone telling him he couldn’t have another helping, he’d pretty much obliterated the contents of both containers.

Despite his desire to be a good houseguest (breaker?), he couldn’t bring himself to do anything with the JDC jumpsuit, which still lay where he had shed it on the floor of the hall bathroom. That would remain behind closed doors at least until he left. He did feel sorry, though, for whoever would have to clean up the mess.

It took enormous self-control to keep from executing his plan early. While he realized the importance of darkness to his chances of success, this was July, and it didn’t get dark until almost nine, for crying out loud. But wait he would, because impatience spelled a trip back to the JDC, or maybe even worse. If all it took was a little patience to keep that from happening, he could endure the boredom.

As he flipped mindlessly through the channels, his thoughts turned once again to the trouble he was in. He was developing a new perspective on it all. He was beginning to accept his situation as an unchangeable fact that had to be dealt with, rather than a series of events to be regretted. Okay, so he’d killed a guy and that was bad, but it really was an accident, and it really was in self-defense. In his heart, Nathan was certain that he only intended to make Ricky jump back. It might take a while for him to sleep through the nightmares of the blood and the noise, but there wasn’t a lick of remorse in his heart for protecting himself.

He conceded, however, that running away from the JDC might have been a stupid thing to do. It sure made him look guilty, and in retrospect, with Ricky dead, he probably didn’t have to worry about anyone else trying to kill him. So, why had he run? The best answer he could think of was the simple truth: because he was scared, and most important of all, because the opportunity presented itself. Given those circumstances, who wouldn’t run? And now that he was out, staying out seemed more important than… well, anything.

What really surprised him was how quickly his list of crimes grew. He had already added burglary—he supposed that’s what it was called—to the list, and within the next few hours, he was planning to steal a car. By the time he reached Canada, he figured he’d have to burgle at least two more times, and steal at least two more cars. No doubt about it, if he got caught, he’d be in deep shit.

The only answer, then, was not to get caught.

He stopped his tour of the channels to watch a couple of minutes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, until he remembered how it ended, and he started flashing through the channels once again.

It had been a long time since Michaels had heard Hackner so agitated. “Calm down, Jed. He was just telling you his opinion. You want the guy to lie?” Jed’s conversation with Johnstone had put a burr six inches up his butt, and he was taking it out on his lieutenant over the phone.

“Opinion my ass, Warren! This guy is a menace to the very kids he’s supposed to be protecting. He couldn’t care less about anybody in there!”

If it had been anyone else taking up his time with such irrelevant bullshit, Michaels would have lost his temper long ago. But it was Jed, and Jed didn’t go off the deep end very often. Must have struck a nerve, Michaels told himself. Something in Jed’s past maybe, when he was a kid. Maybe an old man who hit first and asked questions later. Or a buddy who’d gotten the shaft. Who knew the baggage people carried around with them? Michaels decided to cut his sergeant some slack.

“Okay, Jed, accepting the fact that he’s a menace, what would you have me do about it?”

“Get his fat ass fired!”

“I can’t do that. He doesn’t work for me.”

“Jesus Christ, Warren, don’t you see…”

“Jed… Jed…,” Michaels tried to interrupt. “Goddammit, Jed, shut up!” That did it. “Listen, I understand that Johnstone’s a hateful son of a bitch, and I’ll stipulate that he’s a menace to the people under his control. But the fact of the matter is, we’re already up to our ass in alligators over the kid’s escape, we’ve turned up exactly zero worthwhile leads, and I simply don’t have the time to worry about the staffing of the Juvenile Detention Center right now. And, I might add, neither do you.”

When Hackner didn’t respond, Michaels knew that he’d made his point. “Now, then,” he continued, “do we have any evidence at all to corroborate the Bailey kid’s self-defense story?”

Jed sighed. “I just got finished telling you—”

“Yeah, I know, that Johnstone’s a bad guy,” Michaels finished for him. “What about Ricky Harris, what did Johnstone say about him?”

Hackner clearly didn’t want to answer. “He said he was a model employee.” Jed’s reply was little more than a mumble.

“And his personnel jacket?”

“Same thing.”

“Face it, Jed,” Michaels concluded. “We’re still looking for a murderer. I want to give the kid the benefit of the doubt just as much as you do, but they taught us both in cop school to let the evidence guide our conclusions, not the other way around. And frankly, right now, the evidence against Nathan Bailey is pretty damning.”

Jed wouldn’t let it go. “I’m telling you, Warren, there’s something else here—something we’re missing. We don’t have any evidence as to motive. All we’ve got is a dead body and a very plausible story from the boy. You believe him as much as I do. You said so yourself this morning.”

This really wasn’t going anywhere. “Tell you what, Jed, let’s split this case into two parts. The first part: we’ve got to bring the kid into custody. His motivation for killing Harris doesn’t affect that. Once we’ve got him back, we’ll have all the time in the world to prepare the case against him. That’s the time to hang Johnstone out in the breeze—and Harris, too—if that’s what’s appropriate. Fair enough?”

Hackner was quiet again, as though he wasn’t sure whether he had won or lost. “I guess it’ll have to do. But I’m going to dig deeper into this guy Ricky.”

Warren smiled. Jed was too hardheaded to answer with a simple okay. “Now that that’s out of the way, we’ve had the uncle’s place under surveillance, I trust?”

Jed was all business again. “Yep. Not a sign of either one of them.”

“Think maybe they skipped town together?”

“I guess that’s possible, but considering their history, I don’t think it’s likely. The uncle’s the whole reason he ran away, remember?”

Michaels thought it was a long shot as well, but he had to pursue it as an option. One of the most basic principles of investigative police work was to eliminate the obvious before searching for the obscure. And as unlikely as it might have been for Nathan to return to the uncle he purported to hate, it was a place that he knew, and where he had roots. It would have been irresponsible not to surveil the house. “So, where else might he have gone?”

Jed answered succinctly, “I can’t think of a single place where he might not have gone.”

Michaels conceded that the question was ridiculous. If the uncle were deleted from the equation, Nathan had no one left in his life. And sad as that was, it left him with limitless options. Owing allegiance to no one, without so much as an obligation to phone anyone to say he was all right, the entire world belonged to this fugitive from justice; his options were limited only by the breadth of his imagination and his cunning. If he were an adult, these conditions would add up to the most difficult type of search. Since he was just a kid—hell, Michaels didn’t know what that meant. Certainly there were options available to adults that were not available to children, but on the other hand, children sort of blended into a crowd, and to a large degree, they all looked alike. Not feature for feature, of course, but human nature was such that people didn’t notice children’s features. Police were fortunate if people even remembered the presence of children in a crowd, let alone any specifics. Consequently, a child on the run could have options that would never be available to an adult.

The bottom line was this: They had no way of quickly focusing their search.

Dr. Baker’s day had begun nearly eight hours ago with a SIDS baby who had arrived by ambulance, unnecessarily, as it turned out. The baby had likely been dead for hours, already showing signs of lividity and rigor mortis when he was transferred from the ambulance cot onto the gurney in the ER. Even the medics had known that there was no hope, but they weren’t paid to deliver that kind of news to frightened, desperate young parents. As medical director, that was Baker’s job.

Life and death were his business, and this was neither the first nor the last time that he would hold the hands of sobbing adults, as he sewed his own emotions together with a thin suture of professional aloofness. Still, it was a shitty way to start a day.

As of twenty minutes ago, however, the world had been brought back into balance as he delivered a very fortunate young man into this world via emergency cesarean section. Not one to show emotion on the job, he was self-conscious of the tears in his eyes as he handed the wailing infant over to his grateful mother. Somehow, it was easier to let the emotions go on the good news than on the bad. For Tad Baker, it was what had kept him coming to work every day for the past eight years.

Between the day’s two momentous events was an endless stream of broken bones and sliced flesh, all of which had to be handled in due course, prioritized in order of the injuries’ threat to the longterm health of their owners. As he slipped a set of x-rays into the clips on the viewer, he frowned, instantly regretting the decision of the triage nurse to put this case at the end of the line. Ordinarily, broken fingers were, on the ER’s scale, a low-priority injury, but this guy was the exception. The ghostly white hand on the screen before him was more than just broken; it had been mangled. The pain must have been excruciating, Tad thought. How odd that he would have sat so patiently in the waiting room for—he referred to the admissions chart—four hours! Cringing at the potential liability an event like this posed to his hospital, he made a mental note to follow through on it later. It was, after all, not the sort of note one would want to have in writing, in case Mr.—he referred to the chart again—Bailey turned out to be the litigious sort.

Putting on his best clinician’s face, Dr. Tad (as he was called by his staff) slid back the curtain and addressed for the first time the occupant of Bed Four. “Good afternoon, Mr. Bailey,” Tad greeted his patient. “I’m Dr. Baker. I see by your chart that you’ve had an accident. Hand injury, huh?” Mr. Bailey looked awful. He was drawn and pale, like someone who was fast approaching the limit of his pain tolerance.

Mark jumped at the suddenness of the doctor’s entrance, mustering only a wan smile in response to Baker’s clinically cheerful greeting. The intense throbbing in his hand had transported itself all the way back to his shoulder blades now, and lighthearted conversation was no longer in his repertoire.

Tad reached gently out toward his patient. “May I see it, please?” he asked, nodding toward the hand. The look he received as his reply told him that Mark Bailey had no plans to let anyone within five feet of his injury. Tad softened his voice nearly to a whisper. “I promise I won’t move anything around, okay? I’ll be very, very gentle.”

Mark studied the doctor’s face for a few seconds, then gently passed his right hand over, carefully supported by his left. “It really hurts, Doc,” he said.

“I bet it does,” Tad agreed. “I’ve seen your x-rays. It’s really quite a significant injury you’ve sustained. How did it happen?”

The first time that question had been asked, by the triage nurse, Mark had been caught off guard, and he had stammered clumsily through the poorly formulated lie. In the ensuing hours of his wait, he had worked through most of the details, actually practicing the answer out loud once, albeit at a whisper. “I was changing out the brakes on my car when the jack slipped,” he explained. Smooth as silk, he commended himself.

Tad winced at the thought. “Didn’t have it up on blocks, huh?”

“Nah, I was too stupid to do that,” Mark said. “You know. I was in a hurry; took shortcuts. Same old story I guess you guys hear every day.”

Tad smiled noncommittally, knowing right away that the story was a lie. First of all, the fingers were still on the hand; a highly unusual outcome for that particular scenario. For another, the angulation of the fractures was all wrong. An impact from a single heavy object should project a uniform force more or less perpendicular to the plane of the body part being injured. In Mark Bailey’s case, the displacement of the bone ends was longitudinal in the case of the first digit, and lateral in the case of the fourth.

The fact that patients lied to him—and many of them did—was typically not a source of great concern to Tad. Quite often, he had to admit that if he were in the position of the patient, he, too, would probably try to float a story in hopes of mitigating the embarrassment. Nine times out of ten, he played Mr. Gullible. People had the right, after all, to live their lives any way they wanted to, and it wasn’t his place to interfere with their fantasies, so long as they weren’t harmful to others.

But harmfulness was the key. In the medical world, as in the legal, the good of the many outweighed the privacy of the one. When a gunshot case or a case of suspected child abuse came to him, he was legally bound to report it to the police, even over the objections of the patient. The same was true for knife wounds and other acts of criminal brutality, but only when there was clear, irrefutable evidence that such acts were the source of the injury. While few doctors argued the spirit of the law, the way it was crafted put them in a very difficult position, because the burden of proof ultimately fell on the physician. Overreacting and reporting a case based merely on one’s supposition of foul play would place a doctor in violation of the Hippocratic Oath if his or her suspicions proved groundless. On the other hand, ignoring a bona fide criminal act would place a doctor in violation of the criminal statutes of the Commonwealth of Virginia. In either case, the doctor’s license to practice medicine would be at stake.

There was no doubt that Mark Bailey’s injuries were the result of something other than the causes described by the patient. In Tad’s judgment, these fingers had been broken intentionally, by someone who seemed talented at doing such things. This judgment was not something he could prove, however; nor could he ignore his suspicions. He needed to delve a little further into the details—not because the law required it, but because it was the right thing to do. Finger-breaking was not a talent he preferred among his neighbors.

“So your hand got caught under the wheel itself?” Tad asked as he gently turned the hand over in his own, trying for the sake of argument to match the purported mechanism of injury with the damage done to Bailey’s hand.

“Sure did:’ Mark said, his body tense and ready to take back his hand if the doctor broke his promise not to hurt him.

Tad noticed his patient’s uneasiness and smiled kindly, tenderly resting the injury back on Mark’s chest. “Relax:’ he urged softly. “The last thing I want to do is to hurt you.”

Now that he was back in sole control of his pain, Mark did, indeed, relax. “You’re right, Doc:’ he said. “You didn’t hurt me a bit. Kinda nice, for a change.”

Interesting turn of phrase, Tad thought. “Oh, really? How do you mean?”

“How do I mean what?”

“You said it was a nice change that I wasn’t trying to hurt you. I was just curious what you meant.”

Mark was exhausted, mentally and physically. He didn’t even remember saying that, but now he had to come up with something to cover it. “Did I say that?” he stalled.

Tad pretended to be distracted by Mark’s chart. “Mm-hmm. Somebody been hurting you, have they?”

Mark laughed at the very thought of it. “Nobody but myself, Doc. I guess I meant doctors. You know, even when they’re trying to help you it still hurts.”

Tad nodded and smiled. “Really no such thing as a painless shot, is there?” He finished jotting his note on the chart, and flipped it closed. “Here’s what we’re going to do with that hand,” he explained. “We’re going to put you under a light general anesthetic, and we’re going to have to set the bones. Looks like somebody might have already tried to do that, but made a bit of a mess of it.” He looked to Mark for a reaction, but none showed.

Tell me about it, Mark thought. His stomach turned all over again at the memory of sitting there on the filthy floor of the Hillbilly Tavern, grinding his own bone ends together as he brought the fingers back into alignment. It was the only way to even begin to walk out of there. Despite the initial agony, his efforts had reduced the sharp, electric pain to the dull throb that currently wracked his entire body.

“Once we’ve got that taken care of,” Tad continued, “we’re going to put you in a soft cast for a couple of days just to make sure we’ve got the swelling under control, and then we’ll do a hard cast for probably ten to twelve weeks. How’s that sound?”

“Just peachy?’

“There’s also a chance you’ll need surgery,” Tad finished. “The x-rays show some possible involvement of the metacarpals—the little bones in the back of your hand that run from your wrist to your fingers—and that can mean tendon or ligament damage that can’t be fixed as easily as bone. We won’t know for sure, though, for another couple of days. There’s been a lot of bleeding in the hand, making damage assessment by x-ray a little more complicated.”

“So you’re gonna have to knock me out?” Mark asked. There was an edge of hope to his voice.

Tad nodded. “It’d be pretty tough getting bones set any other way.” It was time to push. “Why do you suppose only two fingers got broken instead of your whole hand?”

Even through the haze of his pain, Mark instantly spotted the hole in his story. Shit. He suspects something. But suspicions were different from knowledge, and he was in too deep to change his story now anyway. “I have no idea,” he said. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“You can do without too much more of that kind of luck,” Tad joked, his eyes probing Mark’s face for the truth, and getting a “kiss my ass” in response. “It’s interesting, too, that the fractures angulate in different directions. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that your hand was deliberately broken.” That was smooth as gravel, he chided himself.

“Well, you’re the doc, Doc. Maybe you can write me up in a medical journal or something.”

“You’re sure that’s how your hand got broken—a jack fell on it?”

Stick with medicine, Doc, Mark thought. This police work just ain’t for you. “A jack? God, no. The whole goddamn car fell on it. You don’t think I’m lyin’ to you, do ya?”

Tad stared just long enough to convey his true thoughts. “Of course not. No sane person would lie to his doctor. To do that would just delay recovery.”

Piss on it, Tad thought, its your hand and your life. I’ve done my part. He clicked the ballpoint back into its casing, and stuffed the pen into the breast pocket of his lab coat.

“Rest quietly for a little longer, Mr. Bailey. The orthopod will be here in a minute to work on you. I’ll see you later.”

It was just after seven-thirty, and Monique Michaels was surprised to hear the sound of Warren’s car in the garage. Most nights he didn’t get home until nearly seven, and she’d assumed that his investigation of the Bailey thing would keep him much later than that. After fourteen and a half years of marriage, she could tell just by the way he slammed the door of his patrol car that he’d had something less than a good day. Having heard a good portion of The Bitch that morning, followed by continuing coverage not only of the Bailey boy’s escape but of his media appearance as well, she couldn’t blame him if he was a little cranky. Plus, it had been a long time since he’d had to play policeman for real, and he probably was exhausted.

The meal of the day had been spaghetti, and the kids had snarfed up all but a thimbleful of what she fixed. Even as the doorknob turned, she was already pulling a frozen Mexican dinner out of the freezer.

Warren’s look said it all as he entered the kitchen. Rigidly well-postured by nature, and normally energetic even in the evenings, he looked as though he’d slept fully clothed in a windstorm. Monique nearly laughed at the sight of him. “Boy hunt getting you down, dear?” she teased.

A wry smile brightened his face. “Don’t you start with me. I’m getting too old for this shit.”

“Is my baby tired?” Monique mocked in a little-girl voice as they hugged and kissed. “Not enough sleep last night?”

As part of a well-practiced ritual, Warren went directly to the cabinet over the stove and pulled down a gray lockbox, the kind secretaries normally used to store their petty cash, and thumbed the combination. When it opened, he slid his. 38 caliber Police Special, holster and all, off of his belt and deposited it in the box. He still preferred the five-shot snub-nose over the bulky cannons selected by most of his subordinates. Next came the speed loader he carried in his suit coat pocket. After locking the box again, he placed it back in its assigned spot over the stove. As a young, newly married police officer many years before, he’d balked at the notion of being separated from his weapon. In the end, Monique had prevailed, of course, and in the succeeding years, he had come to be far more satisfied knowing that the kids couldn’t become a statistic than he was paranoid that he wouldn’t be able to repel an attack on his family.

There just was no denying it anymore. He had become the old fart he’d always feared.

“It’s been a zoo, hon,” he explained as he put his weapon away. “Just an absolute zoo. You’d think Al Capone had escaped, instead of some kid.”

“Do you think you’ll catch him?”

“Oh, we’ll catch him, all right,” Warren said. “Once we figure out where to start looking for him.”

Monique led her husband into the living room and sat him down on a chair, where she moved around behind him and began massaging his shoulders. “I guess that means you don’t have many leads.”

“Leads,” Warren snorted. “It’s not that we don’t have many leads. We don’t have any leads.”

“What about your man Thompkins?” Monique teased. “He seems hard-charging enough to turn up some clues.”

Warren dramatically dropped his chin to his chest and rubbed his forehead. “You heard that, did you? Could you believe it? He was supposed to get their permission, not beat them into submission. What a bonehead.”

“Now, Warren, I’m sure he was just trying to do his job and make a good impression.”

Warren snorted again. “Yeah, well, so was Barney Fife. And I can assure you that Patrolman Thompkins made an indelible impression on a lot of people. The county executive even called me today and asked me to send his regards. I have a meeting scheduled tomorrow afternoon for just that purpose.”

Monique hugged him from behind and kissed his ear, crossing her forearms under his chin. “Now, you go easy on him. It wasn’t so long ago that you were a stupid rookie.”

“I was never that stupid,” Warren grumped.

“Oh yeah? How ’bout that time you shot at yourself in that lady’s house?”

Warren’s head sagged even further. He laughed. He reached up and rubbed the back of her head as she rested her forehead on his shoulder. “You just don’t forget anything, do you?” That incident had occurred fifteen years before, when he was in the process of tracking down a prowler in an old woman’s house. As he swung into the bedroom in a full crouch, he saw a man crouched down on the other side of the door, aiming a pistol directly at him. Not until Warren had squeezed off three rounds did he realize that he was facing down his own reflection in a full-length mirror. The woman nearly had a heart attack, and he was suspended for a week while Internal Affairs did an investigation. Worst of all was the merciless ribbing to which he fell victim for years after the incident. Unbeknownst to him, the ribbing continued to this day, only now it was always behind his back.

“Tomorrow should be interesting,” Warren said, changing the subject. “I understand Petrelli’s taking the radio station to court tomorrow with an emergency petition to compel release of the telephone records:’

“Do you think it will work?”

“Hell, no, not a chance. I’d pay a thousand dollars, though, just to see Petrelli get trashed one more time in front of the cameras. The only good thing about my day today has been the thought of how really shitty a day he’s had.”

Monique slapped his arm playfully and stood up straight again. “You’re terrible,” she scolded. “What happens if the judge says no?”

“Then we’re left with plain old police work. I think the kid’s holed up somewhere. He can hang loose for a day or two, but sooner or later he’ll have to move, and when that happens, he’ll start leaving another trail. That’s when we’ll get our next good shot.”

Monique came around the chair and kneeled down in front of her husband, resting her elbows on his knees. “Do you think he killed that guard—or supervisor, or whatever—in self-defense?”

Warren shrugged and closed his eyes. “Doesn’t really matter right now. He still has to go back.”

“But what do you think?”

“Honestly? In my heart of hearts?”

“Yes.”

“I really don’t care. I think it’s a red herring, something I have no business thinking about. At least not until we get him back in custody and he goes to trial for killing the supervisor. The escape and the murder are separate issues.”

From out of nowhere, their conversation was interrupted by the thunder of footsteps coming down the stairs. “Daddeeee!” His seven-year-old, Shannon, turned the corner into the living room at full tilt, and vaulted into his lap, followed closely by her sister Kathleen, two years her senior. A round of hugs and kisses followed, along with a couple of tickles.

“You’re home early!” Kathleen proclaimed, genuine delight twinkling in her eyes. “Mommy said you wouldn’t be home till late.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I probably shouldn’t be home till late, but I just couldn’t stand the thought of not tucking you two characters into bed for a second night in a row.” He kissed her on the cheek.

“Can I ask you a question, Daddy?”

“Any time at all.”

“Are you trying to put Nathan in the electric chair?”

Warren shot a look across to Monique and got a shrug in return. Incredulous that his daughter considered herself on a first-name basis with an accused murderer, Michaels leaned back in his chair and gently repositioned his older daughter on his lap so that she was facing him directly. “What kind of a question is that?”

“I was playing with Benny Parker today, and he said that you were going to kill that boy on television by putting him in the electric chair.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him that he was a liar, and then I popped him in the nose.

Warren laughed in spite of himself. “Kathleen!” he scolded, embarrassed by the pride he felt at his petite little girl punching a kid the size of Benny Parker. “You can’t hit people just for saying something you don’t like.”

“It is a lie, isn’t it?” From the look in Kathleen’s eyes, Warren suddenly was not sure who was scolding whom.

“Honey, they don’t put children in electric chairs.”

“So what’s going to happen to Nathan?”

Warren fought the temptation to lie. It would have been easy to give her a fairy-tale answer, but he had long believed that truth was the only way to maintain credibility with his kids.

“That’s really not for me to decide, Kathleen. That’s why we have courts. My job is to arrest Nathan and bring him back to the Juvenile Detention Center so that a judge can decide what ultimately happens to him.”

“But Nathan says that people tried to kill him in the Juve… whatever that place is. Are you going to send him back to that same place?”

Warren looked to his wife for some help. Monique gave it a try. “Kathleen, sweetie, this boy Nathan isn’t like boys in your school. He was in jail for stealing, and he killed a man to get out of jail. That makes him a bad guy. And bad guys go to jail.”

“The kids don’t think he did anything wrong,” Kathleen protested.

Warren’s patience for all of this suddenly evaporated. “Well, he did do something wrong!” he erupted, far more loudly than he had intended. “He killed a man, and you can’t go much more wrong that that! My job, Kathleen, whether you like it or not, is to put murderers away in a place where they can’t harm other people. Just because he’s a kid doesn’t make him any less dangerous!”

Both girls fell silent and slid down off his lap, disappearing back upstairs. Kathleen looked as though she might cry; whether for herself or for Nathan, he couldn’t tell. When the children were out of sight, Monique returned to Warren’s shoulders and started massaging them.

“Did I overreact?” Michaels asked.

“Mm-hmm,” she replied, leaning over to gently bite his ear. “You always overreact when you lose your sense of humor. Remind me in a couple of hours and I bet I can help you find it again.”

It was nearly ten now, and it was dark, inside as well as out. Nathan put the finishing touches on his note to the Nicholsons—he’d found his hosts’ name on a magazine—and walked from the kitchen into the garage. His stomach was in a knot again, but he knew there was no turning back now. The one thing he needed more than anything else was distance between himself and the JDC. The fulfillment of his need lay just on the other side of the garage. The seat and the steering wheel were already adjusted, and he’d killed an hour or so in the afternoon memorizing the locations of all the important levers, switches and buttons, so that he could make the BMW do as he commanded, even in the dark.

On the outside chance that he might do something stupid, such as locking the keys in the car, he’d kept them in his pocket all afternoon. He moved cautiously now, in the dark, as though someone might be home, even though he’d been in and out of the garage a dozen times that day. He winced at the click the car door made as it opened, and was startled when the inside light came on. He moved quickly, the better to get the door opened and shut without anyone seeing him. Once comfortably in place in his seat, he fastened his seat belt, held his breath, and started the engine. He’d barely turned the key when the motor roared to life. He reached up and pushed the button on the sun visor to raise the garage door, working quickly, because he had seen in a movie once that you can die if you run the car engine indoors.

With the movement of the door came an explosion of sound and light, a stark contrast to the otherwise still evening. Nathan was certain that every neighbor in a two-block radius was on the phone calling to report the theft of the Nicholsons’ automobile. As the garage door reached the top of its climb, he slipped the BMW into reverse and turned in his seat to guide himself down the long, steep driveway. When he turned, though, all he could see was leather head rest. He jammed on the brakes and lurched to a halt. The stupid car wasn’t built for twelve-year-olds. How was he going to see where he was going?

It took a moment for him to reason that once you’ve broken into somebody’s house and stolen their car, it really didn’t matter a whole lot if you drove over a bit of their lawn. He let the brakes slip again, and he slid further down the driveway, pausing halfway to lower the garage door again. Nervous glances out both sides of the car revealed an empty street-clear passage for him to begin his journey in earnest. When the back wheels bottomed out at the end of the driveway, he cut the wheel hard, slipped the transmission into Drive, and gently stepped on the gas. The Beemer lurched forward to the end of the street, then lurched to a stop at the stop sign, flinging Nathan against his seat belt. He remembered from his previous driving adventures that steering wasn’t the hard part, really. The tough part was making the car move smoothly. But he’d gotten the hang of it before, and he was confident that he could do it again.

While he’d plotted his trip carefully on a Rand McNally map he’d found in the glove compartment, he still didn’t know exactly where he was, and now he was faced with his first critical choice. He could go left or right. The lady or the tiger. On the logic that left and lady began with the same letter, he turned left in hopes of finding the road that would lead him out of the neighborhood.

After about ten minutes, and only one real mistake in navigation, he found himself on the Cannonball Parkway, whose name he recognized from his months with Uncle Mark. He knew for sure that the Cannonball Parkway intersected with Prince William Road, not too far from where Uncle Mark lived. From there it was a straight shot out to Route 66, which in turn would take him to Route 81, and from there north toward Canada. The digital compass in the Beemer displayed SE, and he was once again faced with a left-right decision. Knowing that he ultimately needed to head west before he could go north, he turned to the right. Happily, the SE disappeared from the display and was replaced with w. He beamed with pride.

The Beemer handled smoothly, and he felt well in control of the vehicle, except a couple of times when the road turned sharply at the same time the headlights from an oncoming car hit him in the eyes. After another fifteen minutes or so, the scenery along Cannonball Parkway began to look familiar to him. On the left was Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School, the last one he had attended before becoming a ward of the state. About a mile up the road, he knew, was the intersection with the 7-Eleven and the McDonald’s, marking the road that led to Uncle Mark. Just sharing the same air with that place brought back memories he’d hoped he’d never face again.

Drunk son of a bitch, Nathan thought. I hope you drown in your own puke someday.

As he neared the intersection, traffic slowed considerably, and finally stopped. In the distance, the night was alive with the strobes and light bars of emergency vehicles. Nathan’s first instinct was to turn around and head the other way, but there was no way to cross the median without drawing all kinds of suspicion. It was probably just a traffic accident, anyway. Nobody was going to notice him.

It took another quarter-mile of bumper-to-bumper backup to confirm his worst fears. This was no accident. This was a roadblock, just like they had described on the news. Cops in brown uniforms were stopping every fourth or fifth car to shine a flashlight around and talk to the driver.

“Oh, God,” he prayed aloud, “please don’t let them stop me.”

Hoping to stay as invisible as possible, Nathan had chosen the left lane. Without moving his head, he glanced over at the driver to his right. Even in the darkness of night, that driver was fully recognizable. Blond hair and mustache, maybe twenty-three years old, with a mole on his left temple.

If I can see him, they can see me, Nathan thought. He felt his heart gain speed, and he gripped the steering wheel hard enough to make his fingers go numb. “Stay in control;’ he told himself again, out loud, for perhaps the hundredth time that day. “Sometimes the best place to hide is out in the open.”

He felt like he was living out his only recurring nightmare, where he was naked in school and everyone was laughing, but there was nothing he could do to cover up. People were all around him, any one of whom could end his flight with a single word, but none of them were looking yet. Up ahead, the very people he feared most were planning to shine a flashlight in his face and throw him back in jail. All day long, he’d carefully planned this night, but he hadn’t allowed for the scenario unfolding in front of him. Like the house alarm and the call tracing, he’d figured that it was useless to worry about such things that he couldn’t change. If only he’d known.

In Nathan’s lane, twenty-three cars and two motorcycles stood between him and the roadblock. Six cars were let through without being checked, leaving seventeen in front of him. His hands were moist with sweat now, and his legs were shaking so badly that he was concerned whether he was going to be able to control the car.

Please, oh, please God, he prayed, silently now so as not to attract attention. Please let me get by them. Please don’t stop me now. I’ll be good, I swear I will. I’m sorry for every bad thing I’ve ever done. Please let me get through.

Tears tried to well up in his eyes, but he willed them away. Whatever happened, it was going to happen quickly, and there would be no time for that kind of emotion. In the next round, the cop let only three cars through before he searched the fourth. After that, he let five through. There seemed to be no pattern; he just stopped cars at random. If it didn’t end soon, Nathan thought, his heart would explode right out of his chest. Wouldn’t that just startle the living daylights out of the policemen?

There were only eight cars ahead of him now, and the cop let thiee go unnoticed. Next time, only two.

Oh, shit, I’m the third car now, he thought, feeling himself on the edge of panic. He’s been stopping number threes. Oh, God, please!

To Nathan’s horror, the cop stopped the very next car. Nobody got through on that round. Desperate, he tried to plan his way out if they caught him. None of them were in their cars, he thought. If they made eye contact, he’d just stomp on the gas and take his chances. It. was the only choice he had.

Once the cop was done with the car, he waved that driver on with a smile. And stopped the very next car!

“Oh, shit!” This time he said it out loud, a whisper. In the green light of the instrument panel, he could actually see his right leg shaking now as it tried to maintain even pressure on the brake pedal. He tried to swallow, but his mouth felt as if he’d been eating chalk.

The officer seemed particularly interested in the vehicle in front of Nathan, spending a long time shining the light carefully around the interior of the back seat, and then talking for a good thirty seconds with the driver. Nathan couldn’t hear the words—he couldn’t hear anything but the drumbeat of blood in his ears—but the conversation seemed to be heating up. The cop opened the driver’s door and motioned for him to step out, motioning for his partner in the other lane to come over and help. Obediently, the driver of the car stepped out and placed his hands on the roof of the car.

As the cop reached for his handcuffs with one hand, he motioned with the other for Nathan to drive around. There was some very brief eye contact, and Nathan thought for an instant that he was busted. But whatever recognition there may have been on the part of the cop quickly evaporated when his prisoner started to struggle, and they both tumbled to the ground. Nathan watched the brawl for a moment in his sideview mirror, and nearly rear-ended the car in front of him in the process.

It took a couple of miles of driving for Nathan to realize that he’d made it. After the roadblock, the traffic thinned out, moving at posted speeds or better. Nathan cruised into the right-hand lane. A green-and-white sign announced that Route 66 was just three miles away. He felt nearly dizzy with a sense of pride and accomplishment. He’d beaten them again. With each passing hash mark on the road, Nathan sped closer to his freedom, and further away from the nightmare that his life in Brookfield had become. Before him lay his future, where his past didn’t have to matter. He could start over, and somehow pretend that Uncle Mark and Ricky and judges and death itself had never entered his life and so abruptly shut down his childhood.

The windows were up, the radio was blaring, and the air conditioning was turned on high. He was free, and he planned to stay that way. As a sense of pure triumph washed over him, he threw his fist into the roof liner and shouted at the top of his voice, “Yes!”

When Monique Michaels rolled over to spoon up with her husband, she noticed he was gone, and she was instantly wide awake. The digital clock on her nightstand read 3:21, while the one on his read 3:28 and the VCR across the room flashed its perpetual 12:00.

Leaning up on her elbow, she listened for sounds, but the house was silent. She was worried about Warren. He wasn’t himself tonight. Even the sex was a little off. He did his part well enough, but half his mind was somewhere else.

It was happening again, she knew. He was shutting them out. Something was chewing up her husband’s insides, and rather than sharing it with her, or leaning on her for support, he was falling back into his macho, suffer-in-silence bravado.

Before she could control it, old anger bubbled up again from deep within. It had been nine months since their son, Brian, had been killed on his newspaper route, but only two since Warren had started to deal with it. In between, Monique and the girls had been stranded alone, left to deal with unspeakable grief in virtual silence.

Monique thought—she prayed—that they’d worked through it all. Through counseling that Warren had fought every step of the way, Monique was finally given the freedom to grieve openly. Freed from the shackles of the make-believe strength she showed to the girls, her emotions had flooded out of her, raw and bitter in their purity. Week after week, the anger and grief and bitterness spilled out to the therapist.

Yet, week after week, Warren just sat stoically, clearly in control and clearly concerned for his bride. He held her hand; he spoke sympathetic words; yet he never shed a single tear where she could see. God, how she’d hated him for that!

In the end, as the counseling diminished from three sessions a week to two sessions a month, her anger subsided just enough to let the love return. And Warren was still there. Still stoic. Still strong. Still kind.

But the pain remained as an open wound.

Slipping on the summer-weight robe with the big flowers—the one Warren hated so much, making it fun to wear—she swung out of bed and left to find him. On the way out, she habitually checked on the girls, who were sound asleep.

Normally, when Warren couldn’t sleep, he simply went downstairs to watch TV until he faded off, but tonight he wasn’t there, either. “Warren?” she asked the house softly. “Where are you?” No answer. Now she was really concerned.

Then she saw movement on the front porch, and noticed the door was ajar.

“What’s wrong, honey?” she asked as she glided silently out onto the porch to join him.

Warren greeted his bride of nearly fifteen years with a smile. He was sitting in one of the wooden rockers, holding three fingers of Scotch in a glass, wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants, with his bare feet crossed on the porch rail. “Hi, babe:’ he said. “Kids okay?”

Monique sat down in the rocker next to his. “They’re fine,” she said. “Out cold. You’re the one I’m worried about.”

“I’m fine,” he assured her. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

He was anything but fine, and Monique could tell. “Like what?” she probed.

“Work stuff.”

“What kind of work stuff?”

“Stuff stuff,” he insisted, trying to blow her off. “Really. It’s nothing for you to be concerned about. Why don’t you go on back to bed? I just need to work through some things.”

“Warren, look at you.” It was the same tone she used to scold the kids. “You never sit on the front porch, and I don’t remember the last time you had a drink by yourself.”

“If I was by myself, you couldn’t remember me having a drink. Sort of by definition.”

“Don’t change the subject. Tell me what’s going on in there.” She tapped his temple with her forefinger. “You promised you’d never shut me out again.”

Warren inhaled deeply and noisily through his nose and let it go as a silent whistle. He started to answer once, but stopped and looked away. “I’m—ah—I guess I’m having some problems keeping this Nathan Bailey thing in perspective.” His voice sounded weak, and a little shaky. He told her of the video and of Nathan’s transient likeness to Brian.

So that was it. Monique hugged him as best she could from a different chair. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she soothed. “I know how much you miss him. But all kids that age look alike sometimes.”

He forced a chuckle. “I guess. But it makes it tough to throw him in jail.”

“But it’s your job. You said yourself…”

“I know what I said, Monique,” he barked, much more harshly than he would have wanted. “You don’t know the whole story. You don’t know what his life has been like. In the past two years, he’s lost everything:’ So have I, he didn’t say.

Monique let the silence that followed linger in the humid night air. Promises aside, this was how Warren worked out his problems. He guarded his pain the way a gambler hides a losing hand. As long as no one could peek at the cards, he could bluff forever.

The moment when Jed Hackner entered the house with the news about Brian, Monique watched her husband die inside. Warren was a man of many talents and many interests, but his son was his life. They breathed the same air and thought the same thoughts. Identical in looks and personalities, they laughed at the same movies and together dreamed up the most ridiculous practical jokes, which only they thought funny. They shared a very special world, those two, one in which girls were simply not allowed.

Brian was Warren’s reason to stay young. He told everyone who would listen that the girls were important to him—and they absolutely were—but that it was his son who’d fulfilled the order he placed at the baby store.

On that day in October when Brian was stolen from their lives by a drunk teenager in a crush of twisted steel and aluminum, Warren’s personality changed. He went through all the motions of life, but something was gone, like a table lamp, perhaps, with a 25-watt bulb where a 60-watter belonged. At first he withdrew completely, grieving in silence while he made a great show of helping others cope.

Next came the anger. He attended both days of the teenager’s trial, arriving early to sit up front where he could stare at the defendant, and be clearly visible to the jury.

When the driver was convicted as an adult of voluntary manslaughter and sent to the state prison in Richmond, it was as though the anger had been exorcised from Warren’s soul. A spring returned to his walk, and he began to show an interest again in the family. He told Monique one night that justice had been done, and now he could begin to put this all behind him.

But he’d never be the same, and they both knew it.

The look in Warren’s eyes and his posture in the chair reminded Monique so much of the bad days following Brian’s death. She didn’t know how much more of this he could hold in until he just came apart. It would happen one day, she was sure, just as it had happened to her time and again in the therapist’s office. She wouldn’t force it. But she prayed she’d be there for him the day it happened.

“It’s just not fair,” he said after a very long time.

Together as a couple, yet alone with their thoughts, they sat in silence on the front porch for more than an hour, listening to the shrill chirping of a million night creatures as they screamed their battle cries and sang their love songs in the darkness. They had been through a lot together, most of it wonderful, some of it horrifying. But on balance, they’d grown closer through it all. In the deflected glow of the stars and the streetlight, Monique held Warren’s hand and secretly watched as tears balanced themselves on the edge of his eyelids and rolled down his stubbly cheeks. He said nothing, and he made no move to wipe them away.

As a knot formed in her own throat, Monique realized that she loved her clumsy, intolerant, macho, sexist husband more at that moment than she had on the day he proposed.