Andrew Gross - 15 Seconds

He lifted the barrel again so it pointed level at Dexter’s midsection. “I got a big fat target, son. The Oxy, boy. I want a name.”

“He’s no one! No one…! ” Dexter cried out, putting his palms up for protection. “He’s just some jerk-off mule who earns a few bucks bringing them up to me once a month. Hell, it’s all small potatoes anyway. What’s the big fucking deal?”

Vance squeezed the trigger again and the Remington blasted a hole in Dexter’s other knee, taking away much of his shinbone as well.

“Aaargh,” Dex screamed, crying now, falling onto the floor and rolling from side to side in pain. His arms wrapped around both his shredded legs.

“The big deal ”-Vance stood up and bent over him-“is that there are people who are dead, son. People who had a lot more worth in life than you, you miserable mess, because of what you do. And others, who won’t get a chance to live their lives out ’cause they were stupid and weak and easily preyed on by the likes of you.”

Dexter rolled around on his back, sobbing.

“Now, I can just leave you as you are, son, and you can get those legs mended-maybe-and you may well even walk one day and prey on some other fool’s daughter. You’d like that around now, wouldn’t you, son, if it turned out like that?”

“Yes,” Dexter said, moaning. “Please…”

“Or we can try another part. Say, right here…” Vance held the gun over Dexter’s groin. “Shit, probably gonna be useless to you anyway after today…”

“No, no, no, no, no…!” Dexter covered his crotch, his eyes stretched wide with panic.

“Then you give me the name, son. Who supplies you. Where’d that Oxy come from… You can spare yourself a lot of pain, not to mention eventually getting your head blown off.”

“All right, all right…” Dexter moaned, sobbing, his face a mishmash of blood and tears. “No more… Please, no more. He’s no one. Just some mule who brings it up. Pays for his own use. He’s just a mule. That’s all.”

Dexter gave him the name and told Vance where he could find him.

“Now you gotta get outta here. Please… I gave you what you wanted.” Tears ran down Dexter’s face. “Now just leave me. Please…”

Vance shouldered the gun, and for a moment he almost did leave Dexter be. After all, the guy would likely never walk in a straight line again anyway.

But then Vance stood there thinking for a minute or so, remembering all that had happened and why he was here. And what his vow was. His gaze bored deeply into Dexter’s helpless, pleading eyes.

“Can’t, son,” he admitted sadly.

He drew the gun over the dealer’s chest, who put up his hands and started muttering, “Please, no, don’t, don’t…” and turned his face away.

Vance said, “Sorry, just not the way it works here.”

He squeezed and the recoil lifted his arm all the way up to his shoulders. Dexter’s body jumped off the floor, his “Life Is Fucking-A Good” T-shirt with the winking smiley face on it pooling up quickly with blood.

“Someone’s gotta pay.”

Carrie left the Exxon station with an envelope full of security tapes from the morning Martinez was killed. A camera had been focused onto Lakeshore, but the angle was wide enough to catch a view of vehicles driving toward the highway.

She drove back to headquarters by way of Avondale, where Mike Dinofrio lived. Whoever killed him had likely driven via I-95 and gotten off at the Riverside Boulevard exit. From there, it was another six or seven minutes to Avondale. Martinez and Dinofrio had been murdered within about thirty minutes of each other, and Carrie calculated it would have taken approximately fifteen minutes or so to get to Dinofrio’s given traffic and the time of day. Whoever had done it-either the person in the blue car or Steadman via taxi-would have needed to get there fast.

She exited at Riverside and scanned both sides of the street as she drove past familiar office buildings-the Florida Times-Union, Haskell, Fidelity-until the structures along the road grew residential. Under a canopy of old oak trees, she passed the stately, historic homes that lined both sides, looking for cameras.

Nothing.

Eventually she hit Riverside Park, the neighborhood growing progressively more upscale, but still she saw no obvious cameras.

Until she happened on something that gave her hope.

A speed warning. YOU ARE GOING 35 MPH, the digital sign read. SPEED PATROLLED BY AUTOMATIC CAMERA.

Her heart rose with excitement. It would have definitely caught whoever had passed by two days before.

A couple of hours later, Carrie was back at the office, in the fourth-floor video station, reviewing the tapes. She’d gotten the speed-warning video from a friend who worked at the Transportation Authority. She began, frame by frame, with the tape from the Exxon station near where Martinez was killed.

The camera was focused on the comings and goings at the station, but it also took in the first two lanes of Lakeshore Drive heading west.

This was the best she had.

Carrie fast-forwarded to 10:06 A.M., the approximate time of the Martinez shooting. She sighed that it would have made this process a whole lot easier if Martinez had just had an in-dash camera in his car like a lot of the patrol cars now had.

She rolled the film forward, estimating that it was approximately two miles to the highway from the crime scene, and taking into account the traffic flow, which was steady, the blue car would have had to have passed by the station sometime between 10:09 and 10:11.

If it hadn’t turned off sooner.

And if Steadman wasn’t lying.

She watched the footage closely. It was going to be difficult to read the full license plate, especially on a car driving in the outer two lanes, because the camera angle wasn’t exactly positioned to capture that view. Steadman had said the car was a domestic make. A dark blue. Which wouldn’t exactly be helpful since the film was black-and-white.

10:07 … Just a steady stream of traffic passing by. Nothing yet.

Carrie advanced the frames. 10:08… At the slower film speed, she studied every car she could. In real time, they had driven by in a flash, the camera picking them up for only a split second.

It was impossible to make out the car color, so she focused on the plates. South Carolina. ADJ-4…

10:09:23 … Still nada. She was thinking a car might have already passed by this time. This was starting to feel like a giant waste of-

Something flashed by her on the screen.

A midshade sedan switching lanes. The camera picked it up for only a second. Carrie stopped the tape, rolled back, was able to zoom in. It was a Mazda. Not what Steadman had said, but he’d also said he wasn’t sure.

At the higher magnification the resolution grew even grainier. But she was able to make out numbers-at least some of them, though only on the right-hand side of the license plate: 392. The left side was completely obscured.

On the bottom of the plate she could make out a word that made her heart sputter:

Carolina.

Not South or North. The left side wasn’t clear.

Just Carolina .

It wouldn’t be hard to figure out which Carolina; however, she didn’t know state license-plate colors by heart.

And the plate also wasn’t ADJ-4, like Steadman insisted. Nor was it a Ford or a Mercury, whatever he thought it was. The only thing that stood out was the state.

10:09:46. Driving by at a high rate of speed . She wondered if that could be it. She made a note of the time and license numbers and continued forwarding the frames, just in case.