Andrew Gross: 15 Seconds

My eyes stretched wide.

One of them was that asshole. Rowley. Baldy. The one who just winked at me maliciously and said, “Just never let me catch you again!”

He’d wanted to rip me a new one over nothing more than a traffic violation. Now one of his own had been murdered.

He was the last person on earth I wanted to hand myself over to!

I thought about pulling out of my lane and finding someone else. But there wasn’t anyone. Not here. The line of cars kept creeping forward. I had no choice but to inch closer, or draw attention to myself. The kind of attention I didn’t need right now.

Suddenly Rowley looked up and scanned down the line of cars, and to my dismay, his eyes seemed to lock like a magnet on the sight of my white Caddie.

Then they fixed directly on me.

Every cell in my body froze. I put my hands up where he could see them. I didn’t know what else to do.

Then I watched as the sonovabitch shouted something to his partner and reached for his gun.

To my horror, he started running up the line of cars toward me.

I started yelling, “No, it wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!” And he was shouting something back, “Out of the car! Out of the car!”

Oh, shit!

And then he aimed!

My heart almost clawed its way up my throat as I vividly recalled what he had warned me of if our paths ever crossed again. A warning bell inside me rang: Henry, you have to get the hell away from this guy!Now!

I jerked on the wheel and forced the Caddie out of my lane.

I turned around and saw Rowley’s weapon aimed directly at me! He’s going to shoot, Henry! My heart clawed its way up my throat. No way I could simply make myself a sitting duck for him.

I hit the gas.

Suddenly the front windshield exploded, glass raining all over me. He was shooting!

Oh my God!

“No, no,” I yelled back in horror. “It wasn’t me!”

I whipped my head back and saw Rowley again, this time in a shooter’s position, two hands on his weapon, steadying, eyes trained directly at me.

He’s going to kill me! I screamed to myself.

I floored the accelerator, the Caddie screeching into the oncoming lane, as another shot crashed through the side window, shattering it, narrowly missing my head.

“How the hell is this happening?” I screamed in the car. “It’s not me!”

I spun a U-ey, jolting up onto the pavement and hitting a street sign, ducking my head as low as I could, and sped off in the opposite direction on Lakeview as two more shots slammed into my chassis, clanging off the rear.

I didn’t know if I was making the biggest mistake of my life, but I was sure that if I didn’t get out of there, I’d be dead.

I cut a sharp right onto the first cross street I encountered, and then an even quicker left onto a residential lane. I floored it again and for the first time checked behind me.

No one was there.

At the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, on Adams Street downtown, it was Carrie Holmes’s first day back on the job.

She knew it wasn’t going to be an easy one. It had been four months, the four toughest months of her life, since that day. The day her world had fallen apart. But she knew she had to get back into the world. Back to the person she was before… Before “the day my heart died too,” as she always referred to it.

Take a deep breath, she told herself, stepping off the elevator onto the detectives’ floor.

Life starts over-now.

Carrie worked for the JSO. Community Outreach Director, her business card read. A glorified way of saying she took care of matters in which the department’s duty interacted with the public, building goodwill in the parts of town where the department didn’t have much. Softening the outrage after an incident in which excessive force was used, or worse, an officer-involved shooting. Overseeing police-sponsored community events. A new chief had been appointed since she’d been gone. Erman Hall. More of a numbers guy who was given a mandate on issues like the tough immigration law and budget control. She’d heard that everyone was trying to curry favor with him.

Truth was, Carrie was kind of surprised she hadn’t already received her “pink slip” in the mail. Let’s just say “community outreach” wasn’t exactly a priority in a time when cops were being pulled off the street and station houses closed. She’d always expected she’d become a detective herself-her dad had been a chief in New Hampshire for twenty-four years and her older brother, Jack, was a supervisor with the FBI in Atlanta. With a master’s in criminology from the University of Florida, she’d always thought that was the path she would take, but with Rick on duty overseas, and then starting up his law practice, and then Raef, she took the job that opened-in Administration-and it just kind of stuck. The brains of the family, her dad always said, and the looks!

Not that any of that really mattered now. Brains, looks, but nothing had prepared her for what had hit her. Nothing could.

To lose your husband and your son… Well, almost your son…

And on the very same day.

Now it was time to start over.

Carrie hugged a few people hello as she made her way back to her office. This was harder than she’d thought. Everyone was tiptoeing around on eggshells, not wanting to say the wrong thing: “How are you doing?” “So great to have you back!” And, of course, “How’s Raef?”

“He’s doing really well,” she replied, as upbeat as she could. “He’s at my folks’.” It seemed the best thing for a while that he remain with her parents in Atlantic Beach, which was closer to the hospital. “We hope to have him back in school soon.”

Of course, no one mentioned Rick-except just to shake their heads, eyes glossing over a little, and to say how sorry they were.

“Well, you give that boy a big hug from me!”

She ran the gauntlet of well-wishers back to her desk. She found a card there-signed by most of the office, detectives and administration. Great to have you back! That brought a little tear to her eye. And made her smile.

So did the handful of photos that were still on her shelf. Rick finishing the Marine Corps Marathon in D.C. last year. In 3:51:29. His personal best, by far! Raef looking very ferocious in his pee wee football gear. That nice one of the three of them at her folks’ last Thanksgiving. All decked out.

Carrie felt herself starting to get sad.

She looked at the mountain of files and memorandums that had been arranged on her desk by Andrea Carson, her deputy, and then the phone started to ring: people she dealt with on the force and even a local press contact, all glad to hear she was back. She started to read through a few of the files, trying to catch up on what was happening. She knew she’d have to ease herself back into the routine.

Andrea knocked on her door, folders in hand. “You ready?”

“Ready.” Carrie nodded with a smile. “Come on in.”

That’s when she noticed that a crowd had gathered underneath the TV in the detectives’ bullpen. Things seemed to have gotten a little hectic. Lots of people running around.

She stood up, the captain’s office door had been closed a long time now. Then she saw the chief, the new chief, with whom she’d hoped to grab a couple of minutes, heading out of the office with Cam Winfield, the department’s press liaison-not looking at all as if “community outreach” was high on his list of priorities right now.

Something had happened!

Carrie stepped out and found Robyn, Chief Hall’s secretary. “What’s going on?”