John Gilstrap - Nathan’s Run

Pulling the handset down to his face, he grumbled, “Michaels.”

“Hi, Warren, it’s Jed,” a familiar and wide-awake voice greeted him.

“Jesus, Jed, what time is it?”

“It’s about five-twenty. Listen, some important shit went down last night. You awake enough to listen?”

The urgency in Jed’s voice brought Warren to full consciousness. He pulled himself to a sitting position in bed and turned on the light on the nightstand. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said. “Shoot.”

“Nathan Bailey was caught last night in Pitcairn County, New York by some local sheriff’s deputies.”

“Really. How’d they get him?”

Jed explained all he knew about the chase and the arrest, and finished with the shootings. “The locals say that the Bailey kid grabbed one of the deputies’ guns and just blasted his way out of the jail.”

“Oh my God,” Warren groaned. “Are both deputies dead?” “They never had a chance.”

Warren was quiet for a long time, allowing his tired brain to process what it all meant.

“Are you there?” Jed prompted.

“What? Oh, yeah, sure. I just really wanted this one to turn out differently.” Warren sighed. “I really bought into the kid’s story.”

Jed understood. It had been a tough year. “You know, Warren, you weren’t alone on that score. I think we were all pulling for the kid. Boys his age are supposed to be innocent.”

Warren swung his feet around and planted them on the floor, checking his watch. “I’ve come this far, Jed. I’m gonna head on up to Pitcairn County, wherever the hell that is, and see what we can do to assist in the kid’s arrest. Pass the word to anyone who’s interested.”

“You got it, boss. Sorry to wake you.”

“No you’re not,” Warren replied, careful to put a smile in his voice.

After hanging up, Warren sat still for a while, attempting to manage an odd assortment of emotions. He knew that he’d lost his objectivity on this case. Somehow or other, he’d bundled the Bailey kid’s problems with Brian’s death. He’d allowed himself to believe in the innocence of this boy whom he’d never met, to empathize with his fears and his desperation. Emotionally, it was a big step for him to accept that the kid could kill again. Brian could never have killed a man.

How, then, could Nathan Bailey?

The answer, he knew, was simple enough: They were different people. Each child had been raised with his own set of values, and Warren would never know which values were important to Bailey or his kin. It was just so damned hard to believe that the kid on the radio—the same kid who cleaned laundry and inventoried “borrowed” items—was capable of killing three police officers in cold blood. Perhaps Ricky had posed a threat to the boy, just like he claimed; but what possible justification could there be for killing two more people in an entirely different jurisdiction?

Again, the answer was simple: Nathan Bailey was a murderer and a dangerous fugitive. And it was Warren’s job to help apprehend the kid before he harmed anyone else. The courts would then decide his fate. And however the chips fell, Warren would live at peace with the result.

After all, he wasn’t the kid’s father. And Nathan wasn’t his son.

Bertrand Murphy was beside himself with anger and grief. Never before in his four consecutive terms as sheriff—indeed, in the history of the department—had there been such a tragic day. He had fielded the phone call in the wee hours from a hysterical deputy who had discovered the bodies as he arrived for shift change. Less than ten minutes after the call, Sheriff Murphy was on the scene to personally oversee the investigation and to make sure that the bodies were treated with the proper respect.

He was not prepared for what he found. Deputy Watts was a personal friend; they and their wives had played bridge together every other Thursday night since 1985. Their kids had grown up together, attending the same schools and playing on the same playgrounds. In another year, Adam, the oldest of the Watts brood, would be off to college with dreams of someday running a sporting goods store.

Schmidtt had been a new man on the force, having just finished rookie school the previous spring, and as such, Murphy hadn’t really known him. Rumors told him that his wife was pregnant with their first baby, due in December.

“What kind of animal shoots two fine deputies?” Murphy asked Deputy Steadman, whose grief was written in deep wrinkles and pallid flesh. “Shot them in the mouth, for Christ’s sake.”

Under Murphy’s watchful glare, a team of young deputies worked quickly to mark the outlines of the bodies on the floor with white adhesive tape, the last step before placing them in body bags and driving them off to the morgue, where the final insult of an autopsy awaited them. Murphy was sickened by the thought of a giant “Y” being carved into the torso of his friend while a team of pathologists with tape recorders and cameras piled his guts onto a plate.

He checked his watch. It was going on six o’clock. Word of the killings was spreading, and they had yet to announce the names of the dead, pending notification of their next of kin. That notification was his job, and it was time to get on with it. He turned to the grim-faced deputy at his side.

“You knew these men, didn’t you, son?”

Steadman nodded, his eyes wet. “Yes, sir. Worked with them every day.”

“You want to get even with the son of a bitch who did this to them, don’t you?”

Steadman turned to face Murphy. His eyes gleamed with his thirst for retribution. “Yes, sir, I do.”

Murphy nodded. “Good. I think you’ll get your chance. But first, I have a job for you to do.”

“Tell me what it is, and I’ll do it.”

“I have to go and break the news to the wives of these brave men. I’ll return in an hour or so. In that time, I want you to oversee things here. Make sure your friends are handled gently, respectfully. And make sure that nothing except the bodies—and I mean nothing—is moved from this scene until get back.”

Steadman nodded attentively. “Okay, sir, I’ll see to it,” he said. “Do you want me to order roadblocks, too?”

“No, son, we’ve already got deputies out on the street doing that even as we speak.”

Taking a moment longer to look down on his mangled friend, Murphy said a brief, silent prayer for his soul before leaving to break the news to Judith Watts.

Denise rocketed upright in bed the instant the newscaster’s words gelled in her sleep-deadened mind. She gasped, “No!”

But the deep baritone voice from her clock radio was unequivocal.

“Police sources will not release the names of the murdered officers, but they have officially confirmed reports that America’s so-called favorite criminal escaped from custody in this quiet New York town, following the brutal, execution-style killing of his two captors. It is still not clear if there are any witnesses…”

Denise felt as though she’d been punched. How could he do such a thing? She knew he was desperate, but who would have thought? Words from her first conversation with Nathan rang in her memory.

“I’m not going back to that place…”

Could he possibly have meant that he would kill to stay out? Could it be that he was giving everyone a warning, but that they had missed it in their zeal to believe in the innocence of a child?

She remembered the vividness of his account of Ricky Harris’s death, in which Nathan was the real victim. Could that all have been a lie? Maybe he was one of those children you read about in a Stephen King book, who’s so psychotic that he doesn’t know what his other half is doing.

Denise shook her head. None of this made sense. Call it woman’s intuition, call it a feeling, call it whatever you wanted, but something about all of this didn’t add up. Nathan wasn’t a street kid, devoid of moral underpinnings. Sure, he’d had some rough times—so rough, in fact, that he refused to discuss them on the air—but could that push a boy to murder? Three times?