John Gilstrap - At all costs

The nurse raised her hands as she walked, making Jake smile. “You can keep those down, ma’am. I’m really not here to hurt anyone. I’d just like everyone to stay together.”

“Did you really kill people, Mr. Brighton?” asked the ponytail girl out of nowhere.

The suddenness of the question caught him off guard. He regarded the girl cautiously, looking for something he didn’t find. She seemed just genuinely curious. “No, honey,” he said. “I’ve never hurt a soul.” He moved a little closer, then bent down to look her straight in the eye. “And that’s the absolute truth.”

Seemingly satisfied, the little girl smiled. “Good,” she said.

He patted her head, taking care not to rumple the hairdo, then turned his attention back to the adults in the office. “Have you made your announcement yet, Mrs. Harris?”

“N-no,” she said. “I–I thought you wanted to hear me do it.”

“That’s very thoughtful.” He made a special effort to show a smile. “Okay, then, let’s get to it. I’m listening now.”

Mrs. Harris punched a button on the console. “Mrs. Hawkins?” she asked.

The open mike on the other end sounded hollow, distant. “Yes?”

Mrs. Harris glanced back at Jake before continuing. “Would you send Travis Brighton to the office, please?”

In the background, the open mike picked up a group “Ooooo” from the class. A trip to the principal’s office was never good news. “Class! Hush!” At Mrs. Hawkins’s command, her room fell silent. “Okay,” she said to the microphone. “Anything else?” Clearly, she was waiting for a reason.

“Make sure he brings his books and his jacket with him.” Mrs. Harris looked back at Jake and seemed pleased by the smile she got in return.

“Which books?” Mrs. Hawkins asked.

Mrs. Harris deferred to Jake, who merely shrugged.

“All of them,” Mrs. Harris said.

“All of them?”

Mrs. Harris fired another look to Jake, who made a rolling motion with his fingers, urging her to move things along. She turned back to the microphone, clearly at a loss for what to say, then gave up and turned the system off.

Her solution struck Jake as funny. “Nicely done, Mrs. Harris.” She seemed proud of herself.

“Why get your son wrapped up in all this, Brighton?” Menefee asked. His tone had the hard edge of a father scolding his son.

Jake’s smile disappeared. He glared at the man for a long time, deciding whether or not to answer. Finally, he said, “Don’t look at me like I’m some sort of child molester, Menefee. In case you haven’t realized it yet, this is a time for you to be very, very careful.”

Menefee shook his head and stood a little taller, as if finding a lost vein of courage. “I don’t look at you as a child molester, Brighton,” he corrected. “I look at you as a murderer, because that’s what you are.”

The ladies gasped as one. Mrs. Harris brought a hand to her chest-as though she might be having a heart attack-and shot Menefee a surprised, angry scowl. All of them edged away from their boss, reminding Jake of that scene in every cowboy flick where the street clears before the big gun battle.

Jake never shifted his stare from Menefee’s eyes, yet he registered precisely what everyone in the room was doing, where they were going. He sensed that things were about to come unraveled. Menefee was a fool to draw verbal battle lines. What could he possibly hope to gain by picking a fight with an armed man? When Jake spoke, he carefully selected every word. “If I were a murderer, you’d be dead now, Menefee. As it is, I haven’t even threatened you.”

“You bring a gun into my school…”

Jake silenced him with an abrupt movement of his left hand, making Menefee flinch. Under different circumstances, Jake might have laughed at the reaction, but not this time. He leveled his forefinger at the principal, six inches from the end of the man’s nose. “It’s time for you to shut up now,” he said. “I’ve done nothing wrong. The details are none of your business, but rest assured that, to date, I have never killed a soul.” He paused, shifting his eyes individually to each of the people standing there in the office. One by one, all but the little girl broke eye contact the instant he landed on them. “Also rest assured that I will do what ever I have to do to protect my family from harm. Is that clear, Menefee?”

The principal’s eyes shifted from the tip of Jake’s finger to the gun on his hip and back again. He swallowed hard, then nodded.

Jake lowered his finger slowly. “Good. Now, why don’t you take a seat over there.”

Menefee hesitated for an instant, as though unsure what to do.

“Please,” Jake said, motioning with his hand toward one of the three metal secretarial desks behind the counter. “And don’t touch anything, okay? Especially not the phone. Really, my business here is almost done.”

Eleven minutes had passed, and Carolyn was freezing. She slid the temperature control further toward red, realizing that it just wasn’t that cold outside. Nerves, she figured. Her body temperature always plummeted when she got nervous. Her feet felt like they might blister from the hot air blasting down on them, yet she still couldn’t stop shivering.

This was taking too long. How big a deal could it be to go inside, pick up Travis, and come back outside? Five minutes? Maybe ten? Now they were closing in on twelve, and still her men were nowhere to be found. She hated herself for not going in with him. She should have insisted. At least then, whatever happened would happen to them together. The thought of being separated from the action-good or bad-was unbearable.

Twice she started to climb out of the van to check up on them, but both times she stopped herself. If things turned bad, they’d need her to be right where she was. Her mind projected a nightmare scenario, with Jake dragging Travis in a dead-out sprint up the hill, with cops close on their heels, only to find the van empty.

How many times had Jake said it? The key to success is sticking to the plan.

In her heart, though, the plan was doomed to failure. How could it possibly work? There were a million variables, with billions of combinations. This whole business with Travis and his field trip, for example. Who’d have thought? Or the drug bust that morning in the shop? Nothing was as they’d planned it. The original version of the plan didn’t even take Travis into account-he wasn’t even conceived yet.

In the old days, Carolyn and Jake were obsessed by the plan. They worked on it every night, investing thousands of dollars into the equipment and the tools and the safe house in the mountains. God, the safe house! How long had it been since she’d even seen it? Eleven years? Twelve, maybe? Travis was just a little guy, she knew that, and even then it was a rattrap; an easy place to avoid. Balanced right on the edge of civilization, the safe house-really an old travel trailer to which Jake had assigned the lofty name Donovan’s Den-sat in the middle of a five-acre tract in the hills of West Virginia. Jake had read about it in the legal notices of the Beckley newspaper and bought it from the bank for $15,000 cash, the day before the trustee sale. According to the real estate records, the property now belonged to one Francis Wheeler, of High Point, North Carolina. Sometimes Carolyn wondered how Jake kept all of the aliases straight in his head.

Early on, the aliases had been an obsession of his. You couldn’t have too many names. Every week or so, for more than a year, he went to the library and perused death notices from a dozen key papers. Once he had a name, he’d simply call the Division of Motor Vehicles under the guise of checking a driving record for an insurance company. With a little bullshit and a lot of bluff, he’d wrangle the driver’s Social Security number out of the clerk, and once armed with that magical nine-digit identification, the rest was easy. Using a series of post office boxes-a new one every month-they’d get new driver’s licenses. Each new application carried its own risk, of course, but if something went disastrously wrong, everything would be traceable to a defunct P.O. box, last owned by a dead man.