Richard Doetsch - The 13th Hour

“She says they may have been burglarized.” Nick threw his hand up in frustration. “Look, she was supposed to be on that flight today; she’s really freaked out right now. I would like to go find her.”

“Okay,” Shannon nodded. “I just have one other question.”

Nick watched Shannon reach into the basket. He saw his hand drift over Marcus’s letter, over the European’s letter, toward the watch, but then detour for the St. Christopher medal, lifting it out by its silver chain. He laid it on the table, the necklace dribbling down like water, and pushed it across the counter surface in front of Nick.

“Where did you get this?”

Nick picked it up, turning it over in his hand reading the fateful inscription. “I don’t know who it belongs to.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Shannon reached into his own pocket and drew out his hand, he laid it upon the table, looking at it, and finally pulled his hand back to reveal the same medal.

Nick’s heart pounded, trying to explode from his chest. He looked up at Shannon, the detective who had interrogated him, had beaten on him, had actually been poised to kill him here in this very room nine hours from now, accusing him of killing his wife when he was the one who actually pulled the trigger. As much as he hated Dance, this was the man who had killed Julia.

The man he had chased from his home, through the streets, forcing him off the road into a tree. The unseen man he had a gun battle with and almost caught. The man who he had ripped this very medal off in the future, whose medal now existed in two separate times. Nick’s eyes suddenly burned with hate.

“Whoa, did I hit a nerve? What’s with the stare of death?” Shannon asked. “It’s just a religious medal.”

Nick sat there wanting to reach out and kill the man who sat before him, the one person in this department he had thought he could trust.

“All other things aside,” Shannon continued, “I really need to know where you got it.”

“Why?” Nick whispered, as he stared at the two medals.

“Because I know who owns that, and I didn’t realize it was missing.”

Nick’s world, for the umpteenth time, turned upside-down.

“What do you mean you know who owns it?” Nick asked. It hadn’t occurred to him that there could be more than one medal.

“The inscription on the back,” Shannon said as he took the medal out of Nick’s hand, turned it over, and did likewise to the one on the table. And Nick saw the difference: There was no engraving on Shannon’s.

“He always takes it off, along with all of his rings and his bracelet and watch, when he gets to work in the morning, tucks it in his shoe inside his locker, then puts it all back on at the end of the day before he leaves.

“Thing is, I saw him take it off at seven this morning and there is no way you could get into the locker room. This place is locked up tighter than a steel drum, and until the plane crash, it was swarming with cops.”

“Whose is it?” Nick said, his voice anxious.

“Ironically, it’s Detective Dance’s,” Shannon said.

“Are you sure it’s his?” Nick asked slowly.

“Positive.” Shannon leaned forward. “Look at the edge, see the chip? It happened when he was moonlighting on some job down-county. And the note on the back, his mom had that done, Miracles do happen. She was a great lady, very religious, believed in God’s influence, that it was his hand controlling fate, that we’d all be held to a higher judgment at our demise. Dance was her only child, her miracle.”

And everything fell together. Dance was Julia’s killer, as he was Paul Dreyfus’s, McManus’s, and Marcus’s. He was as evil and depraved a man as Nick had ever known. Nick’s mind took on a sudden focus. He needed to stop the robbery, but most of all he needed to stop Dance from ever initiating the robbery at 11:15. For if the robbery didn’t occur, there would be no reason for Julia to be killed, for Marcus, for anyone to die.

But Nick took comfort in the fact that even if he couldn’t stop the robbery from happening, at least his search for Julia’s killer was over; he knew who he had to kill.

Nick looked up at Shannon, his opinion of him changing for the third time today. “Why do you guys wear the same medal?”

“Dance can be a real ass, but he’s family, he got me this job a few years back, we went to the same high school in Brooklyn. He’s my cousin.”

“He’s your cousin?” Nick said in shock.

“Believe me, there’s no love lost. Anyway, we went to St. Christopher’s Catholic High School in Brooklyn. They gave these out at graduation.”

“I hate to interrupt, but my wife… she has no idea where I am.” Nick knew he needed to get out of here as quickly as possible in order to be in place to stop Dance and stop the robbery from ever happening.

“Right, right,” Shannon said. Standing up, he gathered up the two medals, putting his in his pocket and Dance’s in the basket, and opened the interrogation room door. “I just need to process you out, get you to sign for all your stuff. I promise we’ll be quick.”

Nick stood and followed him out of the room, happy to be free, happy to be on his way to finally setting things right, to saving Julia, to ensuring a long future ahead of them.

Shannon laid the basket on a small desk in the hall and quickly set to filling out a triplicate legal-release form. “Your pistol is in our gun safe, I’ll get it as soon as we get you signed out.”

Nick picked up Marcus’s envelope along with the letter he had received from the European, glad that Shannon hadn’t peered at either, and tucked them back in his coat pocket.

“Shannon, what the hell are you doing?” Dance called from the corral area of the police station. He was dressed in his blue blazer, white JC Penney shirt, and blue-striped tie, and the rigors of the day were not yet reflected in his appearance.

“Where the hell have you been all morning?” Shannon shouted back. “I can’t find you for hours and then you drop a silly Q &A in my lap.”

Dance stormed down the corridor, walked right past Shannon, and took Nick by the arm, leading him down the hall.

“Hey,” Shannon yelled as he chased after him. “What the hell are you doing?”

Dance continued down the hall, pulling Nick along with him. He opened a large metal door, revealing a large room containing five jail cells.

“Dance, let him go. He’s done nothing wrong.”

“Shannon here gets all touchy-feely,” Dance said to Nick.

Dance pulled the door of the first jail cell fully open, shoved Nick inside, and, with a crash, slammed the iron-barred door closed behind him. The cell was ten by ten feet, surrounded by typical vertical bars with metal cross-hatches. There were two folding chairs in the center of the room and a wooden bench anchored into the wall.

“What the hell you putting the guy in there for?” Shannon asked as he came into the room. “Cut him a break. His wife just narrowly missed getting on that plane. And besides, you actually owe him, he found your St. Christopher medal that you lost.”

“What?” Dance tilted his head. “I didn’t lose my medal.”

Silence filled the air as confusion reigned.

Shannon and Dance stepped out of the room, closing the door behind them.

“What the hell is going on?” Shannon pressed him.

“Do you mind telling me what you were doing letting him go?” Dance said.

“What are we holding him on? The only thing he did was be in the wrong place at the wrong time-” Shannon stopped. “And you never answered my question. Where the hell have you been?”

Shannon was several inches taller and carried twenty more pounds of muscle, but that didn’t stop Dance from rushing into his face, staring up at him like a junkyard dog.