Richard Doetsch - The 13th Hour

Nick grabbed Dance’s leg, pulling him off-balance. He leaped to his feet and with a bone-crushing right hook drilled Dance in the nose, stunning him. All Nick’s anger, all his rage filled his fist as he drew it back and hammered it into Dance’s jaw. He continued with a rain of blows, a release of his pain and frustration. All his emotions poured out of his clenched fists as he hit the man who would end Julia’s life, who would shoot her in cold blood, a devil playing God as he ripped her from this earth. Nick would kill him right here, right now, with his bare hands. Dance might have been strong, he might have been tough, but there is a point of desperation all men reach when everything they hold dear is taken from them, when what they love most is stolen away. Nick had endured Julia’s death, her danger, her fear, he had left her behind in the future to die with Dance, a man who through the twisting of time, seemed to haunt his every living second.

He hit him again and again.

But Dance was tough. He blocked Nick’s next punch and countered with a hard right that sent Nick staggering back. Dance jumped on him, holding him by the collar, as he rained blow after blow upon Nick’s body, doubling him over, knocking the wind out of him. Nick could feel a rib crack, the pain excruciating as he struggled to breathe as Dance’s attack raged on.

Nick’s awareness was slipping, consciousness drifting in and out, but a single image filled his mind. The golden timepiece. Without the watch, he would be trapped in this time line, continuing forward with his and Julia’s fate set on a course of death, a death he knew for himself was only moments away. And Julia would be dying all the sooner, alone, with nothing but questions swirling in her mind.

Nick could barely see through the blood that ran down into his eyes, he could barely make out the clock on the wall, but his vision was just clear enough to see the time: 12:59, the second hand sweeping up toward the top of the hour.

And then Nick thought of Julia, of everything she meant to him. He thought of her gentle touch, her lips as she woke him this morning, of her hope-filled eyes and her blonde hair as it fell upon him as they made love. He thought of her heart and her passion. He thought of her as she swam too fast at the age of fifteen, gasping as he pulled her from the pool but never complaining. She was his life, everything he cared about, everything he lived for.

With a last bit of strength, reaching into what was left of him, Nick hit Dance in the nose, continuing his momentum, driving the detective up against the bars of the jail cell, his adrenaline-infused muscles pinning him there.

And in a final moment of clarity, as the clock struck one, Nick reached into Dance’s jacket and pulled the watch from his pocket.

11:00 A.M

JULIA QUINN PULLED INTO the short-term parking at Westchester Airport. She grabbed her purse off the seat and raced for the terminal. Held up by an unexpected conference call that had lasted over forty-five minutes, she was behind schedule and afraid she’d miss her flight.

She had made the appointment with Dr. Colverhome on Monday and cleared her Friday afternoon schedule to indulge in a little bit of future mommyhood excitement.

She left the three frames on the seat of her car. They were of different sizes and designs. She had grabbed them from The Right Thing in Byram Hills on her way to the airport this morning, as she was unsure exactly how big a sonogram picture actually was. She was excited about giving it to Nick tonight, surprising him with the news. She had teddy bear wrapping paper and a copy of Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Sox, her favorite from childhood, something she’d loved to hear her dad read, a tradition she was looking forward to Nick’s continuing with their child.

Though the scientific, in utero image of their child would betiny, it would be the first picture to define them as a true family, a picture they would place on a bookshelf in the library among all their crazy vacation pictures from around the country.

She checked her watch: 11:01. With the flight scheduled to hit the air at 11:16, she just might make it. As this was a small regional airport, ticket lines were short and security checks were rarely congested.

With her boarding pass validated, she flew through security and was relieved to see that boarding had just started. She felt an overwhelming excitement. She was bursting to call Nick, to tell him what she was doing, to tell him about the baby, but her patience won out. She wanted to see the surprise on his face, she wanted to feel his arms wrap her with the same joy she had felt when she learned of the life within her.

Nick was unaware of her schedule, unaware of her flying today, which made her feel a bit guilty. He had no love of air travel, always insisting on knowing her flight plans when she flew and that she call him upon landing. But she was afraid it would lead to too many questions, her answers being transparent lies to a man who could read her face like a clock.

They had parted on a sour note just a few hours ago. He was angry about having to dine out with friends he didn’t much care for, and while she returned his anger, she was laughing on the inside, knowing it was all a ploy, knowing that it would make the surprise all the sweeter.

Her heart still skipped a beat when she thought of Nick. That feeling still arose in her stomach, as it had the moment she first saw him standing poolside in his bathing suit sixteen years ago. And while Nick had no idea where she was, she knew his routine as if it was her own. He was working from home, he’d probably be sitting in his leather chair in the library toiling away for the next eight hours, forgetting to eat or even look up, losing all track of time.

NICK SAT IN his Audi, the Sig-Sauer in his hand, checking the safety and slamming in the clip before tucking it in his waistband at the small of his back. He had driven through the bustling town of Byram Hills, in the midst of its late-morning summer routine-mothers with strollers heading for an early lunch at the Country Kitchen; day laborers getting the first pie of the day from Broadway Pizza; landscapers filling their trucks with foliage at Mariani’s Garden Market; real estate brokers sipping coffee outside their offices while chatting about their latest listings as fathers ran into the local bank to grab cash for the long weekend at the shore.

Intersecting lives, hand waves and kisses, smiles and hugs, a town linked by its commonality of existence-lives that would be changed forever in less than one hour.

Nick turned into the Byram Hills Police Department. After all of his ideas, all of his brainstorming, he went back to the simplest of solutions. Nick wasn’t some superhero, he had never been in the military, and he had no illusions that he was some skilled crime fighter. He couldn’t arrive on the scene, guns blazing, killing everyone involved in the theft and think he could succeed, let alone live-and who knew the consequences? He was simply a man trying to save his wife.

And he realized there was one person he could not only trust but who had the skill and authority, he had seen his allegiance to the law when the man stood up to his corrupt cousin, his character in the face of disaster at the crash site, he had seen his sense of right and wrong. Nick felt it in his gut that he could trust this man to do the right thing.

SAM DREYFUS EXTENDED the small tripod legs and placed the six-inch microlaser firmly in the ground, aiming it straight at the lens of the east camera, which overlooked the parking lot, its beam filling the camera’s image with spectral noise. While it wouldn’t break the camera, it would interfere with its imaging capability, disabling it for fifteen minutes, at which point an alarm would sound, indicating a disturbance in the system that required investigation.