Time to Live: Part Five Read Online Free Page B

realizing that he’d been a fool to come out here alone. “I’m just trying to prevent an injustice.”
    Hines snorted a bitter laugh. “Preventing injustice. Funny, that’s what I thought I was doing.”
    Carter recoiled. “By framing innocent kids?”
    “Is that how you see Brad Dougherty, Counselor? You see him as an innocent? He’s killed two people that we know of, and he’s escaped from prison. If that’s your definition of innocent, then I shudder to think what guilty must look like to you.”
    Carter pointed at Jeremy. “There it is, Sheriff. That’s what guilty looks like.”
    Hines followed Carter’s finger and looked long and hard at the boy with the gun. “No,” he said. “That’s what stupid looks like. He made a mistake, for Christ’s sake. He never intended to shoot anyone.”
    “There’s a dead boy and his family to whom that makes no difference at all,” Carter said.
    Hines’s eyes shifted back to Carter, and he smiled at a joke that only he could hear. He mocked, “To whom that makes no difference, huh?” The smile turned to a laugh. “Think you’ve got the high ground, do you? The high and mighty ground? Your daughter’s hanging out with a murderer, and you think—”
    “Brad Ward—or Dougherty, or whatever the hell his name is—didn’t commit this murder, Sheriff. And neither did my daughter.”
    “Yes, he did,” Hines said. “The way I see it, if they’d just stayed out of it—if Dougherty hadn’t tackled my boy—there’d have been no shooting.”
    The point was a ridiculous one, and Carter sensed that the sheriff understood that. Carter chose not to pursue it. “Just tell me why,” he said. “How could you begin to justify this charade?” He turned his head from father to son and back again. He’d take the answer from either one.
    “A year from now, it would all have been over and done with,” Hines said. “Everybody would have come out a winner. Dougherty would be back in prison, your daughter would be back at home, and my boy wouldn’t have to pay for his stupidity with the rest of his life.”
    Carter was confused. “So, you never intended to arrest Nicki?”
    “Of course I intended to arrest her. I had to arrest her, but the charges never would have stuck. You know as well as I do that the evidence never would have held up in court.”
    “It would have been plenty for an indictment,” Carter said. “And with that would come thousands in legal bills, and probably imprisonment.”
    Hines looked unmoved. “But ultimately, she’d have walked free with a clean record.”
    “And Chas Delphin? You were just going to let his murder go unavenged?”
    Another shrug. “He’d be dead either way. A hundred years from now, he’ll still be dead. Nothing any of us can do will change that.”
    Carter turned to Jeremy. “ Why? ”
    The boy looked up long enough to glance at his father, and then looked down again.
    “Go ahead, Jeremy,” Hines growled. “Tell him how this is my fault. How you did it because I’m a terrible father.” When the boy was too embarrassed to answer, the sheriff went ahead on his behalf. “I’m such an asshole that I wanted him to have a baseball scholarship. Here he is, the best pitcher that this county has seen in years—hell, maybe the best pitcher they’ve ever seen—and I was such a miserable son of a bitch that I wanted him to put it to good use. Have you ever heard such cruelty?”
    Carter was lost, but he sensed that it would be dangerous to interrupt.
    “It worked, too. I pulled what few strings I have to pull and I got a scout to come out here and take a look at him. Jeremy got a full scholarship to UNC to pitch on their varsity team. The scout said that he might be good enough for the pros one day.”
    “I didn’t want to go,” Jeremy said. His voice was barely audible above the rain.
    “Don’t stop there, boy,” Hines said. “Tell him all of it. Tell him about the part where you were gonna punish