Time to Run Read Online Free

looking for all the wrong signs.
    This time, instead of bingeing and purging, Nicki turned to diet drugs obtained from friends. Carter knew nothing about them, of course, but if he had, he might actually have approved. They’d have seemed like a good compromise: Nicki would eat something and keep it down for the whole day, even as the drugs reduced the size of her appetite. The diet drug was two drugs, actually, and taken together, according to the popular media—hell, according to the evening news—the results were truly amazing. People shed unwanted pounds, seemingly without side effects. Why wouldn’t that have been a good thing to try? If it would have improved her consistently sour attitude, he’d have tried anything.
    But there were side effects. Deadly ones. Primary pulmonary hypertension, PPH for short, thickened the tiny vessels in the lungs. This thickening, or “hardening,” in turn caused the pressure in those vessels to increase, causing blood to back up in the rest of the body as the cells awaited their turn to pass through the narrowed passages. The biological chain reaction that resulted took a half hour for the doctor to explain, but the time would come when Nicki’s lungs would no longer be able to sustain life.
    The average life expectancy from diagnosis to death was eighteen months. The average waiting time for transplants was twenty-four to thirty months. Do the math.
    At first, Carter had refused to believe it. Doctors were a dime a dozen, for heaven’s sake. He’d figured he could keep shopping till he found a physician who told him what he wanted to hear.
    But the decision was unanimous: a bilateral heart-lung transplant was her only hope for long-term recovery. In the end, Carter decided on a multipronged approach. He’d wear the damn pager for the transplants, but he’d also keep pressure on the doctors to try something new.
    No matter what the literature said, come hell or high water, he was not going to let Nicki die.
    God forbid that Nicki might make it easier. She was so pissed off that her regularly scheduled teen years had been interrupted by illness that she’d turned downright recalcitrant. She just wanted it all to end, she’d said. Life wasn’t worth living if it couldn’t be lived on her terms, and long hospital stays for experimental procedures were not on her agenda. She wanted movies and pizza, not EKGs and intravenous drugs.
    With five hundred yards to go before his street, Carter eased the Volvo down from eighty and hoped that he wouldn’t spin out in the turn.
    Carter’s house on Berwick Place in the Westgate subdivision was identical to fifty percent of the homes in his neighborhood. The builder had designed exactly two interiors for his houses—both center-hall colonials, but one about $75,000 more expensive than the other—with half a dozen exterior elevations for each. The effect to the casual passerby was a wide variety of charming, 2,200-square-foot brick-and-siding homes. The homeowners’ association saw to it that the lawns stayed trimmed and green, and that nobody dared to install chain-link fences.
    Carter jerked the Volvo to a halt in the driveway, nearly forgetting to turn off the ignition as he dashed to the front door. His heart sank when he found it locked. Nicki never locked the door when she was home, despite his repeated demands that she do so. Nobody would try to do harm to a prosecutor’s daughter, she’d say with a smirk.
    His key found the slot and he threw open the heavy door. “Nicki?” he called. “Nicki, where are you!”
    No answer.
    â€œNicki! Are you here?”
    Still, no answer.
    Wheeling from the kitchen, he charged back through the foyer and up the stairs to her bedroom. “Please God,” he prayed, “let her be okay.”
    * * *
    Nicki made the one phone call she needed to make, then turned her phone off. She’d silenced the