Read Online Time to Steal by John Gilstrap - Free Book Online

whole idea was to have a plain vanilla life, sweet but ordinary. The linchpin, though, was always the family. God knew he loved Jenny, and Jenny knew it, too. In retrospect, he wasn’t at all sure that he could say the same about Nicki. He’d left far too many of the child-rearing chores to her mother, always promising to make it right just as soon as he crossed the next hurdle.
    But the hurdles never ended. Somehow, in mere moments, seventeen years had passed, and he was all alone, struggling to temper bonds with his daughter that should have been forged when she was a toddler.
    Every time he thought that life had gotten as bad as it possibly could, he discovered that there was no bottom to the well of badness. Honest to God, he just didn’t know how much more of this he could take.
    â€œGet a grip,” he told himself, embarrassed that he’d spoken aloud. Who was he to feel sorry for himself, when Nicki was staring down the tunnel at her own death? It was terrible, he knew, but more and more he’d come to think of Jenny and Nicki as the lucky ones. For them, the pain had stopped, or soon would. For Carter, the misery and loneliness had no foreseeable expiration date.
    The bungled transplant call was the end of the line for Carter. It was the goal for which he and Nicki had focused everything for so long, and when the call finally came, he’d allowed himself to smile.
    Then, when the heart and lungs were ripped from their hands, it was as if his soul had been ripped from his body. There was nothing left anymore. There was no hope. When he replayed the details of last night’s argument in his head—no, wait, that was two nights ago, wasn’t it?—he found that the specific words were gone, evaporated from his mind into the cloud of so many similar screaming matches. But the desperation in Nicki’s voice remained etched forever in every synapse: All she wanted was to be normal.
    Even in the panicky, giddy ride to the hospital for her transplants, her nervous chatter had dealt not with life in its metaphysical form, but in terms of being able to go to college next year, with a specific eye on spring break. This, from a girl who’d never attended anything close to a spring break.
    Carter hated himself for never having taken his daughter to the beach himself. She had in fact seen it several times, en route to Italy one year and to Disney World another, but she’d never touched it. Neither Carter nor Jenny were all that fond of the water, and together, they’d justified their dismissal of a beach vacation by telling Nicki that she had a whole lifetime in which to make up for lost time at the beach.
    A whole lifetime. My ass .
    The ring of his cell phone brought Carter back to the here and now. He pulled it from the clip on his belt and flipped it open. “Janssen.”
    â€œHello, Carter, this is Warren Michaels. I’ve got some troubling news for you.”
    As he listened, it was all Carter could do to keep his vehicle on the road.
    * * *
    The sky was the color of lead. Brad and Nicki didn’t make it five miles down Shore Road before heavy drops started to hammer the windshield. Three minutes after that, the skies erupted. Rain fell in torrents. They had no choice but to pull to the side of the road and stretch the fabric top over the Sebring. It was time they could ill afford, but necessary. Brad told himself that the rain gave them a reason to have the windows up, and therefore be less noticeable.
    â€œI know what you’re thinking,” he said when they were on the road again. Nicki hadn’t said three words since they’d left the Quik Mart, and the silence made the whole nightmare even worse. His comment drew a numb gaze. “A boy was killed, ” he said, “and we witnessed it, and we need to do something about it. Is that close?”
    He was right on the money.
    â€œWell, listen. That’s not our problem. If we’d come