Read Online Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave - Free Book Online Page B

Or half an hour. Or an hour. Always five. He knew her five minutes probably weren’t going to look like self-defense. He knew it could lead to problems.
    “Yes,” he said, because what did he care? Who was he to say no?
    Even so, he knew he didn’t want to go to jail. He didn’t want her to go to jail either. He weighed that up against Dwight Smith’s future—he had been released for good behavior, and he would be released again for the same.
    “If you want five minutes, you can have them,” he said, and he figured she deserved them. She had earned them.
    “And then?” she asked.
    “And then what happens happens,” he said. “And we deal with it.”
    “I hate him,” she said, looking at Dwight Smith. “I used to think of him as Cowboy Dwight. Even though he’s been in jail all these years, he still keeps me awake. Sometimes I dream about what he did to me. Other times I dream about what I want to do to him. Will killing him help me sleep better?”
    “It won’t make you sleep any worse,” he said, and he believed it.
    “Then what? When the police come, will they arrest me? They’ll know it wasn’t self-defense.”
    “The police won’t come,” he said. “Dwight Smith will disappear. I promise you they’ll never find him.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes,” he said, but of course the car . . . the damn car would make a liar of him.
    So he gave Kelly Summers her five minutes, in which Smith went from being unconscious to dead, then they got him loaded into the back of Smith’s car, and everything was working fine until it wasn’t. Ten minutes short of where he wanted to go, Dwight Smith’s car broke down.
    Will the police go to the service station where Smith worked? Yes, of course they will. Will there be surveillance footage? Yes, there will be. Nothing conclusive. That’s what he told Kelly Summers. She just has to play her part when the police come. He told her that her bedroom window had been broken. He told her what to say. However it won’t be enough. He has to make the police dismiss her as a suspect.
    All those years . . . all those people asking the same question—he is beginning to think that is the answer to all of this. That’s what will keep the police away from Kelly Summers. When you find the guy who did this, just give me five minutes alone with them. Please.
    Please .
    His answer was always the same, a sorrowful sorry, but he couldn’t do that, he understood their pain, but that wasn’t the way justice was done.
    No? What gives that guy/bastard/asshole/son of a bitch more rights than my dead daughter/son/brother/friend/sister/parent? My daughter/son/brother/friend/sister/parent will be in the ground forever, and the guy who put them there will be free in fifteen years to roam the earth. How does that make sense? Why should it be that way?
    Why should anything.
    He knows what he has to do.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Kelly Summers is twenty-eight years old, and on Christmas Day she will turn twenty-nine. My dad’s birthday is on Christmas Day, and I know from experience that it makes shopping harder, but at least you don’t have to do it twice a year. Kelly’s hair is different from the photograph in the file, but the same as the surveillance footage. In the past it was blond and shoulder length. These days it’s black and only finger length. Today it’s sticking up in different directions because we’ve gotten her out of bed. She’s wearing loose-fitting pajamas and the kind of robe my mother would wear. I get the feeling in an hour or two she’ll look the same, that Kelly downplays how attractive she really is. She probably thinks her good looks played a part in Dwight Smith’s selection process five years ago.
    “Has something happened to my parents?” she asks, her words urgent.
    We both shake our heads. “No,” Kent says, and though Kelly won’t know it, I can sense Kent’s relief. The way things work out . . . we were both expecting to find Kelly Summers