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“I found it,” Nick blurted out the lie, hoping to get this over with.
“Where?”
“Outside Washington House, on the sidewalk.”
“May I ask what you were doing there?”
“My wife’s client is Shamus He
“Burglarized? What do you mean? We heard nothing of that.” Nick couldn’t tell if Sha
“She says they may have been burglarized.” Nick threw his hand up in frustration. “Look, she was supposed to be on that flight today; she’s really freaked out right now. I would like to go find her.”
“Okay,” Sha
Nick watched Sha
“Where did you get this?”
Nick picked it up, turning it over in his hand reading the fateful inscription. “I don’t know who it belongs to.”
“That’s not what I asked.” Sha
Nick’s heart pounded, trying to explode from his chest. He looked up at Sha
The man he had chased from his home, through the streets, forcing him off the road into a tree. The unseen man he had a gun battle with and almost caught. The man who he had ripped this very medal off in the future, whose medal now existed in two separate times. Nick’s eyes suddenly burned with hate.
“Whoa, did I hit a nerve? What’s with the stare of death?” Sha
Nick sat there wanting to reach out and kill the man who sat before him, the one person in this department he had thought he could trust.
“All other things aside,” Sha
“Why?” Nick whispered, as he stared at the two medals.
“Because I know who owns that, and I didn’t realize it was missing.”
Nick’s world, for the umpteenth time, turned upside-down.
“What do you mean you know who owns it?” Nick asked. It hadn’t occurred to him that there could be more than one medal.
“The inscription on the back,” Sha
“He always takes it off, along with all of his rings and his bracelet and watch, when he gets to work in the morning, tucks it in his shoe inside his locker, then puts it all back on at the end of the day before he leaves.
“Thing is, I saw him take it off at seven this morning and there is no way you could get into the locker room. This place is locked up tighter than a steel drum, and until the plane crash, it was swarming with cops.”
“Whose is it?” Nick said, his voice anxious.
“Ironically, it’s Detective Dance’s,” Sha
“Are you sure it’s his?” Nick asked slowly.
“Positive.” Sha
And everything fell together. Dance was Julia’s killer, as he was Paul Dreyfus’s, McManus’s, and Marcus’s. He was as evil and depraved a man as Nick had ever known. Nick’s mind took on a sudden focus. He needed to stop the robbery, but most of all he needed to stop Dance from ever initiating the robbery at 11:15. For if the robbery didn’t occur, there would be no reason for Julia to be killed, for Marcus, for anyone to die.
But Nick took comfort in the fact that even if he couldn’t stop the robbery from happening, at least his search for Julia’s killer was over; he knew who he had to kill.
Nick looked up at Sha
“Dance can be a real ass, but he’s family, he got me this job a few years back, we went to the same high school in Brooklyn. He’s my cousin.”
“He’s your cousin?” Nick said in shock.
“Believe me, there’s no love lost. Anyway, we went to St. Christopher’s Catholic High School in Brooklyn. They gave these out at graduation.”
“I hate to interrupt, but my wife… she has no idea where I am.” Nick knew he needed to get out of here as quickly as possible in order to be in place to stop Dance and stop the robbery from ever happening.
“Right, right,” Sha
Nick stood and followed him out of the room, happy to be free, happy to be on his way to finally setting things right, to saving Julia, to ensuring a long future ahead of them.
Sha
Nick picked up Marcus’s envelope along with the letter he had received from the European, glad that Sha
“Sha
“Where the hell have you been all morning?” Sha
Dance stormed down the corridor, walked right past Sha
“Hey,” Sha
Dance continued down the hall, pulling Nick along with him. He opened a large metal door, revealing a large room containing five jail cells.
“Dance, let him go. He’s done nothing wrong.”
“Sha
Dance pulled the door of the first jail cell fully open, shoved Nick inside, and, with a crash, slammed the iron-barred door closed behind him. The cell was ten by ten feet, surrounded by typical vertical bars with metal cross-hatches. There were two folding chairs in the center of the room and a wooden bench anchored into the wall.
“What the hell you putting the guy in there for?” Sha
“What?” Dance tilted his head. “I didn’t lose my medal.”
Silence filled the air as confusion reigned.
Sha
“What the hell is going on?” Sha
“Do you mind telling me what you were doing letting him go?” Dance said.
“What are we holding him on? The only thing he did was be in the wrong place at the wrong time-” Sha