Nick of Time by Tim Downs Read Free Book Online Page B

meeting had been faithfully entered, and the current month’s meeting bore the additional notation, “NICK IN TOWN.” Pete hadn’t forgotten their meeting; he would have been there if not for the intervention of three lead slugs. Nick placed his finger on today’s date and began to scan backward week by week and month by month, noting every entry Pete had made in his perfect script. A brief notation in late November caught his eye: CALL MARTY—no last name, no phone number. Three days earlier he found a similar entry: CALL MARTY. He continued to work backward through the fall calendar and found the same notation again and again. According to the calendar, Pete spoke repeatedly with some guy named Marty just a few months prior to his death. Nick remembered the words of Pete’s letter inviting him to Philadelphia: We’ve really had some interesting cases the last few months . . . I’ve been working on one since last fall and I think it’s about to come together . . .
    Who’s this guy Marty , Nick wondered, and how do I find him?
    Nick turned to the file cabinet and opened the top drawer— but just as he did he heard the blaring whoop of a police siren outside the house and almost simultaneously a pounding knock on the front door.
    “Police—open up!”
    Crap —some nosy neighbor must have spotted the beam from Nick’s flashlight and called the police. He thought about making a run for the back door, but he knew it was useless— the police would have surely sent a man around back before announcing their presence. There was no way out, and there was nowhere to run—and he probably had less than a minute before they let themselves in.
    He turned back to the file drawer and searched through the section headings: Correspondence, Financial, Personal  . . . There it was—right where it should be, in the back, in alphabetical order: Utilities . Nick had never been so glad that Pete was a compulsive organizer; he could find his way through Pete’s files faster than he could his own. Nick rifled through the file folders in the Utilities section and quickly found it: the file marked Telephone .
    He pulled the file and ran out of the office just as he heard the sound of a key scratching in the dead bolt. He raced across the living room to the window and threw open the drapes; he unlatched the window and lifted it just an inch or two— then he slid the file folder out the window and let it drop to the ground behind the bushes. He had just drawn the drapes again when the front door flew open and Detective Danny Misco burst into the room with two patrolmen behind him. Misco held a flashlight in his left hand and a Glock in his right; he pointed both of them at Nick.
    “Well, it’s about time,” Nick said. “I want to report a Peeping Tom.”

7
    A lena waited under a streetlamp on the sidewalk in front of the Endor Tavern & Grille. Two of her dogs sat obediently beside her, one on either side like canine bookends. On her left was Dante, one of the enormous black neo-mastiffs that she always kept nearby for protection; on her right was tiny little Ruckus, the gawky Chinese crested that looked like a half-plucked chicken with its tongue hanging out.
    She glanced down at her cell phone for the umpteenth time and remembered what Nick had told her: Three bars on the right means your battery is good; three bars on the left means you’re getting a signal . She remembered something else Nick had told her too: I’ll call at exactly nine o’clock . She checked the time—it was now 9:45.
    She could have kicked herself for walking instead of driving; she could be waiting for Nick’s call in the privacy of her truck instead of standing on a street corner like some hooker. But it took less time to take the footpath directly down the mountain than it did to make the drive to Endor on the long and winding road—and she didn’t like to pass up an opportunity to exercise her dogs. Besides, she never expected to end up