48 Hours to Kill
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Synopsis
Serving a ten-year sentence in a Nevada prison for armed robbery, Ethan Lockhart hopes that he can one day become a productive, law-abiding member of society. But society has other plans for Ethan. When he’s given a forty-eight-hour furlough to attend his sister Abby’s funeral, he learns that her body was never found—just enough blood to declare her dead instead of missing—and he begins to suspect that there’s more to her death than was reported. Ethan decides to use his forty-eight-hour window to find out what happened. But to get to the bottom of the mystery, he’ll have to return to his unsavory past. Ethan teams up with his sister’s best friend, Whitney, in a search for the truth. They’re united in their shared grief, and their chemistry—both emotional and physical—begins to heat up. But romance goes on hold as the suspects mount. Ethan’s old boss, Shark, a mid-level loan shark, now heads a criminal empire. As Ethan and Whitney uncover more clues, they become convinced that Shark is responsible for the murder, but they have no proof. If Ethan is going to solve his sister’s murder in forty-eight hours, he will have to become the criminal he swore he’d never be again.
Release date: December 7, 2021
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Print pages: 352
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48 Hours to Kill
Andrew Bourelle
Abby
9 years ago
THE TRUCK CAME around a bend, and the lake appeared in front of them, a giant shimmering sheet of blue glass. Speedboats and small yachts scored its surface like jets in the sky, leaving white contrails across the cobalt water.
Abby felt giddy. She sat in the middle of the truck’s bench seat, with Ethan driving and Whitney to her right. The truck made its descent down the mountain highway. Pine trees blurred by. The windows were open, and the cool mountain air flowed in all around them in a whirlpool. Abby’s hair danced around her.
They were going to the beach. On the drive, Ethan had said almost nothing. Whether he was hungover or just tired, Abby didn’t care. Her brother was twenty-one and had his own apartment now and a new job, and she was just a kid getting ready to go to high school. She’d been afraid when he was moving out that he would forget about her, especially since his job was working as a bouncer in a strip club. What kind of guy who hangs around naked women all day and night still gives a shit about his kid sister?
But Abby had always been Ethan’s number one. And vice versa.
When she was little, he’d been the one to watch her while their mom worked. He helped her with her homework and watched TV with her. Took her to movies. She didn’t know what he was doing with his life—roughing up unruly customers when he was working? Partying with off-the-clock strippers when he wasn’t? But it made her happy to know that she was still important to him.
“So,” he said, turning the truck onto Highway 28, “you guys excited to be going to high school?”
“Sure,” Abby said noncommittally.
Whitney shrugged.
The truth was that both of them were excited. Friday night football games. Homecoming. Boys. Dating. Parties. High school had been all they could talk about recently, but those things couldn’t be particularly exciting to someone like Ethan, who could go to bars, gamble in casinos, stay out all night without a curfew.
Abby changed the subject. “How’s the new job? Are the girls at the club really pretty?”
“Some of them.”
He was slowing the truck, looking for an empty spot along the shoulder to park. Cars were jammed bumper to bumper. He began backing into a spot. It was a tight fit, especially since his new truck had a giant trailer hitch on the back, but he parallel parked with ease.
“Have you hooked up with any of them?” Whitney asked.
“Don’t ask him that,” Abby said.
Ethan grinned slyly. “All of them.”
“Gross,” Abby said, and she punched him in the arm.
A path wound its way down the slope through a wooded area. Clusters of beaches were hidden below along the boulder-strewn shoreline. Ethan carried a small cooler with a few beers for him and sodas for the girls, along with a towel and a paperback novel. Abby and Whitney carried their rafts and towels, navigating the trail carefully so their floats didn’t get snagged on branches.
They finally came to the beach they were looking for and found it crowded.
“Where do you want to sit?” Ethan said.
Abby found her way through the blankets and towels on the sand, and they positioned themselves in a fairly secluded spot next to a boulder. They laid out their towels.
“Put on sunscreen,” Ethan said. “Both of you.”
“Okay, Mom,” Abby said.
“Fine,” he said. “Don’t.”
He flopped down on his chest, laying his arms above his head, and closed his eyes like he was going to sleep. His stubble shimmered in the sunlight like sand on his cheeks. Abby waited a few minutes and then put on sunscreen. She and Whitney rubbed it on each other’s backs.
The beach was next to Coffin Rock, a sixty-foot cliff standing above the water, shaped like an upright pine casket from an old western. The backside sloped down to the shore. It was a steep climb among rocks and trees, but part of the draw of this beach was for people to come and cliff jump.
There were rumors about people dying when they jumped off the cliff. The water was so cold that it shocked them unconscious. Or they hit the surface wrong and broke their spines. Abby didn’t know if any of it was true. She’d seen plenty of people do it without incident.
A group of guys, maybe high schoolers, maybe college, sat on towels nearby, drinking beer from bottles. They kept looking over at Abby and Whitney. After finishing their beers, they headed over toward Coffin Rock, scrambling up the backside and jumping off one by one, hooting with excitement as they came up out of the water. One of them made his way over to Abby and Whitney, smiling and shaking the water out of his hair.
“You girls want a drink?”
He gestured over toward the group, implying they had to come join the guys if they wanted one.
Ethan raised his head up off the towel.
“Oh. Hey, buddy,” the guy said to him.
Ethan stood up, towering over the guy. The boy was younger than Ethan but already had a beer gut. He had shaved his facial hair into a thin beard, but the hair was patchy.
“What grade are you in?” Ethan asked the kid.
“I’m a freshman at UNR,” he said.
“So, you’re what? Nineteen?”
“Yeah. So?”
“You ever talk to these girls again,” Ethan said, “I’ll put you in the hospital.”
The guy opened his mouth to argue, but Ethan wasn’t finished.
“I’ll hold you down,” he said, “and rub sand in your eyes until you cry blood. You got it?”
“Jesus Christ,” the guy said, starting to walk away. “I was just trying to be nice.”
He retreated to his group, and the girls could hear low mumbles as he told his friends what had been said. Abby felt a little sick to her stomach—just the possibility of a fight had spiked her adrenaline.
“Geez, Ethan,” she said, “we were just talking to them.”
“We’re not little kids,” Whitney said.
“You two can do better than those idiots.”
The boys started talking loudly, saying words like douchebag and pussy. Emboldened by their numbers, they talked about what they’d do to Ethan if he said anything else to them.
“I’ll be back,” Ethan said.
Abby thought he was going to fight the whole group of guys, and she opened her mouth to stop him. But he walked right past them without looking. He had a certain air about him—he wasn’t pretending to ignore them; he simply was. The boys in the group eyed him as he walked past, but he had already forgotten about them. They were that insignificant.
“God, your brother’s hot,” Whitney said.
“Eww,” Abby said.
She made a gagging gesture and acted like she was vomiting.
Ethan climbed slowly up the steep slope at the back of Coffin Rock. When he got to the top, he stood and looked down, as if contemplating something serious. The sun glinted off the blue water. She expected him to simply jump out, like the boys had, and drop feet first to the water below. Instead, he dove headfirst. He stabbed the water like a spear and disappeared in a small spout of white. Abby expected him to bob to the surface a moment later, but the water calmed without any sign of him.
Seconds passed.
He didn’t surface.
“Oh, shit,” Whitney said.
Abby rose to her feet. Finally, he broke the surface.
“Jesus,” Whitney said. “He scared the shit out of me.”
“Me too,” Abby said.
They laughed together and watched as Ethan climbed back to the top.
He dove again and disappeared into the water, this time staying under for even longer.
“Jesus, Ethan,” Abby said, “come on.”
Ethan reappeared, throwing his head back, and she realized she’d been holding her breath. When he made his way back over, he collapsed onto his towel, breathing hard.
“You about gave us a heart attack,” Whitney said.
“You stayed underwater for, like, five hours. I thought you were dead.”
“I found a little cave down there,” Ethan said. “At the bottom of Coffin Rock.”
He explained that there was a gap in the cliff, about twenty feet underwater, a crack about eight inches wide.
“I could stick my whole arm in there,” he said. “It seemed like a cool place to bury some treasure, you know, if I had any.”
“If only you were a pirate,” Whitney quipped.
“I want to see it,” Abby said.
“The cave?”
“Yeah.”
Ethan said he could climb up on top and make sure no one jumped. That way, Abby could swim over and look for the crevice without worrying if anyone would land on her.
“It’s pretty deep,” he said. “Probably hard to get to without jumping off the cliff. My ears hurt like hell down there.”
“No,” Abby said. “I want to jump.”
“No way.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” she said.
Ethan lowered his sunglasses to the bridge of his nose and considered her.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Abby.”
“I’m going to do it. Either you can help me, or you can sit here and watch.”
Ethan rose slowly to his feet. He was mostly dry now.
“Christ, you’re obstinate,” he said.
“Obstinate?”
“Willful,” he clarified. “Stubborn.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Pigheaded,” Whitney said unhelpfully.
Abby gave them each the middle finger.
It was Ethan’s turn to roll his eyes.
“You want to come, Whitney?” Abby asked.
“Sure,” she said. “I’m game.”
“You know people die doing this?” Ethan said.
“That’s just an urban legend,” Abby said.
They arrived at the slope, and Ethan started up. The trail was sandy at first, but soon they started to scale rocks. They were all barefoot. Ethan moved up the slope with ease, but Abby and Whitney both tread carefully.
“I’m not sure about this,” Whitney said.
Abby wasn’t sure either, but now she had to do it. At the top, Ethan stood a few feet from the edge. He held his arm up like it was a barrier he didn’t want them crossing yet.
Abby looked down. The entire lake lay before her, the water shimmering in the sunlight. The people on the beach looked tiny.
“Holy hell,” Whitney said. “It looks a hundred times higher from up here.”
Abby’s mouth was dry.
“I’m not doing it,” Whitney said. “No way.”
“I’m doing it,” Abby said.
“You sure?” Ethan asked.
She stepped closer to the edge and felt a wave of vertigo. Her legs were trembling.
Ethan held her arm and balanced her.
“Okay,” he said, “you want to jump out, away from the cliff. But you want to go straight down. Understand? Hit the water with your feet. Keep your arms flat against your body. Now, the cave—”
“I don’t really give a shit about the cave,” Abby said. “I just want to jump. I’ll tackle the cave another day.”
Ethan stepped back and made room for her. Abby looked over the edge. Wavelets lapped at the base of the cliff, and from here the sixty-foot drop seemed like two hundred. Abby’s whole body was quivering.
She took a deep breath, let it out. Then another.
“You can do it,” Whitney whispered. “You’re awesome.”
Ethan said nothing.
Abby put her foot on the edge and jumped out far from the cliff wall.
Right away, she knew the angle of her fall was wrong. She was leaning back, not going straight down. She flailed her arms, trying to right herself, but the blue surface was rising fast.
She hit the water with a smack, and all the breath burst from her lungs. The velocity shot her deep into the water. Her body instinctively took a deep inhalation, and suddenly her insides were filled with ice. She coughed and inhaled again, but there was no air. Only water. She tried to swim upward, but an invisible weight dragged her down.
Above, the sunlight came through the surface in heavenly rays. The water was impossibly clear—she could see up the cliff and even make out Ethan, as tiny as a toy action figure, looking down on her.
He wouldn’t know anything was wrong. He would suspect she’d decided to look for the cave after all. From his perspective, she was just a blur under the water.
Ethan! Help!
But she could say nothing. The water around her grew darker, like she was swimming in a cloud of ink. She wasn’t sure if she was sinking or if she was blacking out.
No! No please!
Something crashed through the surface above. Ethan was in front of her, grabbing her arms, looking into her eyes.
Then the water turned as black as oil, and Abby was gone.
She woke up coughing. She was lying on her side in the sand. Fluid drained from her nose. The water, so cold when it had gone into her body, felt warm coming up.
“Breathe,” Ethan said. “Just breathe.”
Abby started crying. She curled up in a ball. Ethan rubbed her arm. Whitney kneeled in front of her and told her she was going to be okay. Abby sat up and wrapped her arms around her brother and sobbed.
Someone began clapping, and then several people joined in the applause. Abby peeked through her watering eyes and saw that a small crowd had gathered around them.
“You saved me,” Abby said, sniffling.
Ethan laughed. “It’s no big deal.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “I could have died. You saved me.”
He kissed her forehead. “Of course I did. I would dive into hell itself for you.”
Ethan
2 hours until release
THE CELL WAS cold, as always this time of year, and Ethan kept the thin cotton blanket wrapped around him like a funeral shroud. Faint traces of his breath were visible in the gray-dark air, wisps of mist appearing with each exhalation. He could hear the sounds of the prison stirring, like some great creature coming to life. The scratch of cigarette lighters. The squeak of bedsprings. Coughs, wet and phlegmy. People rolling over, trying to get comfortable before morning roll call. A few muffled voices conversing in faraway cells, whispering at first but becoming less and less considerate as the minutes ticked by.
The window of Ethan’s cell began to turn from black to blue. The glass was several inches thick and crosshatched with iron rods, and even in the best light it provided nothing more than a blurry view of colors and shapes. But the window was the only thing in the cell worth looking at, the only thing with any color in the ashen early light. As he lay awake in his bunk, he stared, watching the subtle changes as the four-by-sixteen-inch rectangle evolved from dark steel blue to indigo and finally to a light baby blue.
Below Ethan, in the bottom bunk, Jack was quiet too. Ethan couldn’t hear Jack’s breathing, which told him that his cellmate was awake.
“You up?” Jack said from below.
“Yeah,” Ethan said.
“Figured you was,” Jack said. “You get any sleep?”
“Some,” Ethan said, although what little sleep he got was restless and lucid, where dreams and thoughts swirled around like paint in water.
“Today’s the big day, huh?” Jack said.
“Uh-huh.”
The springs squeaked below him as Jack rolled over.
“I don’t want to sound faggy,” Jack said, “but I’m gonna miss you.”
Ethan laughed quietly. “I’ll be back soon enough.”
Ethan had been granted a forty-eight-hour furlough. For forty-eight hours, he would be free from the prison, able to walk outside instead of staring through a clouded block of glass. Able to walk among people besides cons and guards and caseworkers.
No house arrest. No ankle bracelets. No supervision whatsoever.
But the reason he hadn’t been able to sleep wasn’t excitement. Or anxiety. He’d spent the night, as he had every night of the past few weeks, thinking about his only sister.
Abby.
He was being released to attend her funeral.
Ethan
1 hour, 43 minutes until release
ETHAN HOPPED DOWN off the bunk and walked over to the toilet. The concrete floor was cold on his bare feet. He began to unload his bladder. Even though he had hardly slept, he felt only partly awake, and he stared at the wall. Jack lay behind him. There was no reason for embarrassment. They had to do everything in front of each other. Pissing. Shitting. Sometimes even crying when they got a letter from outside. When they masturbated in their bunks, they each did the other the courtesy of pretending they couldn’t hear. There were no secrets from a cellmate.
He’d had a different cellmate for two years, a Black kid in for trying to knock off a convenience store in Las Vegas. He’d talked all the time, an incessant stream of stories and fantasies of what life would be like when he got out. Ethan was relieved when he was paroled. After that, he was alone for a while, but then they bussed Jack in from the Lovelock Correctional Center. He was pale, gaunt, and scarred. He’d been in prison for seven years at that point, but in the last two, there had been half a dozen attempts to kill him. Someone had finally gotten the idea to transfer him to a different prison to try to save his life.
It seemed to have worked. There had been only one attempt, and Ethan had been the one to save Jack, throwing his elbow into the assailant’s jaw as he snuck up behind them in the yard. After that, Jack began to eat well, build up strength, and slowly form a friendship with Ethan. He joined Ethan in taking correspondence courses from Western Nevada College. He took a job within the prison, making teddy bears. He now had aspirations to be transferred to the neighboring minimum-security facility—Carson City had three prisons—where the cons could work with horses. He was from Montana and had grown up with horses all his life. Jack was one of the few people in the prison who actually felt guilt for what he’d done. But he’d settled into a life where he was, if not happy, at least content to make the most of it.
While they never spoke of it, Ethan knew that Jack’s serenity with his life was at least in part because of their friendship. Jack was the rare person here Ethan had any measure of respect for. The rest were sociopathic, emotionally immature, or just plain stupid. Career criminals too dumb to break out of the cycles they were in. Drug addicts who, despite years of sobriety in prison, would get high within twenty-four hours of parole. Most thought only of themselves, with no measure of empathy, let alone sympathy, for anyone or anything.
Jack was nothing like them. He was a good guy. Ethan always thought Jack, all in all, was a much better person than him. Ethan had been a professional criminal and had more in common, if he was honest with himself, with the rest of the cons than he had with Jack. He’d broken bones and bloodied noses. He’d never killed anyone, but he’d pointed a gun in someone’s face.
Jack had had no history of violence. Up until the day he shot four people.
They sat in the cafeteria, the two of them alone at a four-person table. Ethan kept checking the time on his watch: a simple digital display on a rubber wristband that he’d bought years ago at the prison commissary. He wasn’t normally a fidgety person, but he couldn’t sit still. Not today.
The cafeteria was loud. There was nothing left of the quiet waking noises from before. Now everything around them was raucous—grouchy and hungry and anxious. Ethan and Jack ate in silence. The inmates were Black, White, Latino. They had shaved heads and beards and tattoos. Some were boisterous, posturing because of their insecurity. Others kept to themselves, trying to escape notice. The longtimers and the lifers—the ones in for “all day and night,” as the saying went—seemed at ease, tenured professors among the junior faculty still figuring out how to survive. But beneath the pretense lived an atmosphere of tension and fear. At any moment, a fight could break out. Prison was violent. Brutality was second nature to most of the men.
Ethan had seen it before. During his first week, a man had been stabbed one table over from him. As the man lay on his back, blood spread out over the concrete floor into a wide red puddle that looked like spilled wine. One minute life was discernible in his eyes. The next it was gone. It was unlike any death scene he had ever watched in movies because there at least you could tell that the actor was still alive, pretending, holding his breath and waiting for the director to call “cut.” But death is visible. There’s no faking it.
“Can I ask you something?” Ethan said.
“You just did.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
Jack nodded.
“I don’t figure you’d do it all over again if you had the chance, would you?”
Jack studied him seriously. He put down his plastic fork.
Ethan knew Jack’s story. His twenty-year-old brother had become involved with some drug dealers, and they ended up killing him for reasons no one ever discovered. Jack and his other brother, who was only sixteen, took the law into their own hands. They started a gunfight on a neighborhood street in Carson City, two Montana cowboys with hunting rifles and shotguns against a house full of meth heads with machine guns. When the smoke cleared, there were five dead drug dealers and two dead bystanders, and Jack’s kid brother had taken a bullet in the head. He was in a psych hospital somewhere, halfway to being a vegetable, and Jack hadn’t seen him since his arrest.
“Would I do it all over again?” Jack said. “Not a chance.”
Ethan had pressed on a bruise, so he didn’t push the conversation further. But Jack seemed to sense there was more to his question, so he spoke up.
“Why? You thinking of going vigilante when you get out there?”
Ethan didn’t answer. His sister’s murder remained unsolved, and he’d been kicking around the idea of making inquiries, seeing what he could find out. He hadn’t allowed himself to think far enough ahead to what he would do with the killer if he found him. Or her. Or them.
“Thing is,” Jack said, “when we was asking around about our brother, trying to figure out who killed him, I kept thinking I’d do anything to make things right. I’d risk death, dismemberment, damnation—I’d risk my soul. I don’t mean soul in any biblical sense. I know there ain’t no god. I’m talking about my humanity. I’d put it on the line to fix things.”
Jack’s breathing went shallow. He opened his mouth, and his words came out choked.
“But my brother was already dead, so nothing we did made a damn bit of difference. There’d be people out there living right now if it wasn’t for me. And my other brother wouldn’t be in a hospital somewhere, collateral damage from my stupid need for revenge.”
“Sorry to ask,” Ethan said.
“Don’t go doing nothing stupid while you’re out there, Ethan,” Jack said, staring at him to force the words home. “You’re getting your shit together in here, and you could still have a pretty good life when you get out in a couple years. Don’t go throwing it all away on revenge. Your sister’s gone, and there ain’t nothing you can do to bring her back.”
Sometimes people joined Ethan and Jack for breakfast, but today they were alone until a Mexican kid named Miguel approached and said, “Hey, Lockhart, you a free bird today, huh?”
The kid smiled. His two top front teeth were missing, and he had a pathetic excuse for a mustache. Tattoos crept out of the collar of his shirt, like tentacles.
The kid had joined the prison a couple months ago, and within his first few days, he’d approached Ethan to tell him that he had worked for Shark, Ethan’s previous employer. “We’re keno buddies,” the kid had said. Ethan didn’t know what that meant, and he wanted nothing to do with any of Shark’s associates. Prison was full of sycophants who tried to leech themselves onto bigger fish. A lot of prisoners liked the attention, but Ethan never greeted the kid with anything but cold indifference. To his credit, the kid got the picture and left Ethan alone.
Until today.
“Say what’s up to Shark for me, will you?” Miguel said.
Ethan said nothing. He and Jack didn’t want any company.
“Sorry about your sister, amigo,” Miguel said, and walked away. “I seen her dance,” he called over his shoulder. “She was as hot a piece of ass as I ever saw.”
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