At All Costs by John Gilstrap Page B

snatching his kid from a school. This one has ‘bloodbath’ written all over it, okay? Tell everybody to be very goddamn careful.”
    The image of automatic-weapons fire and bleeding children raced through Irene’s head and gave her a chill. “How long till you have units on the scene, Chief?”
    He placed his hands on his hips and took a deep breath as he glanced at the map and ran calculations. “Ten minutes, I’d guess. Maybe twelve. Kinda far off the beaten path.”
    She checked her watch and sighed. Somehow it seemed like forever.

C HAPTER E IGHT

    They were less than a mile from the school now.
    As he piloted the van ever closer to danger, Jake realized with a shiver just how high the stakes had become. It wasn’t fair.
    Some wild, weird conspiracy that he’d never fully comprehended had cost him his entire life; his future as well as his past. Over the years, the panic attacks had grown less common—those sudden rushes of paranoia when someone would look at him strangely, or those horrifying moments in the grocery store when someone would say, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”—but their accumulated burden had robbed him of his faith in people. Slowly but steadily, the concept of fairness had eroded to the point where his expectations were painfully simple to meet. Life was about survival; about making sure that at the end of the day you still had what was important. Today even that cynical goal seemed unattainable.
    He wondered sometimes what might have happened if he hadn’t run; if he’d let the justice system run its course. At the time, it had seemed so much easier to disappear. So much safer. Now he realized how foolish they’d been. In the eyes of the world, the very act of running away served as proof of their guilt.
    They’d gotten into this, Carolyn and he, at a time in their lives when they still believed that it would all work out somehow. They believed then that bad things didn’t happen to good people and that given their lifelong efforts to be decent citizens, they’d somehow stumble onto a happy ending. Looking back, his naïveté infuriated him.
    Over the years, he’d reached a fragile inner peace with his pessimism that still eluded Carolyn. He feared she’d never stop looking for the silver lining—never fully comprehend that they were destined to die young. The real tragedy in all of this was Travis. What could a boy possibly have done, even in a previous life, that would warrant parents who would so destroy his childhood? And who were they to expose him to . . .
    No, don’t go there, he commanded himself. He’s your son. You’re his father. You have every right. Every responsibility.
    All that mattered was family. Everything else was gravy. Jake would lie, he would steal, he would kill to protect them, just as whoever had set them up would do whatever it took to protect their sordid secret. And the FBI was happy to help. The Donovans represented one of the greatest embarrassments in Bureau history, and Jake could only imagine how its agents’ thirst for revenge had blossomed over the years. All in the name of justice, of course. What a crock.
    To the government, justice was a weapon, used to gain power over other people. Politicians and their pawns cared only about publicity and career advancement. Bring in the bad guy, get a bigger staff. If ordinary citizens like Jake or Carolyn or true innocents like Travis had to die to make that happen, well, so what?
    “Jake, are you okay, honey?” Carolyn looked like she’d been trying to get his attention.
    “Huh? Yeah, I’m okay.” He forced a wholly unconvincing smile.
    “Do you think they know yet?”
    He checked his watch: 2:20. “Oh, yeah, they know. I’m sure that’s why those cop cars were racing all over town. They’re trying to track me down. They’ll have everything covered by now—our house, the shop, everything.”
    She gasped and swung around in her seat, grabbing his arm. “They’ll be at the