Read Time to Run for Free Online

came out.
    Three minutes later, the matter was settled. Vinnie gratefully accepted his new coffee—this one a venti size as a form of compensation—and three times told linebacker-boy that everything was truly all right. Finally, they went their different ways.
    As Vinnie headed toward his gate, it never occurred to him to wonder why the kid who was in such a hurry to catch his flight was now on his way back to the main terminal.
    * * *
    Rachel Raty hadn’t spoken to Nicki in over three months. In fact, according to her, no one in the old crowd had spoken to her. “I don’t mean to be mean or anything, but Nicki’s gotten kind of weird recently. I know she’s sick and all, but sometimes, when she walks into class, she like just doesn’t talk to anybody. Try to talk to her and she bites your head off. I don’t think she hangs around with anyone anymore . . .”
    Carter made an excuse and hung up. The clock was ticking too fast to waste time listening to some bitch dis his daughter. A second call, this one to Leslie Johnson, another name he pulled out of memory, brought essentially the same result. He stared at the phone after he hung up with her. Maybe Nicki really didn’t have any friends anymore. Given the way she’d been behaving recently—the huge mood swings and the general nastiness—how difficult was that to imagine?
    Okay, so if the “we” of her note wasn’t someone from school, then who might it be?
    Carter’s eyes scanned the room and fell on her computer. Good God, that was it. The Internet.
    Nicki’s computer was an old IBM workhorse with few bells and no whistles, but it had nonetheless claimed that part of her existence once owned by the television. He couldn’t count the number of nights he’d been on his way to bed at some ungodly hour and heard Nicki tapping away at her keyboard. Sometimes, he’d hear her laughing as somebody typed something back at her. Once or twice, he’d mentioned to her that it was getting late and that she should get to bed, but she’d responded with one of the withering glares that always seemed to be in special reserve just for him.
    Jenny used to lecture Carter on the importance of choosing your battles when raising a teenager, and all things considered, he’d decided to let the computer fixation go. Score another home run for dear old dad. His stomach knotted even tighter. The thought of running away with someone was horrifying in its own right; that it would be with some predator she’d met online was unthinkable.
    Two years ago, Carter had worked a computer-stalker case in which a teenage girl was lured out of her house by some psycho posing to be a sympathetic ear. She’d been tortured and raped and ultimately left to die, but turned out to be stronger than her attacker had thought. She’d lived, only to wish every day that she hadn’t. Mercifully, the latticework of facial scars were invisible to her slashed eyeballs. The police had done a terrific job identifying a guy named Dickie Menefee as the would-be murderer—a big-necked, washed-out old gym teacher with the IQ of a seat cushion—but the girl, Deni James, either couldn’t or wouldn’t make a positive identification. Carter had never seen such terror on a witness. As a result, Little Dick, as Carter had come to call him, got to walk. Last time he saw the son of a bitch, Little Dick was holding court with others of his breed in a little greasy spoon called the Pitcairn Inn, stuffing his face with pancakes and beer, reveling in the fact that the regulars still called him “Coach.”
    Carter made sure that Nicki heard the details of the Deni James case, if only to drive home the point that the Internet was a vast, unexplored frontier for psychopaths. The anonymity of cyberspace made it potentially more dangerous than the worst neighborhood in the toughest city on earth. In the