15 Seconds by Andrew Gross Page A

have to take responsibility for what you’ve done. You killed a woman, honey. And her baby . . .”
    And after, how she’d just walked around in a big daze crying how she was hurt too. Those animals . . . Her so-called friends. Look what they’d done to her. Vance had fought for right from wrong his whole life, and this was what it had left him. “No one can make that go away, darlin’. There just ain’t much I can do.”
    “ Twenty years, Daddy! That’s my whole life! You know people. I know you can help me.” She was crying, his little girl. Thick, childlike tears. But crying for whom? Herself. “You have to!”
    “I can’t help you, honey.” Vance lowered his head. “At least, not in that way.”
    “Then how ? ” Amanda stared back at him. “How can you help me, Daddy? You were a cop, all those years . . .” Her tone was helpless and desperate, fragile as thin glass, but also with that edge that dug into him with recollections he didn’t want to hear. “You were a cop! That has to mean something.”
    A fire began to light up in Vance’s belly. First, like a match to kindling. Then catching, fueled by the anger he always carried, and his shame. The people demanded justice. She’d killed two perfectly innocent people. He understood that better than anyone. His daughter had to pay the price. They’d been bleeding him, one cut at a time, over the years, one at a time . . . And deeper . . .
    “How you gonna help me, Daddy?”
    It got to the point you couldn’t take no more . . .
    Someone had to pay.
    Vance leaned forward and said in barely more than a whisper, “Who gave you the pills, ’Manda?”
    “No one gave me the pills, Daddy. You don’t understand. You just get them, that’s all. I needed them.”
    “Someone gave ’em to you, honey. So you tell me who? I’m pretty sure I know who.” His eyes fixed on hers. “You think, if the situation was reversed, that boy’d be protecting you?”
    She snorted back, angry. “You’re wrong, Daddy. You’ve always been wrong.”
    “Who gave ’em to you, honey?” Vance put his beefy palm on the glass partition, hoping she’d do the same, but she just sat there. “For once, do the right thing, hon. Please. Who took my little girl from me?”
    “No . . .” For a moment she looked back at him and shook her head, and then there was anger in her eyes. “That’s your answer, Daddy? That’s how you’re gonna help me? I’m sitting here, looking at my whole life taken away, and all you want to know is who took your little girl?” She screwed up her eyes and gave him a cajoling laugh, daggers in them. “ You done it, Daddy. You took her. You took that little girl. You know what I’m talking about. You want to know so bad? Well, take a long, hard look at the truth, Daddy. It wasn’t the drugs. It wasn’t Wayne. It was you . Take a good look at what you see”—she pushed herself back and lifted her jangling hands—“ ’cause you’re the one who’s responsible! You .”
    She stared at him, her once-soft, brown, little-girl eyes ablaze. “You think you’re gonna help me . . . ?” She nodded to the guard and stood up, brushing the stringy hair out of her eyes. “What’re you gonna do, Daddy, hurt them all? Everyone who took your little dream away?” She took a step away from him, crushing his heart, though he didn’t know quite how to say it.
    Then she turned and faced him one more time. A smile crept onto her lips, a cruel one. “You may not be in this prison,” Amanda said, like she was stepping on a dying insect to put it out of its pain, “but that don’t mean you’re any freer than me now, does it, Daddy?”

Chapter Eight
    M y eyes locked on the gamecock, the question throbbing through me if some kind of connection could’ve existed between Mike and the person who had just shot Martinez, or if this was just some crazy coincidence.
    Either way, I drove back on the highway, knowing I was safe in Mike’s