Free Last Chance by Bradley Boals

1.”
    April mulled over her next move carefully. She didn’t want Sam to think she was pumping him for information, but she also determined that this was her best chance to find out what he knew. She went with the guilt approach. “Wow, I can’t believe that I actually threw my emotions and my feelings on the table with you and now you just shut me out. If we are going to make something work with us, you have to trust me. I don’t know what is going on in my own neighborhood, people are dying, and the one person that I thought would put my mind at rest doesn’t even trust me enough to tell me what he knows.”
    April began to make her way to the door to leave and turned around one last time. “I guess I was wrong about you.”
    Sam jumped to his feet and pleaded, “Wait, don’t go! I’m sorry. You’re right. If I can’t trust you, then who can I trust? Please, come back in.”
    April slowly turned toward Sam and walked back into the office. They both sat down at his desk, and he told her the details of his meeting with Mr. Kellington.
    “This guy that my supervisor knows, Keith Kellington, shows up here while some sector investigators are going through the warehouse. He wants me to go with him to the primary security headquarters for questioning. I’m thinking that it won’t be a big deal because I really don’t know that much, beyond calling in for backup last night. Brett and I saw this bright light coming from one of the warehouse’s windows about eleven, and it needed to be checked out.”
    Sam took a sip of coffee from the cup on his desk, moved to the office window, and pointed to the warehouse. “We couldn’t see anything but the light coming from that window. Since the building is supposed to be shut down at night, I wanted a security team to make sure someone wasn’t in there that shouldn’t be.”
    Sam moved back to the desk and sat down. “The team arrived within five minutes of the call and came by the office to let us know that they were going up. Brett wanted to go with them, so I told him that he could. I thought it would be some good on-the-job training.”
    April asked, “When did you know that Brett had been killed?”
    “Well, that’s just it; the entire security team came back down after a couple of hours of sweeping the building, and they didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The room that the light was coming from was empty. The problem was that Brett wanted to go back into the warehouse after the rest of the team left. He kept saying that he thought they missed something. I got tired of listening to him so I told him to go take another look if he wanted to, and he did.”
    Sam began to get emotional as he started to realize that his decision played a part in Brett’s death. April caressed Sam’s hand. “It’s OK. You can tell me.”
    After Sam took another sip of his coffee, he continued, “He hadn’t come back and had been gone for two hours, so I called up the sweep team again.” Sam wiped his eyes. “This time, they found Brett, dead, in the same room that the light had come from.”
    “Do you know how he died?”
    Sam got up from his seat again and looked out the window. “I really don’t know. They won’t show me his body and no one will tell me anything beyond he’s dead. My own supervisor still thinks it may have been an accident, but I don’t think people from Sector 1 show up to investigate accidents.”
    April got up from her seat and joined Sam at the window. “I’m so sorry that you had to go through all that.” April paused for a minute and asked, “What happened at sector headquarters?”
    “We get to headquarters and I go through the whole explanation that I just told you with that Mr. Kellington. He really didn’t say much while I was going through it all, but he did the strangest thing once I got done.”
    April asked, “What did he do?”
    “He asked me to hold this rock that was sitting on his office table, so I did. He just sat