James Patterson: Now You See Her

It was actually a comforting one. Definitely soothing, considering the current circumstances.

Maybe this was the DEA thing after all, I thought.

Maybe Peter really had to work undercover and had just invented the story about traffic duty in Big Pine so I wouldn’t be worried. Sure, he’d still lied to me, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as I had first thought.

Please let that be the reason, I prayed as I buzzed along behind him like a complete maniac through Key West’s pitch-black streets.

Ten minutes later, the car pulled into the empty parking lot of Fort Zachary Taylor State Park. I waited on the street by the park’s walled entrance, watching as the Mazda stopped in the center of the lot and sat idling. After a moment, its lights dimmed and went off.

Were they staking someplace out? I wondered. Doing a deal? Waiting for someone?

Wind began blowing through the darkened, creaking palm trees as I crouched along the stone wall, watching the car. As I stared down the deserted street at my back, I remembered Elena warning me about the Jump Killer. About how some people thought he was from Key West.

Great, I thought. Thanks again, Elena. Really appreciate it. I really need something else to freak out about around now.

I sank down behind the wall as the car suddenly started and screeched out of the lot.

I lost the car as I was getting back on the moped, so I decided to drive back to Peter’s car parked in the alley on Duval. The silver Mazda was letting Peter out beside the alley when I made the corner half a block north ten minutes later. I pulled to the curb in front of the crowded corner bar to see what would happen next.

The first thing I noticed was that instead of the green duffel I’d seen him with, Peter was now carrying a much larger black leather knapsack.

A feeling of desperate, last-ditch hope floated in my chest. Did that mean there really had been some kind of DEA work? I wanted so badly to believe that what I had just seen was Peter working undercover.

The Mazda Z pulled onto Duval and rolled to the red light where I sat idling. Spanish music began to blare out of it as its tinted passenger window zipped down. I listened to horns and bongo drums racing each other as I laid my wide eyes on the two people inside.

I squinted in surprise and shook my head. That couldn’t be right, I thought.

I knew them both.

Teo, the skeevy bartender with the frosted hair, was behind the wheel doing what he seemed to do best, rubbing at his nose.

Even more surprising, beside him, my boss, Elena, sang along to the salsa with her eyes closed as she drummed on the dashboard to the beat.

Then the light turned and the tricked-out Mazda peeled off and disappeared into the traffic of upper Duval.

Still sitting on my buzzing moped, staring at its red running lights, I tried to piece together what I had just seen. For a moment, the fact that I knew everyone involved in the odd encounter gave me a feeling of relief. I actually wondered for a silly second if they were doing all this sneaking around for my benefit, as if they might be planning some kind of surprise party for me.

Then reality took hold. There was no party. Quite the opposite.

My husband is a bad cop? I thought.

No, I realized. It was Elena! Elena was the bad cop. Peter was working a case against her and Teo. I knew for a fact that Teo did coke and he probably dealt it, too. That had to be it!

That’s when the car behind me laid on its horn.

I turned the handlebars and throttled to get out of its way, but I must have given it too much gas. The back wheel spun out, the bike tipped, and I went down hard. I lay there for a moment, my elbow and knee in agony, my head in the gutter. Then I scrambled out from underneath the moped and sat on the curb.

I stared fascinated at my torn-open knee. A thin line of blood rode down the ridge of my shin and took a left as it reached my ankle.

As I watched myself bleed, the Rick James song “Super Freak” floated out into the street from the crowded bar behind me.

“When I make my move to her room, it’s the right time,” the drunken crowd sang along. “It’s such a freaky scene.”

“Hey, you OK? Can I help you?” called a beery male voice from somewhere on the sidewalk behind me.

I shook my head as I lifted the bike, got back on, and headed home.

IT TOOK ME TWENTY MINUTES to get home. I took a shower and bandaged my knee. When I got into bed, I lifted the remote off the night table and turned on the TV. I was determined to stay up until Peter came home, but after only a minute or two I found myself nodding off.

The sky outside my bedroom sliders was the dark gray of predawn when I woke up. The TV was showing an aerobics program: thin young women with too much makeup, smiling like Miss America as they counted off toe touches.

Then the doorbell rang.

I stumbled out of bed. Was it Peter? Did he forget his key?

I was even more confused when I saw a squad car in the driveway outside the living room window.

I opened the door. It wasn’t Peter. It was a short female officer in a Key West PD uniform. I thought I knew all of Peter’s fellow cops, but I’d never seen her before.

“Jeanine Fournier?” she said.

Even in a dazed fugue, I could tell by her demeanor, by the intense look in her eyes, that something was seriously wrong.

I suddenly felt tired and powerless, thoroughly unprepared for whatever I was about to be told. Staring at the woman’s hard face, I felt like going back into my bedroom and lying down. The sun broke as I stood there, light rapidly filling the sky.

“Yes?” I finally said.

“You need to come with me, Jeanine,” she said.

What the? What was this?

“I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” the lady cop said. “It’s your husband. Peter. He’s been involved in a shooting.”

A SHOOTING?!

That one stupid thought kept repeating in my numb mind as I sat in the passenger seat of the speeding cruiser. Every few seconds, I would try to form another thought, but my indignant, stubborn brain wouldn’t have it.

A shooting? I thought. A shooting?

That meant that Peter had been shot, right? I stared down at the cop car’s incident report–covered carpet. It had to. Otherwise, the red-haired lady cop behind the wheel wouldn’t be involving me.

I needed to talk to Peter. To find out what was going on. Now he’d been shot? I didn’t know what to think as the cop car’s tires cried around a curve. What did it mean?

If I thought I’d been disoriented riding in the cop car, it was nothing compared to the skull slap I felt as we screeched to a stop beside a Shell gas station on North Roosevelt.

It looked and sounded as if the world was coming to a violent end. Besides a half-dozen siren-screaming patrol cars, there were three ambulances and a fire truck. Yellow evidence tape strung across the pumps wafted in the breeze from the nearby north shore. The whole block around the station looked like a huge present wrapped in the stuff. A crowd of tourists and beach bums stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, behind the yellow ribbon like spectators at a strange outdoor sporting event that was just about to get under way.

It seemed like every cop in the department was there. I glanced from face to face, marking the people I knew. At our pickup softball games and barbecues, these men had been so happy and laid-back. Now, as they secured the crime scene in their stark black uniforms, they suddenly seemed cold, heartless, angry, almost malevolent.

What the hell had happened here?

“She’s here,” a cop and good friend of Peter’s named Billy Mulford said as he saw me.