James Patterson: Now You See Her

The last time I saw Billy, a blond, middle-aged fireplug of a man, he was doing a cannonball off a booze cruise boat at a retirement party. Now he looked about as fun-loving as a concentration camp guard.

“It’s Peter’s wife, Jeanine. Let her through,” he ordered.

I was too stupefied to question what was happening as the evidence tape was lifted up, and I was beckoned under. Why were they treating me like a first responder? The deafening siren of yet another arriving ambulance went off as Mulford quickly led me over the sun-bleached asphalt and past the pumps.

Just inside the door of the food mart, half a dozen EMTs were kneeling down beside someone I couldn’t see. My hands started shaking as I tried to figure out what was happening in all the commotion. I grasped them together in a praying gesture.

“Come on, come on! Give me some fucking space here,” a big black medic barked as he retrieved a syringe from a bright yellow hard-pack first-aid case.

“Coming out!” someone else yelled in a high, panicked voice a moment later. There was a tremendous clatter as a trauma stretcher was clicked into rolling position. The crowd of cops and medics began to part in front of it, letting the stretcher through.

My knees almost gave out when Mulford moved out of my line of sight and I finally saw who was on the stretcher.

I staggered back, shaking my head.

Something caved in my chest as Peter was rolled past me, his eyes flat and unfocused, his face and chest covered in blood.

COPS MADE A TIGHT CIRCLE around Peter, shielding him from the public as he was rolled toward a reversing ambulance.

I noticed several things at once. He was sheet white. A thin spiderweb of blood was splattered across his cheek and neck. His uniform shirt had been cut open, and I could see more blackish blood caked on his arm, dripping off his elbow.

Peter didn’t just look shot, I thought, staring at him as he was lifted into the back of the ambulance. Peter looked dead.

“Let her through,” Mulford said, dragging me forward. “It’s his wife.”

“Not now, goddammit,” the burly black medic said, stiff-arming him away.

“Oh, God. Oh, God,” Mulford said, shaking his head as Peter was borne away. He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jeanine. This shouldn’t be happening.”

“What happened?” I said.

“We’re not sure,” he said, ashen-faced, as he shrugged his shoulders. “I just got here myself. We think Peter came in here to get some coffee during his shift. Walked into the middle of a robbery. Two Jamaican males. They had some kind of machine gun. Our guys were ambushed. We’re looking for them now.”

Mulford wheeled around as a wiry, startlingly muscular female EMT with bloody sneakers emerged from the food mart door.

“How is she?” he asked her.

She? I thought.

I stepped to my right and looked farther into the store. That’s when I saw the rest of them. Three more EMTs were surrounding another body.

When I stepped forward and saw the spill of blond hair beside a fallen police cap, I felt like I’d walked face-first into an invisible electric fence. For absolutely no reason, I began slowly nodding to myself.

My boss, Elena, her throat shot to ribbons, was lying in a pool of blood, dead on the floor.

ONE OF ELENA’S UNMOVING EYES, the one that wasn’t shot out, was wide open, staring up at the ceiling. Blood was everywhere as if a mop bucket filled with it had been overturned. On her uniform. On a bunch of knocked-over plastic jugs of blue windshield-wiper fluid. On the surgical gloves that one of the EMTs snapped off with a loud curse. Ink blots and dashes and horrid smears of copper-smelling crimson red blood.

“I’m so sorry,” the female EMT said to Mulford. “Poor thing took at least half a dozen in the face and neck and another four in the lower abdomen. She’d lost too much blood by the time we got here. She’s gone.”

“And the other one?” Mulford said to the EMT, pointing to his left. I followed his finger to the pair of bare brown feet that poked out from the end of the aisle like the wicked witch’s from under Dorothy’s house.

“The station clerk?” the medic said with a shake of her head. “He took a long burst in his throat, looks like. Died instantly.”

I slowly nodded again at the new knowledge. There was a third victim?

I gaped at the blood-and-brain-splattered food racks, the brass shell casings, the broken glass. In the air was the strong hospital stench of voided bowels. I’d never been that close to so much violence and death. It was literally a bloodbath.

I stumbled behind Mulford back outside to get away from the smell and noticed that the crowd beyond the tape seemed to have doubled in size. A tall, shirtless middle-aged man in cutoff shorts and a panama hat suddenly reached under the crime scene tape and lifted a shell casing to his red-rimmed eyes.

“Hey! Put that down!” Mulford yelled, running toward him.

That’s when I noticed the gun.

On the fuel-stained asphalt, halfway between the first pump and the gas mart’s front door, beside a bright yellow police evidence cone sat a flat black pistol.

When I took a step forward to look at it more closely, I saw that I was mistaken. It wasn’t a normal pistol. It was a larger black submachine pistol with little holes around its barrel. It had gray duct tape around its grip and scuff marks beside the words “Intratec Miami 9mm.”

I stood there bent over, staring at the weapon. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, in fact.

Because it wasn’t just like the gun I’d seen on Peter’s boat. It was the gun from Peter’s boat.

“That’s a roger,” Mulford said into his radio as he arrived back beside me. “Get those detectives down here ASAP. It looks like the goddamn Valentine’s Day massacre. Tell them that Officer Cardenas has been killed in a robbery-homicide. See if that gets them moving.”

As I stood there, the white masts of the sailboats at the Palm Avenue marina across the street from the gas station suddenly became supervivid against the blue sky.

Peter’s gun? Why was Peter’s gun here? Was it really his?

“Come on, Jeanine. They took Peter to Lower Keys Medical. I’ll take you right there,” Mulford said.

We walked to his cruiser and got in. I jumped as the feisty little cop suddenly punched the steering wheel.

“Those fuckers,” he said. After a moment, I realized he was crying. He quickly wiped his face and got the car started.

“Sorry, Jeanine,” he said. “Elena was just awesome, you know? How can she be dead? At least they got Peter’s bleeding under control. We can thank God for that.”

“They what?” I said, sitting up as if Mulford had punched me instead of the steering wheel.

“What? No one told you?” Mulford said. “The EMTs got the bleeding under control. It looks like Peter’s going to make it.”

THEY’D BROUGHT PETER to the Lower Keys Medical Center five minutes from Key West on Stock Island. I was told by a male ER nurse that Peter had been taken directly to surgery.

For the next couple of hours, I sat in a cop-filled waiting room on the hospital’s second floor.

After a while, the surrounding cops started drifting out into the hallway and stood in clusters speaking softly to one another.

From the cheap TV above the door, I watched a 7 News special report about the Jump Killer. A Filipina massage therapist from Marathon, Florida, had gone missing, and speculation was that the Jump Killer had struck again.

The special report had just been replaced by Family Feud when a tall, gray-haired uniformed cop entered the waiting room.