James Patterson - Now You See Her

I didn’t want to be late to my own funeral.

After I locked the front door, I pulled up my gray jogging T and patted my belly.

“Wish us luck,” I said to my baby. “Mommy’s sure as hell going to need it.”

TEN MINUTES LATER, I was cruising at full throttle along Smathers Beach on my moped. Surprisingly, there were only a few people on its sugar white sand. A woman braiding her daughter’s wet hair and a couple of pudgy old men the color of leather, casting sea poles into the almost glass-still water. I looked up as a biplane sputtered by: COME TO THE GREEN PARROT! RIGHT BESIDE US 1’S MILE ZERO! THE MOST SOUTHERN BAR IN THE US! read its ad banner.

Mile Zero, I thought. That’s exactly where I was. Make that Mile Less Than Zero.

I suddenly put on the brakes as I spotted what I was looking for. A tall, skinny white kid with dusty blond dreadlocks was sitting on the concrete boardwalk in what looked like a yoga position. Yet another one of Key West’s many street kids and skate rats and punk rockers. A young beach bum come down to the country’s lower right-hand corner God knew why, escaping God knew what.

I was escaping, too, in the opposite direction, and I needed his help.

“Excuse me,” I said, stepping in front of him.

The kid held up a still finger, his eyes closed. After a moment, he stood, a guileless smile on his tan face.

“Mornin’, ma’am,” he said in a Texas accent. “Just doing a little Zen breath counting there. Sorry to make you wait. What can I do for you?”

Oddly enough, this was the way most Key West conversations went.

“I know this sounds weird,” I said, “but I was wondering if you could buy something for me.”

“Drugs?” he said, looking at me suspiciously.

“No, no,” I said. “Nothing like that. I need you to buy me some cord.”

“Cord?” he said, eyeing me. “Like rope? You gonna hang yourself? I don’t go for that kinky stuff.”

“Of course not,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. I need paracord. It’s a special kind of rope for parachuting. I use it in my parasailing business, and I’m out. My ex-husband owns the only marina supply store on the island that sells it, and I don’t want to give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of going in to buy it myself.”

I needed the cord for my escape plan, of course. The ligature was linked to several of the Jump Killer cases.

I knew the request and my explanation sounded fishy, but I also knew it didn’t matter. Despite its small size, Key West had a healthy big-city, screw-the-cops, left-wing street vibe. Even if this stoner put two and two together after my disappearance, there’s no way he’d go anywhere near the cops. Who better than some burnt-out street kid to be a go-between?

“What do you say?” I nudged him.

“Paracord, huh? That does sound pretty weird,” the kid said, adjusting his dreads as he stood. “But I’ve been down here for a month now and have heard a lot weirder. I happen to be in the cord-buying business this morning. Ten bucks do it for you?”

“Ten bucks, it is,” I said, waving him toward my scooter.

AFTER MY YOUNG ZEN-COWBOY FRIEND scored the paracord for me, I hit a vintage clothing store in Bahama Village and then a CVS. A thin, homeless, twenty-something girl with sun-and-drug-wasted eyes holding a baby asked me for money as I exited the pharmacy, carrying two brimming bags.

Though I could hardly spare it, I stopped and gave her a dollar, praying that I wouldn’t be her pretty soon.

I took the Vespa back over to Flagler Street and stopped at my favorite bodega for lunch. I ate my cubano slowly as the sun crested almost directly overhead.

I figured it would take until probably midnight for Peter to come looking for me. If I was lucky, he might even wait until morning.

After I finished lunch, I drove back to Smathers Beach, which ran along the southeast side of the island. Near its most deserted end, by the airport, I pulled over and got off the bike and stepped across the sandy path to the dunes.

I walked along the beach to where the beach grass grew about chest high and hunkered down.

There was no one on the beach, no one in the water.

It was time.

The first thing I did was upend my fanny pack, which contained my keys and wallet. Then with a pair of scissors that I’d bought, I cut a length of the paracord and dropped it on top of my CD Walkman.

The next part of the plan was the one I’d been dreading. It was also the most crucial. I took a small package out of the CVS bag and opened it.

It contained razor blades. They flashed like mirror shards in the bright light as I retrieved one and looked down at myself, debating. I swallowed as I finally decided on the back of my left calf.

I bit my lip as I lowered the blade down and sliced myself open. I hissed as I started the incision a little down from the back of my knee. Then teared up as I dug in harder with the blade, parting my skin.

At first, only a little blood dribbled out of the wound, but after I began to flex my calf over and over again, more came until I had a nice red stream going. It began to drip down my leg and off my heel, darkening the sand. I hopped around on one foot, flicking the blood on my fanny pack, the sand, the sea grass, the piece of paracord.

After about ten minutes, the area looked perfect, a total bloody mess.

Why not? Peter had shot himself to make his crime scene look good. The least I could come up with was a bit of self-mutilation.

I hopped back a few feet and sat down in the sand. I cleaned and bandaged myself carefully with peroxide and gauze and bandages that I’d bought at the pharmacy. I was even more careful to retrieve every scrap of trash.

After I was bandaged, I went over and kicked some more sand over everything. Then I stared at the scene for a minute, resting my chin on my thumb like a painter before a canvas.

Finally I stood.

It would have to do.

I crossed my fingers as I turned and walked away.

IT WAS AS DIM as a cave. The concrete floor was littered with cigarette butts and some wriggly-looking thing I didn’t even want to think about. The smell of urine made my eyes water.

Perfect, I thought, locking the door of the public beach bathroom a ways from my fabricated crime scene.

It was skeevy and scary, but the most important things were that the women’s side had a lock on the door and the sink worked. I turned on the sink’s rusty tap as I opened the CVS bag.

Twenty minutes later, I looked at myself in the mirror.

My reflection provided some much-needed comic relief.

My still wet, self-cut, bleached hair was already turning platinum, and I had more black around my eyes than a raccoon. In the Catholic-school plaid skirt, black Social Distortion concert T, and Doc Martens boots that I scored from the secondhand store, I now looked like a cross between Courtney Love and a homeless fortune-teller.

My disguise was complete. I could have been any of the punk-rock girl runaways who hung around Duval asking for handouts. Time to go.

There was a city bus to Marathon, but that would be the first place Peter would check if he wasn’t convinced by the crime scene. My plan was to hitchhike out, find some tourist passing by who would never link sweet young cop wife, Jeanine Fournier’s, disappearance to my new punk-rock persona.

The wind was picking up as I came back out onto the beach, the first gold shadows stretching over the sand. There was a roar, and I looked up at a small “puddle jumper” passenger prop plane coming in. Happy tourists about to touch down in paradise.