James Patterson: Now You See Her

The Z28’s speedometer was hitting three figures, its rear end starting to rise like an airplane on takeoff, when I caught some movement on the dark beach to my right.

I squinted at the motion through the windshield. It was a blur, something small running. Was it a rabbit?

No, I realized as I got closer very quickly. It was a dog, a collie with a red bandanna around its neck. I recognized the belly-flopping dog from the bar at the exact moment it changed course, like a guided missile, and shot out into the beach road.

Directly in front of the car.

Immediately, instinctually, I slammed on the brakes and spun the steering wheel to the right, trying to avoid it. A high howl of evaporating tire rubber filled the car as the Z28’s rear end fishtailed to the left like it was on ice. I tried to straighten it, but I must have overcompensated because the car suddenly reversed momentum and went into a rubber-barking, skidding, counterclockwise spin.

Shit!

I’d lost complete control of the car. My head flew back onto the headrest heavily, helplessly, like I was on a carnival teacup ride. I held my breath as I felt the right side of the car swell, threatening to flip. Instead, it did a 180 and kept right on rotating. It was when the car completed a full 360 that I saw what was looming ahead.

And I screamed.

Lit in my pinwheeling headlights, as if he’d been conjured there by a magician, was the dog’s owner, the biker from the bar with the gray braided hair.

The last thing I remember was pumping the brake again and again, savagely, as the ridges of the spinning steering wheel flickered painfully over the insides of my fingers.

I closed my eyes as the Camaro’s swinging front end clipped the man in the waist with a sickening, heart-skewering thump.

There was a brief crumpling sound of rolling weight onto the metal hood followed by a squeegee-like squeak as the man slid up the ramp of the windshield.

And then there was silence. Nothing but horrible, deafening silence.

I FORCED MYSELF to open my eyes.

The Camaro had come to a shuddering stop another fifty feet to the north.

I stared at the empty road in front of me, my foot pinned down on the brake, my hands as tight on the steering wheel as a pair of vise grips. The only sound was my panicked breathing as sweat seemed to pour from everywhere at once, the inside of my elbows, the backs of my knees, even my ears.

The Camaro idled in the empty road, its engine chugging loudly like an animal catching its breath. I thought the windshield would be cracked, but it was unmarked. So was the hood. Besides losing a couple of inches of tire rubber and brake pad, the car seemed to be doing fine.

It was as if nothing had happened at all.

As if.

I didn’t want to look in the rearview mirror. I stared at Albert, Alex’s stupid grinning orange University of Florida Gator logo air freshener instead. Albert wasn’t offering any suggestions. I sucked in a hard breath, like a diver before going under, and finally looked.

The biker lay in the middle of the right lane behind me. He was facedown on the asphalt beside my skid marks, his thick gray braid half undone, his arms flung out in a Christlike spread. Traffic cones and stanchions from a work area along the side of the road were scattered around him like nailed bowling pins. He wasn’t moving.

When I noticed the dark, inky splotch in his gray hair and on the street beside his head, various parts of my body started to shake simultaneously, my knees, my hands, my lips. I let out my sour, rum-scented breath and covered my face with my quivering hands. My trembling, clenching fingers clawed at my skull like a rock climber searching for purchase.

“What have I done?” I asked myself between hysterical gulps of air.

Killed a man, came a stone-sober answering thought in response.

You just killed a man trying to save his dog.

I glanced up at the open road through the windshield. It curved away out of sight in the moonlit distance, beautiful, dreamlike, beckoning like the Yellow Brick Road in The Wizard of Oz.

That’s when the cool, rational, very sober-sounding voice in my head delivered two words, a sound bite, an ad slogan.

Just go.

It wasn’t your fault, my interior voice-over continued. You were trying not to hit the dog. There was nothing you could do. Besides, no one saw. Take your foot off the brake and move it onto the gas. Don’t look back. Don’t be stupid. Just go.

It was true that no one had seen it, I realized with a swallow. I was on an empty stretch of road near the airport with nothing but the deserted beach on the right. The only structure was an abandoned-looking concrete industrial building a couple of hundred feet up on the left.

The only witnesses to the incident were a silent armada of yellow school buses parked behind a chain-link fence across the street. Their dead eyelike headlights seemed to stare at me as if wondering what I was going to do.

I looked around for the biker’s dog. It was gone.

It was as if I came back online then. Having thought the unthinkable, the spell was broken, and I could once again focus.

I slid the car into park and turned it off.

I had to help this poor man. I needed to do what my father would have done. Start CPR, stop his bleeding, find a phone.

Go? I thought, disgusted, as I fumbled with the door latch. How could I have even considered such a thing? I was a good person. I’d been a lifeguard, a candy striper. That’s my good girl, my daddy used to say as I’d help him off with his high-gloss police oxfords.

I was getting out of the car when I noticed a pair of headlights approaching in the distance behind the injured man. Before I could breathe, an unexpected and dazzling flash of brilliant color crowned the headlights.

I stared, paralyzed, mesmerized, as the night suddenly blazed with a fireworks burst of police lights, blinding bubbles of blood red and vivid sapphire blue.

THE FLASHING POLICE CRUISER was strangely silent as it rolled to a slanting stop halfway between me and the fallen biker. As the metallic squawk and chitter of its police radio reached my ears, my chin dropped to my chest like a condemned prisoner’s, waiting for the ax.

I looked up as I heard the heavy crunch of a footstep by the cop car’s open door. I couldn’t see the officer’s face, which was backlit by the blinding roof lights. The only thing I could make out was his large, squarish, dark outline against the crazily strobing lights.

“Stay there and keep your hands where I can see them,” the cop said like the voice of God.

I immediately complied.

Over the trunk of the cop car, I watched the officer quickly approach the injured man and squat by his side. The next thing I knew, the cop was looming over me.

He was unexpectedly handsome, with short black hair and pale blue eyes in a lean face. He was six two or three, early thirties, powerfully built. His all-American physical attractiveness made the whole situation worse somehow. Made my guilt sharper, my despair more vile.

“He’s dead,” the officer said.

Something at my core faltered.

“Oh, no,” I whispered like a crazy person into my lap. “Please, God, no. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I buried my shaking head deeper into my hands as the recruitment-poster police officer leaned down beside my face and sniffed.

“And you’re dead drunk. Stand up and put your hands behind your head.”

WHEN MY FATHER DIED and I saw his coffin for the first time, I remember thinking, This is it. Nothing will ever be this bad.