James Patterson - Now You See Her

Orders?

“What are you talking about?” I mumbled. “From who?”

The Jump Killer started laughing then. “You still don’t know what the hell is going on, do you? Even now. Of course not. Precious little Jeanine always kept in the dark.”

What!?

“My orders come from Peter, Jeanine. Remember him? Your husband? My best friend. There is no Jump Killer. There never was one. There’s just Peter. Peter and me.”

THE HILARITY NEXT DOOR hit a fever pitch as the old-school rap classic “Wild Thing” by Tone-Loc started up. The volume suddenly blasted twice as loud as I lay there staring up at the coffered ceiling.

“You know Peter used to talk about you all the time,” the Jump Killer said, sitting in the chair by the side of the bed and checking his watch. “The silly things you guys used to do together. He really thought you were a good kid. I wanted to meet you, but of course Peter said no way. I think he might have really even loved you. That’s why I was so surprised when he asked me to kill you.”

I looked at his face. He was still smiling.

“You never figured this out?” he said, shaking his head. “Peter hired me to kill you, Jeanine, while he was off on his fishing trip. Make you disappear. Sell you to our drug-running friends like all the others. I was going to do it, too, when I saw you leave the house.

“I followed you around all goddamn day, watched you cut yourself on the beach, watched you dye your hair. I didn’t know what the hell you were doing until you hit the Overseas Highway and I realized you were exiting stage left. That’s when I pulled up and gave you a lift. But then you pulled that trick with the Mercedes and you got away. At first, I didn’t know what to do. But it looked like you weren’t coming back anyway, so I just lied and said I killed you.”

The cotton ball effect of the drug began to wear off and was replaced by a dull head-to-toe ache. I moved my right arm. It went a foot before the handcuff got painfully taut against my wrists. I stared at the bed’s heavy wooden posts inside the steel cuffs. They were scratched and worn from use, as if chewed. I gagged as I realized it was from women rattling them as they struggled.

When I looked back, the Jump Killer was picking at something in his perfectly capped teeth with his pinkie.

“I should have told Peter the truth, but frankly I was afraid to,” he said. “You think I’m bad? Peter’s like the Tony Soprano of Key West, except without the sense of humor.” The Jump Killer shrugged. “But he never showed you that side, did he? With me, it was always death threats and slapping me around for forgetting something, but not you. With you, it was always flowers and rainbows and love notes.”

He stood and yawned.

“See, Jeanine, women, even wives, come and go, but friends are forever. Best friends, anyway. We were in the Rangers together. When he needed someone to watch his back, I was the one he called. I’ll admit that he really wasn’t too happy with me when he saw you in New York. But he finally relented and gave me a second chance to take you out. I almost had you at your hotel room, too.”

The Jump Killer walked to the door and opened it.

“Don’t worry, though. I’m not going to blow it this time. When these boys are finished with you, before your burial at sea, I’m going to put two bullets in the back of your head to make sure you stay dead. Once and for all.”

THE DOOR CLOSED. A quotation popped into my head as the electric guitar riffed between hip-hop bass thumps next door.

The hard way is the only way.

Whether it was from a writer or the Bible, I couldn’t quite recall. All I remembered was that I never understood it. Why would someone choose for things to be hard?

But as I lay there, my face drenched with tears, an ironlike fear clenching every sinew of my body, I finally knew what it meant.

It meant there were no shortcuts. You had to pay for things. Sometimes, it was your job to go down no matter how unfair things were. Meeting Peter had allowed me to avoid my fate for killing Ramón Peña, at least up until now. Today I was going to pay for that crime with interest.

I remembered how shocked I’d been when I’d seen how resigned to die Justin Harris had been. I wasn’t shocked anymore.

Someone knocked on the door.

But instead of stiffening with a soldierly stoicism like Justin, I went into a full-body twinge of revulsion and horror. My tendons felt like they were about to pop.

“Hola!” said a jolly whisper as the door opened.

The man who stepped in looked more French than Mexican. He was swarthy and tall and lean with long, lustrous shoulder-length black hair. A cigar jutted from his stubbled jaw. In his tailored pinstripe suit coat, an open-throated banker’s shirt, and nice jeans, he looked European, a sophisticate, a rich ne’er-do-well dandy ready for a night on the town.

When he took off his suit coat, I saw that he wore a pearl-handled automatic in a shoulder rig. He smiled at me from around his cigar as he selected a bottle and glass from the bar and poured himself a tall drink of whiskey. He pointed to the drink and then at me in a gallant gesture, wondering if I wanted one.

The handcuffs started click-clacking off the wood as I started to shake.

He shrugged his shoulders in an oh-well gesture. Then he puffed elaborately on his cigar, blew smoke up at the coffered ceiling, and approached the bed.

He was sitting at the foot, pulling off one of his cowboy boots, when there was a noise over the loud music.

It was the wail of an air horn above deck.

Next door, the volume quit as men shushed one another, listening.

“This is the United States Coast Guard!” came the order from a bullhorn. “No one move!”

Two gunshots blasted one right after the other above us. There was a surprised yell in Spanish followed quickly by a splash.

“Don’t move! We will shoot! Don’t move!” the bullhorn speaker said.

There was some more gunfire, and the long-haired man at the end of the bed looked up in shock as running footsteps passed directly overhead.

One boot on, one boot off, his cigar in his mouth and his automatic out, he clopped to the door. He opened it. Then I screamed as he pulled the trigger.

There were more shots and yelling as someone returned fire. A hunk of paneled wood blew out of the wall beside the drug dealer’s head. Then the gun suddenly fell from his hand. The expression on the man’s face was one of curiosity as he looked down at his blood-soaked banker’s shirt. Then there was another violent, earsplitting bang and then another and he fell, sparks from his cigar flying up as he crashed forward onto his face.

I was crying as young men dressed in blue and carrying rifles rushed into the room. After another moment, Charlie, soaking wet, was smiling down at me. He wasn’t dead somehow.

I tried to say something, but found that I couldn’t. It seemed like I was in shock.

Charlie tried to pull me off the bed until he saw the handcuffs. Then he took the baseball bat off the wall and began breaking the bedposts one by one.

“OK, ONE MORE TIME from the top,” Scott Dippel, the commanding officer of the coast guard ship, said, clicking his pen in one of the now docked cutter’s staterooms.

I was wearing some borrowed USCG sweats and my hair was still wet from, by far, the best shower I’d ever taken in my life. Charlie sat next to me. He was holding a bag of frozen green beans against the lump on his head that he received when he planted his face on the deck.

“Yes, please. From the tippy top, considering we have two men dead and three Mexican nationals in custody,” added FBI Agent Holden. He’d come aboard immediately when we returned to the coast guard’s base.