James Patterson: Now You See Her

He burst into laughter again, snorting as he fought to contain himself.

“Now, come on. What are you waiting for? Dunk for those apples,” he said as he slammed me under again.

PETER WAS WRENCHING MY HEAD out of the water for maybe the fourth or fifth time when I had the hallucination. I must have been deprived of oxygen because all of a sudden, I thought I saw Emma in the doorway behind Peter.

She looked like an angel. There was something over her head. Wings?

No, I realized. It was the glass-and-metal table from my bedroom. She had it reared back like a baseball bat.

At the last second, Peter turned.

But it was too late.

An elongated, rattling explosion of shattering glass rang off the tile walls as Emma crashed it onto his skull like a sledgehammer.

Peter’s eyes rolled back into his head as he went over and down, spurting blood. Burned and feeling dizzy, my palms getting cut by broken glass, I wriggled over his legs on my hands and knees out of the bathroom. I made it as far as the living room when Emma knelt down beside me and cut my taped wrists free with kitchen shears.

“Run,” I said hoarsely. I gained my feet. “Door. Go. Police. Run!”

“Leaving so soon? Without giving Daddy a kiss?” Peter said behind us.

I turned slowly and froze. I had trouble registering what I was seeing.

The glass table had injured Peter. Grievously. His left ear was hanging off, flopping against his jaw, dangling by a string of skin. More skin had been shorn from the side of his head, from his temple to his jawline, the exposed pink tissue like bloody bubble gum.

Peter reached up and grabbed his damaged ear between his thumb and forefinger. He grunted and, with a quick hard tug, tore it free. It made a small, wet, ripping sound, as if he were removing a Band-Aid. He frowned as he looked down at the detached ear. He shook his head before he laid it carefully on the picture shelf on the wall by his shoulder.

“Someone,” he said, nodding to himself with conviction, “is going to have to pay for that.”

Then he smiled, his blue eyes flashing like neon, like a gas burner cranked up all the way.

“Bitches, bitches, bitches!” he said in his Southie accent. “All the same. Can’t live with ya. Can’t kill ya.”

The razor-sharp kitchen scissors were on the floor at his feet. He stooped and picked them up.

“No, wait. Spoke too soon,” he said, snip-snapping them open and closed like a barber about to get to work. “Actually, I can.”

EMMA AND I stood in the living room like statues, kids caught in a game of freeze tag.

“Daddy doesn’t like bad little girls,” Peter said, grabbing Emma by her wrist with his free hand. He pivoted on his heel as he leaned back and swung her like a rag doll. There was a shattering sound as she crashed face forward into our glass bookcase. It teetered and fell over on top of her, raining down books as she hit the carpet.

That’s when I saw it. Peter’s gun was where he’d left it, on the couch next to the tape. It was my only chance. I spun, my feet sending fallen books flying, as I dove for the couch.

The gun bounced with a double thud off the carpet. I grabbed it, my finger curling around the trigger as I swung around. But I wasn’t in time.

Peter slammed into me, knocking the gun out of my hand as he pile-drived the back of my skull into the hardwood.

I felt as if my head had been split open, as if I’d been hit with a hatchet. I forgot the pain as Peter wrapped his hands around my neck.

I made an involuntary gurgling sound as he started squeezing. More books went flying as I kicked and flailed my arms. My vision dimmed as my oxygen was cut off.

Peter interlaced his fingers around the back of my neck and dug his thumbs into my windpipe, as if he were trying to pry it open.

I’d lost all hope for myself when the tightening at my throat eased up suddenly.

“Don’t go yet, Jeanine. Time for one last round of truth or dare,” Peter whispered in my ear. “I go first. Truth. Remember Ramón Peña? That night on the beach? Yeah, well, you didn’t actually kill him.”

He licked my earlobe and gave it a playful bite.

“That was all me,” he said.

GASPING, my throat on fire, I stared at Peter’s smile.

“That’s right,” he said with a nod. “Peña was an informant who was going to rat us out to the Feds. I was actually chasing him over the beach, planning to kill him, when I heard you drag-racing down the beach road. As he ran to the sidewalk to wave you down, I shot him three times with a suppressed gun. Next thing I know, he falls into the street in front of your spinning car. There was no way you could have avoided him.”

I shook my head, my eyes slits of disbelief and pain.

Peter nodded. “At first, I thought I was going to have to kill you, too, until I smelled alcohol on your breath and came up with a quick plan. I never got a chance to thank you for giving him a lift back to my house. Great job, Jeanine.”

As Peter’s hands went around my throat again, something happened. A cold ball of pure hatred formed behind my eyes. It traveled down my left arm into my hand, where it formed itself into a claw.

I swung up stiff-armed and buried my sharp nails into the pink, fleshless wound on the side of Peter’s head where his ear used to be. Then I raked them down.

Peter flung himself off me, shrieking. I turned over and lifted myself to my knees, flailing through the pile of fallen books, looking for the gun. I spotted black metal under the couch and dove for it. I pulled the heavy gun up off the floor, in toward my stomach, and slipped my finger over the trigger.

Swinging it around at Peter, I squeezed. Nothing happened. The trigger wouldn’t move. I pushed the safety in with my thumb and then raised the gun again. It still wouldn’t fire.

I screamed as Peter booted me in the side of the head. The gun went flying out of my hands. It spun as it sailed over the hardwood, down the hallway, and toward the bedroom.

“It’s called a double-action pistol, you dumb bitch. You need to squeeze the trigger really hard in the beginning to get off the first round,” Peter said, stepping toward it. “Allow me to demonstrate.”

I jumped up and ran in the opposite direction. I was going to run out the front door screaming for help, but I knew what Peter would do to Emma.

I turned at the last second and ran into the kitchen. I grabbed at the knife block beside the stove. The big eight-inch Henckels slid easily into my grip. I raised it over my head and ran back into the living room.

Peter, standing by the bedroom doorway, now had the gun trained at my face. He actually laughed as he watched me coming.

Still chuckling, he tried to pull the trigger.

Nothing happened. Instead of disengaging the safety, I must have put it on!

I kept coming and swinging as I dove forward. The barrel of the gun hit me in my mouth, knocking two of my teeth loose. I still kept coming.

My knuckles brushed the smooth underside of Peter’s freshly shaven chin as I came down with all my might.

I opened his throat and buried the knife to the hilt in his collarbone.

He fell back into my bedroom, making a wet, gagging sound. I remember warm blood in my eyes and on my cheeks as I turned and ran for Emma. Kicking books away, I found Emma’s hand and dragged her to the door before she groggily got to her feet. We hobbled out of the apartment and down the stairwell, clutching each other.

A woman with a bad face-lift, walking her Labradoodle, screamed and took off sprinting when she saw me come out of the building’s service entrance onto the sidewalk in my bloody bathrobe. When we got to the Korean grocery store on the corner of Third Avenue, I stopped by the florist sink beside the racks of cheap roses. I was still hosing the glass out of Emma’s eyes when the first cop car jumped the curb.