Джеймс Паттерсон: Revenge

The sirens were getting closer now.

“Drop it, Bennett,” said Shelley. His finger tightened on the trigger, and for a moment he almost . . . but no. His finger relaxed. “Drop the gun,” he said, but realized Bennett had no intention of discarding his weapon. Instead his head dipped, and he pushed the barrel of the gun into his own mouth. “Bennett, don’t,” started Shelley. “You don’t have to—”

But he never got to finish that particular sentence.

EPILOGUE

TWO WEEKS LATER Shelley and Lucy maneuvered their battered, injured bodies into the Saab, complete with crutch for Lucy, and made the drive from Stepney Green to the Drakes’ house in Ascot.

Arriving, they drew up in front of brand-new gates, where Shelley approached the keypad and out of sheer curiosity punched in Susie’s birthday for the code. No way would it still be the same, he thought. Not after all they’d been through.

The gate clicked and began a slow swing open. Shelley shook his head. “Fucking idiots,” he said, and rejoined Lucy in the car.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“‘Fucking idiots,’ you said. Not exactly the toughest bit of lip-reading in the world. Who on earth were you calling ‘fucking idiots’? Not our hosts, I hope.”

Shelley grumbled something non-committal and eased the Saab onto the driveway. Being back brought mixed emotions. Lucy, on the other hand, was paying her first visit to the Drake home, and she gawped through the Saab’s window. “Whoa,” she said. “Big house.”

“Yeah, big house,” agreed Shelley.

“Must be difficult to heat.”

“Never known it cold, to be honest.”

“Oh, well, that’s a relief. I was thinking of launching an appeal.”

Apart from his Jag and her Porsche there were no other cars on the drive; evidently the Drakes had cleared their diary. When Shelley and Lucy buzzed at the front door it was opened by Guy and Susie together—apparently joined at the hip all of a sudden—and they were led through to the lounge.

As they sat and waited for drinks to appear, Shelley mused that the last time he’d been in this lounge it was filled with the Met’s tech guys, as well as DI Phillips, who’d been convinced Drake and his men were lying to him. Which of course they had been.

Since then the police had proceeded with varying degrees of exasperation and disbelief, with the dust from the investigation yet to settle. Shelley and Drake received an occasional call from Phillips, being dogged, the way detectives are supposed to be, but that was about as far as it went. The police didn’t like bodies turning up, of course. But the fact that the bodies had belonged to Chechen and British gangsters had sucked a sense of urgency out of the investigation.

What’s more, Claridge had informed them off the record that there was no intention of pressing charges for anything that had happened at Foxy Kittenz that night. Nor, indeed, anything since. If there ever was a hook, Shelley, Drake, Lucy, and Susie were off it.

And then one afternoon Drake had called Shelley.

“Same number, huh?” the millionaire had said.

“Told you so,” Shelley had replied, and for a while they’d chewed over the events of a fortnight previously, with Guy expressing his dismay at the treachery of Bennett’s crew, and finally—“At bloody last!” Lucy had said later—thanking Shelley for everything he’d done.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he’d told Drake.

“I’m well aware of that, Shelley. But thank you anyway. Something else I want you to know: I’m making reparations to the kid who was hurt the night we raided the cam place. He’ll be well looked after, that much I can say.”

Rich-guy solution: throw money at the problem. But, as far as Shelley knew, the kid had made a complete physical recovery, and no doubt he wasn’t going to turn his nose up at a bit of financial help.

And then Drake had asked if he and Lucy would be able to come to the house, and Shelley had been about to tell him to take a running jump when Drake told him the reason for the invitation. And now, here they were.

Susie greeted them both effusively. “My savior,” she told Lucy, who demurred.

“Actually, you saved my bacon,” she said.

“Really?”

“You kicked the car door, remember? Throwing off the guy’s aim. Nifty move.”

“Even so, it’s because of me you need this,” said Susie gravely, indicating the crutch.

“Not for long,” Lucy assured her.

“And how is the shoulder, David?” said Susie, turning to Shelley.

“On the mend,” he told her.

She took his hands. “My lifesaver,” she said, and gave him a kiss on the cheek, bringing her perfume back into his life. “How can I ever thank you?”

Lucy could think of a way, but Shelley had made her promise not to say anything. “You and your bloody pride,” she’d fumed.

Small talk out of the way, Guy collected the urn and all four of them left the house, crossed the front lawn, and passed into the field beyond, where Emma used to keep her horses. There they gathered in a semicircle, Susie at the center, and bowed their heads.

“I knew this is where you’d want to be, sweetheart,” Susie said. She upended the urn, a mother saying farewell to her daughter, and they each said their silent goodbyes.

A short time later Shelley and Lucy took their leave, and at last Shelley put the Drake house behind him for what he dearly hoped would be the last time.

For a while they drove in silence, until Shelley cleared his throat. “Luce,” he said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“I see,” she said quietly. “It’s like that, is it?”

“It’s a bit like that, yeah.”

“Okay, but before you go on: are you leaving me?”

“Can’t I just—”

“Just answer me that: are you leaving me?”

“No. Absolutely not. God no.”

“Then I think I know what it is.”

“Look, why can’t I just—”

“Did you sleep with her?”

That was it. The question lay between them.

“No,” he said at last.

“But . . . okay then. Did you want to sleep with her?”

“There was a moment outside the hospital where I wanted to put a bullet into Bennett. But that’s all it was. A moment. Like an impulse. Half a second later I knew I didn’t want to do it.”

“Because it was the wrong thing to do? Or because you didn’t want to do it?”

“I didn’t want to do it because it was the wrong thing to do.”

“And you’re saying it was like that with her?”

“There was a kiss, Luce.” He saw her flinch and the sight was like a knife into him. “But that’s all it was. That was the impulse. Half a second later I knew I didn’t want to do it.”

“Because it was the ‘wrong thing to do,’” she parroted unhappily.

“Yeah, but what made it wrong was the fact that I loved you—loved you then, love you still. More and more every day.”

They drove a while in silence.

“You know what this means, don’t you?” she said at last.

“What?” he replied, fearing her reply.

“It means you owe me brainstorming, Shelley. A lot of bloody brainstorming.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks of course go to James, as well as our brilliant editor, John Sugar, and copyeditor Alison Rae. Also my agent, Antony Topping, and Dave Taylor. “Do a good show, all right?”

—A.H.

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About the Authors

JAMES PATTERSON is the world’s bestselling author and the world’s most trusted storyteller. He has created many enduring fictional characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, and I Funny. Among his notable literary collaborations are The President Is Missing, with Bill Clinton, and the Max Einstein series, produced in partnership with the Albert Einstein estate. Patterson’s writing career is characterized by a single mission: to prove that there is no such thing as a person who “doesn’t like to read,” only people who haven’t found the right book. He’s given over three million books to schoolkids and the military, donated more than seventy million dollars to support education, and endowed over five thousand college scholarships for teachers. The National Book Foundation presented Patterson with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and he is also the recipient of an Edgar Award and six Emmy Awards. He lives in Florida with his family.