Джеймс Паттерсон - The 19th Christmas

The stricken faces of the friends and families ripped from Christmas parties or beds spoke without words of the devastation.

Joe stood with his back against a wall hung with children’s Christmas drawings. I sat a few feet away in a row of attached chairs, holding Julie in my lap. The woman sitting beside me was a few years older than me. Her arm was around the shoulders of a young teen, her son, who was cut and bruised and waiting to see a doctor.

The woman turned her stunned face to me.

“My oldest, Jeffrey, went through the windshield. He’s…they’re operating…it was bad…” She started to cry. Her younger son threw his arms around her and said, sobbing, “He has to be okay. He has to be okay.”

Sitting in this waiting room was like being wrapped in sheets of broken glass. I felt for the parents and their children whose lives had been tragically altered. I was also flooded with horrific memories of my own, spanning decades.

I pictured Joe and me sleeping in these chairs, holding hands in this very room when Julie was an infant with a rare disease, not knowing if our tiny baby would survive to see her first birthday.

I flashed back to waiting-room vigils for cops who’d been shot, the death of a partner. And I’d waited in one on that horrifying day, not long ago, when Joe was brought to San Francisco General with a life-threatening head injury after the bombing of the science museum.

How quickly a romantic dinner had changed to what could have been the worst day of my life and the end of his. I felt his presence behind me now and thanked God for his life.

Julie didn’t have any memories like these. She was big-eyed, bubbling with questions that I couldn’t answer. How could I explain to her why so many people were sobbing, keening, holding on to one another?

I turned to face Joe and we exchanged looks. On a bad-parenting scale of one to ten, bringing Julie here had sent the needle off the dial. And yet how could we leave without knowing what had happened to Mrs. Rose?

Short of an assault on the ER, I had done my best to find out her condition. I had badgered the head nurse, who had explained that since I wasn’t a relative, she was forbidden by law to tell me anything about the patient.

I persisted. I produced my badge. I told her that a paramedic had called me from the ambulance, for God’s sake, to say Mrs. Rose was being taken to Metro. I told her I was as good as Mrs. Rose’s closest relative, that she had no one else in San Francisco.

The nurse shook her head no. But then she relented.

She scribbled on a pad of paper and turned it around so I could see the word Stroke. After I read it, she ripped the page from the pad, balled it up, and threw it into the trash.

I told Joe I’d be right back, took my phone out to the street, and looked up emergency treatment for stroke victims. Mrs. Rose was probably having a CT scan right now. Whatever was learned would determine her course of treatment over the next few hours or days.

If she lived.

I had stored her daughter’s number, and I punched it in, expecting to get Becky’s outgoing message again. But instead I heard her actual voice, a breathless, frantic “Oh, thank God. I tried to reach you so many times. How’s my mother?”

I filled her in, telling her I’d hit a bureaucratic wall but that she could get information on her mother’s condition. “I have the keys to your mom’s apartment,” I said. “Let me know your plans. And tell me what I can do to help.”

Just after ten, as Joe, Julie, and I were headed back home to Lake Street, my phone buzzed.

It was Conklin.

“I’m outside your door,” he said. “Where are you?”

“About ten minutes out. What’s wrong?”

“I’ll wait,” he said. “A hot Loman tip just came in. We’re catching.”

Chapter 40

Megan Rafferty was too smart for this, yet here she was.

Six years ago she’d graduated from high school having been voted most likely to become rich and famous. She’d spent the two years after that in college. Then two years in rehab.

Now she was living in a housing project next door to a Superfund site, sweating in a stinking van, waiting, waiting, waiting for directions from someone she didn’t know via the drug-riddled brain of her current boyfriend.

What came from Mr. Loman’s call would either set her free or earn her a stretch in a state pen.

She was glad her mother couldn’t see her now.

Using. Living with Corey. Not a mother or a schoolteacher or a doctor. It would break her heart.

Megan busied herself in the navy-blue transport van neatening the shelves and picking up after Corey, who was a pig.

The van was an aging Chevy with a spunky new motor and amazing pickup. It had rear cargo doors and decals reading TANYA’S CAT AND DOG GROOMING: WE COME TO YOU on the side panels. No phone number. No email. But in Megan’s humble opinion, it was perfect camouflage.

They were parked on Donahue Street near the construction dump behind the replacement housing where they lived. The field was four city blocks of radioactive dirt and rubble from the bulldozed former shipyard, polluted with petroleum, pesticides, heavy metals.

What a dump.

Other vehicles were parked at a distance from one another on both sides of Innes Avenue, their occupants steaming up the windows.

Here inside the van, Corey was in the driver’s seat, fiddling with his playlist, earbud cord dangling from his ear. He was singing along with some vocalist, killing time.

The two of them, waiting for Mr. Loman. Waiting.

Megan had a high idle. She hated to wait.

She climbed up behind the front seat and pulled the bud out of Corey’s ear. He spun around like he was ready to pull his piece.

“What’s the latest?” she asked.

“I told you never to sneak up on me,” he said.

Corey was good-looking for his age and weight. Thirty-eight. Five foot ten. One ninety. A semiretired drug dealer and not a bad bunk buddy. He was also ambitious. He said he was hooked up with a major-league mobster. That big money was in the future.

His future or theirs? Corey kept secrets. And right now he owned her, one baggie at a time.

Megan said, “You told me that he was calling an hour ago.”

“Chill out, will you please. Make coffee. Thassagirl.”

“Make it yourself.”

Megan pulled back one of the blackout curtains and looked out on Donahue. The apartments across the way were lit up. She could see twinkling lights.

A beat-up ’85 Mustang GT parked up the road, and a couple of kids got out. They walked down the middle of the street, smokin’, jokin’, heading in their direction. One was wearing a Santa cap and a fake beard that was pulled away from his face and hanging over his shirt like a bib.

Santa Claus was coming to town. Ha.

The other one—boy or girl, she couldn’t tell—was wearing a flimsy skirt over skinny jeans.

“Corey. Those two look like undercover to you? Corey?”

“What? No. I know the one in the skirt. Calm down, Meggy, will you? You’re driving me crazy. Is that what you want? Me on crazy?”

She blew out a long, exasperated sigh, returned to the rear of the van, and threw herself down in the bunk against the wall.

How was she supposed to calm down?

On the one hand, freedom. On the other hand, jail.

She put a T-shirt over her face and was counting backward from a hundred when Corey thundered down the length of the van.

“Get up,” he said.

“Get up please . Mr. Loman called?”

Corey was standing on the bunk, rummaging in duffel bags in the overhead cabinet.

“Here,” he said, handing her a semiauto pistol. He grabbed one for himself, jammed a second into his waistband. He tugged open the blackout curtain.