Джеймс Паттерсон - The 19th Christmas

Bavar had been unharmed and had since made a sizable gift to the San Francisco Police Officers Association, turning a horrible week into Yahoo s going into the next year.

Only one thing nagged at me on this happiest of evenings.

I hadn’t spoken to Jacobi since he was shot in the thigh almost a week ago. We’d exchanged texts, and he’d sent me a cheery message saying, Boxer, I’m fine. I’m comfortable in my own bed. Have a drink for me, but I still hadn’t heard his voice.

Joe squeezed my shoulder and said, “Check it out.”

I looked up and saw Claire and Edmund cha-cha-ing down the narrow hallway from the bar to the back room. She was wearing a sparkly, low-cut black dress, and they were both glowing from their week in San Diego.

Once they were seated, my closest friend and I got caught up. I told her what she had missed—the hairy, scary tightrope-walking Lomachenko interviews and his complete and somewhat unexpected capitulation.

“We have him on suicide watch,” I told her.

“That depressed, huh?”

“Yes. And in Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman kills himself.”

“But the one in the play does it by crashing his car, right?”

I laughed. “Loman is pretty creative. He might go tried-and-true with strips of bedsheet. We don’t want that.”

I poured a beer for Claire, and she told me about the go-get-’em students in her extra-credit Christmas-break class.

“Some of those kids moved me to tears,” she said. “I know at least three of them are going to make stellar pathologists. Two of them are going to be better than me, if you can believe it.”

I looked up from her grin to see another friend headed our way—the lovely Miranda Spencer, a daytime-TV-show actor who was both glamorous and down-to-earth. She was also Jacobi’s girlfriend.

I was out of my chair, already beginning to shout greetings and a lot of questions, when she smiled broadly and said, “Lindsay. He’s right outside. And he’s got a surprise.”

Chapter 93

It was after eleven. I had fully expected to kiss my husband at midnight right here at Susie’s.

But Miranda was getting us up and hustling us out, saying, “Hurry, hurry.”

We paid up and pushed our way through the raucous bar crowd and out to Jackson Street, where a limo was parked at the curb.

Brady opened the rear door—and there was my dear friend in the back seat, holding a crutch and wearing a huge smile.

“The mayor has had some seats cordoned off for us,” he said. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

We all piled in and took off on a fifteen-minute drive through our city, still lit up for the holidays. When we disembarked at Rincon Park, Brady and Conklin helped Jacobi out of the car and blocked for him. Joe put his arm around Jacobi’s back and said, “Lean on me, Chief. Put all your weight on me.”

We found our reserved-for-SFPD block on the seating walls. We had a primo view of the bay, the ferry terminal, and the bridge decked out in swags of lights.

This was San Francisco in her party dress.

Thousands of people had collected on the Embarcadero to watch flowers blooming in the sky. We had just gotten settled into our seats when the first fireworks were launched from barges off Pier 14. Music was synced to the display, and the crowd cheered with each new explosion.

When the ten-second countdown to midnight came over the sound system, my husband grabbed me. Nearly squeezing the breath out of me, he showed me without words how afraid he’d been for me and how he couldn’t bear to lose me.

For the next twenty minutes the sky crackled with rockets and pyrotechnics, all reflected in the water below and capped off with a brilliant grand finale.

My husband and I kissed in the New Year.

I told him, “I love you, Joe. I love you so much.”

“I’m so lucky, Blondie. Do I say it enough? I love you, too.”

“You say it a lot.”

He kissed me again.

And then I cried. The feeling had been building, and it came out in full waterworks with heaving sobs. Joe held on to me until I was laughing again.

My best and dearest friends were all around us, hugging one another, kissing their partners, and I noticed that I wasn’t the only one with wet cheeks. I’d never seen Brady cry.

At Jacobi’s urging, we huddled, rugby-style, to wish one another the best of everything. We girlfriends pressed cheeks and ruffled one another’s hair before settling back into the arms of our men.

This was it. The best New Year’s Eve of my life.

I felt ready for whatever the New Year would bring.

Epilogue January 2

Chapter 94

The New Year’s holiday had ended, and for Joe, January 2 began as a workday like any other.

He had kissed Lindsay good-bye as she left for the station, walked Julie to the pre-K school bus, and settled her into her seat next to her favorite aide. Then he went back home, made a roast beef snack for Martha in exchange for a handshake, and sat down at his desk. At ten-something that morning, as he was paying bills in his home office, his desk phone rang.

The caller ID said Drisco, a landmark hotel in Pacific Heights.

He picked up the phone and said, “Joe Molinari.”

All he heard was soft breathing, so he said, “Hello?” and was about to hang up when a young woman’s voice said, “Papa? Papa, it’s Francesca.”

Joe felt the floor drop away beneath him. The receiver nearly slipped from his hand. He got a grip and said, “Franny? Is that you?”

There was nervous laughter and then she said, “It’s me. All grown up and right here in San Francisco.”

It felt crazy but he believed her.

The last time he’d seen Franny, she was Julie’s age. Just about four. Talking. Asking questions. Why, why, why? He hadn’t been able to answer the important ones.

He filled the lengthening silence by asking, “Okay to call you Franny?”

“Of course. Okay to call you Papa?”

“Of course.”

They both laughed and then Joe asked, “How long will you be here? Who or what brings you?”

The daughter he hadn’t spoken to in more than twenty years said, “You, Papa. I came to see you. I have to fly home in two days. To Rome.”

Joe loved the sound of her voice, Standard American with a hint of Italian. He said, “Two days? When can I see you? What’s your schedule?”

“I’m free until my flight on Friday.”

The last time he’d seen Franny, she’d been wearing footie pajamas and sleeping under a mobile of the cow jumping over the moon in the small bedroom with baby-farm-animal wallpaper in the Washington, DC, apartment. The time before that, she was also asleep. And before that, also sleeping, ad infinitum.

He tried to picture her as an adult. “Would you like to have lunch?”

“Today?”

“Yes. I can pick you up at your hotel at say—noon?”

“Perfect,” said his daughter—his elder daughter.

They ended the call and Joe spun his chair around and stared out the window at the blue sky. He remembered saying good-bye to her as she slept and then leaving their apartment, not knowing that Isabel was packed and ready to grab Franny and fly away.

What was her last memory of him?

Fighting with her mother, Isabel?

He shook his head, remembering his fractious marriage to his college girlfriend that had shown cracks and fissures right away and had only gotten worse after Franny’s birth. His work, the lengthy assignments away from home—it wasn’t what Isabel had wanted or expected in marriage.

One day in June he’d come home to find a note stating that she had taken their baby girl to Rome, where her parents lived. Next to that was her lawyer’s business card. After that, she’d cut off all contact.