Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

A woman was lying on her side under a small table. Rick Craft, apparently asleep, was sitting on the floor with his back against a wall, a blanket around his shoulders like a big, stained coat.

“The children,” I whispered to Nick. “The ones who died. They weren’t living here , were they?” He shrugged. I looked at the woman on the floor. Her greasy hair fell across her brow, and as I bent to get a better look, I noticed white foam at the corner of her mouth. I put two fingers on the side of her neck. Her pulse was faint.

“Hey, asshole.” Nick put a boot into Craft’s side. “Rise and shine.”

Craft opened his eyes and looked at Nick, then scratched at the sores on his badly shaved neck. Nick dragged the waking man to his feet and then slammed him against a wall as if he were banging an old television set to get the picture to clear.

“What—what the fuck do you want?” Rick seized Nick’s arms, his eyes wide now. “I ain’t seen the guy! He was never here!”

“You don’t even know who I’m looking for,” Nick snapped. I went to the table by the sleeping men and found exactly what I’d expected—two colored capsules. One was the yellow smiley identical to the one I had confiscated from Winley Minnow; the other was bright red, the face frowning.

“Where are these coming from?” I showed Craft the capsules. He took a moment to focus, then tried to pry Nick’s hands off him.

“You’re those fucks who were at the bar with Mayburn,” Craft snarled.

“We weren’t with Mayburn,” I said. “We just find you as repulsive as he does.”

“The man asked you a question.” Nick gave Craft a shake so hard that his oversize head jiggled on his scrawny neck. “You the one who’s been handing those pills out to schoolkids?”

“Fuck off!” Craft yelled. I glanced at the men on the couches, but they were down for the count. “You’re not cops. I’m not giving you shit. Get out of my house! Get your hands off me! Get—”

I took Craft from Nick and pushed him down the narrow hall out of the sailors’ mess. I knew what I was looking for, having sensed its presence by the faint reek in the room. The toilet was at the head of the boat, beyond the upper freezer hold. I marched Craft through reeking water to the toilet cubicle and kicked open the door. Exactly as I’d expected—the junkies had no plumbing, so they’d simply pretended that they had. Craft saw what I planned to do and braced himself in the tiny doorway before I could force his head into the bowl heaped inches high with human waste.

“Oh God, no.” He twisted in my hands. “No, no, no.”

“You and your pals need a cleanup crew to come through here,” I said. “A man’s home is supposed to be his castle, isn’t it?” I realized I was biting into Craft’s flesh with my fingers.

“Let me go!”

I tried to force Craft into the cubicle, putting all my weight behind him, my hand on the back of his neck. I got him bent above the pile of feces. The smell was eye-watering.

“Tell me where those pills came from.”

“No!”

“Tell me where they came from or you’ll be picking shit out of your nostrils for the next year and a half.”

“His name’s Cline!” Craft howled, sinking to his knees. The arms that slipped through my grip were reed thin and covered in scabbed sores. Craft was sobbing on the wet rubber floor. “Mitchell Cline. He lives in town. Don’t tell him I gave him up, man.”

“You mix with violent people, you get violence,” I said. “If Cline wants to hurt you for snitching on him, I’m not going to intervene. You signed that deal yourself.”

“I don’t care if he hurts me.” Craft sniffled, rubbing his nose on his arm. “I just don’t want him to cut me off his list. He can ban whoever he wants. I need the gear, man, and Cline’s got all the dealers wrapped up around here.” Craft looked up at me, his red eyes full of tears. “Please,” he said. “I need him.”

I left Craft sniveling and feeling sorry for himself in the wet, reeking hall outside the head and walked back up to Nick. He had lifted the woman from the floor and was holding her in his arms like a baby, her head against his shoulder.

“You get a name?” he said when he saw me.

“Yeah.”

“Good, because we gotta get out of here.” He turned toward the door. “This woman ain’t right.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

NICK SAT IN the back of the car with the woman from the boatyard, her head in his lap, and monitored her pulse, his fingers on her carotid. We exchanged worried glances in the rearview mirror all the way to Addison Gilbert.

The nurse behind the ER triage desk, an African-American woman whose name tag said BESS, took one look at Nick and the woman in his arms and pulled a microphone sticking up from the counter toward her mouth. Her fingers sported bright yellow nails that were two inches long and pointed like claws.

“Code Orange in the ER, please, Code Orange,” Bess announced. She spotted me and ran her eyes up and down my form.

“Can I have the patient’s name, please?” Bess said.

“We don’t know,” I said. “We found her like this. I believe she’s probably had—”

“Fentanyl,” Bess said. “It’s the flavor of the month.” She dragged the microphone to her lips again. “I said Code Orange in the ER, please. Code Orange.”

Whatever the term Code Orange was supposed to initiate, it didn’t seem to work. I looked around the waiting room. There was a young couple on gray plastic chairs watching the television in the corner, ice packs and a paper towel on the man’s wrist. Bess sighed and walked through a side door, then reappeared through double swinging doors to our right pushing a gurney. The emergency room behind her was filled with life. Nurses in pale blue scrubs jogged across the crowded space; family members stood in corners looking worried.

“It’s a bit hectic today.” Bess walked up to Nick, took the woman from his arms like she weighed nothing, and laid her on the gurney. She pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. “We’ve had two other dreamers like this young thing already this morning. One’s got brain damage, and the other didn’t make it.”

I stood by Nick, feeling oddly self-conscious as Bess checked the woman’s vitals.

“You seem shocked, honey,” Bess said to me. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I lied. Bess’s total lack of panic about the unconscious patient rattled me. She made a note on the nameless victim’s chart with a pen she took from her breast pocket, pink with a fluffy poof swinging from a chain.

“You need somewhere to sit down, you let me know. I’ll find you a nice warm spot.” She winked at me. Nick pursed his lips. Bess wheeled the woman into the emergency room and returned to her desk a couple of minutes later.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen these floating around the emergency room lately,” I said, showing her the pills I’d confiscated from Rick Craft’s boat. Bess reached over and took my hand.

“Let me get a closer look.” She examined the capsules but kept holding my hand, stroking my thumb with hers. “Oh yeah, sure, honey. We sucked a couple of these yellow ones out of a girl’s stomach yesterday.”

“What’s the difference between the yellow ones and the red ones?” Nick asked.

“The red ones are the angry ones.” Bess held the pill up, still holding my hand in hers. “They’ll straight-up snuff you if you’re not a long-term serious addict with a tolerance. They’re not for a party. You want a party, it’s the yellow smileys, the purple dopeys, or the green winky faces. Just different combinations of uppers and downers, cerebral and bodily effects.”

She let my hand go and took a folder from behind the desk. Nick was barely keeping it together over Bess’s obvious affection for me. I kicked him in the ankle as Bess opened a page to photographs of colorful pills. “We started seeing them about four months ago, but we already knew they were on their way. Lots of deaths down in Boston. You two local cops or something? How come I’ve never seen you in here before?”