Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“What’s your plan?” I asked. “You’ve told me the truth, and you must know I can’t have you living here and doing what you’ve been doing.”

“I’m going to leave.” He nodded. “If Cline doesn’t know I’m with you now, he’ll find out soon enough. I’ll be in danger. I’ve got plenty of money. Give me a couple of days to make arrangements, and then I’ll be out of your life.”

He started to leave, and I turned away, not wanting to watch him go. All that I wanted to say was left unspoken, just like it had been with Marni. Another person I cared about had been stripped from me by Cline’s hand. I made a silent promise that he would be the last.

I’d thought the doc had gone inside, but then I heard his voice behind me as I stood looking out at the water. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry about your friend Malone.”

“What do you mean, you’re sorry about him?” I turned, and the old doctor looked surprised, uncertain. He shrugged a little sadly.

“If you don’t know yet, I shouldn’t be the one to tell you,” he said. He left me standing there, my head full of questions I wasn’t sure I wanted the answers to.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

CLINE WAS POSSESSED by a level of rage that was so hot and wild, he felt like his brain was swelling, like his eyes were bulging from their sockets. He stood in his office looking out over the water, trying to calm himself. Below him, the gardener was just wrapping up for the day, throwing tools into the back of his truck with heavy clunking sounds. Downstairs, some of the clingy idiots drawn in by his money and power were blaring their lazy rap music. The pressure in his skull collected at the top of his spine.

Four of his best men were in the hospital. Bones and Simbo had apparently been beaten silly by the moronic local sheriff. Cline couldn’t believe that. Unless the man had cornered his soldiers unexpectedly and sat on them, Cline didn’t know how to account for Bones’s ruptured kidneys and Simbo’s skull fracture and broken arm. Then there were Turner and Russ, who had approached a houseful of dead-beats and dropouts in the middle of the night and somehow wound up in the back of an ambulance, even though both of them were experienced killers. They’d been foiled by washouts and crazies sleeping in their beds. It was unthinkable.

Cline tried not to let his mind linger on what he had lost on the lobster boat. The fury was making his jaw ache. Between bursts of anger, he had tiny moments of fear, the unmistakable fingers of panic flicking and stroking wires inside his brain. News of a loss this horrendous, this complete, would get around. If Cline didn’t recover quickly, someone would come for him. Cline had men, territory, respect, and he had built his business carefully, but now others might assume he was all fluff, easy prey; everything he had was lying exposed, one of his kingdom’s walls shattered.

Cline walked down the stairs to tell the idiots in the yard to turn off their music. He was going to send them away, this little posse of sycophants Squid had brought to the house months ago who never seemed to leave. There were two girls who were always there, high-school dropouts like Squid most likely, wannabe gangsta bitches Instagramming themselves in his Jacuzzi while drinking his champagne and flashing gang signs. Cline liked having easy pussy around, but he hated their music. In Cline’s day, rap had been about something. The song they were playing as he walked toward the French doors was just a sonic squealing and the word juice whispered over and over.

He stopped just outside the doors when he heard what the girls were discussing.

“ … he was like nothing, man. Like some old cop dude from down Boston way. I seen the fool out here. He was the one put a plant through Cline’s windshield, yo. The crew at his house is all like homeless people and women and retards and shit.”

“And they fought off Russ and Turner? How did they do that?”

“Yeah, man. I don’t know! I heard Russ’s leg was, like, disconnected. Like detached. Some fucked-up cripple, one of the cop’s guys, blew it off with an Uzi.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“Nah, man! Doctors had to sew it back on and all.”

“Fuck. This old cop dude sounds ripped.”

“Hell yeah. He some badass motherfucker.”

Cline opened the door and saw the two girls on the couch, curled up together, their knees up and their feet on the cushion. One of them had shoes inset with lights that flashed different colors. He grabbed that one by the neck.

“What’s that you were saying?” Cline asked as he marched the girl toward the fountain in the middle of his yard. She managed a squeal before he thrust her head under the water. Her friend followed them but she didn’t know what to do; she stood nearby pleading and crying, wanting to reach for Cline but not having the courage. Tough little gangsta bitch, huh? he thought. Cline let the girl in his hands up for a second and then plunged her back under. He pressed her against the edge of the concrete fountain, his crotch against her cute little ass, pushing her head down hard until he could feel it scraping against the bottom of the structure.

He let her up. “The old cop, what did you say he was?”

“Nothing. Nothing! I didn’t say—”

Cline plunged the girl under the water again. Her flashing shoes twisted on the pavement; her fingers clawed at his hand. He looked at the friend and counted the seconds off, the pain in his head easing considerably. The friend kept begging, but he couldn’t hear her—there was only a warm, pleasant humming in his ears. He let the girl up and she coughed and vomited.

“What did you say?”

“He’s nothing!” the girl blubbered. “Please! Please, man! I said he’s a loser! He’s … he … he ain’t—”

Cline dunked her head. Lifted it. “What did you say?”

“A badass. I said he was a badass.”

Cline dunked the girl again, held her under until she was spasming violently against him, urine mixed in with the water soaking them both, staining her white jeans. When he thought she was just about to go limp, he released his grip and let her slither down the side of the fountain. After a moment, she crawled away from him, a loathsome, soaking-wet creature, shivering and whimpering. He watched the girls hugging each other and sobbing, and he stretched his neck until he heard a crack, the tension and pain melting like butter.

“Who’s the badass now?” he asked, and he turned back toward the house.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

I NEEDED TO get away from the Inn, from the house where my friends were recovering from their wounds, where blue and red lights had flashed in the night and gunshots had shattered the windows. It was too emotional there for me to properly plan my next move. I invited Malone, Nick, and Susan out with me to the Greenfish and sat with them at a high table near the windows looking out on the street.

Nick and Malone went to order at the bar, and Susan sat close to me, turning a coaster over and over. I had told them about the doc on the way here, and it weighed heavily on everyone’s shoulders.

“I just can’t see that in him,” I told her. “He’s someone I thought I knew, and that scares me. It makes me feel like I don’t know anyone in my house—that my house is full of secret keepers and liars.”

I thought of Nick’s words on the boat, of his claim that he had done bad things on his deployment. How bad were we talking? Why hadn’t he, my best friend, ever confided in me?

“The doc’s been in the house maybe … a year and a half?” I said. “He told me he hit a crisis point in his life a year ago. He was that low, low enough to accept Cline’s offer, and I couldn’t see it.”