Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

Guilt and rage picked at me. The words of fury at Doc Simeon rolled off my tongue so quickly and easily, and yet under my bed there was a bag of Cline’s cash that I had not yet disposed of. I was one of the liars too. One of the secret keepers.

“Maybe Doc didn’t want you to see it,” Susan said. “You ever think of that?”

“But why not?” I asked. “I’m a good listener. I could have talked him through it.”

“That’s just the thing. You would’ve wanted to help him.” She put a hand on mine. “You know how difficult it’s been for you to let people help you with your grief over Siobhan.”

I thought of Marni, of the memorial she had organized with the others only days earlier. Marni had poked a hole right through the cone of silence I had erected around myself about Siobhan. I’d thought that if I simply closed my ears and my mind to the memory of my wife, the pain of her loss might go away. But it turned out that Marni’s intervention had been exactly what I needed. Cline had come into Doc Simeon’s life when he was low, breaking through his inactivity and loneliness with sudden promises of purpose and adventure. The master of pain had offered to take the hurt away, and the old man had accepted.

Nick put a beer down in front of me and he and Malone sat down. “This guy is going to come at us again,” Nick said. “We need to be ready.”

“I don’t know.” Malone looked at me. “What can he do now? I mean, how many guys can he have? We put two of them on stretchers, and your local sheriff took care of two others. His little running boy Squid is under a rock somewhere in Augusta. Cline has got to be feeling threatened, at least for now.”

“He’ll have other guys,” Susan said. “He might have to reach out to other distributors to get them, but there are always soldiers who are willing to make a name for themselves by doing the dirty work for a boss as powerful as Cline. The guys we took out just leave open spaces for these men to prove themselves. If you ask me, the first order of business for Cline will be getting rid of those men who are holed up and injured.”

“He’s going to kill his guys just because they got hurt?” I looked at Susan. I remembered Cline’s words: So what does a guy do when all his men have proved to be useless to him?

“I think you can bet on that,” Susan said. “When your men fail you, you clean house.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY

“DRUG LORDS DON’T offer health insurance,” Susan said. “While the injured men are out of action, they’ll need to be paid to keep quiet or they’ll be easy pickings for cops who want to question them, make offers.”

I gripped my head, squeezed my eyes shut. Cline was right. I hadn’t won; I’d just put more people in his firing line.

“You don’t know this for sure,” I said to Susan. “You’re just guessing.”

“Think about it.” She shrugged. “We’ve got Turner and Russ approaching the house in the middle of the night, armed and hostile. If we can’t prove attempted murder, we can at least go for weapons charges, assault, breaking and entering. With their records, which are likely to be extensive, they’ll do serious time. Then there are Bones and Simbo, who will be charged with kidnapping, assault, and attempted murder for what they did to Clay. Some or all of them will trade what they know about Cline for a better deal.”

“They could get a lot of time off for being helpful,” Malone mused. “They could argue that Cline intimidated them and coerced them into coming for us. They might get by with no jail time, or they could make a play for a minimum-security prison and witness protection after.”

“But surely Cline’s not going to come for them himself,” I said. “He’s a coward. He hasn’t stepped out from behind his thugs since we’ve known him.”

“He hasn’t had to,” Nick said. “But if we’re right, these guys are just liabilities now. They better have security on their hospital-room doors. And not the local cops either. We know they’re dirty.”

The table fell silent. A group of young women were crowded around the old jukebox nearby, laughing and play-fighting over the music choices. Their happiness stood in stark contrast to the mood of the people around me.

“There are going to be more deaths,” I said. I felt the truth of it in my bones. “Unless we stop Cline ourselves somehow, those four men are on the chopping block.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

NICK AND SUSAN ordered dinner, but I couldn’t eat. I stood on the deck outside the bar and looked at the lights of Gloucester and the soft slope of the hill toward the water where the blinking port lights guided men home from the sea. I thought about Doc’s words, his warnings about me suddenly removing the master of pain from the town and leaving the addicts who relied on him in the lurch. There would be men on the boats who used Cline’s products to get through the relentless hours and backbreaking work of lobster and crab fishing off the coast, the brutal life they led trying to feed their families on the shore. How many people would be left desperate and sick if I took Cline out of the equation? And how long would it be before someone else took his place, preying on the young, the hurting, the hungry of our town with his deadly cocktails? I was deep in my thoughts when Malone appeared beside me, his face a welcome light cutting through my brooding.

“I don’t know what you’re doing sulking out here,” he said. “I’d be in there with that lady if I were you.”

“Who? Susan?”

“‘Who? Susan?’” he repeated, imitating me. He laughed. “I’ve seen you looking at her, Bill. I’ve seen her looking at you. I’ve been dodging fireworks across the table all night.”

I felt heat creeping into my collar. “Is it really that obvious? I guess Nick must know, then. Maybe they all know.”

“Is it serious?”

“I don’t—” I laughed, feeling stupid. “I don’t know! I’ve kissed her once. With everything that’s been going on, I haven’t even had the chance to ask her if … if it was just a random moment or … ” I opened my hands. “She said she’d wanted me to. But what does that mean? Was she talking about right then or has she been thinking about it for longer?”

“Look at you.” Malone grinned. “You can’t even talk about it!”

“I can’t talk about it,” I agreed, trying to cool my cheeks with the palms of my hands. He leaned on the rail beside me, and for a moment we looked just like we had years ago, two patrol cops marking time at the end of a night, watching boats in the city harbor.

“You remember that bomb threat we caught at the Meritage?” he asked, already grinning at the memory. I did. Malone and I had been newly assigned partners on patrol, tasked with assisting the Secret Service for the visit of an ex-president to Boston for Veterans Day. The president had been rushed out of the restaurant halfway through his spaghetti marinara when someone spotted a brown paper bag another diner had left under one of the nearby tables. A bomb threat had been called in to the president’s hotel that morning, so the Secret Service agents were taking no chances. The entire building and half the waterfront were evacuated. Malone and I were told to go up to the restaurant and check that everyone was out, and like an idiot, I got curious about the package and decided to see if I could get a glimpse of what was inside the bag.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said now, watching Malone as he tried not to laugh his ass off. “Maybe I thought I might have been able to hear it ticking or something.”

“You were a hero.” Malone laughed. “A true hero of the people.”

I’d gotten very close to the bag on that fateful day, and I was so young and brazen that I’d reached out to see if I could open the bag and see inside. When my fingers were mere inches away, the bag moved.