Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“These dumb-asses have done more damage to Cline in two days than you have in months,” Susan said. “Take a look at yourselves before you go insulting them.”

The female cop came toward me. Though she had to look up at me, she was still intimidating, her features hard and taut.

“Stay off Cline.” She poked me again. “Or you’ll find yourself sharing a jail cell with him.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

SIMBO COULDN’T BELIEVE it had come to this. He sat on the edge of the motel bed and looked at his hands. They were still trembling. This was not how it was supposed to go. He’d been with Cline for three years and never slipped, never gotten himself tangled up in a felony arrest that would be worth betraying his boss to squeeze out of. Cline had made it clear from the beginning: If you go down for serious time, you’re dead. It didn’t matter if Simbo decided to trade Cline in. The man was going to come for him in any case.

The police had come after him, of course. Within minutes of Simbo arriving at the hospital with a concussion due to the door inside the Inn opening in his face, there were two cops standing at the end of his bed. They were Boston undercovers who looked familiar, for some reason, a man and a woman with the keys to his handcuffs. Simbo had told them what they wanted to hear, made them promises, waited until their backs were turned, and split. He wouldn’t turn Cline in. Maybe that would help when the man came for him.

Maybe he’d make an exception as he had before.

Cline never hired users. It was another one of his policies. Simbo went to the filthy motel bathroom now and stared at himself in the cracked mirror, tried to breathe through the nausea. He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on Cline, a face in the back seat of a shiny black Escalade watching through the window as Simbo beat a homeless man half to death with a tire iron. The man had come for Simbo’s stash, which Simbo had spent the whole day getting, kneeling between the legs of men in business suits in expensive cars, using his body and his mouth because he had nothing else to offer. Simbo had thought Cline was just another one of these men indulging their secret desires on the way home to the wife and kiddies. But instead, Cline had been the one offering something—a way out, a use for the violence and fury Simbo was so accustomed to.

Simbo washed his face, tried to stay calm. He went and opened the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he had brought with him, drank half of it in nervous, jittery gulps, watching the television without really seeing it. After a while, he pulled back the curtain at the front of the motel room, checked the parking lot. Empty. He crawled into bed and lay wide-eyed in the dark, twitching at sounds in the street.

He didn’t know he was asleep until he felt the man land on him. Simbo tried to roll over, but Cline had braced his legs on either side of him. He felt the scratch of something plastic coming down past his nose and then a loop pull tight around his throat. “You knew the rules,” Cline said.

Simbo grabbed at the zip tie, buried so deep in the flesh of his neck that his fingers could only scrabble at the band impotently while the pain rushed to his head. Sounds were coming out of him that he didn’t recognize, but the noise of his choking was soon drowned out by the blood screaming in his ears. He fell off the bed, thrashed and kicked, his limbs out of control, refusing to pull him toward the door. Cline flicked the light on and stood there watching, his arms folded. Simbo’s whole body was convulsing violently. The seconds ticked by. Cline got bored and glanced around the room at the peeling veneer of the particleboard cabinets, the moldy floral curtains. In the street, a homeless man was yelling at someone; an ambulance rolled by, sirens wailing.

Cline’s gaze returned to Simbo as he spasmed and flailed violently on the floor, taking his time to die. “Look at this place.” Cline smirked. “You didn’t end up very far from where you started.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

SUSAN CLIMBED INTO my car when we left the bar. Malone wanted to get some supplies for home, and he and Nick headed into town. My thoughts were so tangled as I drove along the wooded roads toward the Inn that I couldn’t keep track of what Susan was saying. Had I done the right thing in starting all this with Cline? People were dying, and he remained in our town in his castle on the hill, like Dracula preying on the villagers below him, trying to decide whose blood he wanted next. Susan put her hand on my leg and I found myself squeezing it, the way I had done with Siobhan so long ago.

“I’m sorry.” I glanced at her. “I’m a million miles away.”

“Talk to me,” she said. “What did Malone tell you? When you came in from the deck, you looked devastated.”

I told her about Malone’s diagnosis, what little I knew. It was stage four, inoperable. Chemo and a spate of experimental treatments hadn’t worked.

“He has about two months,” I said. “Maybe less. I thought he could just stay with us at the Inn. He doesn’t have anyone else.”

“We’ll take care of him,” she said.

“He came back to reconcile with me before it was too late. About Boston,” I said. She was silent, waiting, probably not wanting to say anything that might tip me one way or the other about telling her. I focused on the road ahead, gripped the steering wheel, and for the first time since it happened, I told the terrible story of my downfall.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

“MALONE CAME TO me at the end of our shift one night,” I said. Susan settled back in the passenger seat to listen. “He said he had a problem. A good friend of his, a woman he went to college with, needed help. Her daughter had gotten involved with a real psycho, a violent, abusive guy, and while they were together, they made a sex tape. It was stupid, of course. The girl was young and she’d been trying to make her parents mad, so she went for the typical bad boy. She broke up with him, but now the guy was saying he was going to put the tape on the internet unless she got back with him, and once it was out there—”

“It’s out there forever.” Susan eased air through her teeth. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly. All this boy had to do was click a button. He said if she brought cops into the picture, he’d post it. So Malone came to me with this plan all worked out. He wanted to go to the boy’s apartment while he was out and steal the computer that the girl said had the video on it. I said I was in.”

On the road ahead of us, a mother deer and two fawns sprang onto the asphalt, danced in the gold light, then leaped into the trees. I watched them go, feeling a weight ease off my shoulders as I spoke.

“The night we show up at the guy’s building, Malone’s got an empty backpack with him. I didn’t ask questions about it—hardly noticed it. He says all he needs me to do is guard the lobby, so I do just that. He goes up to the apartment, and after a while he calls me in a panic. The guy is there. Malone was sure he wasn’t, but he came out of a back bedroom and Malone’s holding a gun on him. I go up there and … ” I took a breath. The words were tumbling out of me, bottled up for too long. “I just lost it.”

“What did you do?” Susan asked.

“Look, I had a case when I was a brand-new officer. Boston cops are walk-around cops. The brass like you to be seen out there on the streets, you know? Out of the cars and talking to the people. Well, one day, Malone and I are running down the street responding to reports a guy and his girlfriend are fighting outside a café. As we turn the corner to break up the fight, he’s got her by the hair. She frees herself and runs away from him—right into the path of a city bus.” I exhaled slowly. “I didn’t see a lot of bad shit in my time on the beat. I was pretty lucky. But that was bad.”