Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“Stanley Turner,” I said. “This is one of Cline’s guys.”

“What is this?” Susan was out of breath, on the verge of panic. “A sick present?”

“He’s been dead a little while.” I ran a hand over the body. He was cold in the back and warmed in the front by the fire. “Killed somewhere else. There’s no blood on the ground.” I looked back at the house, thinking, oddly, of Angelica. The sight of a body with a gaping neck wound propped up a few yards from her bedroom would send the fragile author into conniptions. A strange, detached consideration in the peak of my terror; I supposed my mind was seeking safe ground.

“What do we do?” I dragged Susan out of the light of the fire in case we were being watched. “Is Clay here?”

“No, not that I know of,” she said. “I think he was going back in tonight to work on the case.”

“We’ll do a lap of the grounds, see if—”

“Hey!” A voice in the blackness. Susan and I turned, training our guns on a figure emerging from the dark. Nick put his hands up. He held a pistol in one of them. “It’s me. It’s me.”

“Jesus,” I said. I wanted to grab Susan to me, shield her, shove her inside the house. But that was more of my over-protective bullshit. She had told me she could take care of herself.

“I smelled the smoke, saw the stiff, and did a patrol of the area.” Nick glanced toward the forest, his eyes wide. “There’s no one out there. Not that I can see.”

I was so angry it was hard to unclench my jaw. “He’s trying to intimidate us. Scare us. Dropping one of his guys on our fucking doorstep. He’s a coward.”

“Are we absolutely certain this is one of Cline’s guys?” Susan asked.

“He’d had his head bashed in pretty bad, and not tonight. This is probably the guy Clay stomped on in Dogtown,” I said.

“Cline hasn’t even stuck around to watch us freak out.” Susan was breathing deeply, trying to calm her nerves. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s not about watching us be scared,” I said. “I think it’s about sending the message. These guys, they’re just commodities. They’re disposable. If I can do this to my own men, imagine what I can do to you .”

We stood, all of us lost in thought. Nick was tapping his gun against his thigh, his eyes searching the ground. I looked at him. The muscles in his shoulders were ticking with tension.

“I’m going to go inside and call Clay,” Susan said. “This is a crime scene.”

“Yeah, you report in,” Nick said. “We’ll take care of things here.”

Susan frowned slightly at the comment, then jogged back toward the house. Nick walked a few paces away from me, turned to the forest, and murmured something. He shook his head as though telling someone no.

“Nick, are you all right, buddy?”

“He’s not going to give us anything. We’ll have to find out ourselves. Tell Rickson to load up and you cover the door. I’ll take care of this.”

“Tell … who? What are you talking about?”

Nick raised his pistol and shot the body on the bench twice in the chest.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE

MY EARS WERE ringing. The shock I had already been experiencing suddenly ramped up, the volume cranked high, all my nerves electrified. I snatched the gun from Nick, but he was in a dream state, yawning, rubbing his head, turning and murmuring to people who weren’t there. The body had bucked twice as the bullets entered it and now slowly flopped to the ground before the fire like an oversize doll. I felt a wave of nausea, the lifelike twitch of the body for an instant making me think of zombies, monsters, dark things.

Susan came running out from the house at the sound of the gunshots. I ran and grabbed her before she could get to the body.

“No, no, no, no.” I turned her around. “Stop them coming out. The others. They’ll have heard the shots.” I grabbed the body and dragged him out of the light of the fire. In the searingly cold night, I could hear Angelica’s frantic questioning in the wind, Susan’s placations. I saw Nick’s tall, straight frame walking around the side of the house.

It seemed an age before Susan joined me. There was blood on my arms, my hands. I stiffened to try to stop the shaking in my limbs, but that only made matters worse.

We were both thinking the same thing, but neither of us wanted to say it. In time it was she who broke the silence.

“The shots—they’ll know they’re postmortem,” she said. “But they’ll want to check every gun in the house, and that’ll mean any registered to Nick.”

“There’s blood all over the firepit area now,” I said. “Drag marks in the dirt. They’ll know he was here and that he was already dead.”

We looked at the body. Without speaking, Susan took Stanley Turner’s arms and I took his legs.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

DOGTOWN. OUR HEADLIGHTS picked out the winding roads. Now and then the gold beams flashed on an ancient stone foundation of a house long gone. On huge boulders by the roadside, carved and painted with black letters. They were supposed to be motivational slogans for the unemployed and desperate in the failed town, but their meanings changed as I watched them roll by.

Never try, never win .

I shouldn’t have tried to stop Cline. I would not win against him.

A local vandal had spray-painted a boulder with his own words: Save yourself .

“Cline wanted us to come into his world,” I said. Susan glanced at me. She looked sick. I couldn’t blame her. In the trunk of the car, a body lolled and shifted as we drove through the night.

“What do you mean?”

“If we’d reported the body, we’d have had the house searched. Our people would have been questioned and our home invaded again, not with his men this time but with cops. If we didn’t report the body …”

She looked out the windshield at the night.

“This,” she said. “The night. Dogtown. Cline’s own dumping ground. His guys were out here only days ago dumping a corpse, and now we’re here. He must have known we’d be forced to choose the same spot. It’s the best place for a mission like this, isn’t it? We already know it’s been scouted out!” She laughed, a crazed, angry sound. “He wants us to sympathize with him. To understand we’re not that different. He’s sure pulling out all the stops to get us to back off.”

“I’m not backing off.”

“Look at us.” Susan jerked a thumb toward the trunk of the car. “That’s someone’s son back there. We’re Cline right now. We’ve become him.”

“We’re not him,” I said. “We’re nothing like him. He did this to us. We’ll move the body and then call it in. There’s no sense in sacrificing Nick because of what Cline did. He’ll never pass a psych evaluation, not in his current state. He’ll be implicated in the shooting, and who knows where it will go from there?”

Susan was quiet for a long time. “We have to do something about him.”

“Cline will—”

“I don’t mean Cline,” Susan said. “I mean Nick.”

“What exactly are you proposing we do with Nick?”

She didn’t have an answer. “He’s not safe to have around the house.”

“He’s not a dangerous dog, Susan. He’s a person.”

“I get that,” she said. “Don’t you think I get that? I’m here, aren’t I? Doing … doing this. Nick needs treatment. He needs to talk to someone about what happened over there, on his deployment. He can’t keep it locked away anymore. It’s killing him.”

We drove on in silence. I watched the roadside as I drove, looking for a discreet trail to dump our evil secret.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-SEVEN