Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

In the end, I decided that I had to finish Cline. One way or another, I had to remove him like a cancer from his ex-wife’s life, from my neighborhood. I had to release the choke hold he had on the addicts and hurting people of Gloucester and make sure that what happened to Marni didn’t happen to anyone ever again.

“Is there something a bit strange about preparing dinner for everyone when we’re about to do … ” She paused, shaking her head. “What we’re about to do?”

“I’m finding a weird comfort in it,” I said, wiping my hands on a dish towel. I tried to explain to her and myself that, somehow, knowing the people in my house were fed, even with my subpar culinary offerings, gave me some consolation. “It’s a job. I have to do it. We’ve got a couple renting the front room tonight. But I’m also doing it because it’s a relief, and I think we’d better grab hold of whatever relief we can get right now.”

She seemed to take the suggestion literally and put her arms around me. There was an exhilarating rush that shuddered through my body every time she touched me and also a warm, familiar sensation that I knew came from the feel of Siobhan in my arms not so long ago, the smoothness of her cheek against mine.

“We might never come back here,” she said. I gripped her shoulders. “Do you get that? We might put this dinner on and leave here and it might be the last time we walk out the door.”

I thought about Siobhan and the dinner she’d been coming home with, the last time she would walk out the door already having occurred without my knowledge. I hadn’t said goodbye properly. But even if I’d had the chance, I reminded myself, there’d have been an impossible amount of things to say.

“I don’t mean to be morbid.” She laughed, pulling away from me and wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s just been a while since I was in the thick of it. A couple of years writing about circus hamsters and yarn sales will do that to you. Make you realize that there are things at risk, important possibilities you might be about to destroy.”

She gestured to me as she said that. I wondered if I was one of those “important possibilities.” She was certainly one of mine. As I’d lain awake the night before, I’d watched her sleeping and known just how deeply I’d fallen for her already, how difficult it would be to climb back out of my desire for her. I was indeed risking Susan in my plan. I was risking everyone I cared about.

“But we have to do something,” I said, finishing my thought for her.

Doc Simeon came through the kitchen door and stood near us, frowning. I knew from the paleness in his cheeks and the tremble in his old hands that he’d done what I’d asked of him.

“Did he buy it?” I said.

“I think so,” the doctor replied. “I think we’re on.”

CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

SQUID SAT IN the passenger seat next to me looking slightly disheveled, thinner than I’d last seen him, with bags under his bloodshot eyes; he looked like a cat who’d escaped into the wild and been found after a couple of weeks of hard living. Nick had left him in the care of his cousins and aunt in Augusta, but the boy hadn’t wanted to endanger his family and he’d wandered out into the night. Nick told me he’d found the boy hanging out with a menacing bunch of people in the parking lot behind a popular bar. He reeked of cigarettes and sweat.

Doc and Susan sat in the back seat, silent, as we followed Nick and Malone on the highway down to Boston.

“Something’s going to go wrong,” the boy said, watching the tall pine trees whiz past us on either side of the road. “I can feel it. Something bad’s about to happen.”

“I know what that feels like,” I said. The fever, hot and heavy, had been nesting in my chest since we left the house. I told myself it was just memories of Boston and my fall. Trepidation about what lay ahead on the road.

“You don’t trick Cline like this,” Squid said. “He reads minds. He’s like a fucking vampire or something.” The boy’s eyes were a little too wide. I let him rattle off the words, getting it out of his system. “That’s how he came into my life, you know. Like a vampire. Like he’d always known I was there and now it was, like, time to come get me. Bring me into the family. Make me one of his own.”

“How did you meet him?”

Squid rubbed his nose, laughed a little.

“I was stealing bags at the airport,” he said. “I had a good scam going. I’d go in dressed really nice with a suitcase full of magazines, make like I’d just gotten off a flight. I even had one of those neck pillows that I’d dirtied up so it looked like I traveled all the time. I’d find a flight that had just come in, so there were only a couple of people down in the baggage area. I’d watch the first bag come along, and if no one jumped at it, I’d grab it and walk out.”

I heard Susan give a little laugh behind me. Somehow, even with all that was ahead of us that night, Squid’s story lightened the tension in the car. We crested a hill, and I saw the cluster of lights on the horizon that I knew was Boston.

“Anyway, one day I picked up the wrong bag,” Squid said. “It had two bricks of heroin in it. The guy had been dumb enough to check the bag with all his personal stuff too. I worked out who he was, bought a burner phone, and texted saying he could have the bricks back for ten grand. The guy didn’t show up. Cline did. And not at the meeting place. At my house. He knew my name, my mother’s name, everything.” Squid shuddered. It wasn’t cold in the car, but he rubbed his arms. “Maybe it wasn’t the wrong bag,” Squid said. He drew a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, extracted one, and rolled down the window slightly. “Maybe it was the right one.”

“What do you mean?” Doc asked.

“Cline will give you everything you want.” Squid shrugged. “You want money? He’s got money. You want girls? He’s got girls. He’ll tell them to be in love with you and they’ll be in love with you. It’s like magic. You can have everything you want—all you got to do is stay out of trouble. Because if you trip once …”

The car fell silent. Squid smoked his cigarette too fast, leaning and blowing the smoke out of the crack in the window with shivering breaths.

“What happened to the guy who lost the drugs?” I asked. “The one whose bag you stole?”

“He’s in a drainpipe off the highway,” Squid said. “Cline stabbed him in the head with a letter opener in his nice big office.”

CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

COMING HOME. RETURNING to where it had all begun, the happiest and the most horrific days of my career, when Malone and I had walked the streets with no idea of the downfall that awaited us, the cliff edge about to crumble beneath our feet. We’d been untouchables in uniform, hunting down the drunk, violent, careless on our streets, two faithful dogs rounding up wolves and driving them away from our flock of innocent sheep. Now I drove and watched the wide streets rolling by, the windows of grand old hotels where we had responded to weddings gone wild, the banks where we had stood guard with our brothers foiling brazen stickups. Every corner had a memory.

Here, outside the Union Oyster House, we had stopped to examine Malone’s trooper badge in the sunlight when he finally made rank, the clash and clatter of the bar’s patrons on one side of us, press of tourists celebrating St. Patrick’s Day at the other.

Here on the steps of the courthouse, we had elbowed aside journalists huddling around accused murderers, fraudsters, and priests caught up in the Catholic archdiocese scandal. I’d copped a microphone in the eye from a Fox News reporter here once. Just one block down, Malone had nearly tripped on a DVD player tossed over the shoulder of a meth addict running for his life across a parking lot.