Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

Cline’s sales tactics again, trying to tell me what was good for me, trying to bring on the guilt and the pain. Because wasn’t that what I wanted to do? Of course I wanted to turn away from the horror that he had brought into my life. Forget it all. Leave town. Ignore the suffering of others. Let the people I loved defend themselves. I knew that if I had not pursued Cline in the first place, Marni might still be alive. Maybe Doc. I’d taken this mission on myself. Cline’s sales pitch was good. He was outnumbered two to one, so he was giving it all he had. I could let him go, save myself and my friends additional bloodshed. Hope someone else would bring him to justice.

But Cline was right. Another man might have headed for the hills when Cline moved into town. I was not that man.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I yelled. “And neither are you.”

I crept along the base of a cubicle divider and heard a shuffle near me; I peered through a crack and saw Malone taking aim.

He fired, blasting out one of the windows. The wind howled, lifting sheets of plastic, making them sail like ghosts through the air. Malone had been near the target, but not on point. He must have fired at Cline’s reflection, because the man popped up perpendicular to where Malone had hit, his shots flashing off the ceiling. I was so close that a cartridge from Cline’s gun sailed over the top of the cubicle beside me and bounced, red hot, off my shoulder.

Cline had been overzealous, firing where he was sure Malone was, in the cubicle next to me. But he was out of bullets. His gun clicked impotently, and as I felt a smile spread over my face, a sound rose up in the distance. It was a sound I had heard almost constantly for two decades, a sound that once filled me with excitement and now was like a cold hand reaching into my chest and gripping my heart.

The wail of police sirens.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

CLINE’S LAUGHTER BARELY reached above the rising and falling sirens of three or four squad cars on the street below. I heard his gun clatter to the carpet. He kicked the weapon, and I watched it sail soundlessly across the carpet and over the edge of the blasted-out window into the night. It would fly downward toward the street, empty of bullets, and land on the windshield of a car or on the pavement for the police to find. Cline’s gun, with Cline’s prints, empty and useless, leaving the cops to conclude that he was unarmed and at our mercy when we did whatever we were about to do next.

Cline rose to his feet and stepped backward toward the wall of windows. The bullet holes in the glass behind him brought a breeze that ruffled his hair. He grinned as Malone and I rose and stepped out from the cubicles.

“Don’t be stupid, now,” he told us, his tone light and sweet, like a parent gently chastising a child. “You know how this could end. You’re already on the wrong side of the Boston PD. Committing a cold-blooded murder wouldn’t end well for the two of you.”

Cline eyed Malone, getting his first good look at my partner. Malone’s gun was held out like mine, an extension of his body, straight and high and pointed at Cline’s chest.

“Cold-blooded murder suits you perfectly,” I said. I was trembling all over with rage. “If we let you go now, there will be more teenagers who take a pill of yours at a party and die lonely deaths in the woods. There will be more soldiers strangled in their beds, more doctors ruining their good names by taking your dirty money.”

“Maybe.” Cline shrugged. “But you can hear the sirens, Bill. They’re coming for us. You’re not going to do this. Think about those people at the house. They need you, and you need them. You’re happy there, aren’t you? You’ve got a good life. You’ve got too much to live for, Robinson.”

Malone looked at me. There was a mixture of sadness and resolve in his features; his eyes hardened and then emptied.

He turned to Cline.

“He does,” Malone said. “But I don’t.”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

MY LIMBS WERE frozen, though I could see what was about to happen as soon as Malone’s gaze turned from mine. He dropped his gun, bent low, and threw all his body weight into the sprint, his shoulders and long arms out, ready to catch Cline should he try to run. Cline saw it coming but seemed as immobile as I was, his eyes full of the awful breathless terror of a man already dead before his heart had stopped beating. Malone slammed into Cline, the momentum carrying them both toward the window that was already weakened by bullet holes. The deafening crunch of Cline’s shoulders meeting the glass was like a gunshot, quickening my heavy limbs. It seemed like I watched them falling through the splintering, shattering glass, the window collapsing like a curtain, the two men hanging almost in the dark air beyond the bounds of the building. I ran for them as fast as I could.

I dropped, slid in the glass, was close enough to touch Malone’s boot as the two fell. I gripped the edge of the floor as the icy wind raked my hair, a scream shuddering out of my lungs as they disappeared into the darkness.

For a second before they were consumed by the night, I saw Cline’s bulging eyes over Malone’s shoulder, heard his scream carried by the wind. He was reaching for me. I covered my eyes, rolled away from the edge, and curled into a ball, as though the motion could drown out the sickening sound of my friend and my enemy thudding to the pavement eighteen floors below.

I was saved from that horror by the noise of a team of officers crashing through the door to the office, shouting, guns drawn, flashlights winding over the room. Lights swept over me. I didn’t get a good look at whoever reached me first. I was shoved onto my stomach and cuffed in the darkness.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

THE OFFICERS WHO had responded to reports of a shoot-out in the Boston CBD were young, fit, crisis-squad guys. They were the heavily tattooed and worryingly muscular types who had joined the force for the sole purpose of making the chaotic, fast-paced, high-stakes special response team. Black tactical vests, big guns. They knew who I was by my ruined reputation only. These guys were used to being over the top, and I didn’t take it personally. Two gripped my arms as we rode the elevator down; another stood by the door with his gun hanging in his gloved hand, barking questions at me.

“Are there any other shooters?”

“No,” I said.

“What is this? A drug thing? You and Malone taking out your dealer? Your partner? We’ve got reports of four casualties in the street. Two from the building. You push those guys from that window? Who’s the kid on the sidewalk? You shoot that kid? Who’s the old man?”

Four casualties. Doc hadn’t made it.

“You’re not giving me enough time to respond to these questions,” I remarked calmly to the head guy. “You’re just asking questions without waiting for answers.”

“What are you, some kind of smart-ass? Is that it? You a smart-ass, Robinson?”

I sighed and stared at the door.

The street was a wash of red and blue light; there were dozens of officers rigging cordons, crunching through the glass on the foyer floor in their heavy boots, making radio reports. Half the people present had their guns drawn. It wasn’t every day in Boston that men fell from skyscrapers and civilians took cover from bullets. I was marched past Squid’s body, already covered with a sheet. I spotted Nick sitting cuffed in the back of a police car.

I was being pushed toward another police car when Susan ran out of the crowd toward me. She was somehow beautiful even then, maybe because I was so relieved at seeing her unharmed. She was flushed and didn’t slow as she approached, so she knocked the wind out of me as she wrapped her arms around me in a desperate embrace.