Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“I saw them fall.” She was shivering, gripping my shirt as though we’d be wrenched apart at any moment. “Jesus Christ, Bill, I thought it was you. I heard a scream and I looked up and—what the fuck happened?”

I didn’t answer. Over Susan’s shoulder, I saw another familiar face in the crowd, a woman approaching with her characteristic stiff-legged walk and unflappable expression. Commissioner Rachel McGinniskin was in full uniform, as if she wore it to bed and had been roused in the early hours and come right here with perfectly polished buttons and her hat perched like a crown on her curls.

“Robinson,” she said by way of greeting. “Why am I not surprised?”

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

“RACHEL,” I CALLED her, because I could. A tiny, mean-spirited joy in my evening, making the squad guys bristle at my disrespect of their gold-striped queen. She licked her teeth and looked Susan up and down, raising her eyebrows at the blood—Doc’s—that stained Susan’s clothes from neck to knee.

“I got a call a half an hour ago saying guys were shooting at each other in the street,” she said. “I thought, What a dangerous, irresponsible, cowardly thing to be doing . A witness looking out her apartment window at the fray reportedly recognized one of them as a former Boston PD officer, and I thought, Ah. Our old friend is back .”

“I try to make an entrance wherever I go,” I said.

Rachel hadn’t told the thugs flanking me to get rid of the cuffs. I guess she deserved a tiny, mean-spirited joy in her night too. She nodded at them to leave us. I took a couple of steps back and sat on the warm hood of a squad car. Exhaustion and shock were setting in. Susan put a hand on the nape of my neck, firm and calming. McGinniskin made a get-on-with-it gesture, rotating her finger like she was spinning a wheel, and in a low voice I told her what had happened on the street and in the tower and in the days before Cline and I came together for the last time.

“You really are a piece of work, you know that, Robinson?” McGinniskin said. I couldn’t argue.

Commissioner McGinniskin folded her arms, glanced away, seemed to try to take in the story. She looked like she was struggling to decide how to say what she had to say next. In the end, she just laid it on me straight.

“A letter from Malone came through my office on Monday,” she said.

I just looked at her.

“He explained what the two of you did a couple of years ago,” she said. “He took full responsibility. Said he tricked you into it. Some story about a girl who needed help and a sex tape.”

I glanced at Susan. She put her arm around me, kissed my head.

“Of course, how can I believe him?” McGinniskin mused. There was a softness to her voice I’d never heard before. Though her face remained hard, all the fury had suddenly left her. She took a handcuff key from her pocket and tossed it to Susan.

“Malone knew he was dying,” McGinniskin said. “Could just be that he had been planning some kind of big fuck-you like this all along.” She gestured to the building above us, the site of my partner’s fall. “And why not save your skin in the process? One last favor for an old friend.”

“Could be,” I said. I wasn’t up for fighting for my cause now. But for some reason, I felt like I didn’t have to. Susan unlocked my cuffs and I handed them to the commissioner.

“Malone returned the remaining stolen money with the letter,” McGinniskin said. “Seventeen thousand dollars. I guess that was all that was left after his treatments. Makes me wonder why, if you were indeed his willing partner in crime, he didn’t just give it to you. But in any case, what could I do with it? The guy you both robbed never made an official report, of course. The department suspects the funds are a result of his criminal activity.”

“So what did you do with it?” I asked.

“I donated it to a homeless shelter,” she said, giving a dismissive wave.

I didn’t know if I was free to go and was too tired to ask. I stood and started walking off, but the commissioner called my name and I turned to look back at her standing by the squad car, her arms still folded defensively.

“Stay in touch,” she said with great reluctance. “There are times I could use a good man who’s not on the payroll.”

I nodded, and Susan linked her arm with mine as we walked away. After a few steps she poked me in the arm.

“Good man, huh?” she asked.

“She must be thinking of someone else.” I smiled.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINE

“THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” Angelica said, looking at her watch. “If they say they’re going to be here at ten, they ought to be here at ten!”

“Sit down.” Vinny patted the plastic lawn chair beside him at the foldout table. “You’re makin’ me nervous. The guy’s gonna be here when he gets here and that’s all there is to it.”

I sat at the end of the table with Susan, waiting, as my friends waited, for the FedEx driver whose delivery Angelica had been anticipating for six months. Before us on the picnic table on the lawn was spread a feast not dissimilar to the one Marni had arranged what seemed a lifetime ago to mourn my lost wife. Croissants, bagels, doughnuts, yellow napkins, and yellow paper plates left over from the memorial caught the light filtering through the trees.

We were back where we had started, and yet so far from there. The people laughing, talking, drinking coffee around me in the morning light were battle-scarred. Some of them didn’t sleep well anymore. Some of them had the evidence of their fight on their skin. What Cline had brought into our town had left its mark, but right now, there were more important things to think about.

Next to Vinny, Effie sat with a black coffee in front of her, tearing strips off a croissant. Now and then as she ate, twitching whiskers would emerge from her shirt pocket and she would take a flake of croissant and present it to the snuffling nose. Crazy the rat had become a kind of household mascot in the time since Effie had rescued him from the drain, and feeding him bread, peanuts, sunflower seeds, and the occasional blueberry was an activity everyone—except Angelica—enjoyed. Effie’s shirt pocket sagged with the weight of the obese rodent, drawing her collar sideways, away from her scarred neck.

As I watched my people enjoying themselves, a movement in the window above us caught my eye. Neddy Ives was watching, his arms folded, his eyes moving over Angelica as she complained to Vinny about the FedEx guy. He wouldn’t join us, I knew, but even a glimpse of him in the window was better than nothing. He was changed, like the rest of us.

“I know this is Angelica’s day,” Susan said. “But I keep thinking about Marni.”

I looked at her and was surprised to see her smiling.

“She’d have been so buzzed about this,” she said. “Waiting for the books to arrive. Opening the box for the first time. She always got in on other people’s excitement.”

Clay was near us, leaning on the table as he listened to Susan’s words.

“I still think about her all the time,” he said. “I know it’s stupid but … I thought just this morning that after what happened, her mother would have found out that the little heart tattoo on her cheek was real.”

“It was real?” I gasped.

Susan laughed. “Of course it was.”

“She told me—”

“That she drew it in every day with lip liner.” Clay laughed. “Yeah. She said she was going to tell you that.”

“So you all knew the tattoo was real? Everybody knew except me?”

“We helped her hide it from you when it was fresh and swollen.” Susan snickered. “When you arrived home, we’d warn her. She kept her right side to you for about a week. You had no idea.”