Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

Chapter 2

“You can predict him?” said Milt.

“Girl in the turtleneck,” I replied.

There was a set of stairs in Goran’s path where foot traffic slowed down a bit. Goran would be passing a girl in a turtleneck sweater. He’d walk by her and create a small situation. I could foresee it.

“Finger to the chest,” I said to Milt. “Watch.”

“Her? She’s with a guy.” Milt pointed to the young man on her left. “Look. She’s holding hands with the kid in the flannel shirt.”

“Keep watching.”

My hobby is people. I see them do things before they know they even want to do those things. Goran passed the girl and reached out, quickly, to give her chin a brief, soft, bold, two-finger squeeze. In passing. Nothing anyone else would notice. But a grotesque violation of personal domain nonetheless. The girl hardly expected it, hardly saw who had done it, and couldn’t do anything but keep walking with the crowd, in total repulsion.

“Big deal,” said Milt. “Wasn’t her chest.”

“Not her chest.”

I nodded, a heads-up to what was happening next. The kid in the flannel—the one holding the girl’s hand, the only witness—now felt he had a duty to call it out. He let go of the girl’s hand, turned around, and hurried to catch up to Goran.

But before he could finish his first sentence, Goran put his finger to the kid’s chest and spoke directly in his face. Finger to the chest. I couldn’t tell what the exact words were, but the message was clear: I can have you damaged and no one will do anything about it. Which was the first time the two bodyguards got closer. We’d nicknamed them Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were now hovering just near enough to be “felt.”

The kid saw the doom. You could see him seeing it. You could see the instant fear. While in Goran’s face you could see the comfort. Goran would go home that night and sleep peacefully, thinking nothing of the moment, possibly forgetting it had occurred. But the flannel kid would be shaken for days. To say nothing of the girl. I’d seen it a hundred times.

Infuriating that they’d let this oily boy and his expensive gang wander the halls of such a sacred place. That’s what money can buy behind closed doors.

When Goran and his thugs exited the quad, I wanted to follow him home and end his life right then. But then Milt grabbed my shoulder to remind me, “We don’t get paid that way.”

The job required a hit on Harvard soil. A hit tomorrow, not today.

“Floral dress,” he said.

It’d be a complicated kill, but with a predictable variable in the center of the equation—the kid himself—we could make it work. We could complete the assignment and get to safety.

Just as long as we took care of the most important factor. “Need to keep it under six minutes,” I said to him.

“Six? Sure. If we know our crowd well enough. Like we’ve been talking about. Gauging their reaction time.” He loved this part. He was already fixated on the young lady he’d been fixated on. “I’m still nominating her.” He pointed in her direction, packaging his suggestion in a flowery load of BS. “See how she turns to face you? That’s the dead giveaway, brother. How the front of the torso rotates. See? As you walk by? Rotates slowly toward the man she desires. Like a daisy in the sunlight.”

“No. Not her. We need a reliable screamer.”

“Who could be more reliable than a daisy?”

I’d made my choice. “The barista.” She was behind the counter of the café across the street, checking her phone for likes—for whatever pic she’d just been tagged in. She was busy. She was trapped. She was perfect.

We headed over to the café. Milt was right about the behavior of his chosen muse: the floral-dress girl had rotated as we passed her. I’d assumed when she locked eyes with me it was out of boredom. Was he right about her all along?

Half plus seven— it’s socially acceptable to date someone who’s half your age plus seven years, according to Milt. That qualified me for a twenty-eight-year-old. Not sure my wife would have enjoyed that math, but lately I’d been desperately wondering if I had any appeal.

We entered a room full of Harvard’s finest, a café abuzz with the chatter of freshly caffeinated opinions.

I looked at Milt. He looked at me. He was clutching his chest, slightly bent over.

“You look like you’re about to have a heart attack, buddy.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“Books on the topic. And the fact—”

“Raaoooowwwgggggggooooddddd!” Milt screamed.

He snapped his head back and tumbled in midair to fall backward, half onto nothing, half onto a circular café table so that the table flipped up all its dishes and glassware. Milton Prescott looked like he was dying.

Chapter 3

My partner of eleven years frantically grasped for his trachea, the universal gesture of zero air.

“He’s choking!” yelled a brilliant mind from across the room.

Milt flailed around on the floor. He’s a thick, stocky stegosaurus of a man, so he easily knocks things over. Tiny students were no match. Nobody could aid him.

Wouldn’t matter, though.

As quickly as he went down, Milt got up, stood up, took a moment for dramatic emphasis, pointed directly out the front door, yelled “Marrarrrruuuuwwggh!,” then ran out the opposite way, through the back exit of the café, top speed, bulldozing everyone along the way, making a spectacle.

Over before it even started.

Leaving a small but deafening moment of silence.

“Holy shit,” said virtually every person in the room.

Two girls then immediately rushed to assist him—the barista and another girl, in a hat. I followed and the three of us as a team ran into the back to find an empty corridor.

“Was he stabbed more than once?” I asked the girl in the hat.

“Stabbed?” she replied.

You could see her gears turning, her pliable memory now searching for details that fit the suggestion. Stabbed?

“You saw those three guys who ran out the front, right?” I asked her.

“N-no,” said the girl in the hat.

“No,” said the barista confidently. Confidently…until something occurred to her. “Wait.”

“Jeez, is this a shooting?” I asked, my eyes widening.

The barista looked at me. Shooting? The seed was planted. The garden of doubt—tilled. The barista was already calling 911.

I left them. I returned to the café. Thankfully, there were very few people recording video. I don’t like being on camera. Especially in such drab lighting. I hustled over to the introverts in the corner. The farming had only just begun.

“Did any of you see how many times he was stabbed?” I asked the group.

A chorus of the word stabbed echoed throughout the herd. Child’s play. Their apparent leader made the next 911 call placed. “Um, nine one one?…Okay…um…there was a man who was stabbed…I think…multiple times…definitely stabbed…at least twice. Ran out to the alley.”

In this modern era, any police response to an assault call from a college campus is going to be swift and crowded. They already have patrols every thirty minutes.

The caller was doing our work for us. “We think there was an assailant who ran through the courtyard.”

The beauty of a heart attack is that once the story was straightened out, hours from then, it’d stand as just a minor, weird incident while having granted me a powerful glimpse into the future. We’d tested the tissue of the local response system like a marine biologist might prod an anemone to test its reflexes: gently. Just enough of a prick to stimulate the response, but not too much that anyone would know it had happened. Harvard was the anemone. Milt was the prick.