Джеймс Паттерсон - The 13-Minute Murder

It was a show of submission to Goran. I had my back to him now. He’d see this as a sign of sincerity, a show of support for Rachel. Rachel was the name I’d given the girl in my mind—I needed to do that.

Otherwise, I’d lose a sense of where the fiction ends and reality begins: Rachel is a hopeful sophomore at Harvard who might be missing a larynx soon. Goran is the guy who started to lower his weapon. I could finally end this peacefully. I might even rope the kid up and put him in a warehouse somewhere and somehow earn half of my half of a hundred and fifty grand without going the distance.

“Okay,” I said to Goran, seeing him cooperate. “Thanks for being—”

Blam blam blam!

Three shots. Milt had his orders. He was a good shooter. He had shot both of them.

Chapter 9

Assassination is not the rosy little business everyone thinks it is. Dead kids in an alley shall serve as Exhibit A. We hustled to the parking lot at the far end of JFK Street. We needed a getaway car.

“Time?” I asked Milt.

The smart move was to steal a vehicle. We were about to steal three.

He checked his watch. “Four minutes forty-one.”

“That’s it? That’s miraculous.” We were so much faster than I had thought. That made the next steps far more comforting. “We start with a sports car, then we go sedan, then sedan.”

We were restating our plan again. The first car would be the nimble one. The second car would be the one that blends in. The third would be the one that survives inspection. Each leg of the race would require a different specialty. Yet obviously, all three cars should do all three things.

Right then we primarily needed speed.

“We wipe all prints,” replied Milt. His turn to recite the plan. “We check under the seats to make sure we didn’t drop anything. We ditch out of sight from helicopters.”

Ideally, you also scrape your gun barrels with a chisel and go to a gun range for an hour. This lets you pass a possible paraffin test, and restructures the forensics of your gun’s bullets. The day before we’d carefully surveyed the array of potential getaway vehicles and singled out a candidate. A little Ford Festiva. The idea was to pick something that wasn’t obvious, something that wouldn’t be noticed in the Boston traffic lanes.

Milt pulled a Slim Jim from his coat and used it to bypass the passenger door lock, as I watched for anybody loitering on our level of the garage. Once the lock clicked, we jumped in the car and squealed out of the parking space. We were both in our XXL Patriots hoodies, which came off as soon as we were on the turnpike. Next they were sailing out the window to become road garbage.

“Can’t keep that in the car,” I said to Milt. I was looking at a stolen phone he had in his lap.

“Nobody’s gonna track it in the middle of a circus.”

“Toss it.”

But he was already dialing. “Hi,” he said to whoever was answering the 911 line. “Our emergency is we’re chasing after an Asian guy on a motorcycle who shot two kids. He’s heading south on Quimby Avenue and he’s wear—”

I yanked the phone out of his hand and tossed it out the window.

“That’s how you get someone killed!” I yelled.

“Better him than us.”

I cranked a hard left and accelerated past the whizzing bushes onto a dinky little side street. Our nondescript late-model navy-blue Festiva swerved onto the main road.

“Don’t signal lane changes,” said Milt. “You keep signaling and it keeps drawing attention from cops miles behind us.”

You fucking shot some kids, I growled at him in my head.

That’s what I said to him in the uncut version of my autobiography. “You’re staying sharp,” I told him. “I appreciate that. You were cool under pressure.”

“Thanks.”

“And you were able to keep us under six minutes.”

“Thanks.”

That was the simple exchange we had.

Then, after a few moments, he added a small clarification. “Sorta.”

“Sorry?”

“Sorta. My stopwatch says four minutes forty-one seconds, but I’m not sure exactly when I hit Start.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“We’re good, though. We’re on our way.”

“How much time elapsed, Milt?”

“We’re on our way. I don’t know.”

“Since shot number one. What do you mean you don’t know?”

“That’s the thing,” he began. “The first gunshot came from them . And I had to duck for cover, so I may not have pressed the stopwatch button right away.”

“When did you fucking press it?” I asked. This was bad.

“I don’t know. Maybe after we killed Goran. As planned.”

“After we…? As…?” I paused. “That was three minutes later!”

“We don’t know that.”

“By my own math I’m feeling like it was three minutes. Maybe more.”

“If you can do all this math, why do we need a stopwatch?” Milt said sarcastically.

“How much time went by before you arrived in the alley?”

“Me?”

I had to get it out of him. “Tell me, Milt. You must’ve seen a number at some point. Think. How much are we adding to your four forty-one and my three eight?”

“We’re on our way. I don’t know. I guess it was maybe…five minutes?”

“Five? Are you serious? That brings our total to thirteen fucking min— ”

Then I was drowned out by the sound of glass shattering, as our rear window exploded into shards. The car lurched to the side and almost lost traction, and the horizon ahead jolted upward for a moment.

Because we were being shot at.

A glance in the mirror confirmed my fears. Cops.

Chapter 10

“Jesus,” screamed Milt, staring at the Cambridge Police Department. “Since when do these assholes just shoot at us?” They were unloading rounds of fully automatic MP5s in our direction. “No questions asked…just ‘Merry Christmas, here’s five hundred bullets in your windshield.’”

They hadn’t hit our bodies or our engine. But they’d hit Milt’s pride, like flicking the ears of a rhinoceros.

I floored the gas and made our Festiva earn every ounce of its five-year, fifty-thousand-mile, bumper-to-bumper warranty. We were going 110 miles per hour.

Milt leaned out the passenger window and tried to shoot left-handed.

“Back window!” I shouted.

I could see a curve in the road up ahead. We were veering to the right. That meant we’d open up an angle of attack, starboard. Milt let loose a barrage from his automatic, and fate played its hand. The trash truck to our right slammed on its brakes and thirty-two tons of bad news careened over us, towering for what felt like the majority of my adult life, as the other half of its wheels went airborne just long enough to make me swallow my larynx.

Stray fire must’ve stripped the truck driver of control.

Which was only the beginning of our very special moment, as an oncoming bus, desperate to avoid the trash truck, skidded back and forth, only to clip the trash truck— dink —before devouring the first two police cars behind us.

Head-on.

FWAAAAmmmbbbwwaaAAMMM.

It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, as the trash truck also flipped—an overturned behemoth that slid a half block down the street in front of us—yielding just enough daylight for us to pass on the inside lane, speeding through the gap just before it cinched shut.

The carousel had closed. The cops were behind us.

I knew what would come next: helicopters. If they anticipated which parking structure we were heading toward before we reached it, dear Lord, we’d be doomed. They’d prep their other officers and have the building surrounded with SWAT well before our arrival. I screeched the car to a halt at the far side of a drainage ditch. If nothing else, we had our plan. I knew that the ditch snaked back under the main road and led straight to parking garage number two.