James Patterson - Gone

We were buzzed through a gate and went down a long, worn, once-white corridor. The hospital’s emergency lockup was lined with the kind of heavy doors usually seen on walk-in freezers. The blast doors had peekaboo windows in them, with thick crisscrosses of chicken wire beneath the smudged, shatterproof glass.

“Are you still dreaming of the lambs, Clarice?” I whispered to Parker, who immediately elbowed me in the solar plexus.

As we stopped at a door near the end of the hallway, I looked through the screened window to see Scricca, shirtless and on his back, handcuffed to a hospital bed.

I was surprised to see that he was good-looking. He was deeply tanned, with long, shiny black hair and pale-gray-green eyes, and was muscular in a wiry, rock-climber kind of way.

Even the creeps have to keep up appearances out here in the land of make-believe , I thought.

I saw ubiquitous tattoos, inked only on his torso in a vestlike pattern. It looked like he was wearing a paisley blackjack-dealer vest of snakes and soaring eagles and eight balls and evil clowns.

“Style. I like that in a man,” Parker mumbled as the orderly cracked the clasps on the door.

What Sergeant Rodbourne said was true , I thought, quickly scanning Scricca’s face as we went into the room. Though his eyes were bloodshot, he didn’t look deranged. If anything, his tired, forlorn expression was quite sober, that of a man who had just awakened to find himself as far up shit’s creek as one could go, and without a paddle in sight.

“Hi, Mr. Scricca. I’m Agent Parker,” Emily said with the slow, deliberate speech one would use with a toddler or a stoned-out junkie. “I work for the FBI.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry that girl is dead,” Scricca said, nervously chewing on the thumbnail of his free hand. “I got two girls of my own. One of them near her age, but, like I told them, she was the one with that mind-bending shit. She told me it was coke. It was bath salts or something, right? To tell you the truth, she was the one who suggested I make the U-turn. She dared me, in fact. Said I didn’t have the balls.”

“You’re a piece of work, Scricca,” Sergeant Rodbourne said, stepping toward him. “First you throw your date under a truck, now you throw her under the bus.”

Sensing trouble, I took a quick step sideways, into the brawny and angry cop’s path.

“Thanks, Sarge,” I said, steering him toward the rubber-room door. “We’ll take it from here.”

“We’re not here about the accident,” Parker said after I pulled the door shut. “You made a claim that you saw the wanted cartel leader Manuel Perrine here in LA. Where did you see him?”

“It’s not a claim,” Scricca said, folding his arms as he slowly looked back and forth at us. “I saw him this morning, before all this happened. He was with someone I know.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said, peering at him. “This morning, Manuel Perrine, the world’s most wanted and most ruthless killer, just strolled past you with a buddy of yours? That’s what you’re trying to tell us? Because when I meet people who have crossed Perrine’s path, it’s usually in a funeral home, not a loony bin.”

“He didn’t see me. I was a couple hundred yards away,” Scricca said, knocking hard on the bed railing with a knuckle. “I saw him with binoculars. I even looked at my cell phone at the FBI website to double-check the face. I’m not shitting you. It was him. Mr. Public Enemy Number One himself.”

“This was on the water?” Parker tried. “You saw Perrine when you were out on your boat?”

Scricca took a deep breath, his handcuff scraping on the bed rail as he squirmed back against the wall.

“I can’t tell you that until I get a deal. I’ll tell you everything I know when you write up some immunity and my lawyer OKs it. Being a rat makes me sick, but I can’t go back inside. My old lady tried to kill herself last time. I can’t do her like that. Not again.”

“OK, Mr. Scricca. I see. We’ll be back,” Parker said, ushering me out.

“What a noble guy, to consider his wife like that, don’t you think?” I said as we hit the hallway. “After he kills the girlfriend he’s been out drugging with and gets busted, his old lady is the very first person he thinks about.”

“The question is, what do you think of his story, Mike?” Parker said. “You think this waste of life might actually know something?”

“Yes,” I said, after a few seconds of looking back in at him. “Other than his taste in three-piece-suit body art and his obvious self-destructive tendencies, oddly enough, he actually seems like a pretty sharp cookie.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she said. “Screw it. Let’s bite. Offer him a deal based on Perrine’s arrest and capture. If it doesn’t pan out, then what do we have to lose? It’s not like we have any other promising leads.”

“I’m down,” I said. “As long as there’s no cow milking involved, I’m pretty much down for anything.”

Parker took out her phone. She smiled mischievously as she waited for the line to get picked up.

“What’s so funny, Agent P.?” I asked.

“This goose chase that jackass Bassman sent us on,” she said. “How hilarious would it be if we just found the one that lays the golden egg?”

As it turned out, we did strike gold out here in California.

After Emily called back to the task force with our hunch, Bill Kaukonen, the LA County assistant district attorney on call, came to the hospital, and a deal was quickly struck.

Captain Scricca made out like a pirate. He would get a suspended sentence and a six-month stint in rehab for his role in the vehicular homicide if his information led to the capture of Perrine.

It was a sickening arrangement, I thought as I watched Kaukonen leave. The young woman who had been killed was only twenty-eight. But with Perrine out there trying to turn Southern California into the Vietnam War Part Two, it was easy to see that these were desperate times that called for some pretty desperate measures.

After the ADA left, we went back into Scricca’s cell and got his statement. The gist of it was that a little after noon, he had spotted Perrine in Marina del Rey, on a deep-sea fishing boat called Aces and Eights owned by a man named Thomas Scanlon. Scanlon was a sketchy character, he said, and it was an almost open joke among the fishermen down at the marina that he was involved with drug running.

Scricca’s story seemed to pan out further when we went back up to our HQ at Olympic Station and Emily put Scanlon into some of the Big Brother federal databases she was privy to.

Scanlon was, in fact, a sketchy character. In 1995, he had gotten booted from the Navy SEALs for a hot drug test. Soon after, Mr. Scanlon’s passport started appearing in some pretty strange places: South America, the Netherlands, Central Africa, the Middle East. It was a lot of world travel for a man who didn’t seem to have any visible means of support.

“This guy was in Qatar for a year and a half,” Parker said over the diner takeout piled on our desks. “When was the last time you went to Qatar, Bennett?”

“Went to Qatar?” I said, cracking the lid of my coffee. “I can’t even play one.”

“Then Scanlon just disappears off the grid for five years, and pow! Out of the blue suddenly pops up in SoCal as a deep-sea fisherman?” Parker said. “How’s that work?”

“You’re right. Overall, this guy seems pretty fishy,” I said.

Agent Parker tossed a sweet potato fry at me, which I deftly caught without spilling my joe. I took a bite and then, remembering it was a vegetable, promptly chucked it into the wastepaper basket.