James Patterson - Gone

“Don’t you mean all night long, you little sneak thieves?” Mary Catherine said, and watched the kids jump.

Eddie dropped his controller and lay facedown in front of the TV, pretending to sleep, as Ricky turned around, smiling bravely.

“Mary Catherine. Hi. Um, you want to play winner?” he tried.

“Don’t get cheeky with me. It’s almost two in the God-loving morning. Heads on your pillows this instant, or I’ll dunk the both of you in your rooms for a week. I’ve half a mind to talk to Mr. Cody and get you two night owls some milking work tomorrow. Maybe a week of watching the world go by from the underside of a cow will help you learn the meaning of a good night’s sleep.”

“Cow punishment? No! You can’t! The horror!” Eddie yelled, jumping up and racing his brother out of the room, heading for the stairs.

She’d turned off the set and was going back through the kitchen when she saw the full coffeepot. Leo, on duty now out on the porch, must have just made himself some. She primped in the mirror of the powder room and put her barn jacket over her pj’s before she poured a cup.

She was going to kiss him, she decided with a smile as she went down the front hall with the mug. She’d been waiting for the right time for them to get closer, and tonight was the night.

“Hark, I go here,” Mary Catherine said, smiling as she pushed through the screen door.

It took several long seconds for Mary Catherine to piece together what the lump down on the opposite side of the porch was. Then she suddenly understood. The coffee cup fell from her shaking hand and exploded between her feet.

Leo was down on the ground, on his back beside the toppled camp chair. Above him and above the porch’s hand railing, there was a large, ink blot-like splatter on the clapboards. Mary Catherine covered her mouth as she scanned Leo’s face. There was a hole over Leo’s open left eye and a dark pool beneath his head!

Mary Catherine felt a shiver of cold shoot up her back as her breath left her. Leo was shot?! He was dead! No! How? What?

The first thought that came to her racing mind was that it was an accident. Had he dropped his gun?

But then she heard something. It came from somewhere off to the right, in the darkness by the main road. It was a whistle, the low double whistle of someone getting someone else’s attention. It was followed after a moment by the distinct and brief, jagged crackle of a radio.

Mary Catherine stood there in the darkness and silence, not moving, not breathing, the spilled coffee staining her slippers.

They found us , she thought as she felt a sudden presence in the hallway behind her. As she turned toward it, she was grabbed in a bear hug and violently yanked back into the house, a callused hand pressing hard over her mouth before she could scream.

The NSA’S intelligence package on Tomás Neves and the members of his MS-13 set came in around eleven that night.

It was extensive. At the top were all ingoing and outgoing calls and texts to and from everyone’s home and cell phones. Next came e-mails and Google searches. There were tax returns from the IRS, license plate numbers from the DMV.

“Big Brother’s been working overtime, I see,” Detective Diaz said, licking his thumb as he went through one of the stacks.

Diaz was right. There was almost too much info, if that were possible. Emily and Diaz and I ran out of desk space and had to actually lay out all the papers on the floor to try to get a handle on it.

Since our breakthrough the day before, three more people had been added to our team to give us a hand. There was a hulking, fresh-out-of-the-academy FBI agent from Brooklyn named Ed Kelly and a couple of veteran LA-office Immigration and Customs Enforcement people, Agents Joe Irizarry and Steve Talerico.

The ICE agents were born-and-bred Angelenos and were especially helpful on logistics. Bonding over some Chinese takeout, we pored over street and Google maps of Neves’s place in Reseda, trying to work out the angles, where best to place our vehicles for surveillance.

With our players picked out and our surveillance plan finalized, we geared up with night-vision and video cameras around two a.m. We’d only made it as far as the Olympic Station’s garage when Emily’s phone rang.

“OK,” she said into it, then slammed the door of the G-car she’d just opened.

“That was the LA SAIC John Downey,” she said as she pointed toward the elevator. “We need to go back up. Apparently something from Perrine just came in upstairs.”

Rushing back up into the third-floor office space, I thought I was going to see the big smart screen pulled down again, with a crowd of agents and cops standing around it. There were a lot of cops standing around, but this time, the screen was still up and everyone seemed to be looking at me.

“In here, Mike,” Downey said, waving to me from the door of the space’s only private office. There were three techs in there with him, two of them tapping rapidly on laptops.

“What is this?” I said.

“It’s Perrine. The maniac’s just contacted the LAPD website. He says he wants a sit-down, to communicate with you face-to-face on Skype.”

“Talk to me?” I said, squinting. “But I’m supposed to be in hiding. How does he even know I’m here in LA?”

Downey shrugged.

“I don’t know. All I know is that it’s an encrypted signal and we have NSA trying to trace it.”

I have to admit, I got spooked then. Though I’d been at a few crime scenes, I’d kept a pretty low profile. Were the rumors right? Did Perrine really have a source in the task force? And what did it mean?

I passed a hand through my hair.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure about this.”

“I wouldn’t even ask you, Mike, but he has a hostage. He says he’s going to kill him in another five minutes if we don’t get you.”

“Of course he does,” I said. “OK. I guess.”

Downey took me over to the desk and sat me in front of a computer monitor. I took a deep breath when I saw the minimized Skype tab. I still didn’t like this. I had a sick feeling that there was something seriously wrong. Something we’d overlooked.

A tech hit a button, and then Perrine was there. He was sitting in a beanbag chair next to a small, wide-eyed Mexican man who had tape over his wrists and ankles and mouth.

There was some kind of metal wall behind them. They were in a van, I realized. Perrine lifted a tennis ball and bounced it off the floor and wall of the van beside the camera and then caught it again.

When the hostage looked up, I saw his Roman collar. He was a priest! Perrine was holding a young priest hostage!

“Detective!” Perrine bellowed as he glanced at the screen. “Detective, there you are, at long last. I was wondering if you’d ever show up. You’re looking tired. Having trouble sleeping, are we? Seriously, how have you been? How are the kids?”

I wanted to tell the arrogant scumbag to go screw himself, but I couldn’t stop looking at the priest. The terror and pleading in his eyes. He was slight, in his early thirties. My heart went out to him. I needed to save this man’s life.

“I’m here, Manuel,” I said. “So you can let that poor man go now, OK?”

“Let him go? Good idea, Detective,” Perrine said, standing.

The drug lord stepped offscreen. There was a sliding sound as the metal wall behind the priest moved sideways to reveal a blurring guardrail, the shoulder of a road, passing trees.

“No!” I yelled as Perrine, coming back into the frame, reared up his heel and booted the priest in the chest.