James Patterson - I, Michael Bennett

“No way. I’m not staying here by myself,” Eddie said, hopping out after his big brother.

Eddie tried not to make eye contact with any of the gang people as they walked across the street. Bill and the dealer or whoever he was crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence. Following Brian through the fence into an alley strewn with broken bottles, Eddie smelled what he thought had to be weed. He felt like crying. He would never listen to a rap song again. This was so wrong.

They’d just come to the end of the alley, between two crazy dilapidated wooden houses, when it happened. There was a yell, and then Bill and the black guy just bolted, suddenly running behind the house on the left.

Stunned, Brian and Eddie just stood there as a new guy, another black teen, jumped off the back porch of the crumbling house on the right. He had a do-rag tied around his face like a cowboy bad guy. Like everything else he wore, it was red. Red basketball shorts, red Nike sneakers, red tank top.

Blood-red, Eddie thought as the black youth raised his hand, and they saw the gray-and-black gun he was holding.

“Eddie! Run!” Brian said, pushing him back in the direction they had come from.

The guy just started shooting. No warning. No “Get out of here” or “Gimme your money.” It was like a nightmare somehow made real in the middle of that bright and sunny summer day. Someone was actually shooting at them!

Eddie fell to the cracked concrete as Brian collapsed next to him, screaming. Eddie put his arm around Brian and felt wetness at his back. No! What? Brian was bleeding! He was shot. They were getting killed. How could this be happening?

Hovering over his brother and trying to get out his cell phone, Eddie shook as the gun cracked again and again. He’d actually gotten his phone out and opened when he felt something hot and sharp tug at his left shoulder. The phone clattered on the cement as Eddie fell facedown.

He cradled his throbbing arm. It felt scary and weird, like it was hanging on by a string, like it was about to fall off. When he looked up, Brian was hopping toward the street, the back of his white T-shirt splattered with blood and dirt. He fell through the rusted gate and started crawling over the sidewalk, screaming wildly. Eddie had never heard his brother scream so loud. He’d never heard anyone scream so loud.

What had they done? Eddie thought, looking up at the scary house beside him. He cried as he took in its graffiti, its high empty windows. He looked for his phone and saw it ten feet away, its screen cracked, its battery lying on the ground.

Mary Catherine wouldn’t find them. Dad wouldn’t find them. They were all alone now, Eddie thought. Bleeding and lost and alone.

Six o’clock that evening found me trudging up a thick, wooded ridge a couple of miles east of the lake house. Sweating and swatting at bugs, I stopped on a deer path.

“Eddie! Brian!” I called at the trees for the thousandth time.

I stood there listening for a reply, but there was nothing. Nothing except the sound of crickets and the hot wind pushing the leaves.

I’d already been by the pizza parlor. The owner told me he had seen Eddie and Brian leave with two older teenage girls. That Eddie and Brian would run off with two mysterious older girls wasn’t that alarming. What was strange was that the owner said he had never seen the girls before. And why weren’t Brian and Eddie answering their phones?

After driving around and spotting no sign of them, I decided that maybe they had all gone to some teen hangout in the woods near the lake. The area, after all, was very secluded. Where else could they have gone?

As I walked through the forest, I had to force myself to stop scanning the underbrush for their bodies. I was being a paranoid cop. Eddie and Brian were just knuckleheads, young male teens in the midst of some hormone-inspired mischief. I would come upon them any moment up here in a clearing, having a beer party or something. We would all laugh about it after I grounded them for the rest of their natural lives.

I picked up my pace, broke into a half jog. Who was I kidding? This wasn’t normal. This was incredibly bad. Frantic and now almost physically sick with worry, I was not in a good place. The boys were nowhere. What the hell was I going to do?

The forest ended suddenly, and I arrived at a blacktop road. I looked around and spotted house foundations, a rusted dump truck, weeds growing up between stacks of concrete sewer drains. It was a development, I realized. An abandoned one that had probably run out of money after the real estate bubble burst.

Though it was a desolate place, I was heartened by the sight of it. It was just the kind of secluded place a couple of stupid young teen boys would bring some girls. Or was it the other way around these days?

I was a couple of hundred yards up the road, heading toward a windowless colonial, when my phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, back at the cabin.

“Mike!” she said, frantic. “The police just called.”

“The police?!”

“They said it was about Eddie and Brian. They wouldn’t tell me what. They said they had to talk to you immediately.”

Mary gave me the number as I hit the woods and started back for the cabin at a dead run.

Please let it be something minor, I thought as it rang. Maybe it was nothing. Some vandalism, maybe. Just the cops up here being strict.

“Newburgh PD,” came a voice as I crashed through the trees.

I stopped and leaned against a tree, sweat dripping from my face onto the screen of the phone.

“My name is Mike Bennett. Someone called about my sons, Eddie and Brian.”

“Hold, please.”

Oh, God. Let them be okay, I said to the Muzak.

“Mr. Bennett, I’m Detective William Moss,” a voice said a moment later. “Your boys were both shot this afternoon. You need to get to St. Luke’s Hospital.”

Screeching out from the lake house minutes later, I ran every stop sign and blasted through every intersection with my hand on the horn. Coming across the Newburgh city line, I lost a hubcap as I put the bus up on the sidewalk to get around a double-parked pickup.

Dale Earnhardt wouldn’t have beaten me to the hospital in Newburgh. Not even with a head start.

“Stop it, Mike. Stop it! You’ll kill us!” Mary Catherine yelled, hanging on for dear life in the seat behind me.

I didn’t answer her. Hell, I could hardly hear her. Ever since I got the news about Eddie and Brian, I’d become separated from everything, as though I were looking out at the world through a numbing block of ice.

The phrase “Your boys were both shot this afternoon” kept playing and replaying through my head. How could this be happening? I kept asking myself. It was totally insane.

I came a hairbreadth from snapping through the hospital parking lot’s gate arm before I stopped in front of St. Luke’s emergency room with an enormous shriek of the brakes.

“Eddie and Brian Bennett,” I called to the nurse behind the counter inside.

A female doctor in surgical scrubs behind her spun around and waved Mary Catherine and me into an empty examination room.

The slender, fiftyish doctor’s name was Mary Ann Walker. She sat us down and made me have a paper cup of water before she explained what was going on.

“They were both shot with nine-millimeter rounds,” the doctor explained. “Eddie was shot in the shoulder, and Brian was hit in one of the scalene muscles in his neck, above his clavicle. We were able to remove the bullet in Eddie’s shoulder, but left the one in Brian’s neck for now.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked.

“Actually, going in to get it would be more trouble than it’s worth and I’d just as well leave it in there. They both lost a significant amount of blood, but we were able to stabilize them. Their circulation and breathing and neurological function all seem to be completely normal. Treatment is basically the same as a puncture wound now. Some stitches and clean bandages and in time, they’ll completely heal.”