James Patterson - Kill Me If You Can

I SWORE THAT everything I was going to tell you would be true. It has been. I actually did serve in the Marines. I am an art student at Parsons in New York City. And I’m definitely in love with my professor Katherine Sanborne. But I did leave a few things out. Such as—

I’m a hired killer.

It’s not exactly something I signed up for on Career Day at my high school. My father was a Marine, and I more or less decided to follow in his footsteps — at least for four years. The night I got out, my dad took me for a beer.

I knew he wasn’t too happy about my going to New York to become an artist, and I figured he was going to try to talk me out of it.

“So, what did you learn in the corps?” he asked.

“Nothing that you hadn’t already taught me,” I told him and smiled. “Is that what you’re fishing for?”

“Don’t be a wiseass,” my father said. “I’m trying to be serious here. The Marines taught you a lot. I just asked what you learned. ”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but he was definitely very serious.

“I guess I learned how to push myself to my limit,” I said. “Even farther than you pushed me. I learned the meaning of a lot of words that were just concepts when I was a kid— loyalty, bravery, friendship, selflessness .”

He nodded. “What else?”

“I learned how to survive,” I said. “And that means I had to learn how to kill. I did it for my country, but I doubt it’s a skill I can put on my résumé when I’m looking for something to help me pay for school in New York.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

We were sitting at a corner table in a little bar tucked away in the back room of the North Fork Diner in Hotchkiss, Colorado. My father took a long tug on his beer and set the bottle down.

“I’ve been waiting for the right time to tell you this, Matt.”

I could feel my chest tighten. Tell me what? I didn’t like the look on his face.

“For as long as you can remember, you’ve seen me travel around the world from one corporate headquarters to another as a security consultant. Well, that’s not exactly true,” he said. “I do fly all over the world, but I’m not a consultant. I kill people, Matthew. Bad people. But I kill them all the same.”

I was in shock. Complete. There was a buzzing sound suddenly in both my ears. My chest felt hot on the inside.

“You murder people?” I said. “For money?”

“I eliminate scum — the dregs of our world. Most of them are killers themselves. Some just order the murders of others. It doesn’t make it any more righteous that I target only folks who deserve to die. But you know what? I sleep okay at night. I don’t have a problem with it. Do you, Matthew?”

I did, actually. “And you think, what? That that’s what I should be doing? Killing bad people?”

“Not should be doing,” he said. “ Could be doing. It’s just an option you have. I saw your service record. I held your shooting medals. You’re one of the best-trained Marines to come out of Parris Island.”

“Dad, fighting for this country is a lot different from being an assassin for hire.”

“Is it?” he said. “Badasses are badasses, aren’t they? I think so. Seems perfectly logical to me.”

“I don’t know about your logic there, Dad.”

But I’m pretty sure the seed was planted inside that barroom in Colorado.

A few months after I talked to my father, I took my first job, and I’ve been following in his footsteps ever since. I think of myself as the ghost of my father. That’s how I got my name.

I remember the last question I asked my dad the night he told me about his secret life. “Does Mom know?”

He nodded. “I didn’t tell her at first, but I knew I had to sooner or later. You can’t live a lie with someone you love. She could have walked out on me. She could have told me to give it up. But your mother stuck with me and never brought it up again. Rarely brought it up again, I should say. Occasionally she does. When she wants something she considers worthwhile — like tuition if you decide to go to art school.”

And now it was my turn. It was time to share my secret with Katherine.

I went to the closet and opened the room safe. I got out the doctor bag filled with diamonds. I sat down on the bed next to her.

“Katherine,” I said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

KATHERINE LOOKED AT the bag. “Dr. Matthew’s magic medical bag,” she said. “Is there another surprise in there?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, you gave me brie and baguettes when we went to France. What’s in there now that we’re in Italy? Chianti and cannolis?”

“No. Remember I told you I found a bag full of diamonds at the train station?”

“How could I forget?” she said. “The first thing I thought when we set foot in this incredible room was, I hope you brought enough diamonds.”

“But you don’t think the diamonds really exist,” I said.

She rolled her eyes, put her hand to her chin, and shook her head slowly from side to side. I think it’s something she learned in professor school. It’s a way of letting a student know he is completely wrong without broadcasting it to the entire classroom.

I dipped my hand into the bag. The diamonds were loose now. I had taken them out of my socks so I could show them to Katherine in all their dramatic glory. I scooped up a fistful just as Professor Sanborne decided to let me know how preposterous my story was.

“Matthew, you know I love you,” she said. “But love is not blind or stupid, and that whole cock-and-bull story about finding diamonds in a train station is ridiculous. I don’t care how you can afford to pay for this vacation, but I’d feel a whole lot better if you finally decided to tell me the truth.”

What the hell? I thought. I dropped the whole fistful of diamonds on the bed.

“Behold the sparkling truth,” I said.

Katherine shrieked. “Oh, my God!”

Then I opened the medical bag wide and held it so she could get a good look at the other thirty or forty fistfuls.

This time she jumped off the bed and the oh, my God s came in a flurry. Then she sat back down. “Are they real?”

“Very.”

“My God, Matthew, they must be worth — I don’t know — millions.”

“So I’m told.”

“Are they yours?” she asked.

“They are now. In fact, they’re ours. This is the key to a whole new life.”

I gave her the watered-down version of how I found them in Grand Central. Bomb goes off. I stumble on Zelvas. He dies. I take the diamonds.

“What are you going to do with them?” she asked.

“Sell them. Depending on what I can negotiate, I figure I can get seven to ten million.”

She let loose another string of about half a dozen Oh, my God s.

“But what about that man who got killed at Grand Central?” she said. “Maybe he’s got a wife, kids. I don’t even know what I’m saying, Matthew…”

“Trust me,” I said, “Walter Zelvas had nobody. No wife, no kids, nobody.”

I inhaled. It was time to tell Katherine the whole truth about myself and hope she didn’t walk out when she heard it.

“Katherine,” I said, “there’s one more little fact about me you really should know. That man Walter Zelvas who had the bag of diamonds.…I’m the one who —”

Bam! A loud cracking sound and the door to our hotel room flew open. And there she was — Marta Krall standing in our doorway with a large-bore gun in her hand.