James Patterson - Run For Your Life

“I finally found you, you son of a bitch!” she screamed.

Holy crap! the Teacher thought, panicked. It was his publicist, from his former life – the life he’d abruptly abandoned when he’d started on his mission two days ago.

“Wendy,” he said soothingly. “I’ve been meaning to get back to you.”

“How gallant of you,” she fumed. “Considering I called you thirty-six fucking times. Nobody no-shows the Today show! You’ve ruined yourself! Worse, you’ve ruined me!”

He glanced around nervously. Standing out here arguing wasn’t cool. If somebody hadn’t already discovered the dead Frenchman, they would any second now.

But then he realized that she was falling-down drunk, with bloodshot eyes and a smell like a brewery. A plan snapped into his mind. Perfect.

“I can do better than explain, Wendy,” he said, with his most charming smile. “I’ll make it up to you, ten times over. Got an e-mail that’s going to blow your doors off.”

“Make it up to me? How are you going to un-demolish my business? You know how hard I worked to get you booked? At this level, you don’t get a second chance. Now I’m over.”

“I’m talking Hollywood, baby. I just heard from the Tonight Show,” he lied. “Leno’s hot to have me on. It’s going to fix everything, Wendy. I promise. Hey, come on upstairs with me. I’ll cook you breakfast. You loved it when I did that last time, right? How about some fresh Belgian waffles?”

She turned away from him, trying to remain angry. But she failed, and started slurring out words in drunken honesty.

“You don’t know how much I missed you. After that night we had, and then you didn’t call me, and? -”

The Teacher put his finger to her lips. After a few more seconds of resistance, she nibbled his first knuckle.

“We’ll have a better time tonight,” he said. “If you’re really good – or should I say, really bad? – I’ll even warm the syrup,” he said, deepening his killer smile.

Finally, she smiled back. She removed a compact from her purse and touched up her hair and makeup. Then she took his hand and walked upstairs with him to the apartment.

Inside, he locked the door behind them.

“What’s it going to be first?” he said. “Food or e-mail?”

“I want to see that e-mail. Are you kidding?” she said, kicking off her high heels excitedly. “I can’t wait!”

“It’s in here. Follow me.”

As they walked through the spare room doorway, her gaze flicked across the corpse on the bed. She took two more steps before she stiffened and spun back to stare at it, abruptly seeming sober.

“Oh, my God!” she breathed. “What is that? What’s going on here? I don’t understand.”

Unceremoniously, the Teacher shot her in the back of the head with the silenced.22. Then he dragged her into the hall closet, dumped her Manolo Blahniks on top of her, and shut the door.

“Yeah, well,” he said, wiping his hands. “It’s a long story.”

When he fell back into his bed, his eyelids suddenly felt like manhole covers, and his breathing slowed to its usual peaceful rhythm.

Who needs warm milk? he thought as he softly faded into sleep.

When my cell phone went off, it took me a second to distinguish the sound above the constant hacking of the Bennett sick ward. I groped for it in a stupor, noting that the time was just after three A.M. For all my big hopes, I’d gotten maybe ten minutes of real sleep.

“Yeah, Mike, Beth Peters here. Sorry to wake you, but we just got word. A fashion photographer, shot dead on a sidewalk in Hell’s Kitchen. Looks like you-know-who.”

“I’m just waiting for my chance to send you-know-who to you-know-where in a handbasket,” I said grimly. “Any witnesses?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But one of the uniforms said he actually wrote some kind of a message. I didn’t quite catch that part. You want me over there, or? -”

“No, you mind the store,” I said. “I’m closer. Give me an address.”

After talking to Beth, I called Chief McGinnis, hoping I’d get the chance to wake him up to deliver the latest happy news. Unfortunately I had to settle for his voice mail.

Unbelievable, I thought, putting away my phone. The shooter seemed to be speeding up, shortening the interval between kills – giving us less time to figure things out. That was the last thing we needed now.

“Don’t tell me you have to go back in,” Mary Catherine said, still camped out in the chair opposite mine.

“This city never sleeps and apparently neither does its latest psychopath.” I heaved myself to my feet and rooted around the darkened room until I lucked onto my keys, then opened the lockbox in the closet to get my Glock.

“Are you going to be all right?” I asked her. It was a pretty stupid question. What was I going to do if she said no?

“We’re fine,” she said. “You be careful.”

“Believe me, if I get near this guy, I won’t give him a chance to hurt me.”

“Driving, too,” Mary Catherine said. “I’m concerned. You look like you just crawled out of a crypt.”

“Gee, thanks for the compliment,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, I feel even worse.”

I proved it immediately by walking smack into my front door, before I remembered I had to open it first.

But in the elevator down, I started looking on the bright side. At least this time, the guy had the decency to murder somebody on the West Side, so I didn’t have far to drive.

The crime scene techs were still stringing yellow ribbon when I arrived at the murder site on 38th Street.

“Nice work,” I said to one of them. “Tape’s looking sharp. How’d you score a new roll?” A little hamming it up for the waiting cops and techs is pretty much expected from the arriving homicide detective, and, as loopy as I felt, I was more than happy to oblige.

“You gotta know the right people,” a burly guy with a mustache growled back. “This way, Detective.” He lifted the waist-high plastic ribbon to make it easier for me to limbo underneath.

“I mean, this is what I call a crime scene,” I said. “Garbage in the street? Check. Lifeless citizen? Check? -”

“Wiseass detective? Check,” Cathy Calvin called from behind the barricade.

“Backstabbing reporters, present and accounted for,” I continued, without looking at her.

An Amtrak on its way to anywhere but Hell’s Kitchen gave a tap of its horn as it rumbled beneath the sidewalk train bridge we were standing on. I had a sudden impulse to vault off the bridge onto its top. I’d always dreamt of riding the rails.

“Even moody, cine noir sound effects,” I said, giving the techs a satisfied nod. “You know how much money a Hollywood studio would have to spend for this kind of authenticity? You guys have really outdone yourselves. I honestly couldn’t have asked for better.”

On the way over, I’d learned from Beth Peters that the victim was a heavy in the fashion industry. I’d started to wonder if this situation had parallels to the Gianni Versace murder – if the Teacher was some twerp on the outskirts of the rich and famous, who’d decided to reach out and grab his fifteen minutes of fame the hard way.

The hard way for other people.

I squatted down and looked at the corpse. Then I jumped up and stumbled backward, suddenly and totally wide awake.

“4U Mike, YFA!” was written across the victim’s forehead in Magic Marker.

As I looked up and down the shadowed street, I realized that my hands were trembling. They wanted to draw my Glock and kill that son of a bitch. I clenched them into fists in order to still them. My gaze turned back to the young man lying on the sidewalk. I cringed at the sight of his blood-drenched crotch.