James Patterson - Run For Your Life

I cursed myself for provoking the Teacher, but then I stopped beating myself up. He would have killed again anyway. He was just using a cheap, ugly pretext to cast blame on me.

I’d wait until I came face-to-face with him. Then I’d turn loose my rage.

When I got back to my building, even my doorman Ralph knew better than to mess with me. It must have been the stark expression on my face.

Upstairs, I made sure all the locks on the doors and windows were secured before I found my bedroom.

It was going to require smelling salts to wake me come morning, but I did not care. I was not going to brush my teeth. I barely had the energy to take off my shoes. I was going to fall into my bed and sleep until someone wrenched me out of it with great physical force.

I had just pulled my beloved body pillow to my chest when I heard the giggling. It was coming from the other side of the bed.

No, I prayed. Please, Lord. No.

The pillow was tugged out of my grip. A wide-awake Shawna lay there staring at me with a beaming smile.

“Sweetie, this isn’t your bed,” I pleaded softly. “This isn’t even the bathtub. Do you want a pony, Shawna? Daddy will get you a whole herd of ponies if you let him have some rest.”

She shook her head, immediately getting into the spirit of this new game. I felt like weeping. I was doomed, and I knew it. The problem with the youngest kids in a big family is that by the time you’ve gotten to them, you realize it’s actually easier to do things for them than to sit around and agonizingly wait for them to do things for themselves. They instinctively know this. They sense the emptiness in threats the way an ATF dog can detect explosives. Resistance is futile. You are theirs.

As this was going through my mind, I heard more giggling, then felt the movement of something small climbing into the bottom of my bed. I didn’t even have to look to know that Chrissy was getting into the act. She and Shawna were as thick as thieves.

Next, tiny hands separated the largest and second largest toes of my right foot.

“Toe pit sensitivity training,” my daughters screamed in glee as they wriggled their fingers between my toes.

I couldn’t take any more, and I sat up to tell them they had to go back to their own beds. But I stopped when I saw the undiluted delight radiating off them. What the heck. At least they weren’t puking.

Besides, how could you argue with a light beam and an angel?

“All right, I’ll show you some sensitivity training,” I mock-threatened.

Their happy shrieks threatened to shatter the light fixture as I tried the Vulcan nerve pinch on both of them simultaneously.

A few minutes later, after an elaborate ritual of arranging stuffed animals and squish pillows, I managed to tuck in my daughters next to me.

“Tell us a story, Daddy,” Chrissy said as I collapsed again.

“Okay, honey,” I said with my eyes closed. “Once upon a time, there was a poor old detective who lived in a shoe.”

“Bennett? You there?!”

I lunged up from the mattress, hand groping for my service weapon, as a shrill voice drilled a hole in my right eardrum. Then I realized with bewilderment that I was in my own bedroom filled with morning sunlight, not some murky, death-harboring alley of nightmare. My cell phone, folded open, was resting on my pillow beside where my head had been. One of my kids must have answered it and helpfully stuck it next to sleeping daddy’s ear.

“Yeah?” I said, lifting it with an unsteady hand.

“Nine o’clock meeting at the Plaza, and I don’t mean the Oak Room,” Chief of Detectives McGinnis snapped, and hung up as sharply as he’d spoken.

Not only did I make it into my unmarked Chevy in ten minutes flat, I was even showered and dressed. I got the car rolling and dug for the Norelco I kept in the glove compartment, feeling like I’d died and gone to heaven. I must have gotten close to five hours of real, delicious sleep.

I strode through the doors of One Police Plaza with a full forty seconds to spare, and took the elevator up to twelve, to the same cramped conference room where the first task force meeting had been held. The same tired and wired-looking cops were sitting there. I poured myself a coffee, grabbed a chocolate glazed, and took my place among them.

Right on time, McGinnis came barreling in, holding a copy of the Post above his head. “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” the headline read, below the surveillance video shot of the Teacher.

“The answer is yes,” he announced, tossing the paper across the conference table. “We had an Air France flight attendant pick out our shooter an hour ago.”

Spontaneous applause ripped through the room. Thank you, God, I thought, punching fists with Beth Peters beside me. I was so juiced, I decided to let slide the way that McGinnis had said we, with no mention of exactly who we were.

Our lead had paid off! Now we actually had a real shot at this animal.

“Suspect’s name is Thomas Gladstone,” McGinnis said, handing out printouts from a large sheaf. “He’s a former British Airways pilot – lives in Locust Valley, out on the island.”

Locust Valley? I thought. Wasn’t that the place where everyone’s name sounded like Thurston J. Howell III? Pilots made decent money, but they weren’t anywhere near that level on the food chain. I wondered if that explained some of the upscale targets. Maybe Gladstone had gotten snubbed at Polo and 21, or something along those lines, and decided that undertipping just wasn’t going to cut it in terms of showing his dissatisfaction.

“We’ve got a triggering incident, too,” McGinnis said. “Turns out Gladstone was scheduled to fly out of Heathrow to New York last week, but they caught him drunk and he got the ax. And we just found his car, littered with parking tickets in the Locust Valley commuter lot.”

I nodded grimly. Now we were getting somewhere. Losing a job was high up there on the list of why people went on rampages.

“We have an arrest warrant yet?” I said.

“We will by the time we bag this skell’s sorry ass,” McGinnis said. “ESU’s waiting downstairs. Who’s up for a little trip to the Gold Coast?”

I shot up out of my chair with the rest of the surrounding cops, grinning. I’d never even touched my coffee, but for some reason I felt completely refreshed.

Locust Valley ’s town square seemed to consist solely of slate-roofed antiques shops, boutiques, and salons. Our designated staging area was a parking lot on Forest Avenue behind something called a “coach and motor works.” Call me a philistine, but it looked suspiciously like a gas station to me.

Nassau County Bureau of Special Operations and even some Suffolk County Emergency Service police were already there waiting for us. When a cop killer is involved, interdepartmental cooperation is more than a given.

“Morning, guys,” I said, and gathered everybody over by my car for a briefing.

The Nassau crew already had surveillance set up around Gladstone ’s four-acre property. There were no signs of activity there, and no one had gone in or out. Calls to the inside of his house were picked up by the answering machine. Gladstone had a wife named Erica and two co-ed daughters, I learned, but they hadn’t yet been located.

Tom Riley, the Nassau Special Ops lieutenant, tossed digital photos of the front and back of Gladstone ’s house onto the hood of my Chevy. The place was a gorgeous sprawling Tudor with a covered patio and a swimming pool in back. The landscaping was immaculate – Japanese maples, chrysanthemums, ornamental grasses. Definitely not the kind of house one usually associated with homicidal maniacs.