James Patterson - Lifeguard

More cops cars. A morgue van, too.

They were pulled up in front of the Brazilian Court. I started to get nervous. That was where Tess lived. What was going on?

I parked the Bonneville at the end of the block and wandered up closer to the hotel. There was a crowd across the street from the entrance. I’d never seen so many cop cars in Palm Beach. This was crazy. We were the ones they ought to be after. I knew I’d better get back to Lake Worth. But Dee ’s words echoed in my head. The bastard set us up . Set up, how?

A ring of onlookers had crowded around front of the hotel entrance. I eased my way in. I went up to a woman in a white sweater over her sundress holding the hand of a young boy. “What’s going on?”

“There’s been a murder,” she answered anxiously. “That’s what all those sirens were about.”

“Oh,” I mumbled.

Now I was really starting to get scared. Tess lives here . I pushed out of the crowd, not even thinking about myself. Hotel staff in black uniforms were being ushered outside. I latched onto a desk clerk, a blond woman I recognized from earlier in the day. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“Someone’s been killed.” She shook her head, dazed. “ A woman . In the hotel.”

“A woman.” I held her eyes. Now I was starting to freak. “You mean a guest?”

“Yes.” Then she looked at me funny. I couldn’t tell if she remembered me or not. “Room 121,” she said.

My world started to spin. I stood there, numb, feeling my lips quiver. I tried to say something, but nothing came out.

Room 121 was the Bogart Suite.

Tess is dead, isn’t she ?

I WATCHED just long enough to see the stretcher loaded into the flashing morgue van. That’s when I saw Tess’s hand, dangling through the body tarp, those three gold bracelets hanging from her wrist.

I backed away from the crowd, feeling as if my chest were going to explode. All I could think was that I had just left her, a few hours before…

I had to get out of there. The Palm Beach police were all around. I was afraid they’d be looking for me, too.

I made it back to my car just as the shakes took over my body. Then this awful knot hurtled up in my throat. I threw up on somebody’s manicured lawn.

Tess was dead.

How could that be? I had just left her. I had just spent the most wonderful afternoon of my life with her. The hotel maid said murdered . How? Why? Who would kill Tess?

In a daze, I started to fast-forward through the days since we met. How we agreed to see each other again; how the Ocean House job had been set up.

Everything was separate . It was just a coincidence. A horrible one. I felt myself fighting back tears.

Then, unable to hold it back any longer, the dam burst.

I hung my head and just stayed there, my face smeared with tears. At some point I realized I had to leave. Someone could have recognized me from that afternoon. That blond desk clerk! I couldn’t exactly go to the police and clear myself, not with what had happened tonight. I pulled out from the curb. I didn’t know where the hell I was going. Just away .

I MADE A LEFT, then another, found myself back on Royal Palm. My mind was a mess. My clothes were soaked in sweat. I drove the whole way down to Lake Worth in a daze. Everything had just changed. Everything in my life. It had happened once before – in Boston. But this time I wasn’t going to be able to put it back together.

I turned off 95 onto Sixth Avenue, the awful image of Tess’s dangling wrist and the sound of Dee’s freaked-out warning alternating in my head.

Mickey’s place wasn’t far from the highway. No Breakers on this street. No Bices or Mar-a-Lagos. Just shabby streets of boxy homes and trailers where people drank beer on lawn chairs, with flatbeds and Harleys in their open garages.

A cop car streaked past me, and again I tensed. Then another cruiser. I wondered if somebody knew my car. Maybe I’d been spotted in Palm Beach?

I wound the Bonneville down onto West Road, a couple of blocks from the yellow house Mickey and Bobby had rented.

My stomach almost came up into my throat.

Flashing cop lights everywhere. Just like before. I couldn’t believe my eyes. People were crowded all over the front lawns – in tank tops and muscle shirts, looking down the street. What the hell was going on?

Mickey’s block was barricaded off. Cops everywhere. Lights flashing like it was a war zone.

A stab of dread. The cops had found us. At first it was just fear. This whole mess was going to be exposed. I deserved it. To have gotten involved in something so stupid.

Then it wasn’t just fear. It was more like revulsion. Some of the flashing lights were EMS vans.

And they were right in front of Mickey’s house.

I JUMPED OUT of the Bonneville and pushed my way to the front of the crowd. No way this could be happening again. No way, no way .

I edged up to some old black guy in a janitor’s uniform. Never even had to get the words out of my mouth.

“Some kind of mass-a-cree in that house over there.” He was shaking his head. “Bunch a white folk. Woman, too.”

Everybody was staring at Mickey’s house.

Now it was as if I were having a full-out heart attack. Everything in my chest was so tight that I couldn’t breathe. I stood in the semidarkness with my lips quivering and tears sliding down my cheeks. They had been alive. Dee had told me to come back. Mickey and Barney and Bobby and Dee. How could they be dead now? It was like some terrifying dream that you wake up from, and it isn’t real.

But this was real. I was staring at the yellow house and all those police and EMS people. Tell me this isn’t real !

I pushed forward, just in time to see the front door open. Medical techs appeared. The crowd started to murmur. They were wheeling out the gurneys.

One of the body covers was open. “White boy,” somebody said.

I saw the curly red hair. Mickey .

Watching him being wheeled toward the morgue van, I flashed back twenty years. Mickey always used to punch me in the back at school. His twisted way of saying hello. I never saw it coming. I’d just be walking in the hall, between class, and wham ! And he hit like a sonuvabitch! Then he started making me pay him a quarter not to get punched. He’d just raise his fist with his eyes wide. “Scared?” One day, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t care what happened. I charged him and slammed him back against a radiator. Left a welt on his back that I think stayed with him through high school. He got up, picked up his books, and put out a hand to me. In it was about four dollars. In quarters. Everything I had given him. He just grinned at me. “Been waiting for you to do that, Neddie-boy.”

That’s what flashed through my mind, the whole crazy scene in an instant. Then there were more gurneys. I counted four. My best friends in the world.

I backed away in the crowd. Felt boxed in, trapped. My chest was cramping. I pushed against the tide of people pressing closer for a better look.

And I was blasted with the thought: What good is a lifeguard who can’t save lives?

I DON’T REMEMBER MUCH about what happened next. All I know is that I staggered back to my car – fast – and drove – much faster.

I went through my options. What choices did I have? Turn myself in? C’mon, Ned, you participated in a robbery. Your friends are dead. Someone’s bound to connect you with Tess. They’ll pin a murder charge on you . I wasn’t thinking straight, but one thing became shining clear: My life here is over now .