James Patterson - The Quickie

"We're here to help in any way we can," Trahan said solemnly after all the introductions had been made. "Just tell me what we can do for Scott."

How much longer could I keep this charade up? I wondered as I glanced away from the group's pain to the water-stained ceiling. A passing Long Island-bound eighteen-wheeler rattled a window that appeared to be painted shut in the corner. I took out my notebook.

"What was Scott currently working on?" I said.

TRAHAN TOOK A DEEP BREATH and then began. "Scott was our primary undercover on a case we're making on a couple of Ecstasy dealers from Hunts Point, the Ordonez brothers," he said. "The older brother is an Air Force pilot who does supply runs back and forth to Germany. Turns out, he's flying back with just a little more than empty skids on his C-one-thirty. Scott made a couple of midlevel buys with them. We were planning a big one, a quarter-of-a-million-dollar deal, for next week, when we were going to bust them."

"Had Scott been in contact with them recently?" I said.

"He logged a call with them three days ago," Roy Khuong jumped in. "But he could have gotten a call tonight – off duty."

"Would Scott have gone to meet anyone without telling you?" I said.

"Not if he could have helped it," Roy said. "But undercover is seat-of-your-pants, dangerous work. You know that, Detective. Sometimes you don't get a chance to call for backup."

"You're saying Scott could have been approached by someone unexpectedly, asked to accompany them, and he would have had to do it in order to not make them suspicious," Mike said.

"Exactly," said Thaddeus Price. "It happens."

Trahan added another twist. "Or Scott could even have been approached by somebody from a previous case. Somebody he'd busted who'd gotten out of jail maybe. That's your worst fear when you're out there on the street. That you're going to be in Burger King with your kid and meet somebody you've already gone over on."

I heard my partner groan at what Trahan was saying. There were potentially hundreds of suspects in Scott's murder.

"First thing we need to do is bring in these Ordonez brothers for questioning," Mike said. "This deal was for big money. They could have picked up Scott early to rob him. Scott was beaten badly. So maybe he was tortured to tell them where the quarter million was. We need to pick them up. Do we know where these mutts are?"

"The pilot brother, Mark, works out of the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in South Jersey. We'll have the staties talk to his CO and check his apartment in Toms River," Trahan said. "But Victor, the younger one, has three or four stash apartments in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Girlfriends and relatives. It'll take a couple of hours to pinpoint where they're at. We'll get up on our wires and see what we can find out."

"In the meantime," Thaddeus said, "I'll get together the files from Scott's previous busts so we can start cross-referencing them with likelies who might have just gotten out of prison."

"That's a lot of files," Trahan said, shaking his head grimly. "Scott had hundreds of collars. He was one of the best undercovers I ever worked with."

He sure fooled me, I thought, remembering his wife and family.

I turned away from the pain in Trahan's bloodshot eyes. He looked as if he'd lost a best friend more than a co-worker.

"Wait a second," Detective Marut said. "Has Scott's family been told? My God, how will Brooke handle it? All those kids. I think four."

"Three children. We just got back from the notification," I said. "And she's handling it about as well as you would expect."

It sounded like a gunshot went off when Scott's partner, Roy Khuong, suddenly kicked the side of his desk. Paper went flying as he swept the entire contents of the desktop onto the floor before storming out of the room.

Mike shook his head, took out his cell phone, and started dialing a number.

"Who are you calling?" I said.

"Wake up the ADA on call," he said. "I'm going to get him to start on the subpoena to bring up the LUDs on Scott's house and cell phones."

My breath caught. LUDs were local usage details, a printout of the phone company records that would show every phone call to and from Scott's phones.

Including all the times Scott had called me!

Five minutes later, Mike stopped in the stairwell on our way upstairs to our squad room.

"Lauren, your eyes are gray," he said.

"What are you talking about? They're blue," I said.

"I meant the whites of them," Mike said. "You've been banging a mile a minute since this thing started. We're in a holding pattern now. It'll be morning before we get a real handle on anything. You live ten minutes away. Why don't you scoot home for a couple of hours of shut-eye. I was scheduled to work this shift. I'll mind the store."

Part of me didn't want to leave my partner's side, or to possibly miss something on the case. Who the hell knew what would happen next? But out the grimy stairwell window behind Mike, I couldn't help noticing how the streetlights were starting to swim. I was exhausted.

Whoever said moving and divorce were the two most stressful events in your life never had their husband shoot their lover.

Collapsing wouldn't help things, I decided.

"Okay, Mike," I said. "But call me the second you hear anything. Anything at all."

"Go home, Lauren."

"Okay. I'm gone. I'm out of here."

I CUT MY MINI'S ENGINE in my garage and was getting out, when I heard something weird in the far-right corner. I guess I was a little jumpy, because immediately my Glock was drawn, sights center-massed on the seated figure there.

Until I realized it was Paul.

I clicked on the lights before I finally holstered my weapon.

Paul was snoring in a lawn chair beside his toolbench. On the concrete floor beside him was a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. With maybe one shot left in it.

Oh yeah, and Paul wasn't wearing any clothes. He was bareass naked.

He was also wasted. Blotto. Three sheets to the wind, as they say. Maybe four.

How bad I was feeling tonight wasn't a fraction of what was going on with Paul, I realized, staring at his troubled, unconscious face.

I knocked off the last shot in his bottle before I tried to shake him awake. No response.

One of his eyes flipped open when I tugged his earlobe. I pulled at his right hand until he stood.

He mumbled something, but I couldn't make it out as I brought him into the house. I'd never seen him so drunk.

I almost threw my back out, trying to steer him into our bedroom. I finally laid him on top of the bed, and I brought over the wastebasket in case he was sick.

I was just able to make it into the bathroom myself before all the pent-up stress exploded out of me in violent sobs.

Where the hell was all this going? What did I think I was doing, playing dumb in the investigation? This wasn't a game. Scott Thayer was dead . Few things on this earth bring down more scrutiny than an NYPD cop getting murdered. Did I think I could bluff my way through this? Was I crazy?

I thought about Brooke Thayer again. Her autistic daughter. The two other kids. I felt poisoned. Evil. I wanted to turn myself in. At this point, I would do just about anything to take this black burden off myself.

But I wasn't the one who would get punished for it.

It was Paul.

So, what was I supposed to do now?

I STILL HADN'T FIGURED THAT OUT when I totally collapsed three minutes later in the shower.

One moment I was standing there, shampooing my hair, and the next I was sitting down hard on the cold porcelain, water pinging off my torso and legs.

I pressed my forehead to the wet tile as the sum of the night's events dripped through me. What made me the sickest was hard to decide. My flat-out betrayal of Paul? Or staring into Scott's dead face? Or maybe staring into his wife's face?