James Patterson - The Quickie

At the airport, I had to flash my badge and NYPD ID in order to get past the security checkpoint without a ticket. Then I stayed well back in the torrent of people as I followed Paul down the departures concourse, past the regiments of newsstands and gift shops and open bars.

He stopped suddenly, about a hundred feet ahead of me. He sat down at Gate 32.

Keeping my distance by a bank of pay phones, I felt like an ulcer exploded open in my stomach when I saw his destination.

Washington , DC .

IT COST ME $175 to snag a last-minute seat on Paul's flight. What was I saying? It cost Paul $175. Excellent .

Watching from a restaurant across the departure concourse, I literally flinched as Paul was checking in for the business-class boarding call.

That was because the attendant at the counter did something more than a little odd after he handed Paul his ticket stub.

He punched Paul's fist playfully – as if they were old pals! What was that all about?

I snatched a discarded newspaper from the boarding area to shield my face as I passed through the front cabin, but I needn't have bothered. A glance showed me that he was engrossed in conversation with the man on his right – another frequent flier, I supposed.

If there was a good thing to say about my second-to-last, back-row seat in coach, it was that there was no way for Paul and me to bump into each other during the flight. Oh, and it had a handy barf bag. One that I made use of promptly after takeoff.

Pregnancy and motion sickness and watching your world go up in apocalyptic flames – really bad combination.

"Sorry," I said to my thoroughly disturbed female executive neighbor, who was on the phone. "Baby on the way. Morning has broken."

The really tricky part came when we landed in Washington. Paul, along with the rest of the corporate-class dweebs, got off first. So I really had to hightail it out to the arrival gate in order to see which way he'd gone.

But by the time I'd made it to the taxi line on the street, there was no sign of him.

Damn it, damn it, damn it! What a waste this whole trip down here had been.

I was doubling back, heading up the escalator, when I saw him coming out of the men's room. He'd changed into jeans and a nice blue sweater – and he wasn't wearing his glasses anymore.

What kept me from screaming his name right then and there, I don't know. His ass was so busted it was unreal.

Instead, I just double-timed it back down the stairs and continued to trail my deceitful husband.

I needed to know firsthand just how deep he'd sunk the blade into my back.

Paul went directly past the taxi line through the sliding glass doors into the street. The doors were closing when I saw him do something that made me stop in my tracks and just stare.

He opened the passenger door of a shiny black Range Rover that was idling at the curb.

I decided to run then.

By the time I'd made it ten feet outside, the sleek luxury SUV was already moving, tires shrieking as it cut off a minibus and shot into the left lane.

My eyes strained to get the license plate number as I ran across the exhaust-stained pavement after it.

It was a DC plate starting with 99.

I gave up on the rest of the plate number and tried to get a quick look at the driver. I wanted to see who, or more specifically what gender, the person was who had just picked up my husband.

But the windows were tinted. I discovered that little fact about the same moment that I tripped over a golf bag and gave the hallowed ground of our nation's capital an enthusiastic, chest-bumping high-five.

NOT EXACTLY SURE where to start looking for Paul, I decided to pay Roger Zampella, the contact detective listed in the FBI report, a visit.

I'd never met Roger face-to-face, of course. He turned out to be a large, well-dressed African American with a smile brighter than the polished buckles of his polka-dot suspenders.

When I called him from the airport, he'd immediately invited me over to his squad room at the Metro DC Second District Station on Idaho Avenue. I arrived to catch him just beginning an early lunch at his desk.

"You don't mind if I eat while we talk, do you, Detective?" he said, flipping his silk pink-and-green repp tie over his shoulder. He tucked a napkin into the white collar of his two-tone baby blue banker's shirt before upending a brown lunch bag onto his desk with a flourish.

A small apple slid out, along with a Quaker oatmeal bar about the size of a used bar of soap.

He cleared his throat.

"My wife," he explained as he tore open the bar's wrapper with his teeth, "just saw the results of my latest cholesterol test. I got an F-minus. You said on the phone you wanted to talk to me about a robbery? I should have told you, I'm in Homicide now."

"It's actually from nearly five years ago," I said. "I was wondering if you could recall anything about it. The case number was three-seven-three-four-five. An armed robbery at the Sheraton Crystal City Hotel in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the capital. The perpetrator -"

"Left some blood," Detective Zampella said without any hesitation. "The ticket-broker thing. I remember it."

"You have a good memory," I said.

"You never forget the open ones, unfortunately," he said.

"You said something about a ticket broker?"

Zampella sniffed at the oatmeal bar before he took a dainty squirrel nibble.

"The Sheraton, this is the one out near Reagan National Airport, was hosting the annual NCAA football coaches' convention," he said as he chewed. "All the big schools' coaches and assistant coaches receive Final Four tickets every year for free. These ticket brokers – glorified ticket scalpers, if you want my opinion – just set up shop in the hotel and buy them up. Pay out cash right there and then. Illegal, of course, but we're talking about college recruiters. They've been known to bend a few rules."

"How much cash are we talking about here, Roger?"

"A lot," Zampella said. "Some of the games go for a thousand bucks a ticket."

"And there was a robbery?"

Zampella went to take another little bite, decided to hell with it, and dropped the whole thing into his mouth. He chewed twice, swallowed, then cleared his throat.

"One of these brokers apparently came down a couple of nights before the convention," he said. "And somebody must have gotten wind of who he was, and they robbed him of his suitcase of cash."

"Get a description?" I said. "Anything at all?"

Zampella shook his head.

"Guy wore a ski mask."

A ski mask? Wow, Paul was really original. Not to mention completely insane.

"Where'd the blood come from? Anybody figure that out?"

"When the broker was handing over the case, he had second thoughts and hit the thief in the chin with it. Guy was a bleeder, I guess. Ruined the carpet."

"What did the thief do then?"

"He took out a gun, threatened to blow the guy away. That's when the broker gave it up."

"How much did he get?"

"Half a million, maybe more. The broker said it was only seven thousand, but that's because he didn't want to get in trouble with the IRS, or maybe the Mob. This guy was a major ticket guy."

"Suspects?" I said.

"There was no hit on the blood. We interviewed several guests on the broker's floor. There were, like, two thousand people at the conference that night. We weren't going to set the world on fire for some slick, probably Mobbed-up asshole ticket broker who was tripping over himself to lie to us. We went by the book and, you know how it is, moved on to the next thing, forgot all about it. Until now, that is. What are you doing? Gathering new material for a revival of Unsolved Mysteries ?"