James Patterson - The Quickie

I needed to find out what was going on firsthand, I finally decided. But waiting around like this was making me insane.

It was time to face the music.

I needed to go to the hospital. I grabbed my gun, tossed it in my handbag, and ran out the door.

THANK GOD FOR ABS, I thought as I came centimeters from rear-ending with my Mini Cooper the shiny ambulance parked in front of the Lawrence Hospital ER.

"Where's the beating victim?" I called to the polished-looking red-haired nurse behind the Plexiglas at the triage desk.

"Oh my God! You were beaten?" she said, spilling the People magazine out of her lap as she stood.

I looked around the waiting room. It was empty. Stranger than that, it was clean. Calming classical music serenaded from the overhead speakers. Bronxville, Yonkers ' extremely wealthy neighbor to the east, was one of the most upscale suburbs in Westchester, I remembered. Lawrence did lacrosse injuries, the occasional Oxy overdose, a debutante who'd fallen off her horse.

I rolled my eyes as I headed back to the parking lot.

A bloody John Doe couldn't have been left at Lawrence Hospital 's doorstep, I realized, because the entire Bronxville police force wasn't here. So, where could Paul have taken Scott?

I racked my brain for the next-nearest hospital.

Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center, to the south on the Bronx River Parkway, I decided, as I peeled out into the wet street once again.

Back down in the real Bronx. The one without the ville .

After hammering it down the parkway for ten minutes, I noticed that the center-doored colonials that bookended the parkway had been replaced by less quaint, gritty tenements. Steve McQueen would have been proud of the fishtailing stop I made before I ran into the ER entrance of Our Lady of Mercy on East 233rd Street.

I heard vociferous complaints as I cut to the head of the long triage line in the packed, grimy waiting room.

"Have you had any anonymous beating victims in the last hour?" I yelled to the first nurse I could find.

She replaced the bloody dish towel over the barbecue fork stuck in the hand of the Hispanic woman beside her before she looked up.

"He's in three," she said, annoyed. "Who the hell are you?"

More shouts followed me as I rushed through the open door behind her. I found number 3 and ripped back the green plastic curtain around it.

"Ever hear a knockin', bitch?" a near-naked black kid asked me in a malevolent tone as he attempted to cover himself with the hand not cuffed to the bed rail. A big white bandage was wrapped around his head, and a big white uniformed cop was sitting by his feet.

I felt something shift ominously in my stomach.

If Scott wasn't here, I thought…

Then where the hell was he? And where was Paul?

"Yo, Earth to lady," the Bronx uniform said to me with a snap of his fingers. "What's up?"

I was fumbling for a lie when I heard two loud beeps cut from the static of his radio.

He ignored me for a moment as he turned it up. The words were too garbled for me to catch everything, but I heard something about a white male victim, along with an address.

St. James Park. Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue.

White male? I thought. No way. Impossible. Had to be a coincidence.

I closed my gaping mouth as the cop directed his suspicious stare back at me.

"So you're saying this isn't where I hand in my urine sample?" I said, backing away.

Minutes later I was flooring it, heading south down the Bronx River Parkway. I'd just swing by, I told myself as I rocketed off at the Fordham Road exit. No biggie. It was almost stupid, really. Because Scott couldn't be at some Bronx crime scene. Because he was right now at a hospital, being treated for some cuts and bruises. Minor cuts and bruises, I reminded myself.

I rolled west up Fordham Road. I passed under a sign above a broken streetlight that proclaimed, "The Bronx Is Back." Where had it been? I thought, staring at the steel-shuttered Spanish clothing stores interrupted by the occasional Popeye's Fried Chicken or Taco Bell.

I made a hard right onto Jerome Avenue.

And slammed on the Mini's brakes with both feet.

I'D NEVER SEEN SO MANY NYPD cop cars in one place. They were on the sidewalk, under the elevated track, parked like a wagon train in St. James, a block-square concrete park. Every one of their blue and red and yellow lights was flying full throttle. There was so much yellow crime-scene tape, it looked like Christo had decided to do a yellow-and-black installation in the Bronx.

Keep going, a voice whispered in the back of my mind. Some ER doctor is sewing Scott's stitches right at this very moment. Or, who knew? Maybe Paul had already dropped him back at his place.

Get out of this wretched place right now. You'll get into trouble, big trouble, if you stay here.

But I couldn't go. I needed to be sure. I needed to act responsibly. Starting right now.

I rolled directly toward the commotion.

The thin, silver-haired cop directing traffic around the light show gave me a look of eye-boggled shock as I stopped my car almost on top of him.

He was reaching for his cuffs when I opened the door and all but fell out of my car. When I went into my handbag, he changed his mind and went for his Glock instead.

But then I took it out.

Took out my badge.

The gold badge I'd been given when the NYPD promoted me to detective.

"Jesus," the relieved-looking uniform said as he lifted the yellow tape behind him and beckoned me under.

"Why didn't you just say you were on The Job?"

I'D BEEN A COP FOR SEVEN YEARS, the last year and a half as a Detective First Grade on the Bronx Homicide Task Force. Which made my co-worker Scott Thayer a cop, too. Detective Third Grade with Bronx Narcotics.

What can I say?

Office affairs happen in the NYPD, too.

I dodged under the yellow tape and walked toward the blinding white floodlights the Crime Scene Unit had set up at the center of the park. Maybe it was just my frazzled state, but I was all too familiar with crime scenes and I'd never seen one quite so frantic, or one filled with so many pissed-off cops. What the hell was going on?

I walked past rusted monkey bars and a graffiti-covered wall for handball.

I stopped in the darkness just beyond where the lights blazed down on a fountain so old and exhaust-stained that its granite looked black.

A blue plastic tarp around its ornate base was half floating in the water, covering something. What was under the blue tarp?

I had a feeling it wasn't some new artwork about to be unveiled up here in the Bronx.

I almost jumped as a hand, large and warm, palmed the standing hairs at the back of my neck.

"What are you doing here, Lauren?" Detective Mike Ortiz said with his ever-serene half-smile.

Mike, my partner for the past year, was in his midforties and about as laid-back as he was large. He was constantly being mistaken for The Rock, so I guess that made him confident enough to be laid-back, or any other way he wanted to be.

"Aren't you supposed to be down in Quantico, handing out, I mean, picking up, tips at the FBI Academy?" Mike asked.

My seminar in Virginia was with the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, an NYPD-sponsored brushup on the latest investigative techniques.

"Missed my flight," I managed to get out. "I'll get an early one tomorrow."

Mike clucked his tongue as he nudged me forward into the spotlight beside the fountain. "I have a funny feeling you're going to wish you'd made that plane," he said.

My partner tossed me a pair of rubber boots and gloves as we got to the fountain's scrolled stone rim. I slowly pulled them on and then swung myself over the edge and down into the water.