James Patterson: The Quickie

I carefully placed it back under the bag and then locked the shed. I was walking up the driveway to my front door when my cell vibrated.

I looked at the caller ID, then at my lit bedroom window. I pressed myself into the shadows beside the garage door.

It was Paul.

What did he want? Should I pick up and talk to him? Had he seen me? I wimped out and let my voice mail take it. I played his message back a few seconds later.

"Hi, Lauren. It's me. I'm at home. I ran into difficulties with my flight. I'll explain what happened later. Was there a problem with your flight, too?" Paul said. "I noticed that your car's not here. Are you at work? Give me a call when you get a chance, okay? I'm worried about you."

Worried about me ? I thought, staring up at my window. Why? I didn't kill anybody.

Could this get any more bizarre? At least he was all right, I finally thought, folding my phone closed.

Paul was all right physically, if not otherwise.

I was taking a deep breath by my porch stairs, preparing myself to finally go inside and face him, when my phone vibrated a second time.

But it wasn't Paul this time.

It was my partner. I headed back into the shadows by the garage before I picked up.

"Mike?"

"Time's up, Lauren," he said. "Keane's on the move. I won't be able to stall for you much longer. You have to get back here now."

"On my way," I said.

I looked up at my window again. What the hell was I waiting for? I thought. Why was I skulking around in the dark outside my own house? I needed to go in and talk to Paul. Get some crisis management in motion. Call a good lawyer. Be rational. Be an adult. Figure this thing out somehow.

It was just a matter of looking Paul in the eye and saying, "Yes, I cheated on you. Yes, I made love to another man tonight, and now we have to deal with the terrible consequences of what you've done."

I thought about that as the rain continued to fall around me.

I wasn't a procrastinator by nature, but in this case, I thought I'd make an exception.

I stuck to the shadows on the jog back to my car.

I LEFT THE CAR ON GRAND CONCOURSE and walked in a daze down 193rd, trying to think my way through this disaster. I met Mike on the south side of the park, at the entrance far from where the bosses were set up in the Command Center on Jerome.

I couldn't help noticing the half dozen news vans parked alongside it. Great. The public has a right to know. To which I have to ask, Why is that?

"Anybody notice I was gone?" I asked Mike in greeting.

He made a pained face. "Bad news, Lauren. The commissioner came over about ten minutes ago, all outraged about where you were."

My stomach dropped.

"But you know me," Mike said, "I just slapped him around and told him to get his sorry ass back in the donut bus, where he belongs."

I punched my ever-the-wiseass partner in the arm. The contact felt good, actually.

"I appreciate it," I said. Mike had no idea how much.

The steady rain continued to fall as we made our way toward the tenements on Creston Avenue on the east side of the park. If two concrete acres of handball courts, rusted basketball hoops, and pit bull-chewed baby swings could be considered a park.

I don't know what James was the patron saint of, but I have a funny feeling it wasn't the marijuana, coke, and heroin that were sold out of the ancient buildings along the park's perimeter. Judging by the looks of the young, bored-looking, hooded men under the red plastic awning of a corner bodega, our presence had slowed sales considerably, though.

"Give me some good news on your canvass, Sarge," Mike said to a stocky black cop filling out a report in the open door of his double-parked police van.

He looked up, his face disappointed.

Good, I thought. Disappointment was good.

"We got an Amelia Phelps, eighty-year-old African American lady lives in that rattletrap over there," the sergeant said, pointing to a vinyl-sided Victorian on the corner.

"She said she saw a car park near her driveway," the sergeant continued, "and a man carrying something out of the trunk."

"White, black, Hispanic?" Mike asked. A loud shout interrupted him.

"THAT'S WHAT YOU GET!"

It was one of the hoodies in front of the bodega. His arms and hands were outstretched.

"FIVE-0 FINALLY GOT WHAT'S COMIN' TO 'EM!" he yelled again. " 'BOUT TIME!"

Mike moved out into the street at the bodega so quickly I had to jog to keep up.

"What was that?" he said, putting a hand to his ear as he ducked under the crime-scene tape and closed in on the men in front of the store.

Most of the St. James sales personnel had wisely dispersed down the block, but the rabble-rouser, a thin, green-eyed, light-skinned Hispanic, inexplicably stood his ground. He looked to be in his early twenties.

"What? You don't like hearin' the truth?" he said as he cocked his little bantam rooster head at Mike. "Then, do somethin' about it, chump."

Mike picked up the metal garbage can off the corner and threw it at the guy, two-handed like a basketball pass. Its steel-rimmed side knocked the punk instantly on his back and into the gutter. Mike lifted the can and turned it upside down, burying the kid in garbage.

"How's that for somethin'?" he said.

"He's nothing," I whispered into my partner's ear after I caught up. "You want to get jammed up over this mope? Open your eyes, Mike. There's bosses everywhere."

Mike rubbed the vein throbbing at his temple as he finally let me walk him away.

"You're right. You're right, partner," he mumbled with his head down. "Sorry, I lost it."

That's when I remembered.

Mike was a second-generation cop whose father had been killed in the line of duty. His dad had been a transit cop, and he'd walked into a subway car where a rape was in progress and was shot in the face. It was one of the few cop murders in the history of the NYPD that had never been solved.

So there actually was one thing that could rile my even-tempered partner, I thought as I pulled him toward the witness's house.

A dead cop.

Things just kept getting better and better.

HERE WAS OUR WITNESS. And what exactly had she seen?

Amelia Phelps, tiny, elderly, and black, was a retired Bronx High School of Science English teacher.

"Would you like some tea?" she inquired with perfect diction as she brought us into her dusty, threadbare parlor. Books covered every surface and were piled chest-high like trash in a landfill.

"That's okay, Mrs. Phelps," Mike said, taking out his bifocals and putting them on.

"Ms. Phelps," she corrected him.

"Sorry," Mike said. "Ms. Phelps, as you know, a police officer was found dead in the park. We're the detectives conducting the investigation. Can you help us?"

"The car I saw was a Toyota," Ms. Phelps said. "A Camry, I believe, and a recent model. The man who exited it was white, five eleven maybe. He wore glasses and dark clothing.

"At first, I thought he was here for the same unfortunate reason most Caucasians visit our community; namely, the purchase of illegal drugs from our neighborhood boys. But then, oddly, I saw him open the back door of his car and emerge with a large something rolled up in a blue sheet. It could very well have been a body. He returned approximately five minutes later, empty-handed, and drove away."

When I glanced at Mike, he looked as happily astonished as I felt dismayed.

Because this Bronx witness, this former schoolteacher, was a rare species indeed. We'd done midday gas station shootings where not one of twenty people had seen anything. Drive-bys of weddings where both sides of the family hadn't seen or heard a thing. Now, here we had a middle-of-the-night dump job in a drug spot, ostensibly the most difficult of all homicides to solve, and we run into photographic-memory Grandma.