Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

They decide on the back door. Disco is the expert on locks, having focused more on covert work with Berkut than Nicolas, whose talents for brutality made him better suited to interrogations and torture.

Behind him, Nicolas and Trev are quiet, tense. Weapons out. Like Disco, each of them wears rubber gloves.

Disco works the dead bolt open, turns the knob, opens it a crack while keeping hold of the knob, not letting the latch snap back. Listens for an alarm.

No alarm.

There’s a chain on the door, though. Disco could kick in the door, as he often would in Ukraine, boldly asserting himself, but this isn’t that kind of moment. You don’t do that in America unless you’re a cop.

He uses bolt cutters to snap the chain. Stops. Listens. Hears no sounds from the darkness inside.

Turns and nods to his men.

He pushes the door open and quickly walks through a small kitchen, the sink filled with dishes. Hears the faint sounds of canned laughter, identifies it as a television, moves toward the sound.

The bedroom. A man and woman, asleep, illuminated by the television’s light.

The man is in his twenties, African American, with braids, dyed bright red, tight against his head. The woman is—well, who knows? Who cares?

The man awakens with a start just as Disco sticks the SIG Sauer, suppressor attached, into his face, grabs a braid, and holds him down.

“Hello, Junior,” he says, so this man, wide-eyed and terrified, will understand that Disco knows his name, or at least his nickname.

Nicolas grabs the woman, covers her mouth with a gloved hand, holds her down, looks at Disco expectantly.

“Where are your car keys, Junior?” Disco asks.

Junior angles his head to the right, to Disco’s left.

“Ah, look at this, right on the nightstand.”

“Let me do it,” Nicolas says in Ukrainian to Disco, holding the woman down. “A few minutes, at least.”

This is no time for getting your jollies, but as Disco thinks about it, it could help paint the picture. “Go ahead,” he tells Nicolas in Ukrainian. “But keep your pants on. Just use your hands. And keep the gloves on.”

No DNA, in other words.

Disco turns on the man, Junior. “If you stay quiet, I will let you live,” he says.

Junior, sweaty and breathless, nods once.

Disco stuffs a handkerchief in Junior’s mouth. Then he shoots him in the shoulder, the sound muted by the suppressor, the man’s cries by the cloth in his mouth as he bucks and squirms. Disco shoots him in the other shoulder, all but disabling his upper body.

Nicolas, with his free hand, lands a solid punch to the woman’s face, the sound of bones crunching, then switches hands, holding down her head with his right hand while yanking down the bedsheet with his left. The woman thrashes about as Nicolas forces his hand between her legs.

Christmas came early for Nicolas this year. An unexpected bonus.

“My friend is going to have some fun with your girlfriend,” says Disco. “What do you think about that, Junior?”

Junior is about to go into shock, his eyes turning glassy while he makes guttural sounds through the handkerchief.

Disco shoots him in the upper right thigh. Then the other. Junior’s mouth opens, letting out another scream but then gagging on the handkerchief as it moves toward his throat.

Trev is standing back, keeping an eye on the scene.

Nicolas is doing a serviceable job of muting the woman’s screams with his hand, but it’s getting to be too much. They’ve made their point.

“Enough!” Disco stands up, holds the tip of the SIG’s suppressor against Junior’s head, and puts him out for good.

“A few more minutes,” Nicolas says, enjoying himself.

“No.” Disco aims the pistol at the woman. “No.”

Nicolas steps off the bed, panting like an animal himself, his eyes wild. Disco puts a suppressed bullet through the woman’s temple.

“Let’s go,” he says. “We have to hurry.”

Back outside, Disco pulls the paper bag out of his pocket, which still contains the cigarette butt that was left for him. He drops the butt on the back porch. Then they find Junior’s car, an old beater Ford sedan parked in the rear. Disco uses the car keys to pop the trunk. He removes the floorboard and finds the spot where the spare tire would normally be.

Nicolas, who went to their car, returns now, holding the AR-15 that Disco used in the K-Town shooting. Disco drops the assault rifle in the trunk, replaces the floorboard, closes the lid, returns the car keys to the bedroom.

Then they get the hell out of there. They drive back to the northwest side of the city in silence. Disco returns to the same alley, to the same garage, places the SIG and the suppressor back in the paper bag, and puts the bag back up in the enclosure of the garage door opener, just where he found it.

There, he thinks to himself. Porter can take it from here.

This better be fucking over now.

Chapter 21

VALERIE?

You call out her name, your voice shaky, your throat clogged with emotion. You just kissed your little angelic daughter, your beautiful Janey, for the last time, said your good-bye at the hospital.

And her mother wasn’t there.

She’s dealing with it, you tell yourself. Dealing with it in her own way.

But she couldn’t have been there? She couldn’t have answered your phone calls?

These thoughts while you climb the steps of your home, calling out her name again.

Valerie. Valerie.

Open the bedroom door. Empty. Light’s on in the bathroom.

Valerie, you whisper.

You know it, somehow, before you reach the bathroom, before you see her legs. Her body turned awkwardly to the side. Blood spatter on the walls.

The gun, your service weapon, in her limp hand.

I draw a gasp of air, my eyes popping open, stinging from sweat. I push myself from the drenched pillow, shivering as I sit up, checking my phone for the time. My alarm was just about to go off anyway, so at least my nightmares have good timing these days.

I head into the bathroom and turn on the shower, my body reeking from slimy perspiration, my mouth dry as dirt. My heartbeat slowly decelerates, my breathing evens out, as I put my face under the pulsating water and let it wash everything away.

They’ve been dead for four years. You’ve had four years to get past it .

And so much has happened since then. I returned to the job; I even fell for another woman; I was almost killed; I stood trial for murder; I unearthed a scandal that took down all kinds of major players. Why am I back to having nightmares about Valerie? I never stopped thinking about her, of course; not one day has passed that I haven’t. But it’s like her death is front and center again for some reason. Why? I’ve got the whole freakin’ city breathing down my neck to solve this murder, and I’m dreaming about Valerie again.

“Why now?” I whisper. “Why are you back?”

Chapter 22

TODAY’S THE day. We’re already well into the twenty-four-hour cease-fire that Andre Oliver promised us. And the protest rally, for which the city is already preparing, is tomorrow.

Praying that my meeting with Jericho Hooper will bear fruit.

The sky is a brilliant orange as I drive to the station just before six in the morning, sipping a large black coffee, no more than three hours of sleep under my belt.

The front pages of the Trib and Sun-Times are all about LaTisha, all about the gang violence, all about the new Special Operations Section, all about how black people have to live in drug-infested, violent neighborhoods, with cops only paying lip service to their problems.

I don’t know a single cop who doesn’t care about what’s happening on the West Side. We see the victims, and it hurts. We go after the perpetrators and okay, sometimes we go overboard, maybe because we can’t get out of our heads the images of dead children or drugged-up addicts choking on their own vomit. Sometimes we cross lines. We pay for that. Courts throw out evidence. People hold up their smartphones and record us. Then we can’t solve cases, so people stop helping us. They figure, Why should we, if it’s gonna be for nothing? Why stick our necks out, even risk our lives, to bear witness against criminals who aren’t going to be caught anyway?