Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

“I need your help,” I tell Patti when she’s finally calmed down. “Carla took one in the shoulder. I think she’s fine. But that’s two of us, two GSWs.”

“Two mandatory reports,” she says, wiping her face. “And you want me to be the responding officer.”

“Yeah. We’ll figure it out tomorrow. We’ll get the paperwork cleaned up—”

“Fuck the paperwork and tell me what happened.”

I give her the Reader’s Digest version. The ambush. Two dead, one escaped, only known name is Disco. Sosh putting together a strike team right now.

“And if I told you that you’re done for the night, Detective, that you have to go home and take it easy? No—that’s what I thought,” she says.

“Night’s not over,” I say. “Stay here with Viviana. We need a patrol officer to keep her here. She’s gonna need detox, or in a few hours she’s gonna be tearing her skin off.”

“I’ll make it happen. Where you going?”

I’m going to see Carla, if she can be seen.

Takes me a minute, but I find the trauma doc, an Indian woman named Siddiqui. “It’s a clean through-and-through,” she says. “We’ve controlled the bleeding. She won’t need surgery.”

“I need to see her.”

“She’ll be groggy. Might be asleep.” The doctor leads me down a hall, pulls on the curtain.

Carla is upright on the bed, her head lolled to the right, eyes closed. Peaceful. A large bundle of gauze and tape on her shoulder, still the bandage on the side of her face, too. Beaten and battered. But no longer feeling pain.

She opens her eyes when I walk in. “Hey.”

“You’re gonna be fine, they say.” I take her hand, squeeze it.

“You need to know,” she says. “You need to be ready for him.”

“Okay. You able to do it right now?”

She nods, faintly.

“Then go,” I say. “We don’t have time.”

“You remember a skell named Trino DeJesus?”

“Trino,” I say. “Ran meth in the south suburbs. The meth king. Worked outta Cal City.”

She nods.

“Narcotics took him down about, what, three years ago?” I say. “Huge bust. Wiped out his whole operation.”

Now I make the connection. She worked undercover in Narcotics.

“So you worked Trino’s case,” I say. “You were one of the UCs?”

She allows a smile to play on her face, only briefly. “I was the UC. I was Trino’s girl.”

“Whoa. You got next to Trino?”

“Yeah,” she says, “and that’s where it all went to shit.”

Chapter 100

IT WAS an unexpected promotion. Carla was undercover as a junkie, cozying up to one of Trino’s lieutenants, whatever scraps of information she could vacuum up. But then Trino, he sees her in a nightclub, takes a shine to her, decides that she belongs to him. Even kills the guy she was seeing, one of his own profitable lieutenants, to make sure her loyalty is undivided.

So all of a sudden, she’s living with the guy running a twenty-million-dollar meth operation, about as deep as deep undercover gets.

The good news: she learns a lot.

The bad news: she’s in role, and if you’re playing a meth junkie, you score meth. That’s old hat for a UC, buying the dope and dumping it, or transferring it to your handler for evidence. You don’t actually take the shit. The department has rules.

There are rules, and there’s reality. Especially when your boyfriend is supplying the meth, and he’s the protective, jealous type who has eyes on you practically 24-7.

“I started scoring meth,” she says. “I couldn’t fake it. So next thing I know, the junkie I’m playing? I’m not playing anymore.”

You hear about UCs working Narcotics ending up with addiction problems themselves. The department feigns sympathy, puts you in rehab, but that sticker goes on your file. You’re damaged goods.

You get a brick on your career.

Doesn’t matter you had to take the dope to keep your cover. Doesn’t matter you got inside the operation, a tremendous coup for the department. Doesn’t matter you risked your life every second of every minute of every day, smuggling information out to your people. Doesn’t matter you’re almost single-handedly responsible for taking down one of the most notorious drug empires in the last decade.

No—if people find out you’re a junkie, you’re radioactive on the job.

“So what did you do when it was over?” I ask. “After the bust?”

“I kept using, that’s what I did. I was a cop with a drug habit. Didn’t take long before I was caught. Got me on video, buying it and scoring it.”

“The feds?”

“IAB,” she says. “Denny Porter.”

Porter. Don’t know him. Heard the name, heard some bad things.

“He gave me two choices. Door number one, I go down. Maybe some time in prison, but either way, I lose my star, my pension, my benefits. But most of all…” She can’t even finish the sentence.

“Most of all, Samuel,” I say. “And door number two?” As if I don’t know.

“He puts me to work. Be his eyes and ears. I gotta get well first, though. Three months of rehab, such as it was. Porter arranged it himself.”

“Sweet of him.”

“Right, but I’m no good to him with a rehab sticker on my file. So we call it cancer. I take a leave for chemotherapy, come back, and say I’m cured. Porter had a doctor who played ball, signed all the paperwork.” She smirks. “All he really did was transfer my addiction from one thing to another.”

Ah. Okay. “So those pills you take, they aren’t ginger pills. There’s no cancer or chemotherapy.”

“No better liar in the world than an addict,” she says. “But I’m clean of meth. I haven’t scored since that rehab. Three years clean.”

“Good. That’s great.”

“The pills are dextroamphetamine.”

“Dex,” I say. Speed. Uppers. Makes sense. You can get addicted, but you’re far more functional than a meth head would ever be.

“Porter’s my supplier. Even makes them look like ginger pills. Probably uses the same doctor who did the bullshit paperwork. He must have something on that guy.”

“They help, those pills?”

“They help with the cravings, yeah,” she says.

“You still have cravings for meth?”

She almost laughs. “Harney,” she says, “I crave meth every waking hour of every day. Only now I crave dex, too.”

“Jesus, kid. Jesus, I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry.” She breaks eye contact, blinks away the tears. “Porter’s had his eye on you. He’s been real concerned about your interest in Evie. I was feeding him updates. I didn’t think much of it. I mean, the K-Town shooting was a turf war, right? Evie, she was just collateral damage. That’s what I thought, at least. Until that video from Latham Jackson.”

The video that made it pretty damn clear that the shooters had nothing to do with warring street gangs.

“So I went to Porter and called bullshit. I said now it looked like K-Town was all about the dead girl, not a drug war.”

“And I bet he had an answer,” I say. “Let me guess. I was a corrupt cop.”

“Fronting for a rival sex-trafficking ring,” she says. “He says he’s this close to busting you and I should steer far away from it. Told me to call in sick. Gave me some money and sent me to a water park in Wisconsin for a long weekend. He said it would all be over by then.”

“But you didn’t go.”

“I pretended to. I drove my mother-in-law and Samuel to Rockford, put them up in a hotel for a few days until I could figure this out.” She lifts her good shoulder. “I didn’t trust Porter. And I trusted you.”

And she saved my ass. I’m dead on that gymnasium floor if not for her.