Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

“Still want that lawyer, Augustina?” I ask. “Or do you wanna tell us where Disco is and have a chance to stay out of prison and live a normal life?”

“You have one minute to make a decision,” says Agent Foster. “Make a smart one.”

Augustina looks back and forth between us, doing the math in her head, the pros and cons. “I do not know where he is,” she says. “He is afraid. Afraid of the general. He will…he will run.”

“Run where?”

“I do not know where he will run.”

I give that a moment. It’s her instinct to clam up, but how far her loyalty to Disco goes is something I can’t know.

“Disco’s in a world of shit right now,” I remind her. “Everything’s crashing around him. Your operation here is down the toilet. And yet he didn’t reach out to you, did he? Didn’t warn you. Didn’t call or text you. Didn’t say ‘Run, Augustina, get the hell out, the cops are coming.’ Nothing like that.”

I hold up her cell phone, which I’ve already reviewed—no recent communications from Disco or any unidentified caller.

“Why not?” I ask. “I’ll tell you why not. Because he doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t give one shit about you.”

She breaks eye contact. Hard words to hear, but she can’t argue with the logic.

I bend over, hands on my knees, so we are eye to eye.

“So, Augustina,” I say, “why are you protecting him ?”

Chapter 106

DISCO DRIVES toward the house on Mayfield Avenue, on the southwest side of town, slowing as he gets within a block, listening for sirens, looking up at the dark sky for any illuminations or flashing colors. Nothing. Nothing but dark sky.

He passes Mayfield Avenue, where he’d normally turn, and instead turns into the alley on the next block over. He kills the lights, rolls the car forward, and stops.

Limps between two houses on the opposite side of Mayfield, peeks out to his left, to the house where he keeps his money. A small A-frame bungalow with a detached garage.

The front porch light is off.

The light over the garage is off.

The house is completely dark.

Disco limps back to his car, lights still off, backs out of the alley. He once again passes Mayfield, this time to the east, and turns down that alley.

Again, no sign of police.

He kills the lights, gets out of the car. Puts on his night-vision goggles again. Checks again that the suppressor is securely attached to his handgun.

Limps toward the middle of the alley, toward the back of his stash house. Stops when he reaches it. Turns and looks.

The small backyard of the house. The detached garage. Empty.

He listens. No sounds, at least nothing out of the ordinary. A plane passes low overhead on its way to Midway airport. He uses the cover of that sound to inch forward along the side of the garage, everything lit up in fluorescent green.

Sweat dripping inside his goggles. His foot screaming at him again, intense pain, but he can’t let it affect him now.

He reaches the edge of the garage, seeing the concrete driveway where he’d normally park his car before getting out to open the locked garage door.

But there’s no car there, obviously, because he came around the back way on foot.

Nothing but a dark driveway.

And a man crouched down among the bushes on the other side, gun in his right hand, flashlight in the left. A cop.

A cop who didn’t consider that Disco might have night vision.

Disco takes a breath, readies himself, and steps into the clearing. He fires twice, thwip-thwip with the suppressor, aiming for the upper right torso.

Dennis Porter yelps in pain and falls backward. Little chance he could still hold the gun with two gunshot wounds to the right shoulder, but Disco takes no chances, moving as quickly as his bum foot will allow, shooting Porter in the left foot, then the right foot, thwip-thwip, to occupy him while Disco closes the distance.

Porter cries out in pain again as Disco reaches him.

The gun is clear of Porter’s hand.

“Wait, wait…wait…we can figure this out.”

Disco falls to his knees, grateful to relieve the stress on his foot, and puts the muzzle of the gun against Porter’s cheek.

“Tying up loose ends?” he asks. “Was this the idea, Denny? I pull up in my car and you ambush me? This was your plan?”

“No, no, that wasn’t—”

Disco leans forward. “That garage light is never off, Denny. If you hadn’t unscrewed it, then you might have surprised me.”

“Listen to me, lis—”

Disco sticks the gun in Porter’s mouth to shut him up. “I don’t have time, Denny. I have to leave. I don’t want to kill you. It would make no sense. It does not help me. But I need to know. Does Harney know my name yet?”

Porter shakes his head.

“Did you tell him about the ambush, Denny? Did he know we were waiting for him?”

He shakes his head again.

“No? He brought someone along. A woman. Did you not assure me that Harney would be coming alone?”

Porter tries to talk, which isn’t easy to do with the gun’s suppressor in his mouth. So Disco pulls back the weapon.

“I don’t know. His sister, maybe. His partner left town.”

Hard to know if he can believe him. Doesn’t really matter at this point.

“I’m the only one…can help you outta this,” Porter says, two clean holes in his shoulder, just outside the bulletproof vest, his sweaty face balled up in pain and desperation. “I can misdirect everything. Keep them off your scent. Keep them off mine, too. Please, just— please let me do that.”

Disco puts the gun back in Porter’s mouth.

“Denny, I’m going to leave now. For good. But someday, my friend, when it’s safe, I’m going to come back here. I’m going to find your family. Your wife, your daughter, your son.”

Porter shakes his head, tries to scream, gags as Disco shoves the gun further still into his mouth.

“Your wife, she’ll beg me to spare the children. She will do anything I ask. And I will ask, Denny. I am going to violate her every way a man can violate a woman. And when I am done, when my cock is so sore I cannot possibly penetrate her again, she is going to watch while I set your children on fire.”

Porter tries to lunge forward, but there’s nothing he can do but make begging sounds.

“And I will tell your children, while I am raping their mother, that all this is because of their father, Captain Dennis Porter.”

He leans forward, so close he’s almost nose to nose.

“Their late father,” he says.

He pulls the trigger.

Chapter 107

DISCO LEAVES Porter dead in the bushes. This house isn’t registered in Disco’s name. Disco has no connection to it.

He limps over to the garage door, grateful now that Porter went to the trouble to unscrew the light above the garage. Better to do this in darkness, so nobody can see him but, with his night vision, he can see everyone.

He punches the code on the garage’s keypad, unlocking the door and disabling the alarm. He lifts the door and enters the garage, grabs the ladder off a hook on the wall, and places it in the center of the floor.

He climbs up to the ceiling, hard as it is with his bad foot, unlocks the bolt, and pulls down the door. Reaches up and feels for the gym bag, pulls it closer.

Inside the bag, a fake passport, baseball cap and glasses, a travel set of toiletries. And thirty thousand in cash.

He climbs down, doesn’t bother moving the ladder. The bag in one hand, his handgun in the other.

His phone buzzes in his pocket. Not his normal one—his burner. A text message.

He hikes the gym bag over his shoulder. Porter’s dead. Nicolas and Trev, too. There’s only one other person who has the number for this burner.