Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

“I’m not suggesting anything,” said Billy. “I’m saying it outright.”

The blood rushed to Driscoll’s face so fast it was like his head had been placed in a microwave. “You want to go for unpaid leave, Detective?”

“You don’t have cause to put me on unpaid. If you could’ve, you would’ve. You try to do that, you’ll be embarrassed. We both know it.” Billy stepped forward, put his hands on the supe’s desk. “You’re a politician trying to save his own ass. If the mayor goes down, you’re out of a job, too. You’re no cop. You’re a fucking coward.”

Billy dropped his badge down on the desk so hard it popped off the desk and fell to the floor. He watched Kate painfully surrender hers, too, without a word.

“Let me know when you’re ready to talk,” said Amy Lentini with a gleam in her eye, having the time of her life.

“Oh, I’ll be in touch, Amy,” he said on his way out. “You can count on that.”

Nineteen

BILLY STOOD inside the coffee shop on Ohio Street, staring at the storefront real estate agency across the street. In the window was a picture of a smiling racially mixed family, the father shaking hands with the agent who just sold them a home with a nice white picket fence, the family about to live happily ever after.

He remembered happily ever after. It didn’t end so happily.

Goldie passed by the window, walking carefully on the treacherous sidewalk, still slick with ice, his breath trailing behind him like smoke from an engine.

He walked into the coffee shop and sidled up to Billy without a word.

“Rough day,” he said. “Sorry for your troubles.”

“It’s okay. I’ve been meaning to catch up on my needlepoint.”

“You talk to your pop yet?” he asked.

Billy shook his head. “Four voice mails from him.”

“He’s worried sick about you. You should call him back.”

Maybe. Billy’s father, Daniel Harney, the chief of detectives, prided himself on two things—that two of his kids were cops and that neither of them used nepotism to get there. Everything you earn, you earn on merit, not because your dad’s a superior.

That was fine. Billy wouldn’t want it any other way. But sometimes Pop took it too far—his desire to avoid favoritism at all costs created a distance, a canyon between them. When Billy made the big arrest earlier this week, every cop he knew showered him with praise, either at the Hole or in text messages, phone calls, shout-outs—everyone except his father.

“Anyway,” said Billy. “You got anything for me?”

Goldie blew out a sigh, which meant no. “The place is tighter than a nun’s legs right now. Best I can tell, it’s what we’ve been thinking. The supe is trying to save the mayor, and the only way he knows how is to cook you and Kate.”

“I don’t even get that,” said Billy. “Even if I did steal some little black book, it doesn’t change the fact that the mayor had his dick where it didn’t belong.”

Goldie didn’t answer. Didn’t even draw a breath. Billy looked at him.

“Even if,” Goldie mimicked. “You mean, like, hypothetically.”

Billy resumed his stare out the window. People bundled thoroughly from head to toe, shoulders tight, heads down, like they were under attack from the elements.

“Even if you stole a little black book,” Goldie said.

Lieutenant Mike Goldberger was the smartest man he knew.

“Let me ask you something,” said Goldie. “How well do you know Kate?”

“Better than she knows herself.”

“You trust her?”

“Yeah.” Billy thought more about that, nodded. “Yeah, I do.”

“You don’t like her for this black book?”

“No. I don’t see her taking it.”

“She had opportunity. She handled the search, right?”

That was true. Billy remembered seeing Kate in the office upstairs in the brownstone, going through the cabinets and drawers.

“I don’t see it,” said Billy.

“How well does she know you?”

Billy shrugged.

“You know what I’m asking,” Goldie said.

“She doesn’t know about me.” Billy shook his head. “Nobody knows. Nobody but you and me.”

Outside, on Ohio Street, a cab screeched to a halt just short of the truck in front of it.

“You sure about that?” Goldie asked.

“Yeah, Goldie. I think I would remember if I’d told my partner that I work undercover for Internal Affairs. I think that would, y’know, stand out in my mind.”

“Okay, okay.” Goldie put a hand on Billy’s shoulder, gripped it tight. “What about your sister?”

“No,” he said. “Patti doesn’t know.”

“Your pop?”

“You tell me, Goldilocks.”

Goldie drew back. “If your father knew that you were my guy inside the detectives’ bureau, he’d string my undies up on a coat hook.”

Billy looked at Goldie. “You think that’s what this is all about, though? You think someone knows I’m with you? You think this thing with the mayor is just an excuse to stop me?”

That, of course, was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Goldie returned a poker face.

“I sure as hell hope not,” he said. “Because if it is, losing your job is the least of your worries.”

The Present

Twenty

“IT JUST doesn’t make sense,” says Patti Harney as she paces back and forth, making herself crazy, unable to contain her thoughts or control her emotions. The last two weeks she’s felt like a pilot trying to navigate through meteors hurtling at her from every direction. Even though it’s the middle of June, she hasn’t seen sunlight for more than a week and sometimes loses track of whether it’s day or night.

“Well, this is definitely not my area.” Her brother Brendan, the oldest child in the family, is a financial planner who moved to Dallas when he fell in love with a Texas girl after college. Brendan rolls his neck and grimaces. He’s been sleeping, if you can call stretching out on a chair and catching a couple hours of shut-eye “sleep.” He’s wearing a shirt he’s had on for the past two days, the collar and armpits stained with sweat, his hair sticking up like it used to when they were kids after a wrestling skirmish between him and the second oldest, Aiden. They used to spend entire days trying to pin each other to the basement floor.

Speak of the devil: Aiden comes out of the bathroom, having splashed water on his face and run some through his hair—as always, too long for Patti’s taste, as if anyone asked her opinion. Aiden is divorced and lives in Saint Louis, where he manages a gym. Why he didn’t move back to Chicago after he split with his ex Patti never understood.

“What’s not your area?” Aiden asks.

“How all this happened,” says Brendan. “The shooting.”

“We still talking about that?”

“She is.” Brendan flips his hand toward Patti. “Pop says it’s obvious what happened. Kate walks in on Billy in bed with this woman Amy, and she goes crazy and starts shooting. She kills Amy, but Billy manages to get a round off before she shoots him.”

“I don’t believe that,” says Patti. “I just don’t.”

“Does it matter?” Aiden wipes a towel over his face. He’s a workout fanatic, which makes the choice of managing a gym a good one for him. His gray Russell Athletic T-shirt is probably two sizes too small for him. He has the bent ears of a former wrestler and looks like he could still be one. He walks over to the bed in the room and gently grips Billy’s ankle over the bedsheet. “All that matters is that our boy is way too tough to let a single fuckin’ bullet keep him down.”

Patti looks over at Billy, who looks like another person—not her brother, not Billy—his head wrapped, hooked up to tubes and machines and monitors. A portion of his skull was removed to lessen the swelling in his brain. These people actually have part of his skull on ice somewhere in this hospital.