Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

Please come back, Billy. You got this far. You survived this much.

It’s been two and a half months since it happened. Two surgeries. The prognosis grim. The doctor explained it to all of them, the whole family—Patti and her brothers and her father—as though he were teaching a class. With a brain injury, he said, it’s like real estate. Location, location, location .

Nobody thought that was cute.

Some good news here, the doc said. The bullet traveled a straight front-to-back trajectory. It didn’t cross the midline, didn’t hit the brain stem or thalamus. It looks like it injured only one hemisphere and only one lobe. It was a low-velocity bullet, and the path was quite linear. There was no yaw, he said. Think of a football moving through the air in a tight spiral versus wobbling. This bullet was a tight spiral, with no wobble.

Patti had furiously scribbled down these words like a secretary taking dictation, not that she really knew what any of it meant. The only words that really registered with her were some good news .

The bad news, the doctor said, is that Billy actually lost brain activity for quite some time, as much as thirty minutes, which was why the responding police officers and paramedics initially thought Billy was dead. He was dead. And then he came back to life. It happens, the doctor said, but not very often.

The long and short: Billy has already beaten tremendous odds. But the truth is that he’s very unlikely to survive, and if he does, we have no way of knowing what kind of damage was done to his brain. We can guess, but we won’t really know until he regains consciousness.

“He’s going to make it,” says Patti. “And he’s gonna be better than ever.”

“Damn straight,” says Aiden.

“He’ll probably be a bigger pain in the ass than ever,” Brendan adds.

“He’ll be like Rain Man or something. He’ll be doing multiplication tables in his head. Like he wasn’t already smarter than the rest of us combined.”

That last part is true. Billy had a mind that never stopped calculating, always ten steps ahead of everyone else—

No, he has that mind, not had . He’s coming back. He’s going to come back. He has to.

“I can’t sit here doing nothing,” she says.

“You’re not doing nothing,” says Brendan. “You’re staying with Billy.”

“I’m gonna get some air.” She pushes open the door and comes upon her father in the hallway.

“Check again,” he says into his cell phone. “I said check again. I don’t care. That can’t be right.” He punches off the phone and turns and sees Patti. “Oh, sweetheart—”

“What can’t be right?”

Her father tucks his phone into his pocket, as if hiding the phone will hide the secret.

“Patti, go home and take a shower. Get some sleep. I promise I’ll—”

“What can’t be right, Dad?” She holds her ground.

Her father looks terrible, just as run-down as the rest of the family. The last two weeks have aged him considerably.

“Ballistics,” he says. “It must be a screwup.”

“Tell me, Dad.”

“I…they…it…it can’t—” Her father takes Patti in his arms. He’s hugged her more in the last two weeks than he has in her entire life, even when Mom died, six years ago.

He whispers in her ear. “I’m sure it’s a mistake,” he said. “Ballistics came back on the shooting. Amy Lentini wasn’t shot by Kate’s gun. She was shot by Billy’s gun.”

Patti pushes herself away from her dad. “What?”

Her father nods. His eyes fall to the ground. “They say the first person to fire a gun in that room was Billy. He shot Amy, then turned the gun on Kate, who fired back at the same time.”

She feels herself backpedaling. “No…no…I…no.”

“It can’t be right.” Her father, the chief of detectives, runs a hand through his grimy hair. “It just can’t be right.”

Twenty-One

PATTI LOSES track of time, marching the hallways of the hospital, not wanting to roam too far from Billy but unable to sit still.

None of this is right. The whole scene at Amy’s apartment. And now they’re saying Billy fired first? Billy killed Amy Lentini?

No, it can’t be. She knows it’s not true.

Now you really have to come back, Billy. You have to say what happened. You have to clear your name. You can’t let this be how you’re remembered. You have to come back, you have to come back, or all this will be my fault—

Wait. How long—how long has she been gone? What if the doctor comes? That would be just her luck—she sits in that damn room for more than ten hours, but then the fucking doctor shows up in the brief window of time when she walks out. I’ll bet that happened. I’ll bet he decides to waltz in while I’m gone—

She finds the elevator and stabs at the button so many times she’s sure she’s killed it.

“Come on!” she shouts at the elevator. Heads turn all around her.

Screw you guys. You try losing your brother, the only person who ever really understood you, the only person you’ve ever trusted in this miserable world, and tell me how well behaved you’d be—

The elevator doors slide open. Two elderly patients inside in wheelchairs, younger family members behind them.

Please don’t leave me, Billy. And now—what they’re saying about you. I know it’s not true. Help me clear your name. Come back to me, Billy; please come back, please come back, or all this will be my fault—

The door pops open. She races down the hallway, knocking into a tray of food, mumbling an apology—

At the door, at Billy’s door, a woman in scrubs. African American, cornrows, a petite figure.

“Doctor,” she calls out.

The woman turns. Dressed in surgical scrubs, yes, but she’s no doctor.

She’s Kim Beans, the reporter for ChicagoPC, the online newspaper covering politics and crime in Chicago. The rag that, last winter and this spring, dripped out a name each day, one at a time—celebrities who were caught patronizing the now infamous brownstone on the Gold Coast where the mayor was arrested.

“Patti?” she says. “Hi!”

“You.” Patti’s hands ball into fists.

A beautiful woman, yes, once destined to be a major star on the Chicago television news scene before it was discovered that she got a little too cozy with the subject of a story she was handling, a local kidnapping. She probably figured the brownstone-brothel story was going to get her back in the good graces of the Chicago news media.

If all Kim did was leak celebrity names from that brownstone, Patti would just chalk her up as another media jackal.

But she will never forgive Kim for what she did to Billy.

“Hang on, Patti. I’m on your side.”

“You’re not on anybody’s side but your own.” Patti gets up close and personal with Kim. “You have five seconds to walk out of here, or I’ll have you arrested.”

“You’re gonna arrest a reporter?”

“You mean a trespasser. Disguised as a surgeon. A reporter who doesn’t have the right to barge into the ICU to interview the family. Or to snap photos of a man in a coma—”

“I just want your side of it.”

“Five seconds,” says Patti. “One…two…three…”

“Patti—”

“Four…”

“Listen to me, Patti.”

Patti slaps Kim hard across the face, a satisfying, full-palm smack. Kim almost falls over in the process, looks back at Patti with fire in her eyes.

“Five,” says Patti.

“I can be your friend or your enemy,” Kim says. “Don’t forget that.”