Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

Patti looks up from her phone. “Morning, sunshine.” She leans over and carefully kisses my forehead. My head is shaved and heavily bandaged—the top of my skull is still sitting in a mason jar somewhere—and I’m still connected to tubes and electrodes and machines. They’re feeding me, monitoring my brain and heart functions, even massaging my limbs with electric pulses so I don’t lose circulation.

“Kate,” I say again, my eyes level with hers. “Please.”

Patti’s eyes drift about, considering the question. We are alone in the room. Not even Goldie’s here.

She tries to touch my face, my head, but there’s nowhere to place her hand. Her eyes well up with tears. She has probably cried enough to fill Niagara Falls. I’m sorry to do this to her, but I need to know, and I know she’ll tell me if nobody’s around to stop her.

“Kate’s dead, Billy. The shooting. You survived, she didn’t.”

Something expels from my mouth. A low moan.

I thought this was coming. It was hard to think of another reason why Kate wouldn’t have been here to visit me. But hearing it—confirming it—something snaps inside me like a twig.

“We aren’t sure what happened,” she tells me.

I let her down. I was supposed to cover her back. That’s what a partner does. I didn’t do that.

Oh, Kate. Oh, Kate…

“Who…who…”

Patti watches me, dreading the question. Injured brain or not, I can read her like a book. She knows what I’m trying to ask: Who killed Kate?

“We don’t know what happened,” she repeats, this time less convincingly, a robotic repetition, like a shield against further inquiry. “We don’t know.”

The more she says it, the clearer it is to me that she’s lying. And why would she lie about that? Why wouldn’t she want me to know who shot Kate?

No. No. It can’t be.

Poison through my veins, a weight crushing my chest, stealing my breath. Some of the machines start making noises, bells and whistles. Patti pushes a button and calls for the nurse.

The door pops open, and doctors and nurses rush in.

Before Patti steps aside, she leans into me.

“Whatever anyone tries to tell you about what happened,” she whispers, “don’t believe it.”

Twenty-Five

“THIS IS a bad idea,” says Patti. “It’s a terrible idea.”

It’s the best idea I’ve had in the fourteen weeks I’ve been here.

I fit my arm through the sleeve of my button-down shirt. “I don’t care. I’m not spending another night in this place.”

Nothing against the hospital, which has treated me more than well. The room to which I was transferred had a window overlooking the lake, which was nice, though it reminded me of the view from Kate’s condo in Lakeview. The people doing my rehab were good souls, too, exhibiting more patience with me than they would with a child, coaxing me into “one more step” or one more bicep curl with a ten-pound weight or one more recitation of “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” or one more round of counting backwards from 20.

It was brutal at first, but they got me back on my feet. I can dress myself and feed myself and walk (albeit with a cane). I can speak in full sentences and read and write. My vision is almost as good as it used to be. My sense of humor, for better or worse, is still intact.

And my skull is fully reattached, thank you very much. My hair is growing back a little straighter than it was before and right now is the length of a buzz cut. I have lost about twenty pounds. I have a scar where the bullet entered my brain, but the rest of the repairs the doctors did to my noggin are covered by hair. Yes, if you look closely enough, you can see scars that read like a road map all across the top and back of my skull, but I can live with it. The fact that I can live at all, I realize, is a small miracle.

So I’m leaving! Ninety-eight days after taking a bullet to the brain.

“You need another month of rehab, at least,” Patti says.

“So I’ll do it as an outpatient. Or I’ll do it at home. It’s not like I’m going back on the job right away.”

I need medical clearance before they’ll let me back to work, even at a desk. A lot of coppers I know would take the disability leave without complaint, as though it were a paid vacation, but not me. I can’t bear the thought of watching game shows and daytime talk shows and soap operas. I’ll think of something. Mostly I’ll work on getting myself back in shape to get back to my job.

But none of that is why I want to go home.

Yes, I’m stir-crazy in here. Yes, I want to be a cop again.

But the real reason is that I want control again. My family—Patti in particular—has controlled my access to information and the news. All I know about the shooting, after fourteen weeks, is that three people were found shot, and two of them—Amy Lentini and Kate—were already dead. I was clinging to life. And I know that the shooting happened in Amy Lentini’s apartment.

And though neither Patti nor anyone else has ever actually confirmed it, it sounds like everyone thinks I shot Kate.

I haven’t pushed the issue. Once I came up against resistance, once everyone started deflecting the issue, I decided to lay low. That’s where I’m at my most effective, when I’ve receded into the background, when I’m the funny, harmless guy, the comedian, the baby brother, the fourth stooge. I’m at my best when everyone underestimates me.

So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll be the guy recovering from the brain injury. The guy with the limp. The guy who moves and acts and thinks slowly. The guy who probably, likely, will never be the same again. The guy who’s no longer a threat.

Let them all think that.

I don’t know how I got to Amy’s place the night of the shooting. I don’t remember any of the circumstances leading up to it. I’ve lost days and weeks before that point in time. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why on God’s green earth I would shoot my partner.

But I’m going to find out.

Twenty-Six

“DETECTIVE.” THE woman who enters the room is tall and thin, with ash-colored hair pulled back, wearing black-rimmed glasses and a sleeveless red dress and heels. I try not to stare, because I’m a gentleman.

“I’m Dr. Jagoda,” she says.

I rise from my seat and shake her hand. “Billy Harney.”

She sits across from me. Lush, high-backed leather chairs. Like something in a reading room somewhere. All we’re missing is a fireplace and a snifter of brandy.

She doesn’t just look nice—she also smells nice, her perfume fresh and clean, not overpowering.

On the dark walls: diplomas from Harvard and Yale, certificates from various psychology associations.

“So how does this work?” I ask. “I tell you my mommy didn’t show me enough affection? And then I realize…” I shake my fists and bite my lip, as if in a moment of self-discovery. “I realize that…I’m not a bad person! And then we both have a good cry, and I go find happiness.”

She observes all this with a poker face. No tell whatsoever. “How do you want it to work?”

“The truth?”

“Preferably.”

“I don’t want to be here at all.”

“I never would have guessed.”

“But I have no choice. The department says I gotta see a shrink. Y’know, on account of my traumatic experience and all.”

Her eyes narrow. That psychologist-appraisal thing. “You did this before,” she says. “Three years ago.”

“Three years ago I didn’t wanna do it, either.”

“But did it help?”

“Not really.”

“So.” She claps her hands and leans forward. There is a table separating us, a small round wooden job with a design on it that looks Middle Eastern. “What do you hope to get out of it this time?”