Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

Maybe she’s right. Maybe my only chance is to say whatever I have to say to save my ass. Make something up. Something good. I can do that, right? Sure I can. I’m the best liar I know.

It might be better than the truth.

“Thank you for everything,” I say to Dr. Jill. “But I’ll take it from here.”

Sixty-Five

I WALK the streets, my stride improving every day, less of a limp, my stamina increasing, too. The weekly therapy and my daily walks have helped. It feels good out here, the feel of late summer and early autumn, a crispness in the air as darkness begins its slow creep.

Fuck my memory. It feels liberating to be freed from that locked room. I don’t need to remember what happened to win my case. I just need a convincing story.

By the time I hit Southport north of Addison, darkness has settled in comfortably. The crowd up here isn’t as thick as it is downtown, but I find myself in a steady stream of people. I don’t do much other than walk and just exist. Just existing is a gift, I realize; I easily could have died from that gunshot wound—in fact, I was clinically dead for several minutes. So anything after that experience is just gravy, right?

That’s what I tell myself, that I’m lucky I’m still breathing, even if one day soon I may find myself living and breathing and existing in the Stateville penitentiary.

I glance over at a storefront and do a double take, sure, absolutely certain for just that moment, that I saw Amy staring back at me. Instead it’s just a mannequin with short jet-black hair wearing a designer suit.

That happens to me sometimes, little triggers like that. I’m not seeing ghosts. It’s not time for séances or exorcisms. But on occasion I will look this way or that and swear that I saw her.

And it’s not the only thing I feel at this moment. I also feel something behind me, a shift in the pressure. Like some movement behind me ceased at just the time I did.

I whip my head around. Nothing but a jumble of people moving in my direction. Nobody dropping back, ducking down, averting his eyes.

Nobody following me.

Still, it sweeps through me like a chill.

So tired of looking over my shoulder.

So sick of playing defense, clawing for my memory and feeling helpless. Time to stop playing defense and start playing offense.

I hail a cab and head north.

The Hole in the Wall. I haven’t been there for ages. Once upon a time it was the first instinct: you were thirsty and had an hour to kill, you went to the Hole.

I get out of the cab, the sound of the train passing overhead on the Brown Line, raining down some rust. I reach for the door of the bar and pause. Then I open it.

The place dies down when I walk in. Something out of a movie: the music stopping, conversations braking to a halt in midsentence, like the abrupt screech of the needle lifting off a turntable.

All eyes on me, none friendly. Nearly a hundred faces I recognize, people I’ve known and worked with on the job. At the bar, Patti has a bottle of beer hoisted to her lips, frozen in midair as she stares at me.

“This is a bar for cops,” someone shouts. “Not cop killers.”

My fists in balls, my jaw set, I cut an angle toward the corner that I once owned, where people once watched and laughed, where people once chanted my name. I step up on the stage and grab the microphone, click it on, pat it for good measure.

“We don’t wanna hear your jokes,” someone yells.

“This isn’t a joke. I didn’t kill any cops,” I say into the mike. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

“What happened to ‘I don’t remember anything?’” someone shouts.

I scan the room again, my heart pounding, my stomach doing gymnastics.

“Well, I remember now,” I say. “I remember, and I didn’t do it.”

I drop the mike, sending a booming clang across the room, and step off the stage.

“Hey!”

I turn on my way out. It’s Wizniewski’s chubby face coming my way. “You’re not welcome here. You know what you did, and we know what you did.”

“And I know what you did,” I say, doubling down on my lie. I pivot and move toward him. He’s ready for me, hands raised. On a good day, I might have a better response, but I’m still moving slowly, and before I can bat them away, Wizniewski’s fingers wrap around my throat. He pushes me backwards against a table, my back arched, my eyes up at the ceiling. My head fills with a rush of anger and desperation as the crowd comes alive with a roar, as the Wiz’s chubby face peers into mine, as I struggle to loosen his grip, but I can’t, I just—

Bam. The table over which I’m bent backwards rocks violently, glass shattering. The Wiz releases me and steps back. For a moment I don’t know what happened. It was like an earthquake of great magnitude, but limited to the small table.

Patti, holding a baseball bat she must have grabbed behind the bar. Letting it rest against her shoulder, but elbow out, like she’s ready to take a swing. Her mouth set evenly, like she’s cool as ice, but her eyes on fire.

“You like picking on people with medical conditions?” she says to the Wiz, loud enough for everyone to hear. “Wanna try someone who didn’t take a bullet to the brain?”

Wizniewski, chest heaving, face tomato-red, glares at Patti. “Hey, bitch on wheels, you really wanna bring a baseball bat to a gunfight?”

Patti takes the bat in both hands, holding it horizontally, and tosses it at Wizniewski’s chest. He puts out his hands defensively, not trying to catch it, so it hits his palms and clangs to the floor at our feet.

Before I know it, Patti has drawn her gun and has it within an inch of Wizniewski’s nose, her legs spread, in the pose.

“Who needs a bat?” she says. Like she doesn’t have a care in the world. Like it wouldn’t bother her in the slightest if she pulled the trigger.

The crowd isn’t sure how to react. A crowd of cops, most of them off duty, most of them wearing their pieces. Most retreat or crouch. Some reach for their waists. This could go a lot of different ways. Some of them bad.

“The fuck you doing? C’mon, Patti,” Wizniewski says, not really believing she’ll use it. But still, she’s an itchy trigger finger away from splattering his brains on the ceiling. It does something to a fella’s attitude.

“We done?” she says.

“Fuck, yes, we’re done, we’re done.”

“Then apologize to my brother.”

“I apologize.”

She lowers the gun and says, “C’mon.” It’s a moment before I realize she’s saying it to me. We walk out of the Hole, now stunned into silence.

“What was that about ‘I remember now’?” she asks me as we beat a path from the bar.

“What was that about drawing your weapon?”

“You first.”

“Like you said before, who’s to say I don’t remember?” I say. “Fuck trying to regain my memory. I’ll just remember whatever I decide I remember.”

“Good; great,” she says. “Doesn’t mean you had to announce it to a roomful of cops. Was that smart?”

Maybe not, I think to myself as I raise my hand for a cab. Maybe so.

Sixty-Six

I LOOK out my bedroom window, watching a man and woman, young lovers, staggering home from a night of partying, the woman holding her heels in her hand, the man singing some pop song in a falsetto voice, trying to sound awful, the cool air filled with their laughter. I take a swig from my beer, but it tastes wrong, bitter, rancid. Booze has tasted that way since the shooting, since I recovered from the coma. Food has, too, as though the damage to my brain screwed up the connections to my taste buds, rearranged them while I slept.