Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

He’s playing that cruel game of “what if.” What if he had spent more time with me? What if he had kept a closer eye on me on the job?

“I didn’t come here for a psychoanalysis,” my father says.

“No?”

“I came here,” he says, “because I have a way out of this for you.”

Eighty-Five

“A WAY out of this,” I say slowly, repeating Pop’s words. “How?”

“Not a question of how,” he says. “A question of where.”

“A question of…” A moment before it clicks. “Are you telling me to run?”

He takes a breath, shuffles his feet. “If you want to,” he says, his eyes on the pavement.

“You’re kidding.”

He looks up at me again, a brisk shake of the head. “I’m not.”

“You put up your house for my bond,” I say. “If I left, you’d lose—”

“You think I give a rat’s ass about my house? ” he spits out. “They can have my damn house. Don’t need it anyway, not anymore. I’m a widower in a five-bedroom—”

“They’ll put you in prison.”

Pop looks up at the sky, scratches the razor burn on his face.

I step back, appraising him. “You’re serious,” I say.

“I’ve never been more serious in my life, son. We can get you out tonight. Get you out of the country. Mexico, I was thinking, for starters. A retired cop down there has a place outside Playa del Carmen. We start there. Probably move you to South America.”

“I surrendered my passport.”

“Yeah, you did. But we can get you papers. And then we’ll have to—”

“I don’t want to hear this, Pop. I don’t even wanna—”

I freeze, midsentence.

“Who’s ‘we’?” I ask.

Pop nods to his Toyota, across the street. I hadn’t noticed it parked along the curb. I can just make out Goldie in the front seat.

Pop and Goldie, willing to put their careers and freedom on the line. It hits me in the throat how much this must be affecting them. That the casualties aren’t limited to the dead bodies or to me, the one facing prison.

“Billy, we can do this. Tonight. I can get you a car and identification, and you can get across the border before they know you’re gone. I have some money. Not a lot, but some. Enough. We’ll both have burner phones so we can talk, coordinate it. It can be done, son. You know it can.”

While he’s been speaking, I’ve backpedaled. I throw up my hands. “And what happens to you?”

“Don’t worry about what happens to me. I’ll…” His shoulders rise and fall. “They’ll suspect me. I know that. We just have to be smart. Not leave a trail.” He nods. “I’m willing to take the chance.”

“And Patti? I don’t even say good-bye to Patti? I never see her again?”

Pop looks off in the distance, wincing. When he shows pain, he reminds me of my sister.

“Your sister would rather see you living on some beach, tending bar and banging the local women, than visit you through a glass window in Stateville the rest of your life. She’d be happy that you have a life.”

I pinch the skin above my nose, let out some kind of noise.

Freedom. Like a warm breeze. I can taste it on my tongue, feel it flow through my blood. Another chance. A new life.

And then my father is on me, his hands gripping my biceps.

“Let me do this for you,” he whispers, trying to hide the tremor in his voice. “You came back for a reason, son. You could’ve died in that bedroom. You should’ve died. But you didn’t. You fought all the odds and came back. You didn’t do that so you could spend the rest of your life in a concrete cell. You have a second chance. I have a second—”

I break away from him.

Above us, murmurs from the sky, the first hint of unrest, the clouds darkening.

He clears his throat, wipes at his eyes with his sleeve, collects himself, letting the emotions recede once more to their familiar hiding place.

“You have no case,” he says. “You’re going to lose. The judge’ll have to give you life. If you run and get caught, what’s the difference? They can’t give you more than life.”

It’s not like we both don’t know it. My case is shit because I can’t remember anything. I’m crippled. I’m being pushed into the boxing ring with both hands tied behind my back.

“It’s what your mother would want,” he says.

“No, don’t—don’t.” I raise a finger. “Mom wouldn’t want me to admit to something I didn’t do.”

My father drops his hands, looks at me the way he did when I was a child—a kid who had done something that completely exasperated his parent.

His expression slowly changing from frustration and pleading to something darker and colder. Something haunted and profoundly sad.

“How do you know you didn’t do it?” he whispers. “How do you know?”

Eighty-Six

STATE’S ATTORNEY Margaret Olson stands before the jury, buttons the jacket of her soft gray suit. There is standing room only in the courtroom. It is utterly silent, crackling with anticipation. It is late in the day, after a morning and early afternoon spent picking the jury. There will be time today only for the prosecution’s opening statement.

Olson angles herself slightly, allowing her to gesture in my direction. She will point at me, Stilson warned. She will point at me and accuse me.

“Detective William Harney was a crooked cop,” she says. “A dirty cop who knew he was about to be caught. So he tried to cover it up the only way he knew how. He killed the star witness, he killed fellow police officers who were on to him, and he killed the prosecutor in charge of investigating him.”

She turns and points at me, her wrist snapping down, her index finger extended. “The defendant killed four people, and he is charged with four counts of murder.”

I shake my head, not in an exaggerated, I swear I didn’t do it fashion but rather in bemusement, as though her claims are so preposterous that they aren’t deserving of a reply.

“The defendant ran one of the oldest scams in the book,” she says. “He was offering protection. If you’re a cop, and someone’s doing something illegal, you tell them: throw a little money my way, and I’ll make sure nobody busts you. I’ll protect you.”

She nods, lets that sink in for the jurors. Convincing a jury of Chicagoans that a city cop is crooked is about as difficult as convincing Donald Trump that he’s an impressive guy. And half these jurors come from suburban Cook County. A lot of suburbanites just assume that everything we do in Chicago is corrupt.

Olson tells them about the brownstone brothel in the Gold Coast, shows them a picture, reminds them of what they already heard play out in the media over the last year about the former mayor, the archbishop, and all the rich and famous clients.

“The defendant was protecting that high-end house of prostitution,” she says. “He was this close to being caught.” Her index finger and thumb are an inch apart. “The Cook County state’s attorney’s office—my office—was investigating that brothel. The lead prosecutor in charge of the investigation was a woman named Amy Lentini.”

Olson places an enlarged photo of Amy in professional attire, a pleasant smile on her face, on an easel.

“Amy was about to break it wide open. She was about to raid the brothel. We will show you the request for a search warrant she was drafting. It will show you what she was looking for, above all else: records. A little black book. You run a business, you need to keep records, right?”

Several jurors nod in agreement.

“But it’s an illegal business,” she continues. “You’re accepting money from clients for sex. You’re doling out some of the money to a cop for protection. All of it illegal. Not the kind of records you file with an accountant or share with the IRS.”