Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

“No kidding,” Shane said, straight-faced.

“You knew that, didn’t you?” she said. “But how? It doesn’t sound like something Cheryl would put in her dossier.”

“You’re right. I had to call her up and ask. You like it?”

“Darn tasty,” Kylie said, taking another spoonful.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You tell me your favorite action movie slash Christmas movie now, and I will tell you a deep dark secret that nobody knows—not Cheryl, not my mother, no one.”

“Deal,” Kylie said. “ Die Hard . It’s also my favorite Bruce Willis movie, so it’s actually a cinematic trifecta. What’s your deep dark secret?”

“I had two desserts waiting in the wings,” he said. “I signaled for the budino because I’m hoping for a second date.”

“Your meddling mother and your complicit cousin will take all the credit,” she said. “But absolutely.”

She took another spoonful of the creamy dessert, and the sugar shot straight to her wine-mellowed brain.

Damn , she thought. A girl could get used to this .

CHAPTER 43

IT’S BEEN SAID that if Gerri Gomperts ever closes her diner, she should go work for Internal Affairs. That woman knows more about the private lives of cops than anybody at IAB.

“Would you like to know how your partner’s date went last night?” she said as soon as I walked through the door.

“Do I look like I want to know?” I asked.

“You look like a guy who’s trying to act like he doesn’t care,” she said. “But who are we kidding, Zach? You can’t wait for me to tell you.”

“Why do I get the feeling that I’m not going to get breakfast until I let you tell me something? How about you just give me the top line. No details.”

Gerri turned on a grandmotherly smile. “It went well.”

“Great. I’m happy for her.”

The smile broadened. “Very, very, verrrrrry well.”

“I said no details.”

“That’s not a detail. It barely qualifies as color commentary. I’ve got more. Are you sure you’re not even just a little bit curious?”

“The only thing I’m curious about is how the hell you managed to dig up so much dirt on Kylie’s date this early in the morning.”

“Cheryl is in a booth in the back. Women talk, Zach. She told me everything she knows.”

“She told you or you pumped it out of her?”

“Is there a difference?”

I ordered breakfast and walked to the rear of the diner. I gave Cheryl a morning kiss and plopped down in the booth across from her.

“Kylie and Shane really hit it off.”

“So I heard.”

“She called early this morning to thank me for fixing them up. I told her she should be thanking you. It was your idea.”

I shrugged. It hadn’t been my idea, but we’d come too far for me to undo that misconception.

“He asked her out on a second date,” Cheryl said.

“I’m sure that’s going to make Aunt Janet very happy,” I said.

“Speak of the devil,” Cheryl said, looking over my shoulder.

I turned around, half expecting to see Shane’s mother. But of course it was Kylie.

“Good morning,” she said. She sat down next to Cheryl and stared across the table at me. “You’ve got a future as a matchmaker, partner. Last night was a home run.”

I responded with a lame smile, but the baseball reference made me think of my high-school days when first base, second base, third base , and home run were metaphors for levels of sexual activity. I shook the thought out of my head.

“Tell him the best part—the dessert story,” Cheryl said.

I didn’t know if I wanted to hear about any of the parts, much less the highlight of the evening. I was thinking about how to exit gracefully when Gerri came to my rescue.

“Your breakfast is ready,” she said. “You said to go, right? It’s at the register.”

“Where are you going?” Kylie said. “Why don’t you stay and eat with us?”

Left unsaid: And hear all about my fabulous night with Shane Talbot .

I thought about it. The past nine months had been hell for Kylie. Her husband started popping Percocets like gummy bears, then graduated to a full-blown heroin addiction, and finally dropped off the grid completely.

Kylie had put in a lot of hours since Sunday, and she’d looked beat when she left work last night. But this morning she was totally pumped.

“Zach,” Gerri said, rolling her eyes at me as if I were missing the fact that she was there to bail me out. “To go or not to go? That is the question.”

“Thanks, but on second thought, can you please unwrap it and bring it to the table? I’m going to stick around for a while.” Gerri gave me a nod of approval and left without another word.

“So,” I said, “tell me the dessert story.”

Kylie smiled. She looked happier than I’d seen her in a long time. Glowing, actually.

I sat back and basked in the glow.

CHAPTER 44

WE WERE JUST finishing breakfast when I got a call from Jamie Gibbs.

“I’m tired of sneaking around like some teenage kid breaking curfew,” he said. “I’ve got a crazy schedule today—a morning meeting at the network, lunch with my biggest cosmetics client, then I’m joining my mother at a fashion show in Brooklyn, after which we will be hosting a dinner in a private room at a restaurant on the East Side.”

“Thank you for keeping me informed,” I said. “It makes it easier on us.”

“You don’t get it, Detective. I’m not trying to make it easy for you. I’m giving you fair warning to back the hell off. I don’t want to be tripping over a bunch of nanny cops, especially when I’m with my mother. Understood?”

Before I could answer, he hung up. I filled Kylie in on what had just transpired, then I called Rich Koprowski and told him to keep the phone tap on Gibbs but to give him a wide berth—even wider if Veronica was around.

“So Jamie is calling the shots now?” Rich said. “He’s laying down the ground rules on how we should be doing our job?”

“Kylie and I don’t like it any more than you do,” I said, “but he’s our main conduit to the kidnapper. If he feels like we’ve got him under a microscope, we risk alienating him entirely. Give him some space. Some cooperation is better than none at all.”

Our day didn’t get any better once we were upstairs. Benny Diaz and his crew at TARU had combed the proof-of-life video looking for a clue and listening for a sound that might help us identify where it was recorded, but they’d come up empty. Dodd had been smart enough not to shoot the video with a cell phone, which would have given us GPS tracking coordinates. Instead, he’d shot it with a GoPro camera.

Then we checked in with Bill Harrison at the DA’s office. He didn’t have any good news either.

“The network lawyers know we’re trying to prevent them from airing any more hostage videos,” he said, “so they’re screaming ‘freedom of the press’ to anyone who will listen. I might just as well be trying to shut down an NRA convention by telling the court, ‘Those guys have got guns, Your Honor.’ No judge wants to fly in the face of the Second Amendment. Or, in this case, the First.”

And just when we thought our morning couldn’t get any worse, it did. It started with a tweet. ZTV had a fresh-from-the-oven-new Erin Easton video, and they turned to social media to drum up an audience.

By ten that morning about thirty cops were gathered around the TV set in our break room and millions of people were tuned in across the country and around the world.

This episode started just like the previous one—the spinning graphic that turned into a newspaper with ztv news bulletin on the masthead. It spun again and morphed into a picture of Erin, but this time the producers outdid themselves on the headline.