Джеймс Паттерсон - Detective Cross

I noticed an open bottle of vodka and a glass pitcher of tomato juice on a crowded coffee table. The ashtray next to them reeked of marijuana.

Vincente threw up his hands. “You’ve basically seen it all. My bedroom’s off limits.”

Mahoney said, “Nothing’s off limits if I think you have something to do with the bombings on the National Mall, Mr. Vincente.”

“The what...?” He threw back his head and laughed again, louder and more caustic. “You think I got something to do with that? Oh, that’ll seal it. Just put the dog-shit icing on the crap cake of my life, why don’t you?”

Bree gestured at the screen. “You’re following this debate pretty close.”

“Wouldn’t you if your income depended on it?” he said darkly. He reached for a half full Bloody Mary in a highball glass. “I decided to treat the floor debate like it was draft night for fantasy football leaguers. Right? Have a few Bloody M’s. Scream at the screen, Senator Pussy, or whatever. No federal offense in that, is there, Agent Mahoney?”

I said, “You ride the Hospital Center bus, Mr. Vincente?”

“All the time.”

“How about the Circulator? The Monuments bus?”

He shook his head. “They won’t let someone like me ride the Circulator. Upsets the tourists. Don’t believe me? I’ll let you check my bus pass. It’ll show you. I only use the D8.”

“That would help,” Mahoney said.

Vincente sighed. “Hope you got time. Gotta find my wallet in this mess.”

“We got all day,” Bree said.

He sighed again, and started ambling around, looking wobbly on his feet.

“We hear you get angry on the bus,” Bree said, putting her hand on her service weapon.

Vincente took a sip of his Bloody Mary, and raised it to us with his back turned, still searching.

He squatted down and moved aside some record albums, saying, “From time to time, Chief Stone, I speak my mind forcefully. Last time I looked, that’s still guaranteed under the Constitution I was maimed for.”

Mahoney also put his hand on his weapon and said, “Even under the First Amendment, the FBI takes seriously any threat to bomb Congress.”

Vincente chuckled, stood unsteadily, and turned. Both Bree and Mahoney tensed, but he was showing us a wallet in one hand and a Metro bus pass in the other.

“It was a turn of phrase,” he said, holding out the pass to Mahoney. “I’ve had this for three years. It’ll show I have never once been on the Circulator. And look at my record. I was a camp cook, ran the mess, not the armory in Kandahar. I honestly don’t know the first thing about bombs. Other than they hurt like hell, and they screw you up for life.”

It was abnormally chilly and drizzling when Mickey climbed aboard the Hospital Center bus, taking his favorite seat at the window toward the back. He readjusted his windbreaker and the hoodie and vest beneath it so that he could breathe easier.

He wanted to explode. All day, the Senators talked and talked, and did jack shit. That one over-educated idiot from Texas talked for hours and said nothing.

How can that be? That’s gotta change. It’s gonna change. And I’m gonna be the one to change it. They’re gonna talk all night, right? I got all night, don’t I?

Mickey had watched the floor debate from the first gavel, growing increasingly angry. As his bus left Union Station and headed north, he felt woozy and suddenly exhausted. Being angry for hours and days on end was draining. Knowing he’d need his energy, he closed his eyes and drifted off.

In Mickey’s dreams, an elevator door opened, revealing a scary, antiseptic hallway inside Landstuhl Regional Medical Center next to the US air base at Ramstein, Germany. Men were moaning. Other men were crying. Outside a room, a priest was bent over in prayer with a woman.

The beautiful brunette woman next to Mickey trembled. She looked over at him, on the verge of tears. “I’m gonna need to hold your hand, Mick, or I swear to you I’ll fall down.”

“I won’t let you,” Mickey said, and took her hand.

He walked with her resolutely until they found the room number they’d been given at reception, and stopped. The door was closed.

“You want me to go in first?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It has to be me. He’s expecting me.”

She fumbled in her purse, came up with a nip bottle of vodka she’d bought in the duty free shop, and twisted off the cap.

“You don’t need that.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” she said, and drank it down.

Dropping the empty in her purse, she turned the handle and pushed open the door into a room that held a single patient lying in bed and facing a screen showing CNN. He was in a body cast with a neck halo. Bandages swathed his head. His left arm was gone. Both lower legs were missing above the knee. His eyes were closed.

“Hawkes?” she said in a quavering voice. “It’s me.”

The man inside the bandages opened his eyes and rolled them her way. “Deb?”

He grunted it more than said it. His jaw was wired shut.

Deb started crying. Shoulders hunched, clutching her purse like a life preserver, she moved uncertainly toward the foot of the bed, where Hawkes could see her better. “I’m right here, baby. So is Mickey.”

Mickey came into the room, feeling more frightened than anything. He waved at the legless creature inside the bandages and said, “Hi—”

Hawkes screamed. “Get him out! I told you not to bring him! Get him out, Deb!”

“But he’s—”

“Get him out!” Hawkes screeched. Monitors began to buzz and whine in alarm.

Shocked, feeling rejected, Mickey started toward the door. Then the tears came and his own anger flared.

Mickey spun and shouted. “Why didn’t you leave when you said you would? You left when you said you would, we never would have been blown up! Never!”

Somebody nudged him.

Mickey jerked awake, realized he’d been yelling in his sleep. He looked around, saw a kindly older man with a cane.

“Nightmare, son?” the old man said.

Mickey nodded, realizing how sweaty he felt under the windbreaker, the hoodie, and the vest, and then how close he was to his stop. Glancing past the older man, he scanned a woman reading a magazine, while the six or seven other passengers at the far back of the bus stared off into space with work-glazed expressions.

Time to really wake them up, Mickey thought when the bus pulled over across from Veterans Affairs Medical Center. This soldier’s done fooling around.

Already late and not wanting to miss any more of the evening meeting, Mickey got up, waited until the rear doors opened with a whoosh, and hurried off the bus.

He didn’t notice that the woman reading the magazine was now staring after him. He didn’t look back to see her get off the bus and trail him at a distance.

Ali, Jannie, and I were waiting on Nana Mama to finish some last minute dinner preparations when my cell phone rang.

“Don’t you dare,” my grandmother said, shaking a wooden spoon at me. “I’ve been working on this meal since noon.”

I held up my hands in surrender, let the call go to voice mail, and sniffed at delicious odors seeping out from under the lid of a large deep-sided pan.

“Smells great, Nana!” Ali said, reaching for the lid.

She gave him a gentle fanny swat with the spoon and said, “No peeking behind curtain number one.”

My cell rang again, prompting a disapproving sniff from Nana. I pulled out the phone, expecting Bree to be calling. We had all been frustrated leaving Vincente’s apartment earlier in the day. He’d looked good for the bomber going in, and not so good coming out. He seemed even more unlikely when Metro transit confirmed he’d never once ridden the Circulator, and the US Army confirmed he’d been a cook.