Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“I don’t think the gods of the Bureau would appreciate me kicking back with a cold one if there’s another attack on the underworld over the weekend.”

“You can always keep your phone on,” I said. “No one says you have to be in your office waiting for a call. There has to be some benefit to these phones beyond Facebook and texting, right?”

Mahoney half bobbed his head, getting a distracted look. “Traffic will be a bitch tonight. Maybe I can sneak away early tomorrow?”

“Now you’re thinking.”

“What about you? And Bree? Why don’t you and the kids come? Supposed to be a beautiful weekend.”

“Nothing would make me happier, but Jannie’s got an invitational thing over at Johns Hopkins, and we were going to see Damon too.”

“There are three days to the holiday. You could always come on Sunday morning, or even on Saturday night.”

“Tempting. Let me run that by the new chief of detectives.”

Ordinarily, the track season ends in mid-August, but the U.S.A. Track and Field organization had launched a program to nurture young talent, inviting high school athletes from across the country to a meet on the Johns Hopkins campus in an effort to help coaches identify those with potential.

The fact that Jannie had been invited at the age of fifteen years and eight months was a shock to us. Initially, she hadn’t been among the athletes offered spots at the meet. But Ted McDonald, a well-regarded track coach who works with my daughter, showed videos of her to the right people, and she got in on discretion.

We were on the shady side of the stands an hour before she was set to run. Down on the field, the kids were warming up. Except not many of them looked like kids.

“What are they feeding them?” Bree asked.

“Human growth hormone cereal with steroid milk,” Nana Mama said, and she cackled.

“I hope not, for their sake,” Bree said. “Jannie said everyone had to submit urine and blood samples.”

“Those can be doctored,” Nana Mama said.

We knew that all too well. Earlier in the summer, a vindictive and jealous girl in North Carolina had tried to frame Jannie for drug use. Since then, we’d always demanded samples from any drug test she had to take.

A group of athletes glided by at an easy ten miles an hour. I watched them, trying to keep memories of the prior evening at bay. This was a holiday, and I’d read that it was important to take them and enjoy them or you risked burnout.

“Can I have a Coke?” Ali asked, pulling off his headphones, which were attached to the iPad we’d bought used on eBay.

“Water would be better,” Nana Mama said.

“I thought this was a holiday,” Ali grumbled. “Holidays are supposed to be fun. You’ve heard about fun, right?”

My grandmother twisted on the bleacher and fixed him with her evil-eye stare. “Are you sassing your great-grandmother?”

“No, Nana Mama,” Ali said.

“I won’t take sass,” she said. “You’ve heard about that, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Bree and I watched in amusement at the mastery with which Nana Mama handled Ali.

“What are you listening to?” Nana Mama asked, her voice softening.

Ali brightened. “A podcast about dolphins and how they have echolocation just like bats, only in the water.”

“What’s the single most surprising thing you’ve heard so far?”

Without hesitation, he said, “Dolphins have the best hearing in the world.”

“Is that true?” Bree asked.

“Humans can hear up to, like, twenty kilo-hearses. Dogs to like forty-five kilo-hearses.”

“Hertz,” Nana Mama said. “Forty-five kilohertz.”

“Hertz,” Ali said. “Big cats, like lions, hear up to sixty-five, I think. But a dolphin can hear sounds up to a hundred and twenty kilohertz. And they have, like, an electrical field around them. They say you can feel it if you swim with them. I want to do that, Dad, swim with dolphins.”

“I thought you had a few questions for Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

“That too,” Ali said. “Can I have a Coke, Dad?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What?” Nana Mama said.

I smiled. “The holiday argument gets me every time.”

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found Damon.

“Hey!” I cried, and I stood to hug him. “Look who snuck up!”

“Hi, Dad,” he said, grinning from ear to ear and hugging me back.

There was a round of hugs and kisses. We heard about orientation, and Ali got a Coke and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and life was good and grounded and solid. The pressure of Bree’s new job drained away too. I could see that in the way she laughed at one of Damon’s tales.

She felt at ease. I did too. A rare thing in those days.

“Hey, Dad?”

Jannie was calling to me from the fence, so I got up and started down toward her.

“Jannie, you got this,” Damon said, following me. “My friends on my hall are coming to see you smoke them all.”

Jannie laughed, and punched the air before hugging Damon. She has never had stage fright, at least not when it comes to running. In the past year, she’d faced women running for NCAA Division 1 schools, and she’d run well enough to be here.

“You good?” I asked.

“Always,” she said, relaxed. “Coach McDonald’s got good meet and race strategies worked out.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ll see. Love you both.”

“Love you too,” I said. “Nana Mama said to run like God gave you a gift and you are grateful for every stride of it.”

She smiled but with some confusion. “Tell Nana Mama I’ll try, Dad. Coach Mac’s up behind you, by the way.”

She trotted off. We climbed back up into the stands.

Clad in his trademark gray warm-ups and a blue hoodie and wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck, Ted McDonald was moving nervously from one running-shoed foot to the other as he spoke to Bree and Nana Mama. In his fifties, with a shock of reddish-gray hair that defied gravity, Coach McDonald had a straightforward style that I appreciated.

“Dr. Cross,” McDonald said, shaking my hand.

“Dr. McDonald,” I said. He had a doctorate in exercise physiology.

“Ready to see a little history made today?” McDonald asked.

Ali had been listening to his podcast, but he tugged out his earbuds and asked, “What history?”

Jannie’s coach said, “Anything can happen under race conditions, but I’ve been tracking her workout times. They’re impressive. She could do something here that would really make people stand up and take notice.”

“Like which people?” Nana Mama said.

McDonald gestured across the track. “Like those folks over there with the hand timers. All of them are D-One coaches. Oregon. Texas. Georgetown. Cal. Stanford. Every one of them is going to watch Jannie run.”

“Does she know this?” I asked.

“No. I’ve got her running against the clock and herself.”

“What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

“I’ll tell you if it happens,” the coach said, looking back to the track and clapping his hands. “Here we go. Nice and easy.”

Jannie lined up on the stagger in lane four. At the starter’s gun, she broke into her long flowing stride and kept pace with two high school seniors from California and another from Arizona.

She was third when they crossed the finish line and didn’t look winded at all.

“Eighty percent,” McDonald said after looking at his stopwatch. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “With that run she’s got every coach over there interested enough to start giving her calls in the coming months, maybe even make a few house visits.”