James Patterson - Truth or Die

Ker-plop.

Immediately, my eyes went to the shower. The sliding doors were two-thirds closed. I could see enough through the frosted glass to know the boogeyman wasn’t standing behind them. I simply hadn’t turned off the water all the way after showering that morning.

I should’ve known, though. The déjà vu alone was enough of a tip-off. Those motherfuckers...

After a few steps forward to reach for the knob, I took one giant jump back. I wasn’t surprised about anything they’d taken from my apartment, not at all.

It was what they’d left behind.

“Detective Lamont, please,” I said, although the “please” was hardly polite. It sounded more like Right away, dammit! I couldn’t help it.

Not that it changed the officer’s answer on the other end of the phone. “He’s off duty, do you want his voice mail?”

No, I want his actual voice. I stared down again at the business card Lamont had given me, even flipping it over twice, as if somehow that would make his cell phone number magically appear. It wasn’t printed on the card.

“Is there a way you can reach him for me?” I asked. “It’s important.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” said the officer, his voice trailing off as if he were reaching for something. “There’s a note here. Are you Trevor Mann?”

“Yes.”

“Hold on a second.”

It was more like thirty seconds, but I hardly cared so long as the next voice I heard was Lamont’s. On second thought...

“What the hell were you thinking?” he immediately barked, skipping right past any pleasantries. The way he said “hell,” it pretty much rhymed with “truck.” He was pissed.

I knew he was referring to Bethesda Terrace. There were a few ways he could’ve found out already, but I wasn’t interested in asking. I had my own line of questioning, beginning with “Where are you?”

“At home,” he answered. “They patched the call from the precinct. Where are you?”

“At home as well.”

“I tried calling.”

“I just got here,” I said. “More importantly, how fast can you get here?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not going to believe this.”

“You might be surprised,” he said.

“Not as much as I was. Claire’s killer is in my bathtub .”

I was expecting any number of responses from Lamont, all of them falling under the heading of disbelief. Instead, I got sarcasm.

“Is the guy still dead or is he doing the backstroke now?” he asked.

“You think this is funny?”

“Do you hear me laughing?”

No, I didn’t. This was about more than Bethesda Terrace. I was missing something.

“They must have put him there,” I said. “They’re trying to frame me.”

“ They , as in the two federal agents who just left my apartment twenty minutes ago?” he asked. “The ones you shot at in Central Park?”

“They were there to kill me. Christ, what the hell did they tell you?”

“I think you’re going to need a lawyer, Mr. Mann.”

“I am a lawyer, Detective Lamont.”

“You know what I mean,” he said. “We’re going to need a formal statement from you regarding Claire Parker’s murder.”

“Are you saying I’m a suspect?”

“More like a person of interest,” he said. “And I’m hopeful you’ll cooperate with us.”

“This is crazy.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Mann, I’m not the one with a dead guy in my bathtub.”

“But I can prove—”

He shut me down so fast I was actually startled. “You’ll have your chance, I assure you,” he said.

I was back to my original question. “Fine. Then when can I expect you here?”

“You can’t,” he said. “It’s not my shift. Detectives Charrington and Goldstein will be there soon. We’ve got to do things by the book, Mr. Mann.” He paused. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I answered. I finally did understand. Or, at least, I was pretty sure I did. A lot of years had passed since I’d read the book he was referring to. It was the one we had in common.

Lamont wasn’t ticked off. He was tipping me off. The faster I got off that phone...

The better my chances of staying alive.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid...” I muttered, berating myself as I quickly hung up the phone.

In the heat of the moment, at the shock of seeing Claire’s killer in my own bathtub, I’d gotten sloppy. Leave it to Lamont to catch my mistake.

He was now the official study guide — the human SparkNotes — for 1984. The two detectives he told me were coming to my apartment instead of him had the names of two other characters from the novel. Had he said one without the other, I probably never would’ve made the connection. But the two together? Charrington and Goldstein?

By the time he tacked on, “We’ve got to do things by the book,” I knew what Lamont was trying to tell me, the clever to my stupid. Big Brother was most likely listening in. My phone line was tapped.

So now they knew where I was. Where are they?

I dashed from the phone to my living room window, which faced the street below, pressing my nose against the glass. There was a windowless white van double-parked directly in front of the building. They hadn’t exactly spray-painted BAD GUYS on the hood, but I just had a feeling. This wasn’t the dry cleaners or a florist making a delivery. Nor was it the cable guy.

Time to pare down.

I kicked off my shoes, threw them in the duffel along with one of the guns — the Glock — and bolted from my apartment. Once in the stairwell, I silently stepped along the concrete in my socks for a peek over the railing, five flights down. One of the two guys from Bethesda Terrace was turning the corner to the second floor. It was only a glimpse, but that was all I needed.

Where’s the other one?

I ducked back into the hallway, eyeing the elevator. The floor light moved from 2 to 3, and it wasn’t stopping. There was my answer.

The options were shrinking fast as I ruled out the roof. The closest I’d ever gotten to jumping from one building to another was watching a Nike parkour commercial. With the alleyways on both sides of me measuring at least ten feet wide, this was no time for a crash course, emphasis on crash.

The only remaining option seemed to be standing my ground and letting the bullets fly. It was two against one — not the best odds — but probably my best chance.

Unless.

I made my way over to the middle of the hallway. There were only two apartments on the sixth floor, but there were three doors. As fast as you can say Monty Hall, I was opening door number three.

Like a moment straight out of This Is Your Life , I was flashing back to one of my earliest cases as a prosecutor with the Manhattan DA’s office. A sicko had killed his wife in their Upper East Side apartment and almost got away with it, thanks to the way he disposed of her body. He literally threw her away like yesterday’s trash.

Of course, he denied it, so one of the things I had to prove during the trial was that a 5-foot-7-inch woman weighing 145 pounds could indeed make it all the way down a garbage chute. I came up with the idea to film a crash test dummy with the same dimensions and show it to the jury. Worked like a charm.

But what about a 6-foot-1-inch man weighing 190 pounds?

I pulled open the chute with my free hand, looking into a black rectangle that might as well have been a black hole.

There was only one way to find out.

Zip-zip.

I quickly put the SIG back in the duffel with the Glock. Tossing the bag ahead of me, I listened for the sound it made on impact. A hollow, echoing, bone-crushing BANG! would spell certain doom.