James Patterson - Second Honeymoon

“My pleasure.” Really. All mine.

Scott and Annabelle grabbed their carry-on bags, then walked with their coffees to the back of the line to board the plane. After a few more sips, they turned to each other. Scott squinted. Annabelle scrunched her nose. They both stuck out their tongues.

“I know,” said Scott, looking down at his nonfat cappuccino, extra hot. “Yours tastes a little funny, too, right?”

“It didn’t at first. Maybe I couldn’t tell with the extra foam. But now…”

“Let’s just toss ’em.”

“We can’t.” Annabelle glanced over her shoulder. She was always keen on manners and etiquette, a Junior League version of Letitia Baldrige. “Not here.”

Scott understood. He turned to see the stranger standing outside the Hudson News stand, unwrapping a piece of gum.

“We’ll get rid of them on the plane,” he whispered.

“Good idea,” Annabelle whispered back.

“This is the final boarding call for flight 6589 to Rome,” came the announcement from the front of the gate.

Annabelle looped her arm around Scott’s. “What should we do first when we get there?” she asked.

“You mean after we christen the bed?”

She poked him playfully in the ribs. “Yes, after that.”

“I don’t know; maybe we could go christen the Colosseum.”

Annabelle was about to poke him again when she suddenly screamed. Scott was hunched over, vomit spewing from his mouth. It was like a scene from The Exorcist. Only the vomit wasn’t pea-soup green, it was bright red. He was throwing up his own blood, buckets of it.

“Honey, what’s—”

But that’s as far as Annabelle got before she collapsed to the ground, the knees of her white capris landing— splat! —in her own spew of vomit.

Helplessly, they looked at each other. They didn’t speak. They couldn’t speak. They were dying. So fast, too. Unbelievably so.

Gasping his final breath, Scott turned back and locked eyes with the stranger, who was crumpling up the foil wrapper from a stick of Juicy Fruit.

How’s that high threshold of pain working out for you now, buddy?

The stranger smiled—wide, real wide—and waved good-bye to the newlyweds of flight 6589.

Sogni d’oro! Arrivederci!

Chapter 42

“WELL, LOOK WHO it is,” said Dr. Kline as I stepped into his office in midtown Manhattan. “You’re alive.”

Not that he ever thought I was dead. Why would I be dead? This was his way of needling me for missing our previous session, not unlike the way my old high school football coach would announce, “Nice of you to join us, Mr. O’Hara!” if I was even a second or two late to practice.

The difference being that Kline wasn’t about to bark, “Now drop and give me twenty!” as a follow-up. At least I hoped that wouldn’t be the next thing out of his mouth.

“You spoke to Frank Walsh, right?” I asked, taking a seat across from him on “the couch.”

My boss at the Bureau was now doubling as my mother. I felt like a kid in kindergarten with a note pinned to his jacket. Dear Dr. Kline: Please excuse little Johnny from his last psychiatric appointment because he was trying to catch a bad guy in Turks and Caicos.

“Yes. Walsh filled me in on your involvement with Warner Breslow,” said Kline. “Then he told me to forget everything he told me.”

Typical Frank Walsh.

“The FBI isn’t officially involved in the case,” I explained. “That’s why he said that.”

“I understand, and no worries. This room is even better than Vegas. What happens here legally has to stay here.”

“With one notable exception,” I said.

Kline smiled. “You’re right, absolutely right. Unless you tell me you plan to kill somebody.”

This guy was the master of all segues.

“I’ll make it easy for you,” I said. “Frank was right. From the moment I took up the Breslow cause I haven’t thought once about Stephen McMillan. Not once. Honest.”

“That’s good,” he said.

It was good. It didn’t mean I didn’t still want to kill the bastard for what he did to my family. It only meant that I wasn’t thinking all day and night about how I’d do it.

Baby steps, O’Hara. Baby steps.

I noticed that, in contrast to our first session, Kline now had a notepad in his lap. He was jotting something down.

“Am I allowed to ask what you’re writing?”

“Sure,” he answered. “I was making a note to myself about something you just said, a certain word, actually.”

“Which one?”

“You referred to your involvement with the murder of Ethan Breslow and his new bride as a cause . I find that interesting.”

I wasn’t even aware I’d said it. “Is that some sort of Freudian slip?”

Kline chuckled. “Freud was a drunk and serial womanizer with mommy issues.”

Yeah, but how do you really feel about him, Doc?

“Okay, we’ll leave Sigmund out of it,” I said. “Still, what is it about my saying cause ?”

“It points to your motivation,” he explained. “Why you do what you do for a living, and the role your profession plays in your personal life.”

Cue the skepticism. “All that from a single word?”

“Causes are personal, John. If you make every case personal, what’s going to happen when something truly is personal, like dealing with the man responsible for your wife’s death?”

“I end up here with you, that’s what happens,” I said, folding my arms. “I get where you’re going with this, but maybe that’s what makes me good at what I do. That I take it very personally.”

He leaned forward, staring straight into my eyes. “But you’re no good to anyone if you’re out of a job. Or worse, behind bars.”

Hmm.

I hate people who say “touché” when conceding a point, but if there was ever a moment when it was appropriate, this was it. Kline wasn’t really telling me anything that I didn’t already know deep down. He was just bringing it to the surface in a way that I never could or was willing to.

Suddenly, I wasn’t looking at Kline. I may have been staring right back at him, but it was my boys I was seeing instead. How much they truly needed me.

And how selfish I’d been.

Hadn’t they already been through enough? Was I that blind? That stupid?

I’d been so fixated on wanting revenge for their mother’s death that I’d neglected to celebrate her life— our life—with our sons. What a huge, giant, colossal mistake.

“Doc, do you mind if we cut this session short today?” I asked.

I expected him to be surprised, maybe even a little ticked off. After missing our last session, here I was trying to duck out early on this one. I’d barely sat down.

Instead, Kline simply smiled. He knew progress when he saw it. “Go do what you have to do,” he said.

Chapter 43

EDWARD BARLISS, DIRECTOR of Camp Wilderlocke, looked at me as if I were from Mars. No, worse. He looked at me as if I were the parent from hell.

After a three-hour drive straight from Manhattan, I’d walked unannounced into his small, pine-scented office on the camp’s fifty-acre complex in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Did I mention the unannounced part?

“Mr. O’Hara, what are you doing here?” he asked.

“I’m here to see my kids.”

“Family visiting day isn’t until next week, though.”

I was well aware of this. I was also well aware that I was breaking the rules at Camp Wilderlocke, and that Edward Barliss and his fellow “Wilderlockians” took their rules very seriously. In addition to not being permitted to use electronic gadgets—a ban I wholly supported—the kids weren’t allowed to call home until they were ten days into their four-week session. That was a rule I begrudgingly supported.