James Patterson - 12th of Never

“What do you want?”

“I want to prove to myself that I can change.”

I looked into his deep brown eyes, something a lot of women had done while begging for their lives. Despite Ron Parker’s magical belief in me, I had no leverage. Fish would take us to Debra Lane’s body. Or he wouldn’t.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Chapter 94

WE WERE BRINGING up the rear of the Randy Fish motorcade, the cherubic serial killer and his armed guards bumping along ahead of us on the patchy road.

I swore as our right front wheel slammed into a pothole on Amador Street, jarring my teeth and snapping my last nerve.

Conklin muttered, “Sorry.”

A thermos rolled off the front seat into the foot well, and as I bent to pick it up my partner jerked the wheel and I banged my head into the underside of the glove compartment.

“Hey!” I said.

“The road is like Swiss cheese, Linds. I’m doing my best.”

“Do better.”

It was getting late, sometime after five, and as the sun bled out, I felt a strong pull to be with Joe and Julie. Yesterday at this time, I’d been checking in with Martha’s dogsitter, then heading down to the basement cafeteria for mac and cheese with Joe.

My heart and soul were at Saint Francis.

But I was also being pulled toward a self-storage locker down the street, on the outskirts of nowhere. We hit a good length of road and Conklin gunned the engine. We sped past a rendering plant on our right and a cement factory on our left. Straight ahead, a spotlighted American flag flew at the entrance to the USA U-Store-It facility.

On Parker’s tail, we took a right turn into the asphalt-paved lot lined with rows of garage-type storage units, with their alternating red, white, and blue roll-up doors. We braked next to Parker’s SUV, in front of a red unit marked with the number 23.

We got out of the car and watched as the transport van containing the prison guards and a chained and shackled Randy Fish was unlocked and unloaded.

Parker tacked a notice to the wall, then took a bolt cutter to the padlock and rolled up the door. Fish swung his head around, saw me, then grinned and said, “Hey, Lindsay. It’s great that you’re here. This is going to be a very big moment for you.”

I looked at him, but I didn’t trust myself to speak. I might tell him that he disgusted me, that the next time I saw him, I hoped he’d be strapped to a gurney, looking at the people whose daughters he had killed, parents who had come to witness his last breath.

Randy Fish didn’t read my mind, or, if he did, he didn’t care what I was thinking. He looked excited, but under control. Like one of those guys on the show Storage Wars who had just won an abandoned unit at auction for cheap, and suspected that a ‘64 Corvette was inside, all its original parts in mint condition.

I followed Fish’s gaze, but it was getting too dark to see into the shadows.

Conklin left my side, turned on our headlights, and the storage unit brightened. Everyone turned to face the locker as if an alarm had gone off.

No one coughed or fidgeted or said a word.

We were all waiting for Randy Fish to produce the body of a teenage girl who wouldn’t stop screaming.

Chapter 95

RANDY FISH STEPPED forward, his chained hands in front of him, sweeping his gaze from side to side as he took in the contents of the storage unit.

I saw dinged-up, mass-produced furnishings; a well-used desk; a table with a metal top; a rolled-up carpet; and stacks of cardboard cartons, about a hundred of them, each about eighteen inches long by fourteen inches high and wide. What I didn’t see was a freezer, or a fifty-five-gallon drum, or anything big enough to hold a body. Even the carpet was too thin to conceal a person. I didn’t smell decomp, either.

“I remember now. There’s a map in one of those,” Randy said, indicating the stack of boxes with his chin.

“Map?” Parker said. The anger in his voice was almost palpable. “You said you put Debra Lane in here.”

“I was confused. It’s like a dusty attic inside my head, Ronnie. I thought ‘body.’ Now I’m thinking ‘map.’”

“Map to what? Where’s this map?”

“Those cartons,” said Fish. “My books are in the boxes and the map to where I left the girls is in one of my books.”

“You’ve got three seconds to tell me which carton, which book,” Parker said. “Or I’m gonna cancel this outing and send you back to the smallest, darkest hole in the block. No privileges, Fish, and that includes no phone calls, no access to vending machines, no mail, and especially no books —for whatever remains of your miserable life.”

Fish said, “Sweet-talking me isn’t going to help, Ronnie. I don’t know which box. I was in a coma for two years, remember? I could have some brain damage. Maybe if I can look at the labels on the boxes, it’ll come to me.”

Parker stepped behind Fish, hoisted him by his elbows, and manhandled him into the unit.

“I need more light,” Parker yelled.

Six squad cars and cruisers rolled into the storage facility. Conklin waved them in and organized them in a semicircle, with their headlights pointing toward Randy Fish’s storage locker.

Car radios chattered, doors opened and closed, cops leaned against their vehicles to watch what might be an extraordinary event in the history of law enforcement.

Conklin followed Parker and Fish into the locker, swept a box of pots and pans off a table. Then he began taking down cartons, putting them on the table, and ripping each one open. I joined Conklin, took out books, turned them upside down, opened them, shook them out, dropped them to the floor.

I glanced at Fish. He looked like a guest at a wedding, wearing a nice smile as he watched the proceedings. I got the feeling that even now, he was manipulating the police, manipulating me.

“I drew the map on the back of a sales slip, put it between pages in a book,” Fish said. “I think that’s what I did.”

I got into a good rhythm—opened a book, shook it out, dropped it, repeat. But I didn’t lose sight of Fish, and every time I edged near the cheap pine desk, a muscle twitched in his temple.

Conklin reached for another carton of books.

“Hang on,” I said to my partner.

I went to the desk, placed my hand on it, and said to Randy Fish, “Am I getting warm?”

“Warm doesn’t cut it, Lindsay. I’ll let you know when you’re smokin’.”

I pulled at the desk drawers, all of which opened except for the one on the lower right. That drawer was locked. I rifled through the open drawers, came up with nothing. Then Conklin went to the squad car. He brought back a short crowbar and jimmied open the locked drawer.

I went right at that file drawer. It was full of old records, songs from the fifties and sixties. I took out the records, looked at each one in the light of the high beams, peeked into the sleeves, then passed them to Conklin so that he could take another look.

Fish was watching me and he was humming a tune, one of the “oldies but goodies” that my mom used to sing when cooking dinner or driving us in the car.

Parker said, “Shut up,” and gave Fish a shot to the back of his head with the heel of his palm. Fish fell at my feet just as I put my hands on the last record in the drawer.

The old 45 was by the crooner Johnny Mathis. Fish had been humming the song—“The Twelfth of Never.”

The vinyl record was inside a sleeve. I pulled it out and a piece of paper came out with it and fluttered to the ground. I reached for the paper—a U-Store-It receipt with a rough map of the West Coast inked on the back.

As I bent down, I was eye to eye with the Fish Man. I held up the map so he could see it.