James Patterson: 12th of Never

Richie was blanched and sweating. He asked for the second time in about ten minutes, “You okay?”

“Yes, you?”

“Fine. Holy crap.”

He took my shaking, sweaty hand and squeezed it. I have never loved my partner more.

I said, “You did great, Richie,” then I tuned into the screams of people and the fire blazing under the tail of the rig.

Conklin called dispatch, ordered fire engines with heavy equipment, as many ambulances as we could get, and every available cop to clear the road of pedestrians and lock down the scene.

I bolted from the car and ran to the first of the two crashed patrol cars. Nardone was panting, said that his right ankle was broken and that he couldn’t move. The cop who’d been driving the second car brushed glass off his face with his right hand. His left arm was hanging at a bad angle. He asked if everyone had made it.

“Stay where you are,” I told him. “Help is coming.”

Baseball fans were all over Willie Mays Plaza, some injured, moaning and crying, others forming a four-deep bank of spectators on the Portwalk, still others forming a matching wall of onlookers in front of the stadium. There were hundreds of people in harm’s way, a good number of them kids.

I smelled gasoline and that scared the hell out of me. The way that truck had slewed all over the street, the numbers of vehicles involved in the collisions—there could be gas everywhere.

I reached the big rig as the driver jumped down with a fire extinguisher in his hand. I followed him to the rear of the truck and he started spraying down the flames. I couldn’t see much of the car underneath the fifty-three-footer, but what I could see looked like a tin can that had gone into a meat grinder.

“I didn’t see him,” the driver was saying to me, tears flowing down his cheeks. “I didn’t know what had happened until I heard the racket. God help me. Please tell me I didn’t kill anyone.”

I ducked under the rig’s undercarriage to see what was left of the getaway cruiser, to see if by a miracle someone had survived.

Smoke burned my eyes and made them water. I forced my lids open and saw that the skin of the car was scorched, the roof of the vehicle flattened. No one could have survived this, I thought.

But then a groan came from inside the car.

And then—unbelievable but true—another sound ripped right through me. It was the wail of a young child.

Chapter 99

THE WALKWAYS AND streets in front of the ballpark were lit up like Christmas in hell. Red and blue lights flashed and spun, fire flared, sirens wailed, car alarms went off, and injured pedestrians cried out for help.

Ambulances came and went through the hastily erected barricades, ferrying people to emergency rooms, while Richie and other law enforcement officers corralled by-standers behind barrier tape and tried to keep the scene of an escaped convict’s crash intact.

But we couldn’t.

Fire engines doused the truck and the streets with CO2 and water, and even though the roads had been closed off, emergency vehicles kept coming.

I stood by anxiously as a fire engine with a hydraulic lift jacked up the big rig. Another fire truck with a heavy-duty hydraulic winch got a hook into the squashed squad car and pulled it out from under the semi with a heavy steel cable.

The child in the backseat was a toddler of about three. He screamed with everything he had and pawed the air with bloody hands. More blood streamed down the side of his head. Thank God he had been strapped into a sturdy car seat and that seat belts had been threaded through the back of it.

His survival was nothing less than a miracle.

Rescue workers applied the Jaws of Life to the back door of the squad car and three EMTs reached for the baby at the same time.

I knew Lynn Colomello, the head paramedic.

“Do you have an ID on this child?” she asked me.

“I have no idea who he is.”

“I’ll get him to the ER,” she said, “and I’ll stay with him, but I can’t even guess at his condition without X-rays. Here’s my number. Call me later.”

Before the ambulance had left with the baby, I was on the driver’s side of the car, which was relatively intact. The door had been removed, the deployed air bag flattened. And I saw that the driver was either unconscious or dead, his head facedown on the steering wheel.

I put my fingers to his neck and felt a pulse—but I didn’t feel facial hair, whiskers, or stubble. The driver was young, maybe a teenager, wearing the blues of a uniformed officer. He was still alive.

How was this young man related to Fish, and whose baby was being rushed to the hospital?

Fish was in the front passenger seat, crushed against the door. The engine block had blown through the fire wall, intruded into the passenger compartment, and was lying on Fish’s lap.

From what I could see, his legs were mangled. Blood was pooling in the foot well, and I saw broken ribs coming through his shirt. Fish moaned. He was conscious.

He saw me, took in a wheezing breath, and said, “Is she alive?” He spoke again. “Please, save her,” he said.

Save her?

Chapter 100

I MOVED BLOOD-SOAKED hair away and looked more closely at the driver’s profile—and for a moment, I thought I had lost my mind.

Just then, Conklin joined me beside the car. He said, “Did the driver make it?” He looked at the shock on my face, then dropped his gaze to the steering wheel. His eyes got huge when he saw her.

“No, no ,” he said. “This can’t be .”

Conklin jerked around, cupped his hands, and yelled at every uniform within earshot. “Get her out . Get this woman the hell out of this car .”

A rescue worker brought over a hydraulic ram, and bam —the dashboard was pushed back and Mackie Morales was unpinned. Two men extricated her carefully from the vehicle, lifted her onto a stretcher, and fitted an oxygen mask to her face.

She’d been beaten up by the collision and looked like she was barely holding on to life.

I said to Conklin, “The child in the backseat. Could he be hers?”

“She has a three-year-old. Benjamin. He’s alive?”

I told Conklin what I knew. My partner looked scared and confused, and he hovered around the stretcher as paramedics strapped Morales down.

“Mackie. Mackie. It’s Rich.”

She didn’t move or acknowledge him.

Conklin spoke urgently to the EMT. “Her name is MacKenzie Morales. She works in Homicide, Southern District. How bad are her injuries? Is she going to make it?”

“Go with her,” I said to my partner. “I’ll stay with Fish.”

Conklin didn’t argue.

He climbed into the ambulance, took a seat beside the stretcher, and was looking at Morales when the doors closed. The sirens came on, and so did the rain, precipitation ringing the lights with intermittent halos of bright, flashing red.

I watched for a moment as the ambulance headed out. I didn’t know what Conklin and Morales had together, but if anyone could find out why she had become the serial killer’s wheelman, Rich Conklin had the means and the motive to do it.

Chapter 101

THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF blinking lights took on another dimension as helicopters landed and took off, medevac units shuttling victims to trauma centers in and out of the city. Media choppers had also arrived and were in contact with the press behind the barricades, sending live reports over the airwaves.

I leaned in to the empty frame of the crashed squad car’s windshield and focused on a man I despised but who had become very important to me. Randy Fish had an IV in his arm, but he had pushed away the oxygen mask and was having a very hard time breathing. Every time he took in air, I expected him to let it out with a death rattle.