Once he was in the lobby of the Trade Center, Parker continued toward the bright daylight of the street. Outside the soaring twin building, everything was chaos, even worse than up on the forty-sixth floor.
Police blockades had been set up everywhere. EMS ambulances, police cruisers with their turrets blazing red, were parked up on the sidewalk. Several thousand people were assembled behind rows of blue police barricades and street cops in pith helmets.
Escape and survive, Parker thought. Just like after Allure, and Cin-Cin, in Soho.
He continued north on Chambers Street, which was also blockaded with bright blue police sawhorses. He kept walking past the blockades, once or twice showing his detective’s shield along the way.
As he walked north through the city, Isiah Parker wished that the world was still simple. All he had ever wanted was to get Marcus’s murderer. Whether he did that through the police department, or not, didn’t matter. All he had wanted was a little justice.
Parker wound up in the Bowery, somewhere around Grand and Canal streets, with their legions of panhandlers. The trembling stewbums, always looking like they had just wet their pants. The sad and desolate Edmonds Hotel. He stood on the street, thinking about his brother, Marcus, their past, all of the promise and hope destroyed by an insane drug pusher.
Isiah Parker didn’t feel like an assassin anymore. There was no guilt attached to what he had done. He had blasted the Grave Dancer straight back to hell.
He continued to walk north, toward his home. He was a crime-busting detective after all. The best in Harlem. He still liked the idea of that.
EPILOGUE
One Last Dance
104
Sarah McGinniss; New York
ON AN AFTERNOON near the end of April, Sarah found herself skirting along a familiar blue tape line, which led her around the Byzantine corridors on the ground floor at New York Hospital.
She had been coming regularly to the hospital every day for almost nine months. She knew the place by heart. That included most of the porters, a lot of the nurses and doctors. Linda and Laurie and Robin in the gift shop. Just about everybody knew Sarah, too.
The seventeenth floor, where she was headed, had an eighty-by-forty gray-stone terrace, which looked out over the East River; that big old Pepsi sign; the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. As hospitals went, it was the most impressive and beautiful one she’d ever been inside.
On that afternoon in the spring, Sarah went directly to Stefanovitch’s room, actually his seventh room so far. Each room had been on a different floor inside the sprawling medical center.
Stef was up and waiting, as she’d expected. His mother and father, Nelson, Nelson’s wife, Hallie, were all crowded into the room.
“Well, this is quite a happy Fizzies party, isn’t it?” he said when Sarah arrived. He had his best smile turned up full. He brought to mind soldiers recovering in army hospitals.
He was peering across the sun-spattered hospital room. He seemed to be carefully studying his visitors. There was a wonderful twinkle in his eyes. Sarah didn’t know how he managed it—especially today.
Finally, Sarah’s eyes found Michael Petito, the tall, balding neurologist who had been to see Stef every day for the past nine months. It was nine months now since three killers had broken into her apartment, and tried to murder both of them. They had succeeded in inflicting two horrifying gunshot wounds, one in Stef’s side, the other in the small of his back.
Dr. Petito had made the decision to operate two days after the shooting. At the time, Stefanovitch had been listed in very critical condition. A half-dozen family members had driven up to New York from Pennsylvania. He hadn’t been expected to live.
Stefanovitch had been in intensive care when his mother and father, Sarah, and Dr. Petito had come to visit. “You don’t look so bad,” Petito had told him. “I’ve seen worse after pro football games.”
Stef had liked the irreverent doctor immediately, maybe because Michael Petito had come up from the streets of New York, and acted a little like it. Or maybe because Petito was the team doctor for the New York Giants, a specialist on back and leg injuries.
He told Stefanovitch that he wanted to operate on his back again, that the new bullets had to come out of there anyway.
“What are the chances?” Stef had asked, struggling with every word.
“About sixty-forty, your way. Let’s say fifty-five—forty-five, that you don’t end up a full quadriplegic.”
“The other doctor said eighty-twenty, the other way. The last time I got shot up like this.”
Petito shrugged. “Overly conservative, in my opinion. Your other doctor was protecting himself, in case he screwed up. I won’t screw up, but those are the real odds. And they’re not great. Especially the prospect of being a quadriplegic.”
Stefanovitch had agreed to sign the necessary releases. He had gone in for the operation, one that could leave him paralyzed from the neck down. As Dr. Petito had said, though, the new bullets had to come out anyway.
Nine months later, he was still in New York Hospital.
The pain following the operation had been unbearable; it seemed to be endless. Petito hadn’t told him about that, the excruciating pain after a second major back operation.
Day after day, Stefanovitch was rolled upstairs to physical therapy, where they thought it was an occasion for champagne if he touched his index fingers together once out of every couple of times, or wiggled his big toe. Every day, as he was wheeled back to his room from therapy, he was soaked to the skin, his entire body screaming from pain.
If he had been forced to do it again, he didn’t think he could. Sarah had been there every day, for nine months straight. Sarah and Sam. Bringing him presents, and dinners from Rusty and Abe’s Steak House, and most of all, hope.
“Sixty-forty my way? Those are the odds?” John Stefanovitch asked now.
His voice suddenly sounded hollow and distant. His family and Dr. Petito were silhouetted against one of the sunny hospital windows.
“I thought I told you fifty-five—forty-five.” Petito’s gaze was steady, his opinion firm.
“Yeah, you did. You know, I was feeling okay this morning, up in physical therapy,” Stefanovitch said. “Now, I’m kind of spacey. Rubbery legs. My adrenaline is mainlining.
“Listen, Sarah.” He smiled, only his brown eyes were mostly glazed and vacant. “I think I need something to motivate me. Would you, uh…why don’t you stand over there. Would you stand right there by the door?”
“Don’t be so bossy. Just because you’ve been laid up doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be cranky,” Isabelle Stefanovitch said. Sarah had watched her operate over the last few months. She could make Stef toe the line; at the same time she was communicating the most touching affection for him.
“I’ll let him boss me around today.” Sarah smiled. The smile felt like a mask being pulled down over her face. She was having difficulty talking.
“You give him an inch, Sarah, he’ll take a mile,” Nelson said from across the room. “He’s always been that way. That’s how he got to be quarterback in high school. Not on his talent. Not with that chicken arm of his.”
The mood in the hospital room was better than it had been moments earlier. Even Dr. Petito smiled at the Stefanovitch clan’s amazingly wrongheaded but healthy defense mechanisms.
“I’m going to stand right here by the door,” Sarah said, as if she’d just thought of it herself.
“If I fall over, let me go,” Stefanovitch said in between deep breaths. He was propped against the edge of his bed now. Some pressure and weight were already being applied to his legs. There was so much going on inside his head that it was overwhelming.
Suddenly, with characteristic stubbornness, he pushed off hard from the hospital bed, almost as if that were the only way to make his family stop talking. “I love all of you,” he whispered as he let go.
Stefanovitch took his first step in more than three years, with the help
of a badly quivering aluminum walker. He’d only recently been fitted for the four-legged walker up in physical therapy. He figured it made him look about eighty years old.
He pushed the strange, awkward-looking walker one more step, the pain inscribed all over his face.
He took a third halting step. The pain and exhilaration seemed to be balancing a little better.
There was nothing but the noise of the clanking metal walker echoing inside the room. Not a sound came from Sarah or his family. Then Stefanovitch reached out one arm for Sarah.
Sarah couldn’t have explained or described what it was like to hold him, to grab onto Stef at the end of his miracle walk. She didn’t know which one of them was trembling more.
She wasn’t sure where his body stopped, and hers began. Nelson and his father were right there to help, in case he actually did start to fall at the very end.
Stef didn’t fall, though. His body shook very badly, but he didn’t fall. He wouldn’t let himself go down.
If he had had any energy left, he would have screamed out in joy. Instead, he whispered to Sarah, “I would scream, only I can’t make it happen. Not enough strength.”
The doctors in physical therapy had promised that in another six months he’d be able to use the walker competently. In sixteen to eighteen months, the chief therapist told Stef, he would walk with a severe limp, and the assistance of a bulky metal cane.
“In six months, I’ll be dancing,” Stefanovitch said. No cane. No walker. No nothing. He made the promise to all of them, but especially to Sarah.
105
Isiah Parker; Harlem; Several Months Later
IT WAS A cold and snow-blown evening, a few days into the new year. Isiah Parker finally left the Nineteenth Precinct station house around eight-thirty. To his surprise, he had returned to his detective duties with energy and dedication missing since before his brother’s death.
He walked down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, listening to a pleasing cacophony of early evening traffic sounds. Certain physical things about the neighborhood made him think back to his youth. The aboveground railroad tracks. Billboards for the latest pomades and preachers. Pawnbroker shops. Men huddled for warmth around a trash-can fire.
Someone stepped out from behind the staircase of a brown-stone a few doors down from the precinct house. Parker had been lost in his thoughts. He’d been careless.
“Turn around nice and easy,” he heard.
Parker turned slowly, a sense of fate already overtaking him.
What he saw couldn’t have surprised him more.
Stefanovitch was standing there, leaning against a sturdy wooden cane. The walking cane had been carved by hand out in Pennsylvania.
“Your eyes are going to fall out of your head,” Stef said to Parker. “Never seen a white guy up in Harlem before?”
“I’m just surprised at how ugly you are up on all fours.”
“You killed him, didn’t you? The Grave Dancer. That was you at the World Trade Center?” Stef asked. Then he smiled. “I came all the way up here to shake your goddamn hand.”
Isiah Parker did better than that. He embraced John Stefanovitch, clasping his back tightly with both hands.
The two detectives stood there grinning in the shadows and winter cold of the Harlem street.
New York—Los Angeles—London
JAMES PATTERSON won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. He is the author of four #1 bestsellers featuring Detective Alex Cross.
JAMES PATTERSON—#1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR
Los Angeles Times Miami Herald
Chicago Tribune Dallas Morning News
Washington Post Publishers Weekly
“Patterson, among the best novelists of crime stories ever, has reached his pinnacle.”
—USA TODAY
A string of #1 blockbusters from Along Came a Spider to Cat & Mouse. Now read James Patterson’s THE MIDNIGHT CLUB.
A stunningly brilliant psychopathic killer who has skillfully eluded the police from London to Paris to New York. A beautiful woman journalist suddenly in grave danger. An unorthodox New York detective whose motive for stopping the killer couldn’t be more personal or emotional.
“Patterson joins the elite company of Thomas Harris and John Sanford in concocting riveting and truly unique serial killers, while creating sleuths who are heroic and fascinating.”
—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
THE MIDNIGHT CLUB is the
novel I wrote just before
Along Came a Spider. I’m
certain that both Alex Cross
and Sampson originated in
ideas I had while writing
this story. It’s one of my
favorites, and I believe it
could make the best movie
of all my novels.
—JAMES PATTERSON
RAVES FOR JAMES PATTERSON, AMERICA’S #1 THRILLER WRITER
“JAMES PATTERSON DOES EVERYTHING BUT STICK OUR FINGER IN A LIGHT SOCKET TO GIVE US A BUZZ.”
—New York Times
“WHEN IT COMES TO CONSTRUCTING A HARROWING PLOT, AUTHOR JAMES PATTERSON CAN TURN A SCREW ALL RIGHT.”
—New York Daily News
“HE’S UNBEATABLE… Patterson proves himself master of the hair-raising thriller.”
—Buffalo News
“PATTERSON JUGGLES TWIST AFTER TWIST WITH GENUINE GLEE.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“PATTERSON KNOWS WHAT HE IS DOING, AND HE KEEPS THE PEDAL DOWN ON THE ACTION AND SUSPENSE.”
—Washington Times
“JAMES PATTERSON KNOWS HOW TO SELL THRILLS AND SUSPENSE IN CLEAR, UNWAVERING PROSE.”
—People
“PATTERSON IS A MASTER.”
—Newark Star Ledger
“PATTERSON LAYS OUT A TRAIL OF UP-AND-DOWN PLOT TWISTS that makes it nearly impossible to figure out the truth before he wants you to.”
—Associated Press
“JAMES PATTERSON BRILLIANTLY EXPLORES DARK CREVICES OF THE ABERRANT MIND . . WITHROLLER COASTER THRILLERS.”
—Ann Rule
“A MUST-READ AUTHOR… reaches out and grabs you from the opening page and doesn’t let go until the last drop of blood.”
—Providence Journal
“PATTERSON’S A MASTER OF SUSPENSE THRILLERS… twists and turns arrive in roller coaster fashion.… Patterson is diabolical.”
—Nashville Banner
“EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED FROM JAMES PATERSON.… Patterson confounds even mystery veterans with spine-tingling twists and turns that leave readers hanging upside down with their hearts racing.”
—Columbus Dispatch
“PATTERSON NOT ONLY CREATES A DIZZYING FLIGHT OF SUSPENSE AND VIOLENCE, but exposes the explosive elements in today’s society that make the world vulnerable to frightening events.”
—Baton Rouge Magazine
“Readers who have not discovered James Patterson just don’t know what they are missing, PATTERSON IS, WITHOUT A DOUBT, ONE OF THE MOST TALENTED AND EXCITING AUTHORS OF CRIME FICTION TODAY.”
—Lake Worth Herald
“A RIDE ON A ROLLER-COASTER WHOSE BRAKES HAVE GONE OUT.”
—Chicago Tribune on Cat & Mouse
“CAT & MOUSE IS A PULSATING GAME… . THE ACTION IS FAST AND FURIOUS.… The pages turn in a blur.… You might just finish this in one sitting. It’s that kind of book.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“Patterson delivers THE SWIFTLY PACED FARE THAT HAS MADE HIM A CHAMP OF THE CHARTS.”
—Publishers Weekly on Cat & Mouse
“CROSS, A BRILLIANT HOMICIDE COP, IS ONE OF THE GREAT CREATIONS OF THRILLER FICTION.”
—Dallas Morning News on Jack &Jill
“CAPTIVATING… A FAST-PACED THRILLER FULL OF SURPRISING BUT REALISTIC PLOT TWISTS.”
—San Francisco Examiner on Jack & Jill
“TOUCH TO PUT DOWN… TICKS LIKE A TIME BOMB, ALWAYS FULL OF THREAT AND TENSION.”
—Los Angeles Time
s on Kiss the Girls
“PATTERSON HIT THE BALL OUT OF THE PARK WITH ALONG CAME A SPIDER. KISS THE GIRLS IS EVEN BETTER.”
—Dallas Morning News
“A WILD RIDE… ALEX CROSS IS TO THE ’90S WHAT MIKE HAMMER WAS TO THE ’50S.”
—Denver Post on Kiss the Girls
“A FIRST-RATE THRILLER—FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS AND KEEP THE LIGHTS ON!”
—Sidney Sheldon on Along Came a Spider
“HAS TO BE ONE OF THE BEST THRILLERS OF THE YEAR.”
—Clive Cussler on Along Came a Spider
“TERROR AND SUSPENSE THAT GRAB THE READER AND WON’T LET GO. JUST TRY RUNNING AWAY FROM THIS ONE.”
—Ed McBain on Along Came a Spider
Books by JAMES PATTERSON
The Thomas Berryman Number
Season of the Machete
See How They Run
Black Friday (formerly Black Market)
The Midnight Club
Along Came A Spider
Kiss The Girls
Hide & Seek
Jack & Jill
Miracle on the 17th Green (with Peter de Jonge)
Cat & Mouse
Cradle & All
When The Wind Blow
Pop Goes The Weasel
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to known persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1989 by James Patterson
All rights reserved.
Warner Vision is a registered trademark of Warner Books, Inc.
Warner Books, Inc.
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Co.
First Warner Books International Paperback Printing: August 1998
First Warner Books U.S. Paperback Printing: June 1999
The Midnight Club Page 26
