12th of Never

by James Patterson

  I was thrown to the ground, as if I’d been hit by a bus.

  Everything went dark and silent and my brain flickered with a single thought: What had happened? I got onto my hands and knees, started crawling, bumping into things, like the deaf and blind thing I was.

  A couple of long minutes later, someone shook my arm. I saw a blurry uniformed cop. His name was Mooney. Or Rooney. I wasn’t sure.

  “Are you all right, Sergeant?”

  Stars were popping behind my eyes. I could hardly breathe. I was gagging, but somehow managed to ask, “Is anyone hurt?”

  “Can you see me, Sergeant?”

  I fought nausea, said, “I can see you. I hear you.”

  Conklin and Parker were on their feet. Conklin came over to me and said, “You okay? You okay, Lindsay?”

  I grabbed his arm and stood.

  Officer Michael Rooney was saying, “It was a flashbang. I saw this uniform pull the pin and lob it toward the locker. I couldn’t get to him in time.”

  “Flashbang” was a descriptive nickname for a stun grenade, a nonlethal military weapon designed to knock down the occupants of a room to give the shooter the upper hand. The effective range is a five-foot radius from the point of impact, and the stunning effect lasts only a minute or two, but you still would not want to be in a room with one.

  As it was, I was still dazed, but I could see.

  “Tell it again, from the beginning,” I told the cop.

  Rooney said, “One of ours fired that grenade. I didn’t know him. He was five six or five seven, young guy.”

  “You didn’t know him? How did you know he was a cop?”

  “He was in uniform. Drove a cruiser. After he threw the grenade, he grabbed Fish and pushed him into the passenger side. Then he took off.”

  “It was an abduction?” Parker asked. “Or a getaway?”

  “Hard to say. Fish was very wobbly.”

  “When did the grenade go off?” I asked.

  “It’s only been a couple of minutes,” the cop said. “The cruiser is headed west on Amador. Two of our cars are in pursuit.”

  “Call dispatch and clear a channel,” I said.

  Parker was moving through the semicircle of headlights toward his vehicle. I started toward ours. Conklin gave me an arm to lean on.

  He dangled the keys. “I’m driving,” he said.

  Chapter 97

  BY THE TIME we blew past the American flag and turned onto Amador, I had gathered my wits, even the ones that had rolled into the far corners of my mind.

  For instance, I understood what Randy Fish had thought was so funny. While we were rooting around in his book and record collections, his ride was coming to get him.

  Very frickin’ hilarious joke on the SFPD and the FBI.

  And the punch line was that a heinous serial killer and a rogue cop were taking us on a high-speed chase through the city on a cloudy night, visibility of about ten feet in front of the headlights, precipitation coming on and slicking the road.

  I was on the car radio, using the designated clear channel, talking to May Hess in dispatch, also to Sergeant Bob Nardone and Officer Gary Hoffman in the lead pursuit car.

  Nardone’s voice came through the speaker as he shouted over the blare of sirens: “Turning left onto Cesar Chavez at sixty. I can’t read his plates.”

  We were gaining on Nardone and Hoffman, and other cars joined in as dispatch sent units ahead to cut off the renegade cop car. Conklin and I followed a more or less straight route over the Illinois Street Bridge, took a heart-stopping turn onto Cesar Chavez, then an equally hard right onto 3rd. We sped parallel to the streetcar tracks on 3rd and continued over the Lefty O’Doul Bridge.

  On the far side of the bridge was AT&T Park, the Giants home field—and there was a game on tonight. I could see the neon marquee and the stadium lights like a row of stars blazing through the fog. If the sirens hadn’t been screaming, I might have been able to hear the fans cheering as a game-winning Giants home run cleared the wall and plopped into McCovey Cove.

  As it was, the sirens were screaming, but I knew that the Giants had won because inebriated fans, euphoric with victory, had begun wandering out onto the glistening street.

  I was looking ahead as we hit King Street and Willie Mays Plaza, and that’s when, in the space of an instant, Randy Fish’s ride ran into trouble.

  A tractor trailer was coming toward us in the opposite lane, like a freight train appearing out of nowhere in the night. Fish’s car was speeding, weaving through traffic, and had almost cleared the length of the big rig when the driver turned the wheel ever so slightly to the left.

  Maybe the driver miscalculated how far he was from the semi, or maybe his hand slipped on the steering wheel. But whatever the reason, the getaway car clipped the back wheel of the looming, fifty-three-foot, twin-screw tractor trailer, and the whole freaking night exploded.

  Chapter 98

  I SAW IT all go down, every second of it.

  Time didn’t freeze. There was no stop-motion, just the awful sight of the rogue squad car winging the back wheel of a monster truck and the front of the car whipping around, being dragged beneath the undercarriage, where it was mashed and mangled.

  Tires exploded like gunshots.

  Plumes of sparks lit the pavement, trailing behind the semi, as its brakes screeched and the truck jackknifed across two lanes, smacking into cars like a bowling ball taking down pins before it came to a halt.

  At the same time as the accident was burning up King Street, Conklin was braking and turning the wheel of our car in the direction of our skid. As I braced for a crash, I saw what was happening just ahead of us.

  Nardone’s car had slewed into the railing alongside the Mission Creek and the following car had piled into it. Our car slid sideways. I don’t know if I actually screamed, but I can tell you that I was screaming inside my mind.

  I was thinking of my daughter, my baby, and that I couldn’t leave her now. My God, not now.

  Conklin was doing his best, but still our car caromed off a guardrail, sideswiped Nardone’s car, and continued moving in a sickening spin, rocking from side to side. We balanced on two wheels, right at the tipping point, then, mercifully, dropped into a four-point crouch.

  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 se
e 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.

  But he was not going to die without answering my questions. I just wouldn’t accept that.

  “Randy. Can you hear me?”

  “Lin?”

  “Yes. It’s Lindsay. Who is Morales to you?”

  “I love … her,” he said. “I love …”

  I reached into the car, shook his shoulder. Blood was coming from his forehead, his chest, his twisted legs. His body was a sieve.

  “Stay with me, Randy,” I said to him. “Please stay with me. We’re going to get you out of here in just another minute. Hey! Randy.”

  Blood bubbled out of Fish’s mouth. He took another breath. I turned away from the car and toward the chaos around me. A fireman was six feet away from me, talking into his phone. Rain dripped from the brim of his hat.

  “We got a survivor in there,” I shouted, pointing to the car.

  “I know, Sergeant. We had to extract the ones who are going to make it first. But I didn’t forget him. I’ve got the Jaws coming back now.”

  The firefighter came back to the car and leaned his face through the windshield as I had done. He said to Fish, “I’m Deputy Chief Robert Wilson. I’m called Robbie. Take it easy, sir. Everything is going to be okay.”

  I had heard those words before, spoken in just the same way. And now I remembered the man called Robbie. The last time I’d seen him, I’d been naked, lightning blazing around me across the black sky. This man had helped deliver Julie.

  “Don’t I know you, Sergeant?” he said to me. “Sure I do. How’s your little girl?”

  My chest heaved. Tears welled, spilled, unnoticed in the rain. God, I was crying a lot these days. I sucked it up and pushed down the emotion that was on the verge of disabling me.

  I put my hand on Deputy Wilson’s arm and said, “Mr. Fish is an important witness to several unsolved homicides. I have to talk to him.”

  “Ma’am, that engine crushed his thighs and his pelvis. He’s got broken ribs, punctured lungs. He’s
lost a lot of blood, and he’s either going to bleed out or the traumatic asphyxia is going to kill him.

  “He’s going in and out of consciousness now, you understand?” Deputy Wilson said. “He’s not leaving that car. If you want to talk to him, you should tell him that he’s got very little time. I’d tell him that right away.”

  Chapter 102

  THE AMBULANCE TOOK off like a rocket. I stood in the street and stared after the taillights and flashers until they became the size of pin lights, trying to understand what made no sense to me at all.

  Why had Mackie Morales, our summer intern, been driving a stolen squad car with her baby in the backseat? Had Fish gotten to her in some way? Had he threatened her or her baby?

  That had to be it.

  Why else would a bright young woman with a big future and a small child commit a felony? But if Fish had threatened her, how did that square with him saying that he loved her?

  Fire bloomed under a car that had been beached on the sidewalk under the marquee. The neon sign reading HOME OF THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS flickered madly. Hoses came out, snaked around my feet, and that’s what broke the spell.

  I walked back to the twisted patrol car, where Randolph Fish was pinned under the weight of the big V-8. The car interior, such as it was, was bright from the surrounding headlights and halogen lamps. I saw that Fish was still taking in air, but his breathing was shallow and labored.

  I angled myself into the driver’s seat, said to the dying man, “Randy, it’s Lindsay. How’re you doing?”

  Fish opened his eyes and slowly turned his head so that he could see me.

  “Mackie?”

  “She’s on the way to the emergency room. My partner is with her. That’s all I know.”