The Inn

by James Patterson

  “Someone’s giving me a problem,” Cline said. “I don’t know what he’s going to try to do next. I want you and the kids out of the house.”

  “But—”

  “But?” Cline snapped. Another clatter, a cry of pain. “But what, Teri?”

  Nick had heard enough. He tried to rise but I dragged him down.

  “Nothing and no one is going to take me away from those boys,” Cline said. “Until I’ve tied up all the loose ends, you pack your shit and get out of here. I’ll call you with the hotel reservation.”

  I heard his footsteps on the floorboards. The boys calling to him from the stairs. Cline’s wife, or ex-wife, started crying from the kitchen beyond where Nick and I hid.

  “Do we go inside and help her?” Nick whispered. I thought for a moment, listening to the little boys going to their mother, asking her what was wrong. The helpless confusion of tiny children living in the shadow of a monster.

  “There’s a way we can help her,” I told Nick. “And it’s the same way we help ourselves.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  SUSAN KNEW WHAT I had decided to do. She stood with me in the kitchen looking worriedly over my work as I massacred some vegetables and then laid them out on a tray, spice-rubbed a shoulder of pork. A day had passed since Nick and I stood idly by while Cline made his ex-wife squeal in terror. The sound of her frightened voice had kept me up all night, Susan tossing and turning as I failed to settle down. Before dawn I’d crept to my basement bed, knowing I’d need her, at least, sharp and ready to be my ally against the man who had come unwelcome into our lives.

  In the end, I decided that I had to finish Cline. One way or another, I had to remove him like a cancer from his ex-wife’s life, from my neighborhood. I had to release the choke hold he had on the addicts and hurting people of Gloucester and make sure that what happened to Marni didn’t happen to anyone ever again.

  “Is there something a bit strange about preparing dinner for everyone when we’re about to do … ” She paused, shaking her head. “What we’re about to do?”

  “I’m finding a weird comfort in it,” I said, wiping my hands on a dish towel. I tried to explain to her and myself that, somehow, knowing the people in my house were fed, even with my subpar culinary offerings, gave me some consolation. “It’s a job. I have to do it. We’ve got a couple renting the front room tonight. But I’m also doing it because it’s a relief, and I think we’d better grab hold of whatever relief we can get right now.”

  She seemed to take the suggestion literally and put her arms around me. There was an exhilarating rush that shuddered through my body every time she touched me and also a warm, familiar sensation that I knew came from the feel of Siobhan in my arms not so long ago, the smoothness of her cheek against mine.

  “We might never come back here,” she said. I gripped her shoulders. “Do you get that? We might put this dinner on and leave here and it might be the last time we walk out the door.”

  I thought about Siobhan and the dinner she’d been coming home with, the last time she would walk out the door already having occurred without my knowledge. I hadn’t said goodbye properly. But even if I’d had the chance, I reminded myself, there’d have been an impossible amount of things to say.

  “I don’t mean to be morbid.” She laughed, pulling away from me and wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s just been a while since I was in the thick of it. A couple of years writing about circus hamsters and yarn sales will do that to you. Make you realize that there are things at risk, important possibilities you might be about to destroy.”

  She gestured to me as she said that. I wondered if I was one of those “important possibilities.” She was certainly one of mine. As I’d lain awake the night before, I’d watched her sleeping and known just how deeply I’d fallen for her already, how difficult it would be to climb back out of my desire for her. I was indeed risking Susan in my plan. I was risking everyone I cared about.

  “But we have to do something,” I said, finishing my thought for her.

  Doc Simeon came through the kitchen door and stood near us, frowning. I knew from the paleness in his cheeks and the tremble in his old hands that he’d done what I’d asked of him.

  “Did he buy it?” I said.

  “I think so,” the doctor replied. “I think we’re on.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  SQUID SAT IN the passenger seat next to me looking slightly disheveled, thinner than I’d last seen him, with bags under his bloodshot eyes; he looked like a cat who’d escaped into the wild and been found after a couple of weeks of hard living. Nick had left him in the care of his cousins and aunt in Augusta, but the boy hadn’t wanted to endanger his family and he’d wandered out into the night. Nick told me he’d found the boy hanging out with a menacing bunch of people in the parking lot behind a popular bar. He reeked of cigarettes and sweat.

  Doc and Susan sat in the back seat, silent, as we followed Nick and Malone on the highway down to Boston.

  “Something’s going to go wrong,” the boy said, watching the tall pine trees whiz past us on either side of the road. “I can feel it. Something bad’s about to happen.”

  “I know what that feels like,” I said. The fever, hot and heavy, had been nesting in my chest since we left the house. I told myself it was just memories of Boston and my fall. Trepidation about what lay ahead on the road.

  “You don’t trick Cline like this,” Squid said. “He reads minds. He’s like a fucking vampire or something.” The boy’s eyes were a little too wide. I let him rattle off the words, getting it out of his system. “That’s how he came into my life, you know. Like a vampire. Like he’d always known I was there and now it was, like, time to come get me. Bring me into the family. Make me one of his own.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  Squid rubbed his nose, laughed a little.

  “I was stealing bags at the airport,” he said. “I had a good scam going. I’d go in dressed really nice with a suitcase full of magazines, make like I’d just gotten off a flight. I even had one of those neck pillows that I’d dirtied up so it looked like I traveled all the time. I’d find a flight that had just come in, so there were only a couple of people down in the baggage area. I’d watch the first bag come along, and if no one jumped at it, I’d grab it and walk out.”

  I heard Susan give a little laugh behind me. Somehow, even with all that was ahead of us that night, Squid’s story lightened the tension in the car. We crested a hill, and I saw the cluster of lights on the horizon that I knew was Boston.

  “Anyway, one day I picked up the wrong bag,” Squid said. “It had two bricks of heroin in it. The guy had been dumb enough to check the bag with all his personal stuff too. I worked out who he was, bought a burner phone, and texted saying he could have the bricks back for ten grand. The guy didn’t show up. Cline did. And not at the meeting place. At my house. He knew my name, my mother’s name, everything.” Squid shuddered. It wasn’t cold in the car, but he rubbed his arms. “Maybe it wasn’t the wrong bag,” Squid said. He drew a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, extracted one, and rolled down the window slightly. “Maybe it was the right one.”

  “What do you mean?” Doc asked.

  “Cline will give you everything you want.” Squid shrugged. “You want money? He’s got money. You want girls? He’s got girls. He’ll tell them to be in love with you and they’ll be in love with you. It’s like magic. You can have everything you want—all you got to do is stay out of trouble. Because if you trip once …”

  The car fell silent. Squid smoked his cigarette too fast, leaning and blowing the smoke out of the crack in the window with shivering breaths.

  “What happened to the guy who lost the drugs?” I asked. “The one whose bag you stole?”

  “He’s in a drainpipe off the highway,” Squid said. “Cline stabbed him in the head with a letter opener in his nice big office.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  COMING HOME. RETURNING
to where it had all begun, the happiest and the most horrific days of my career, when Malone and I had walked the streets with no idea of the downfall that awaited us, the cliff edge about to crumble beneath our feet. We’d been untouchables in uniform, hunting down the drunk, violent, careless on our streets, two faithful dogs rounding up wolves and driving them away from our flock of innocent sheep. Now I drove and watched the wide streets rolling by, the windows of grand old hotels where we had responded to weddings gone wild, the banks where we had stood guard with our brothers foiling brazen stickups. Every corner had a memory.

  Here, outside the Union Oyster House, we had stopped to examine Malone’s trooper badge in the sunlight when he finally made rank, the clash and clatter of the bar’s patrons on one side of us, press of tourists celebrating St. Patrick’s Day at the other.

  Here on the steps of the courthouse, we had elbowed aside journalists huddling around accused murderers, fraudsters, and priests caught up in the Catholic archdiocese scandal. I’d copped a microphone in the eye from a Fox News reporter here once. Just one block down, Malone had nearly tripped on a DVD player tossed over the shoulder of a meth addict running for his life across a parking lot.

  All of that was lost to us now. The two of us had thrown in everything one night when we’d decided to take the law into our own hands, Malone for one reason, me for another, more than two years ago. Tonight, I was doing the same thing, driving toward the fateful street where we had crossed the line into that dark territory, knowing in my heart that what I was doing was the right thing and maybe being horribly, irreversibly wrong about that.

  We drove around the block, passing Malone and Nick in their car as they pulled into a space directly across the street from the apartment building where Malone and I had sealed our fates. I met my partner’s eyes and hoped he knew that I forgave him for what had happened here, what his actions had taken from us both. I desperately missed this city, these streets, the way the people had looked at me in my uniform, some lovingly and some hatefully. But what was happening to him, the disease that was eating at his bones and slowly taking him from whatever remained of his life, was not what he or anyone deserved.

  I parked my car at the other end of the street, in view of Nick’s vehicle and the apartment building’s door.

  “Okay,” I said in the heavy silence of the car. I looked at my watch. “Make the call.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  I WATCHED THE plan unfolding before my eyes. Everything had gone perfectly so far. Doc Simeon had called Cline that evening and told him that Squid, the boy he had been giving prescriptions to for more than a year, had come to him for help. Squid was desperate and afraid, having run from Cline after getting himself taken down by Bill Robinson’s team and interrogated. He wanted to make good with Cline and knew the Doc was outside the business, someone disconnected who didn’t have a reason to pick sides. Doc told Cline that Squid had sworn he hadn’t spoken to any police, wasn’t trying to come back into the fold because he was wearing a wire or hoping to lead the cops to his boss. The doc said he was willing to act as an intermediary, to present Squid to Cline and make sure no harm came to either of them. The boy in the car beside me stiffened in his seat as Doc dialed Cline’s number now. I watched the gold-lit street, impossibly still and crossed with menacing black shadows, as the line connected. In the silence of the vehicle I could hear every word from Cline’s end.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m here,” Doc said. “I want you to promise again that you won’t hurt the boy. He said he had no choice but to run from you. But he’s loyal. He wants to work this out. He’s got nowhere to go.”

  “Squid knows he can trust me,” Cline said. I looked at the boy, who gave a tight smile. We both knew what was going to happen tonight. Cline was going to take Squid from the old man with one intention: to kill him. To tie up the loose ends, as he had told his ex-wife. But Squid wasn’t going to die tonight. Nick, Susan, Malone, and I would make sure that didn’t happen. In the most heavily surveilled street in Boston, we would capture Cline taking custody of the boy. We would follow and intervene, recording everything on Squid’s phone.

  As Doc gave Cline the street address, Squid took out his phone.

  “All right,” I said. “You call me. I’ll set off a recorder on my phone and I’ll listen in while we follow you. If anything goes wrong, I’ll hear it. Nick and Malone will be ahead of you, and Susan and I will follow behind. Don’t worry.”

  “Stay close, man,” Squid breathed. He gripped the door handle as he pushed the buttons on his phone. “He’ll be packin’. Cline could pop me in the fucking car and drive me out into the marshes. You better be ready.”

  “We’re ready,” I assured him. My phone buzzed, and I answered it, listening as Squid and Doc got out of the car.

  The old man and the young, gangly boy walked into the light of the apartment building. I pressed the record button, looked up and down the street for Cline. Susan reached forward from the back seat and put a hand on my shoulder, and we watched the silhouettes of Doc and Squid standing still, waiting, as the painful seconds ticked by.

  Squid reached into his pocket, probably for another cigarette. I heard his voice over the phone as he spoke to Doc. “You scared?” he asked the doctor.

  “A little,” Doc admitted. “You?”

  The boy didn’t answer. I felt my stomach twist. “Your man thinks he got Cline all wrapped up, huh?” Squid said.

  “I think we’re good,” Doc said. “This is going to work.”

  “Famous last words.” Squid laughed.

  I watched as he drew a knife from his pocket and plunged it into the old man’s stomach.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

  I HAD ONLY seconds to witness the horror of the old man collapsing as though sucker-punched, the boy’s shoulder dipping and surging upward as he thrust the knife expertly into Doc’s rib cage. The windshield before me exploded. I felt the seat I was sitting in thump as a bullet tore into the headrest right beside my ear. Cline was striding up the sidewalk, his gun in both hands, the pistol bucking as he pumped bullets into the car. I glimpsed a devilish smile. Squid had warned him. They’d orchestrated this together.

  Susan didn’t scream. She popped her door just as I did, and we fell out onto the road together and crawled on the asphalt scattered with glass as bullets zinged off the cars around us. I couldn’t tell when Cline’s gun ran out of ammunition and when Nick’s and Malone’s firing began. I heard them shouting from the end of the street, saw Cline swivel and try to shoot in that direction, his gun clicking uselessly. He ejected his mag and pumped another clip in as a bullet tinked off a lamppost right by his face. He didn’t flinch. This was his city now too, and these were his streets, and the slices of darkness and cars and concrete edges seemed designed to protect him. He fired, and I saw Nick spin as he caught one in the shoulder.

  Susan brushed past me, straightened up a bit so that she could steady her aim on the hood of the car. She fired twice at Cline. One bullet hit the wall behind him, alerting him to the coming second round. He whipped his head left, which made what would have been a fatal shot in the face a graze across the temple by his ear. The shot spooked him, and he fell into the shadows.

  He was gone, ducking between the cars, a flash of black coat between a car that had turned into the street and stopped at the sound of the firefight. Gunshots roared between the buildings overhead, clapping and echoing like thunder. I grabbed my gun from the car and followed Susan to the other side of the road, where we crouched by Doc Simeon, who was pointing in the direction that Squid had gone, coughing blood onto his cheeks and shirt.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Susan told him, pulling his coat closed over the wound in his stomach. Her hands were instantly drenched in blood that looked purple in the gold light of the apartment building. “You’re okay. You’re okay. It’s nothing.”

  Sweet lies from a beautiful woman. There were worse ways to die, I thought. The old man’s feet scra
ped against the sidewalk. I looked down the street and saw Malone and Nick running toward us.

  “Are you all right?” I grabbed Nick. His jaw was clenched, and he was panting hard. Malone tossed me an extra clip for my gun. Nick’s shirt was wet with blood, but he hardly seemed to notice the wound, that strange manic electricity taking hold of him quickly, making him shiver under my grasp.

  “We’ve gotta go! We’ve gotta go!” He tried to drag me down the street. “They ran that way!”

  “I’ll stay here.” Susan knelt over the doctor, pressing hard on his wound. Every cell in my body was telling me to stay with her, to be here for the moments that my friend lay dying on the ground, to somehow try to stop the life from draining from his worn body.

  “Go, Bill.” Susan pushed at me. “You’ve got to stop Cline.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ONE

  MALONE WAS AHEAD of me. He turned the corner of a closed and silent bank and a gunshot clapped overhead; the concrete corner of an ornate pillar just by his face exploded, forcing him back. We ran into each other, then pressed against the wall. I saw movement to my side and noticed a couple who had been out for a late-night walk cowering between two cars, their big spotted dog twisting and tugging on a leash, terrified. Malone rushed forward into the alley between the streets, but when I looked back to find Nick, who I thought was following us, he was nowhere to be seen. Cline rose from behind a dumpster at the end of the alley, fired off a couple of shots, and sprinted into the dark.

  “Nick’s not with us!” I grabbed Malone’s arm. “I have to go back.”