The Inn

by James Patterson

  “He’ll be fine!” Malone dragged me forward. “We’ve got to get this bastard off the street!”

  We ran across the road, causing a car to slam on its brakes, the hood halting inches from my knees, the headlights blinding. In a courtyard, the water in a large square fountain set into the pavement was so still that Malone didn’t see it; he sprinted in, tripped, and splashed to the other side. We crouched against a post as bullets popped into a low garden wall beside me.

  Across the courtyard, Cline and Squid met, two frantic silhouettes against the reflective glass of an office building.

  Cline turned, and for a moment I thought it was his reflection that stepped out and raised the gun and pumped Squid’s frail, lean frame full of bullets. But it was a bigger, stronger man, a shape I recognized, gunning the kid down with the precise motions of a machine. Nick didn’t even seem to see Cline, who shot out the glass door beside him and ran into the dark. Nick looked down at his victim, then up at me as I ran to his side.

  “Jesus,” he said. His eyes were wild, flicking between realities, over Squid’s body and then to the gun in his hand. “I killed him. I killed a kid.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWO

  NICK DROPPED HIS weapon and gripped his head, trying to blink away whatever he was seeing. He flinched at a noise or a movement that wasn’t there, grabbed his weapon, and pushed it into my hands.

  “I can’t … I can’t … I can’t do this. Is … is this real? Did I—”

  “He’s dead.” Malone had his fingers against Squid’s motionless carotid. He looked at me. “Cline’s alone. This is our chance.”

  “I can’t come with you.” Nick backed away from me. “I’m sorry, Bill. I don’t know what’s … I just shot a kid! Christ!”

  I thought about going with Nick. But Malone had run through the automatic doors beside me. One friend was facing Cline alone, and the other was facing his nightmares. I stuffed Nick’s pistol down the back of my jeans and ran into the dark building.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THREE

  IT WAS AN unfinished office building of some sort, belonged to a big corporation. Expensive chrome and marble, light fixtures hanging from their housings, and transparent plastic sheets draped over furniture. Malone was covering the elevators, where a bloody smear on the up button was as stark as a brushstroke of black ink against the white wall. A ruse. Cline wouldn’t wait for the elevator. He wouldn’t put himself in a box with only one way in and one way out no matter how fast it moved away from where his enemies were. Malone crept to the stairs and I followed. In the eerie green light of an exit sign hanging over the fire door, he pointed to a nickel-size drop of blood on the floor.

  Time circling, looping back. I remembered days earlier, before Marni, before Doc, before I really knew what darkness had come into my life, Nick and I breaching Winley Minnow’s house together. Malone and I going through apartment buildings like this, floor by floor, a hundred or a thousand times across the years. My brothers in arms. It had been a mistake for Cline to think he could come back to our city and best us. We knew this place. Even if we’d been thrown out as guardians of these streets, these buildings, we had never put down our shields.

  Floor by floor, we followed the dark spots in the deep green light, a blood trail Susan had started when she grazed Cline’s temple and ear with her shot. She was with us as we followed, round and round, floor by floor, chasing the wolf up the stairs.

  We were sweating as we reached the seventeenth floor, panting, every muscle ticking with tension. Only minutes had passed, but I felt like I’d followed Cline out of the depths of hell and up to the surface of the earth. We couldn’t let him get out among the people again. He was our curse to contain.

  Malone stopped me at the eighteenth floor, his eyes searching the ground for the spots, finding nothing. The hand that pressed against my chest felt strangely cold. Malone was so thin I could see the tendons in his neck and shoulder moving as he worked his jaw. He dried his hand on his jeans and tested the door handle—it was wet with Cline’s sweat. Malone stepped back, and I kicked the fire door open from the side.

  Gunshots ripped through the door as it swung, showering me in splinters. Malone fired into the dark and I threw myself into the room, rolled, fired wildly as Malone came in with me. I felt like Cline had fired from the north end of the huge room, but I couldn’t be sure. The space before me, outlined against the city lights, was a complicated maze of cubicles with desks and chairs and more furniture shrouded in plastic wrap.

  All was silent save for the ringing in my ears and the whistling of the night wind through bullet holes in the distant windows.

  Then Cline spoke.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR

  “ROBINSON!” HE ROARED my name, the word trailing off into an exhausted, angry laugh. “You should have just moved!”

  I locked eyes with Malone. He was huddled behind a desk across a short aisle. In the ticking seconds, my heightened senses registered strange, disconnected details. People had started to move into the office, even though it wasn’t finished. There was a pink afghan draped over a chair beside my partner. A framed photo on a desk. I saw a panel of lights on the wall, thought about turning them on. I knew I couldn’t trust what the reflections against the huge windows would reveal of me to Cline. Malone signaled, and we started moving slowly and silently toward where the voice was coming from.

  “Why didn’t you leave town if you didn’t like what I was doing?” Cline shouted. “You stupid prick. You dug in. Now look at you. You’re drowning, boy. When the big bad storm rolls in, you head for the hills. Don’t you know that, you dumb fuck!”

  I didn’t want to let Cline know where I was, but I couldn’t help myself. “You’re the one who better run, Cline!” I shouted. “This ends here!”

  Predictably, my voice was met with a hail of bullets. I crouched between the desks and fired, caught a flash of Cline by the windows, a streak of shadow. I waited until the shooting stopped, then crawled on my hands and knees toward the last place I’d seen the man. I could see the icy white lights of Fenway Park in the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “I’m not scared of you, Robinson.” Cline laughed. I could hear him reloading his gun again. “You’re a good man. You’re a protector. You got caught up in that bullshit with your partner only because you thought you were protecting some girl.”

  Malone’s sharp breath came from quite close to me. He was working his way along the ground in the next aisle of cubicles. Our eyes met, and I saw the pain in his face through the darkness.

  “You’re not going to hunt me down like this. You’ll walk away and let me go. You know what you are, Robinson. You’re not a killer.”

  Cline’s sales tactics again, trying to tell me what was good for me, trying to bring on the guilt and the pain. Because wasn’t that what I wanted to do? Of course I wanted to turn away from the horror that he had brought into my life. Forget it all. Leave town. Ignore the suffering of others. Let the people I loved defend themselves. I knew that if I had not pursued Cline in the first place, Marni might still be alive. Maybe Doc. I’d taken this mission on myself. Cline’s sales pitch was good. He was outnumbered two to one, so he was giving it all he had. I could let him go, save myself and my friends additional bloodshed. Hope someone else would bring him to justice.

  But Cline was right. Another man might have headed for the hills when Cline moved into town. I was not that man.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I yelled. “And neither are you.”

  I crept along the base of a cubicle divider and heard a shuffle near me; I peered through a crack and saw Malone taking aim.

  He fired, blasting out one of the windows. The wind howled, lifting sheets of plastic, making them sail like ghosts through the air. Malone had been near the target, but not on point. He must have fired at Cline’s reflection, because the man popped up perpendicular to where Malone had hit, his shots flashing off the ceiling. I was so close that a cartridge from Cline’s gun sailed o
ver the top of the cubicle beside me and bounced, red hot, off my shoulder.

  Cline had been overzealous, firing where he was sure Malone was, in the cubicle next to me. But he was out of bullets. His gun clicked impotently, and as I felt a smile spread over my face, a sound rose up in the distance. It was a sound I had heard almost constantly for two decades, a sound that once filled me with excitement and now was like a cold hand reaching into my chest and gripping my heart.

  The wail of police sirens.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIVE

  CLINE’S LAUGHTER BARELY reached above the rising and falling sirens of three or four squad cars on the street below. I heard his gun clatter to the carpet. He kicked the weapon, and I watched it sail soundlessly across the carpet and over the edge of the blasted-out window into the night. It would fly downward toward the street, empty of bullets, and land on the windshield of a car or on the pavement for the police to find. Cline’s gun, with Cline’s prints, empty and useless, leaving the cops to conclude that he was unarmed and at our mercy when we did whatever we were about to do next.

  Cline rose to his feet and stepped backward toward the wall of windows. The bullet holes in the glass behind him brought a breeze that ruffled his hair. He grinned as Malone and I rose and stepped out from the cubicles.

  “Don’t be stupid, now,” he told us, his tone light and sweet, like a parent gently chastising a child. “You know how this could end. You’re already on the wrong side of the Boston PD. Committing a cold-blooded murder wouldn’t end well for the two of you.”

  Cline eyed Malone, getting his first good look at my partner. Malone’s gun was held out like mine, an extension of his body, straight and high and pointed at Cline’s chest.

  “Cold-blooded murder suits you perfectly,” I said. I was trembling all over with rage. “If we let you go now, there will be more teenagers who take a pill of yours at a party and die lonely deaths in the woods. There will be more soldiers strangled in their beds, more doctors ruining their good names by taking your dirty money.”

  “Maybe.” Cline shrugged. “But you can hear the sirens, Bill. They’re coming for us. You’re not going to do this. Think about those people at the house. They need you, and you need them. You’re happy there, aren’t you? You’ve got a good life. You’ve got too much to live for, Robinson.”

  Malone looked at me. There was a mixture of sadness and resolve in his features; his eyes hardened and then emptied.

  He turned to Cline.

  “He does,” Malone said. “But I don’t.”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SIX

  MY LIMBS WERE frozen, though I could see what was about to happen as soon as Malone’s gaze turned from mine. He dropped his gun, bent low, and threw all his body weight into the sprint, his shoulders and long arms out, ready to catch Cline should he try to run. Cline saw it coming but seemed as immobile as I was, his eyes full of the awful breathless terror of a man already dead before his heart had stopped beating. Malone slammed into Cline, the momentum carrying them both toward the window that was already weakened by bullet holes. The deafening crunch of Cline’s shoulders meeting the glass was like a gunshot, quickening my heavy limbs. It seemed like I watched them falling through the splintering, shattering glass, the window collapsing like a curtain, the two men hanging almost in the dark air beyond the bounds of the building. I ran for them as fast as I could.

  I dropped, slid in the glass, was close enough to touch Malone’s boot as the two fell. I gripped the edge of the floor as the icy wind raked my hair, a scream shuddering out of my lungs as they disappeared into the darkness.

  For a second before they were consumed by the night, I saw Cline’s bulging eyes over Malone’s shoulder, heard his scream carried by the wind. He was reaching for me. I covered my eyes, rolled away from the edge, and curled into a ball, as though the motion could drown out the sickening sound of my friend and my enemy thudding to the pavement eighteen floors below.

  I was saved from that horror by the noise of a team of officers crashing through the door to the office, shouting, guns drawn, flashlights winding over the room. Lights swept over me. I didn’t get a good look at whoever reached me first. I was shoved onto my stomach and cuffed in the darkness.

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED SEVEN

  THE OFFICERS WHO had responded to reports of a shoot-out in the Boston CBD were young, fit, crisis-squad guys. They were the heavily tattooed and worryingly muscular types who had joined the force for the sole purpose of making the chaotic, fast-paced, high-stakes special response team. Black tactical vests, big guns. They knew who I was by my ruined reputation only. These guys were used to being over the top, and I didn’t take it personally. Two gripped my arms as we rode the elevator down; another stood by the door with his gun hanging in his gloved hand, barking questions at me.

  “Are there any other shooters?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What is this? A drug thing? You and Malone taking out your dealer? Your partner? We’ve got reports of four casualties in the street. Two from the building. You push those guys from that window? Who’s the kid on the sidewalk? You shoot that kid? Who’s the old man?”

  Four casualties. Doc hadn’t made it.

  “You’re not giving me enough time to respond to these questions,” I remarked calmly to the head guy. “You’re just asking questions without waiting for answers.”

  “What are you, some kind of smart-ass? Is that it? You a smart-ass, Robinson?”

  I sighed and stared at the door.

  The street was a wash of red and blue light; there were dozens of officers rigging cordons, crunching through the glass on the foyer floor in their heavy boots, making radio reports. Half the people present had their guns drawn. It wasn’t every day in Boston that men fell from skyscrapers and civilians took cover from bullets. I was marched past Squid’s body, already covered with a sheet. I spotted Nick sitting cuffed in the back of a police car.

  I was being pushed toward another police car when Susan ran out of the crowd toward me. She was somehow beautiful even then, maybe because I was so relieved at seeing her unharmed. She was flushed and didn’t slow as she approached, so she knocked the wind out of me as she wrapped her arms around me in a desperate embrace.

  “I saw them fall.” She was shivering, gripping my shirt as though we’d be wrenched apart at any moment. “Jesus Christ, Bill, I thought it was you. I heard a scream and I looked up and—what the fuck happened?”

  I didn’t answer. Over Susan’s shoulder, I saw another familiar face in the crowd, a woman approaching with her characteristic stiff-legged walk and unflappable expression. Commissioner Rachel McGinniskin was in full uniform, as if she wore it to bed and had been roused in the early hours and come right here with perfectly polished buttons and her hat perched like a crown on her curls.

  “Robinson,” she said by way of greeting. “Why am I not surprised?”

  CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED EIGHT

  “RACHEL,” I CALLED her, because I could. A tiny, mean-spirited joy in my evening, making the squad guys bristle at my disrespect of their gold-striped queen. She licked her teeth and looked Susan up and down, raising her eyebrows at the blood—Doc’s—that stained Susan’s clothes from neck to knee.

  “I got a call a half an hour ago saying guys were shooting at each other in the street,” she said. “I thought, What a dangerous, irresponsible, cowardly thing to be doing. A witness looking out her apartment window at the fray reportedly recognized one of them as a former Boston PD officer, and I thought, Ah. Our old friend is back.”

  “I try to make an entrance wherever I go,” I said.

  Rachel hadn’t told the thugs flanking me to get rid of the cuffs. I guess she deserved a tiny, mean-spirited joy in her night too. She nodded at them to leave us. I took a couple of steps back and sat on the warm hood of a squad car. Exhaustion and shock were setting in. Susan put a hand on the nape of my neck, firm and calming. McGinniskin made a get-on-with-it gesture, rotating her finger like she w
as spinning a wheel, and in a low voice I told her what had happened on the street and in the tower and in the days before Cline and I came together for the last time.

  “You really are a piece of work, you know that, Robinson?” McGinniskin said. I couldn’t argue.

  Commissioner McGinniskin folded her arms, glanced away, seemed to try to take in the story. She looked like she was struggling to decide how to say what she had to say next. In the end, she just laid it on me straight.

  “A letter from Malone came through my office on Monday,” she said.

  I just looked at her.

  “He explained what the two of you did a couple of years ago,” she said. “He took full responsibility. Said he tricked you into it. Some story about a girl who needed help and a sex tape.”

  I glanced at Susan. She put her arm around me, kissed my head.

  “Of course, how can I believe him?” McGinniskin mused. There was a softness to her voice I’d never heard before. Though her face remained hard, all the fury had suddenly left her. She took a handcuff key from her pocket and tossed it to Susan.

  “Malone knew he was dying,” McGinniskin said. “Could just be that he had been planning some kind of big fuck-you like this all along.” She gestured to the building above us, the site of my partner’s fall. “And why not save your skin in the process? One last favor for an old friend.”

  “Could be,” I said. I wasn’t up for fighting for my cause now. But for some reason, I felt like I didn’t have to. Susan unlocked my cuffs and I handed them to the commissioner.

  “Malone returned the remaining stolen money with the letter,” McGinniskin said. “Seventeen thousand dollars. I guess that was all that was left after his treatments. Makes me wonder why, if you were indeed his willing partner in crime, he didn’t just give it to you. But in any case, what could I do with it? The guy you both robbed never made an official report, of course. The department suspects the funds are a result of his criminal activity.”