“The Evacuation, Part Deux,” Jordan said.
“The last sequel, I hope.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Still, I bet all of us will wind up back at that sick camp. Maybe we’ll find my mom there. I hope she’s healed by now.”
“Excuse me!” I shouted over the rotors to Brianna. “Are you taking us to the sick camp?”
“Those were my orders at first,” she replied. “But with your mom’s gunshot wound, I insisted on taking her and these other gentlemen to the hospital in Charleston. At first I heard some argument, then nothing, so here we go.”
“Thanks!” I replied.
“What she said,” Jordan added.
The two of us faced each other again.
“So who knows?” he said.
“Exactly.”
“Well,” he continued, “we survived a year apart once—and I’m guessing this time Ishango won’t be cutting off our access to cellular technology and that thing known as the internet. We may be apart for a few months, but we’ll be able to travel this time and go wherever we want, right? And I’ll want to be where you are.”
“Same here,” I said, my face relaxing into a smile.
“Maybe we’ll meet up in Washington, D.C., to testify before Congress. I guess it depends on how much of this Ishango stuff comes out.”
“Oh, it’ll come out,” I said. “We may get in trouble, but it’s our duty. This town has released too much radiation and evil. Now’s the time for us to let out the truth.”
Jordan sat back, wearing a thoughtful expression. “You’re right,” he said. “What happened in Mount Hope should serve as a warning to the rest of the world.”
“Yep,” I said. “They may even pay attention for a couple of days. That’s how long the news cycle is, right?”
“Right.”
“In the meantime, scientists will have a field day checking you out … Rho.”
He laughed.
“And I’ll be getting cancer treatments,” I couldn’t resist adding.
Jordan’s expression darkened. “Maggie, we won’t know what’s really going on until you finally see a specialist,” he said with a squeeze of my hand. “Which you’re going to do. I suspect everyone from Mount Hope will have to do the same. Who knows? By the time this is all over, you may be my Jaime Sommers.”
“I have no intention of being your Bionic Woman—or anyone else’s.”
“Well, I already think your powers are pretty super,” he said, and leaned in to give me a kiss. It felt more than nice.
“That may be the cheesiest thing you’ve ever said to me, Jordan Conners,” I said as he pulled back. “Anyway, I’m Han Solo, remember?”
I smiled and looked out the helicopter window to see the skyline of an actual city: Charleston. What a sight. We landed on the hospital’s helipad beside another helicopter with CNN emblazoned on its side plus vans marked with a 2, a 4, and a 5—the local news stations.
“I don’t know if you guys know what’s going on,” Brianna called out as the rotors slowed their spinning, “but with all of that water flooding in and out of that nuke plant, they’re saying the town may not be habitable for twenty thousand years.”
“Cripes,” Jordan said. “What a disaster.”
“Who’d have thunk that a facility so vital to the community would’ve been that susceptible to disaster?” I asked innocently.
“Twice,” Jordan added.
Brianna leaned toward us conspiratorially and said in a hushed voice, “I heard they’re already moving to seal off the plant in a giant cement sarcophagus. Crazy.”
“Crazy,” I agreed.
A phalanx of reporters and camera crews stampeded toward us, trailed by medical personnel.
“Are you ready to issue a warning to the world?” I asked Jordan.
“Yes,” he said, “except for two things. One …”
He pulled out his cell phone, saw the bars on the screen, and exclaimed, “Yes!” He punched in a number, and after a moment, his face erupted in sheer joy. “Mom! It’s Jordan! You okay? … Charlie too? … Great! Hold on!”
Then he cupped his hand over the phone and said, “Two,” and leaned in and planted the gentlest kiss yet on my lips. My face suddenly felt sunburned.
“I love you,” he whispered.
“I know,” I returned, and we both started laughing uncontrollably.
Are you a fan of James Patterson’s stand-alone thrillers?
If so, you’ll love …
THE INN
Bill Robinson is starting over. The former Boston detective has moved to a secluded coastal town where he runs the local inn. Yet all too soon he discovers that his past won’t let him go, and that leaving the city is no escape from dangers he left behind.
A new crew of criminals move into the small town, bringing drugs and violence to the front door of the inn. Robinson feels the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Can he save himself, and his residents, before time runs out?
Read on for an extract of this gripping new thriller
Available in hardback from August 2019
SOMETHING VERY BAD was about to go down.
There are things you know as a cop in Boston. You know how the city feels, because its streets are your veins and the voices of its people come through your lips when you talk. You know the smell of the salt in the harbor like the scent of the back of your wife’s neck, and it’s just as precious, reassuring. The hammering of footsteps out of Back Bay Station for the morning rat race wakes you up, and the wail of sirens in the old Combat Zone at night puts you to sleep. Every Christmas, you gather up some young wide-eyed uniforms to take poor kids from East Boston and Hyde Park into the toy stores, try to show the new cops and the kids that they can get along. You know that in a few years, some of those cops and some of those kids will end up killing each other. But that’s how the city works. It’s like a living thing. It sheds, and it hurts, and it bleeds.
I could feel what was about to happen in the air. It was an unexpected and dizzying heat, surreal against the snow on the ground outside the car.
When my partner Malone and I got a call to go to the commissioner’s office downtown, I knew we were in for it. A Boston cop knows that being called to the commissioner’s office is a bad, bad thing.
Malone always made fun of me for thinking I had Boston’s pulse, a sense about approaching trouble in the city. On the morning of the marathon bombing, we’d been a mile up Boylston Street doing crowd control and I told Malone I felt hot and weird, like I had a fever. We felt the thump of the first blast under our feet a second or two later.
We were in the back of the cruiser, Malone looking out the window, joggling his knee and picking his teeth.
“Wait. I know what this is,” he said suddenly. “This is about that baby. We’re getting a medal for the baby last week.”
The week before, Malone and I had been walking out at the end of a shift when a woman outside a café two doors from the station started screaming like she was on fire. She was standing in the street pointing at a balcony five floors above, where a toddler was sitting on the concrete ledge, having the time of his life. A crowd gathered, and it was quickly established that the mother was inside but wasn’t answering the door or her phone. While some guys went in to try to break down her apartment door, Malone and I watched, pulling out our own hair, while the toddler crawled along the ledge and then, wobbling, stood up.
There was no time to decide who would catch the kid. Malone and I both went in and snared him in a tangle of arms about two feet off the ground while the people around us hollered and screamed. Turned out the mother had been so damned tired from working two jobs that she fell asleep with the baby on the couch, the balcony doors open and a pot of peas cooking dry on the stove.
It was a good get, the kind of thing that wins you cheers when you walk into the station the next day. Ribbing about how tubby you look in the YouTube footage. Calls from the Globe. A medal, maybe. The toddler catch had gotten
my wife, Siobhan, on the phone for a week, bragging to all her friends, telling them to watch the news, patting my head and saying she was proud of me like I was some kind of heroic dog.
But today wasn’t about the kid. I could feel it in my bones.
“This is bad,” I told Malone. “They only send a car for you when they know you’ll be too fucked up to drive home afterward. We’re in big trouble here. You better start thinking what we’ve done to piss off the top brass.”
Malone, still twitching and joggling his knee, settled back and watched our driver. I gripped the seat belt and let Boston roll by, trying to guess what they were about to tell us.
The car dropped us at the building on Tremont Street. We went in, and as the elevator doors closed on us, I noticed that all Malone’s twitching had suddenly stopped.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were fixed on the floor. “I’m real sorry for this, Bill.”
“You’re sorry for what?”
He didn’t answer. I had to hear it from the commissioner.
BOSTON PD LEGEND says that the visitor’s chair in the commissioner’s office is an old electric chair. I’d heard whispers around the department that some sadistic jerk occupying the top job had acquired the chair from a prison auction in Ohio and simply cut the straps and headgear off to make it acceptable for the office. Malone and I entered and took two identical chairs, either of which might indeed have been an Old Sparky sourced from the depths of the Midwest. The wood was eerily warm, and there were gouges in the arms that perfectly fit my fingernails.
I wouldn’t have liked to be sitting in front of Commissioner Rachel McGinniskin even if the news were congratulatory. The red-haired, narrow-faced woman was a descendant of Barney McGinniskin, the first Irishman ever handed a police baton in Boston. From the moment Barney pulled on his blue coat, his appointment spurred hysterical newspaper reports, violent riots, and Irish bashings nationwide. The anti-immigration, anti-Catholic parties dumped him out of his job after only three years, and years later, Rachel McGinniskin had fought her way up the ladder in the force out of pure spite.
The commissioner opened a laptop and swiveled it on the desk so that the screen was facing us. She pushed a button and a black-and-white video began to play.
Only minutes into the video, I could feel sweat sliding down my ribs beneath my shirt. I looked at Malone, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
McGinniskin pointed to a guy in the video. “Detective Jeremiah Malone,” she said. “Is that you there on the screen?”
Her tone was strangely heavy, like she was the one getting the bad news. Malone didn’t say anything. Just nodded, defeated. She let the video play a while longer.
“Detective William Robinson.” She pointed at the screen again and looked at me, her eyes blazing. “Is that you?”
“It is,” I said. Malone still wouldn’t meet my gaze. Look at me, you prick, I thought. But the bastard put his face in his hands. McGinniskin turned the laptop back around and slammed it shut.
“You’re both out,” she said. The muscles in her jaw and temples were so tight, they bulged from beneath the skin. “And I’ve got to admit, gentlemen, after seeing that tape, it gives me great pleasure to say it. There’s no place in my police force for people like you. Your discharge will take effect immediately. If I hear that either of you have inquired about pensions, I’ll make sure you can’t get a job in this city as a fucking mall cop.” McGinniskin swept her hair back from her temples, chasing composure. “Give me your badges and your weapons,” she said.
It was hard for me to get out of the chair. Gravity seemed to have tripled. I took my gun off, walked what seemed like a hundred miles to her desk, and put my weapon down at the same time Malone did. He finally looked at me as we took our badges off. Then we left. Neither of us spoke until we were outside her office.
“Bill,” Malone said. “Buddy, listen. I—”
“I can’t believe you did this.” I was shaking all over. “I can’t believe you did this to us. We’re out. That’s it. It’s over. You lying, backstabbing piece of shit.”
My job. My city. The walls of the old stone building were pulsing around me, closing in. Malone had killed us. We were being expelled from the living thing. Shed like dead skin, like waste. I couldn’t breathe.
“I’m so sorry, Bill.” Malone sounded panicky. “I was trying to—”
I grabbed my partner by the shirt and slammed him into the wall beside McGinniskin’s door. It was all I could do not to knock his teeth out right there. I put a finger in his face and eased the words out from between my locked jaw.
“You and me?” I said. “We’re done.”
Two Years and Five Months Later
THE DEATH TOLL was eight, according to Cline’s count.
He knew it was narcissistic, but every day he sat under the big bay windows on the second floor of his house where he could see the ocean beyond the cypress trees and checked the papers for signs of his work. Some days he told himself he was being too proud, and other days he knew it was just good business. Since he had moved to the tiny seaside town of Gloucester, there had been eight overdose deaths. Two a month. The papers were blaring out words that excited him. Epidemic. Crisis. Downfall. Whenever things started to slide, Cline felt happy. Being a criminal meant his concept of the world was upside down. Reversed. A downward slide for others meant an upward rise for him.
That didn’t mean it was time to take it easy on anyone. As he sat reading the paper spread flat on the table before him, the way he used to in the can so that he could keep an eye on the movement of other prisoners, his lieutenants started assembling before him. Cline had made sure from the outset that his standards were known and respected. Tailored shirts. Cuff links. Ties for meetings. No speed-stripe buzz cuts, no neck tattoos, none of this gold-chain, bling-bling shit. They were a business, not a gang. The men who entered the room looked like a bunch of lawyers attending a daily meeting, but they came in punching each other and giggling and talking trash, and he silenced them with a glance. They were street thugs and prison bitches and violence-intervention-program dropouts he had recruited from rock bottom, but he’d make them true soldiers before long.
“Where’s Newgate?” Cline asked when everyone was settled. “You fuckers know to be on time.” There were uncomfortable looks around the crew, and then Newgate appeared with a baby in his arms. No, not a baby, a little girl, though she seemed like a baby in this setting, surrounded by hard men who made their living dealing in death. Cline stood and watched as big, muscle-bound, scar-faced Newgate put the barefoot child on the floor.
“I’m real sorry, boss.” Newgate gave a dramatic sigh. “I had a fight with my girl and she dropped the baby on me this morning and ran off. I didn’t know what to do.”
Cline watched the girl toddling around the room, pulling books off his shelves, slapping her greasy palms on the huge bay windows. He felt a muscle twitching in his neck as he went to the desk and got his gun.
“No problem, Newby. These things happen,” Cline said. “I’m sure she won’t cause us any trouble. Let’s give her something to play with while we talk. Come here, little princess. Come on.”
The lieutenants watched in horror as Cline loaded a full clip into his pistol and flicked the safety off. Newgate’s daughter gave a coo of intrigue, tottered over to Cline, and took the gun. Squid, perched on the edge of the couch, didn’t dare retreat but he hid beneath his gangly arms like they could protect from the child’s aim. The little girl swung the heavy gun around wildly, then lifted the barrel to her eye and looked down into the blackness. Cline’s eyes seared into Newgate’s, daring him to protest. The little girl walked up to her father and pointed the gun at him.
“Bang-bang!” The girl laughed. Newgate reached for the weapon as his daughter fumbled with the trigger, unable to get her pudgy finger around the steel. Before Newgate could take the gun, Cline reached forward and grabbed it. He pointed it at Newgate, whose face contorted as he realized what
was happening.
“Like this, princess,” Cline said, smiling.
PLANE CRASH, I thought. That’s the only thing that can save me now.
I’d done everything I could to dissuade the residents of the Inn from holding a memorial service for my wife, Siobhan, on the second anniversary of her death. And yet here I sat at the end of a plastic foldout table in the forest of pines that surrounded the large house, tearing a yellow napkin into tiny pieces, waiting for it to begin, fantasizing about something that could interrupt it. Gas-leak explosion in the kitchen. Ferocious black bear suddenly appearing at the edge of the woods. Airbus A380 plunging into the slate-gray sea just visible through the trees. The truth was, nothing was coming. The people around me were going to talk about Siobhan, and I was going to have to listen.
They’d made a good effort, which was unusual for them, because it was difficult to get the permanent residents of the Inn to collaborate on anything. They had nothing in common save Siobhan’s recruitment of them in the months after I was fired. Siobhan had done everything to set up our new life in the north. She’d found the guesthouse for sale, sourced the furniture, got the licenses and approvals we needed to run a bed-and-breakfast by the sea—her retirement dream realized years earlier than she’d imagined it would be. She’d collected a motley crew of weirdos, down-and-outs, and deeply troubled characters, and she accommodated them all. I’d moped in my sweatpants about my lost job, having no idea that I was about to lose her too.
At the end of the table, Marni stood up. She was the resident wayward teenager, Siobhan’s second cousin who’d been sentenced to the house for having constant screaming matches with her mother and running away multiple times. As I sat in my chair watching her prepare to speak, I felt a twinge of guilt. Since I’d lost my wife, Marni had been my responsibility, and like I’d done with everything else, I let her slip. She’d gotten a couple of piercings on her face recently, and there was a little pink heart on her left cheekbone that I wasn’t convinced she drew on every day with lip liner despite what she’d told me. She was fifteen. Tattoos, piercings, and the attitude to go with them. She smoothed out a crumpled piece of paper extracted with some difficulty from the pocket of her jeans. A little speech. I rubbed my temples.
The Warning Page 25
