Run for Your Life

by James Patterson

  He was gearing himself up for action when he walked past a van on the park side of the street and heard the sound—a strange kind of squelch. A radio, he realized. Inside the catering van! The cops had the place staked out after all.

  That cold, snaky shiver ran down his spine again, and his breathing became labored. By sheer willpower, he kept walking casually along, pulling the dog as if he did this every day.

  What was the right move if they challenged him? Shoot? Run? Maybe this was his final chance, and he should go for the Blanchettes right now. Rush across the street into the lobby, guns blazing.

  He palmed the cold grip of the Tec under his left arm and thumbed off its safety. Whatever happened next, he wasn’t going to die alone. Goddamn cops. Why couldn’t they have stayed useless for just another five minutes!

  He chanced a quick look over his shoulder. Nobody! They weren’t coming. He started breathing more easily. Christ, he’d been lucky.

  Two blocks north, the Teacher made a hard left and bolted into Central Park. The mutt started yapping, grating on his fried nerves as he dragged it along the darkened path.

  Calm down, he told himself. He was safe. He put the Tec’s safety back on. Now he had to think. This wasn’t like the Pierre, with a cop car sitting out front in plain sight. The obvious lack of security, with a major event going on, should have tipped him off. Those sons of bitches had set some kind of trap! That asshole, Mike Bennett, no doubt. He’d somehow guessed what the Teacher had planned.

  But the Teacher had read a lot of strategy and war books in his day. The Art of War, The Book of Five Rings, The Prince. They all essentially advised the same simple, yet not so simple thing. Figure out what your opponent thinks you’re going to do next, then do something else. Deception is the art of war.

  He was halfway around the reservoir jogging track when the answer came to him. An inspired plan to get around Bennett’s trap—a little end run. Yes, that was it. Yes, yes, yes. He pressed a shaking hand to his grinning mouth. Bingo. It was perfect, better than his original plan. He’d pulled out a game winner right at the buzzer.

  His grin widened as the dumbass face of Detective Bennett appeared in his mind.

  “You had your shot, Bennett,” he whispered to himself.

  He let go of the leash and drop-kicked the squealing Maltese into the darkness.

  “Now, it’s my turn.”

  Part Four

  THE POOR BOX THIEF

  Chapter 75

  SITTING IN THE DARKENED HOLY NAME confessional booth, Father Seamus Bennett silently blew his running nose and lifted his Sony minirecorder.

  “Poor box stakeout,” he whispered into the microphone. “Day two.”

  Sick, my ankle, he thought, sniffling. He’d never been sick a day in his life. Stay in bed? Didn’t Mike know that at his age, lying down was a hazard to be avoided at all costs? Who knew if he’d ever be able to get back up again? Stay on his feet and stay busy, that was the thing.

  Besides, he had a parish to run. Not to mention a dastardly poor box thief to collar. It was clear by now that nobody else was going to do it. The overrated NYPD was no help, that was for sure.

  Twenty minutes later, he was starting to doze off when he heard a sound—very faint, tentative, a creak that was barely there. Stifling a sneeze, Seamus slowly drew open the confessional’s velvet curtain with his foot.

  The noise was coming from the middle aisle’s front door! It was opening an inch at a time. Seamus’s heart rate kicked into overdrive as a human figure, shadowed in the dim glow of the votives, emerged from behind it. He watched, mesmerized, as the thief stopped beside the last pew, stuck his arm up to the shoulder down into the poor box opening, and removed something.

  The object was a folder of some kind. So that’s how it had been done, Seamus thought, watching the felon slide coins and a few bills out of the folder into his hand. He’d used a type of retrievable trap that would catch any money dropped in the box. Ingenious. For a poor box robber, he was a true mastermind.

  Except for getting caught red-handed, Seamus thought as he removed his shoes and stood quietly. Now for the arrest.

  In just his socks, he crept out into the side aisle. He was less than ten feet away from the culprit, approaching silently from behind, when he felt a nasty tingling sensation in his sinuses. It was so fast and powerful that he was helpless to hold it back.

  The sneeze that ripped from him sounded like a shotgun blast in the dead silence of the church. The startled figure whirled around violently before bolting for the door. Seamus managed to take two quick steps before his socks slipped out beneath him and he half dove, half fell forward with outstretched arms.

  “Gotcha,” he cried, tackling the thief around the waist.

  Coins pinged off marble as the two of them struggled. Then suddenly his opponent stopped fighting and started . . . crying?

  Seamus got a firm grip on the back of his shirt, hauled him over to a wall switch, and flipped it on.

  He stared in disbelief at what his eyes told him. It was a kid. And not just any kid.

  The poor box bandit was Eddie, Mike’s nine-year-old son.

  “For the love of God, Eddie. How could you?” Seamus said, heartbroken. “That money goes to buy groceries for the food bank, for poor people who have nothing. But you—you live in a nice apartment with everything you want, and you get an allowance besides. Don’t tell me you’re not old enough to know stealing is wrong.”

  “I know,” Eddie said, wiping his teary eyes, with his gaze on the floor. “I just can’t seem to help it. Maybe my real parents were criminals. I think I got bad blood. Thieves’ blood.”

  Seamus snorted in outrage. “Thieves’ blood? What a crock.” He shifted his grip to the young man’s ear and marched him toward the door. “Poor Mary Catherine must be worried sick about you. You’re supposed to be home.You’re going to have a thief’s black-and-blue behind once your father hears about this.”

  Chapter 76

  BY THE TIME I GOT BACK to the Blanchettes’ on Fifth Avenue, the party had amped up considerably. I heard dance music blaring as I got off the elevator. In the wood-paneled foyer, I was nearly blinded by flashbulbs as spit-shined executive types and their exotic-looking wives got their social register pics taken.

  Was being a cop in this town unbelievable, or what? I thought. From an actual bowels-of-hell tenement fire to The Bonfire of the Vanities in ten minutes flat.

  The butler had announced that Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette were unable to be present owing to a family emergency but wanted the guests to enjoy themselves. They took him at his word. Glamorously and barely dressed teenage socialites were bumping and grinding in the now dark and strobing party room. I passed a living statue, a transvestite Bettie Page impersonator, a woman in a Vegas showgirl costume, a guy dressed like a bird. I shook my head as he flapped past. Was he the endangered species they were trying to save? No, this event was for a different charity, but I couldn’t remember what.

  “Who is your dermatologist?” someone yelled near my ear as I pushed my way through the crush. “These white truffles are so complex yet so simple,” somebody else announced.

  I turned as someone clapped me on the shoulder. It was a middle-aged man in a black suit with traces of a suspicious white powder under his nose.

  “Hey, I haven’t seen you since the open,” he said. “How was Majorca?”

  “Great,” I said, backing away toward the kitchen.

  I even spotted one of the New York Times editors who I’d almost arrested, talking with some men in suits out by the pool. Probably deciding what tomorrow’s news would be.

  When I finally made it back to my kitchen command corner, I sat for a moment with my forehead pressed against the cool, soothing granite of the counter.

  The newest revelation, still ringing through my aching skull, didn’t make sense. How could Thomas Gladstone not be the man we were looking for?

  No matter how I put it together, I couldn’t get it to add
up. Gladstone gets divorced and loses his job, and then someone else kills his family? And what about the little fact that our eyewitness, the Air France stewardess, ID’d him from a photo lineup? Was she lying? If so, why? Did we need to reinterview her?

  I took a break from being baffled to call in to the security detail. Everything seemed normal. No activity on the street. All of the building’s ground-level doors and windows had been checked and rechecked.

  “We’ve got it all wired tight,” Steve Reno radioed up from the lobby.

  “Like my nerves,” I radioed back.

  “Go ahead and have a glass of Cristal, Mikey,” the SWAT lieutenant said. “Or maybe krunk with some of those debutantes. We won’t tell. You gotta do something to relax.”

  “Busting a move is tempting,” I called in to my radio. “But fortunately, Steve, all I gotta do is retire.”

  Chapter 77

  AT A DIFFERENT luxury apartment building, the Teacher knelt over the sidewalk grate and started working on it with a crowbar. There were no cops staking out this place, he’d made good and sure of that.

  Within five minutes, he was able to swing the grate open. He hopped down inside and silently closed it back over his head. This was a filthy, squalid way of doing things, but if you wanted to get into one of Manhattan’s Fort Knox–like, prewar buildings, you had to make some sacrifices.

  The beam of his penlight, held in his mouth, played over the concrete where he squatted. The filth came up to the ankles of his three-hundred-dollar socks—mounds of cigarette butts and gum wrappers; sodden, unrecognizable garbage; an empty crack vial.

  He shrugged off his jacket, wadded it up, and held it against the dust-caked basement window beneath the grate. He hit the window with a single sharp punch, breaking out the glass. He stilled, listening for an alarm or outcry. There was nothing. He reached in, found the window latch, and squirmed his way into the darkened basement.

  He walked quickly down a corridor lined with dusty storage bins piled with beat-up luggage, old wooden skis, stationary bikes, eight-track tapes. High society kept the same crapola as most other idiots, he thought. He slowed as he approached a doorway with the sound of Spanish music behind it—no doubt the super’s apartment. But the door stayed closed as he silently moved along.

  Past it, on the right, he came to an old-fashioned manual elevator. Inside that, he let the outer door slide quietly closed before easing shut the brass lattice of its inner gate.

  That was when he noticed that his hand was bleeding. Crimson drops were rolling off his thumb, splashing on the worn linoleum.

  Wincing, he pulled up his sleeve. Christ, he’d sliced the back of his arm wide open when he’d punched the window. How did you like that? He was so jacked up, he hadn’t even noticed.

  Well, what was a little blood? he thought, clicking off the safeties of the Tec-9s. He pulled back the elevator switch and started to ascend.

  There’d be a lot more of that soon.

  Chapter 78

  WHEN THE TEACHER LET GO of the freight elevator lever, the car did a funny little bounce. He held his breath, listening, as its humming motor silenced with a clack and it stopped dead in the shaft. Still nothing.

  The floating feeling of elation in the pit of his stomach was insane now, like he’d swallowed a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloon. How many years of his life had he wasted running away from it, denying it? He loved being at war with anyone and everyone. The thrill of it was better than sex, drugs, and rock and roll put together.

  Quick now, he thought, sliding the brass inner gate back silently.

  It opened onto a narrow back landing, a service entrance with two doors and some garbage cans. He put his ear to the closer of the doors. Inside, he heard water running, the bang of a pot being put on a stove, loud voices that sounded like children’s.

  He pressed the thumb of his injured hand to the doorbell. Footsteps approached. He was prepared with a ruse about delivering a package to the Bennett residence. Or, if the door opened a few inches on a chain, to just ram it with his shoulder.

  But the lock tumblers clicked and it started swinging freely inward.

  You’ve got to be kidding me, he thought. Not even a “Who’s there?” Hadn’t they heard about the crime wave?

  His heart double-dribbled against his chest as the door opened all the way.

  Chapter 79

  WHEN I DUCKED MY HEAD OUT of the kitchen about ten minutes later, I could see that the Blanchettes’ party had kicked into full tilt. The mayor was dancing to techno with somebody’s trophy wife, and she was laughing her head off like a hyena. All around them, others were behaving more like raucous teenagers than the dignified adults they no doubt were during their day jobs.

  I exchanged perplexed looks with one of the Midtown North undercovers who was posing as a waiter.

  “I guess it just ain’t a party until the guy in the bird costume is deejaying in front of your Pollock,” he said.

  Then a voice spoke through my earpiece.

  “Mike? Uh, Mike? Um, could you get in here?” It sounded like Jacobs, one of the Midtown North detectives.

  “Where’s ‘here’?”

  “The kitchen.”

  “What’s up?”

  “You, uh, just need to come, okay? I’ll show you when you get here. Over.”

  What now? I thought, heading back to the Blanchettes’ kitchen. Jacobs had sounded weird, even upset. Well, things had been going so smoothly, maybe something had to give.

  I hurried into the kitchen.

  And stopped still.

  Jacobs was beside the back door, standing over a young guy who was lying on the kitchen floor. I recognized him as another detective, Genelli, from the Nineteenth Precinct.

  “Oh, my God,” I said, striding toward them. “What the hell happened to him?” Had somebody bashed him? Was our shooter here after all?

  Genelli briefly tried to lift his lolling head, but it thunked back to the floor.

  “He’s okay,” Jacobs said. “Dumbass rookie, he got bored out by the pool, started drinking beer and playing quarters with a couple of the college girl guests. Next thing, one of them comes to tell me he passed out. Sorry to be coy, Mike, but I didn’t know what else to do. We don’t get him out of here before the mayor sees him, he’s going to get fired.”

  “Him and me both,” I said, grabbing Genelli’s arm. “Open that back door and ring the freight elevator before anybody sees us.”

  Chapter 80

  MARY CATHERINE WAS DRYING HER HANDS with a dish towel when the back doorbell rang. She assumed it was a delivery that the doorman downstairs had okayed, which happened fairly often. Nobody could get up here without going past him.

  But her towel fluttered to the floor as she stared at the man standing there. Her gaze went first to his bloody hand, then flicked to the two evil-looking guns he was holding, then to the wide grin on his face.

  “Bennett residence, I presume,” he said, pressing the snub-nosed black barrel of one of the machine pistols to the tip of her nose. Blood streamed down his wrist, within inches of her staring eyes.

  Oh, my good Lord, she thought, struggling to stay calm. What to do? Scream? But it might enrage him, and who would hear her, anyway? Sweet Jesus—this man here, and the worst of it was that all the kids were home!

  Still smiling, he tucked the threatening gun into his jacket.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he said. She stepped back reluctantly. There was nothing else she could do.

  “Thank you,” he said with mocking politeness.

  When he spotted Shawna and Chrissy at the kitchen island, he lowered the other gun and hid it behind his leg. Thank God for that, at least. They watched him with mild curiosity. At their age, the sudden appearance of a stranger was just one of thousands of other mysterious things. The flu that had kept so many of the Bennett kids home from school had also wreaked havoc with their bedtimes.

  “Hey, who are you?” Chrissy said, sliding off he
r stool and starting toward him to make friends.

  Mary Catherine swallowed, fighting the urge to dive across the kitchen and scoop the child up. Instead, she stepped forward to intercept Chrissy and caught her hand.

  “I’m one of your daddy’s friends,” the man said.

  “I’m Chrissy. Are you a police officer, too? Why is your hand bleeding? And what’s that behind your leg?”

  “Put a sock in the brat,” the Teacher said quietly to Mary Catherine. “This ‘why is the sky blue’ crap is really pissing me off.”

  “Go watch the movie now, girls,” she said.

  “But I thought you said Harry Potter was too scary,” Shawna said, giving her a distressed look.

  “It’ll be okay this once, Shawna. Just do it. Now.”

  The little girls scurried away, finally frightened by their nanny’s harsh tone rather than by the man who might kill them.

  He lifted a carrot stick off the cutting board and bit into it.

  “Get on the phone and tell Mike he needs to get home fast,” he said to Mary Catherine as he chewed. “You won’t be lying if you say it’s a family emergency.”

  Chapter 81

  “ALL RIGHT, YOUNG MAN, it’s Judgment Day,” Seamus said as he guided Eddie through the Bennetts’ front door.

  Then someone on the other side of the door yanked it open, jerking the knob out of his hand.

  Indignant, he started to say, “Well, that’s a fine way to welcome?—”

  His sentence died at the amplified click in his ear. He peered to his left and saw a gun, a big one. A tall blond man in a suit pressed it to his temple.

  “Another kid?” the man said, looking at Eddie. “What is this, a day care center? And a priest, too? Wow, that’s normal. Now I see why Bennett puts in so much overtime. I’d work twenty-four/seven if I had to live in this psych ward.”