10th Anniversary - James Patterson [88]
Man. They were disgustingly happy.
But I didn’t begrudge Yuki a bit of it. Between Yuki and Jacobi, Brady had let my end run fade without so much as a wrist slap.
Damn. It was good to have friends.
Joe called my name. He had the ball, so I stood, ran out, and waved my hands in the air until he tossed it to me. Cindy threw off her blanket and went for a pass, doing some little moves with her hips that had never before been seen in football.
I threw the ball to her, a surprisingly tight spiral, if I do say so, and she whooped and yelled as she caught it. Conklin came off the sidelines and chased and tackled her, and then, even though I didn’t have the ball, Joe tackled me. He tucked me under his body and rolled with me so that I landed on top of him, never even touching the ground.
We were all acting like a bunch of kids. And you know what? We needed to be kids. It was wonderful to just laugh our heads off. That’s what I was thinking when a minute later Brady came over to me at the barbecue and pulled me aside. He leaned toward me, close enough to whisper in my ear.
He said, “For insubordination, Boxer, you’re on night shift for the next six weeks.”
It sucked, but I knew he was right. I had broken the rules.
What could I say? “Okay, Lieutenant, I understand.”
Chapter 121
WE ATE like we never expected to eat again.
When Joe’s secret-sauced ribs had been picked clean, the salad had been reduced to a film of olive oil in the bowl, and all that remained of the baked potatoes was a pile of foil in the recycle bin, we went inside the house.
Claire busted out the cake while Edmund popped the top on the Krug. It was one of the best champagnes, at least a hundred bucks a bottle.
“Introducing my original white-chocolate cheesecake with cream cheese and orange slices between the layers,” Claire said, putting it down on the dining room table. “Baked sour cream frosting, and Grand Marnier in a graham cracker crust. Voilà! I hope you like it.”
The applause was spontaneous and rousing, and I was pushed forward so that I could be next to my best friend. There were ten candles on the cake, standing for the tenth anniversary of the first time Claire and I met.
It had been a memorable occasion: It was my first week in Homicide, and Claire was the low woman on the totem pole in the ME’s Office. We’d been called to the men’s jail. A skinhead was down, three hundred pounds of swastika tattoos and muscle, wedged under his bunk and handcuffed. Not breathing.
The guard outside was in a high panic. He had cuffed the inmate and put him in his cell because the inmate was out of control, and now he was dead.
“He couldn’t find the keys to the cuffs,” Claire said. “And we couldn’t turn the body over.”
Claire was laughing as I told about her locking her kit outside the cell, then dropping her camera so hard she cracked the lens.
“And so Claire bends down for her camera, and I back into the guy’s toilet, which sends me down,” I said. “I reach out to grab on to something — anything — and end up grabbing his still under the sink. And the hooch sloshes all over me. I mean all over.”
Edmund has this big laugh: “Hah-hah-hah.”
He was pouring champagne into the good crystal glasses. I started to lift my flute of bubbly, but put the glass down.
Claire was snickering now, and Yuki’s trilling laugh was sounding the high notes.
“We get back to the morgue,” Claire continued, “stinking of hooch.”
“Disgusting,” I said. “But it was a no-brainer what killed him.”
“No-brainer?” said Claire. “No-brainer for you. I’m the one stuck with doing the post while you go home and change your clothes.”
“He OD’d?” Brady asked.
“Didn’t take much,” Claire said. “If you’re distilling hooch in tin cans — and he was — it turns to methanol. Three ounces’ll kill you dead.”
“I can’t hear that story too many times,” Cindy said, laughing.
She plucked the candles out of the cake one at a time and licked the bottoms clean, making