Kill Me if You Can - James Patterson [5]
But there was no time for a doctor. No time for anything.
Before I could say a word, his eyes rolled back in his head and he exhaled a strained breath. He was dead.
His dark blue suit and the floor around him glistened with blood. It coated the door of the bottom locker closest to him. As I looked up, I saw a wide swath of red where he had leaned against the upper locker and slid to the ground.
Locker #925 was covered in bloody handprints.
And it was open.
Wide open.
Chapter 5
I COULD THINK of only one reason that a reasonably sane man who was hemorrhaging blood would open a train station locker instead of wildly seeking help. Whatever was inside that locker had to be too valuable to leave behind.
I looked down at the dead Russian. Was it worth it, Comrade?
But then, who was I to judge this poor man for choosing locker #925 over calling 911? If I had half a brain, I’d be running out of Grand Central with all my fellow bomb-scared travelers.
But I wanted to know what was inside that locker. No—I had to know.
I stood up. By now the red smoke was starting to dissipate and I could take in the pandemonium.
People were stampeding toward the exits, fighting and clawing their way out of the station. Some cops were trying to keep them from getting trampled in the doorways.
Other cops were trying to evacuate the people who refused to leave.
A woman with three suitcases was holding her ground in the middle of the station, insisting that she wasn’t going anywhere without her bags.
“Damn it, lady,” a ruddy-faced cop screamed, “you can’t get a redcap during a terrorist attack.”
He grabbed all three bags, and she followed him as he struggled toward an exit.
And then a body came flying through the air and hit the marble floor.
It was a young man, Asian, wearing a busboy’s uniform.
Michael Jordan’s Steak House is a popular restaurant on the balconies overlooking the main concourse. People were pouring out, shoving their way toward the wide marble staircase at the west side of the station. The busboy must have been caught at the far end of the restaurant and opted for the quick way out. It was about a twenty-foot drop. He stood up on his right leg and started hopping toward the exit.
I thought I’d just experienced the most insane day of my life. What I didn’t know then was that after I reached inside that locker, the insanity would only get worse.
I put my hand on the open door and peered in. There was a bag inside. But not just any bag. It was one of those old-timey medical bags that you see in black-and-white movies from back in the days when doctors made house calls.
Maybe the Russian wasn’t so dumb after all. Doctor bags are usually crammed with gauze and tape and about twelve hundred cotton balls.
I opened it carefully and looked inside.
My first thought was Holy shit.
My second thought was This is a bag worth dying for.
Chapter 6
I’D SEEN DIAMONDS before. My mother had one in her engagement ring. My aunt had two in her ears. But my recently shot-up acquaintance, now cooling on the floor of Grand Central, had them all beat. Did you ever enter one of those contests where you have to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, and there are so many of them, you know you won’t even come close? That’s how many diamonds were in the Russian’s medical bag.
Correction—my medical bag. At least for the time being.
When I was growing up, my mom used to tell my sister and me about a leprechaun with a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. But she never mentioned a Russian Neanderthal with a bag of diamonds at the end of a bloody trail in a train station. Mom also said something about never taking what doesn’t belong to you. But to whom did the diamonds actually belong? The dead guy with the gun? I definitely suspected he had taken them from somebody else. My mom meant well, but at a time like this, I had to seriously consider my dad’s worldview. Finders keepers.
I could almost hear my dad listing my options. What are you going to do, Matthew? Leave the diamonds with the dead body and walk