The 5th Horseman - James Patterson [4]
But she couldn’t do it.
We sat shoulder to shoulder inside that synthetically bright, inhospitable place as the faces around us changed: the couple with linked hands staring into the middle distance, the families with young children in their arms, an elderly man sitting alone.
Every time the swinging door to the ER opened, eyes would snap toward it.
Sometimes a doctor would step out.
Sometimes shrieks and cries would follow.
It was almost 6:00 in the morning when a young female intern with weary eyes and a blood-smeared lab coat came out of the ER and mangled Yuki’s name.
“How is she?” Yuki asked, bounding to her feet.
“She’s more alert now, so she’s doing better,” said the intern. “We’re going to keep her for a few days and do some tests, but you can visit as soon as we settle her into her room.”
Yuki thanked the doctor and turned to me with a smile that was far more radiant than was reasonable, given what the doctor had just told her.
“Oh-my-God, Linds, my mom’s going to be okay! I can’t say how much it means to me that you stayed with me all night,” Yuki said.
She grabbed both of my hands, tears filling her eyes. “I don’t know how I could have done this if you hadn’t been here. You saved me, Lindsay.”
I hugged her, folded her in.
“Yuki, we’re friends. Anything you need, you don’t even have to ask. You know that, right? Anything.
“Don’t forget to call,” I said.
“The worst is over,” said Yuki. “Don’t worry about us now, Lindsay. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
I turned to look behind me as I exited the hospital through the automatic sliding doors.
Yuki was still standing there, watching me, smiling and waving good-bye.
Chapter 7
A CAB WAS IDLING in front of the hospital. Lucky me. I slid in and slumped into the backseat, feeling like total crap, only much worse. Pulling all-nighters is for college kids, not big girls like me.
The driver was mercifully silent as we made our way across town to Potrero Hill at dawn.
A few minutes later, I slipped my key into the front door of the pretty, blue three-story Victorian town house I share with two other tenants, and climbed the groaning staircase to the second floor, two steps at a time.
Sweet Martha, my border collie, greeted me at the door as if I’d been gone for a year. I knew her sitter had fed and walked her—Karen’s bill was on the kitchen table—but Martha had missed me and I’d missed her, too.
“Yuki’s mom is in the hospital,” I told my doggy. Corny me. I wrapped my arms around her, and she gave me sloppy kisses, then followed me back to my bedroom.
I wanted to fall into the downy folds of bedding for seven or eight hours, but instead I changed into a wrinkled Santa Clara U tracksuit and took Her Sweetness for a run as the glowing morning fog hovered over the bay.
At eight on the nose I was at my desk looking through the glass walls of my cubicle out at the squad room as the morning tour sauntered in.
The stack of files on my desk had grown since I’d seen it last, and the message light on my phone was blinking in angry red bursts. I was about to address these irritations, when a shadow fell across my desk and my unopened container of coffee.
A large, balding man stood in my doorway. I knew his pug-ugly face almost as well as I knew my own.
My former partner wore the time-rumpled look of a career police officer who had rounded the corner on fifty. Inspector Warren Jacobi’s hair was turning white, and his deep, hooded eyes were harder than they’d been before he’d taken those slugs on Larkin Street.
“You look like you slept on a park bench last night, Boxer.”
“Thanks, dear.”
“I hope you had fun.”
“Tons. What’s up, Jacobi?”
“A DOA was called in twenty minutes ago,” he said. “A female, formerly very attractive, I’m told. Found dead inside a Cadillac in the Opera Plaza Garage.”
Chapter 8
THE OPERA PLAZA GARAGE is a cavernous indoor lot adjacent to a huge mixed-use commercial building that houses movie theaters, offices, and shops in the middle of a densely populated business district.
Now, on a workday morning, Jacobi nosed our car