The 6th Target - James Patterson [2]
They are afraid of him. Afraid of him.
At his feet, the black woman holds a cell phone in her bloody hands. Breath rasping, she presses numbers with her thumb. No, you don’t! Fred steps on the woman’s wrist. Then he bends low to look into her eyes.
“You should have stopped me,” he says through clenched teeth. “That was your job.” Bucky screws his muzzle into her temple.
“Don’t!” she begs. “Please.”
Someone yells, “Mom!”
A skinny black kid, maybe seventeen, eighteen, comes toward him with a length of pipe over his shoulder. He’s holding it like a bat.
Fred pulls the trigger as the ship lurches — BLAM.
The shot goes wide. The metal pipe falls, skitters across the deck, and the kid runs to the woman, throws himself down. Protecting her?
People dive under the benches, and their screams rise up around him like licks of fire.
The noise of the engines is joined by the metallic clanking of the gangway locking into place. Bucky stays trained on the crowd as Fred looks over the railing.
He judges the distance.
It’s a drop of four feet to the gangway substructure, then a pretty long leap to the dock.
Fred pockets Bucky and puts both hands on the rail. He vaults over and lands on the flats of his Nikes. A cloud crosses the sun, cloaking him, making him invisible.
Move quickly, sailor. Go.
And he does it — makes the leap to the dock and runs toward the farmer’s market, where he dissolves into the throng filling the parking lot.
He walks, almost casually, a half block to Embarcadero.
He’s humming when he jogs down the steps to the BART station, still humming as he catches the train home.
You did it, sailor.
Part One
DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?
Chapter 3
I WAS OFF DUTY that Saturday morning in early November, called to the scene of a homicide because my business card had been found in the victim’s pocket.
I stood inside the darkened living room of a two-family house on Seventeenth Street, looking down at a wretched little scuzzball named Jose Alonzo. He was shirtless, paunchy, slumped on a sagging couch of indeterminate color, his wrists cuffed behind him. His head hung to his chest, and tears ran down his chin.
I had no pity for him.
“Was he Mirandized?” I asked Inspector Warren Jacobi, my former partner who now reported to me. Jacobi had just turned fifty-one and had seen more homicide victims in his twenty-five years on the job than any ten cops should see in a lifetime.
“Yeah, I did it, Lieutenant. Before he confessed.” Jacobi’s fists twitched at his sides. Disgust crossed his timeworn face.
“Do you understand your rights?” I asked Alonzo.
He nodded and began sobbing again. “I shouldn’ta done it, but she made me so mad.”
A toddler with a dirty white bow in her hair, wet diapers sagging to her dimpled knees, clung to her father’s leg. Her wailing just about broke my heart.
“What did Rosa do to make you mad?” I asked Alonzo. “I really want to know.”
Rosa Alonzo was on the floor, her pretty face turned toward the flaking caramel-colored wall, her head split open by the iron her husband had used to knock her down, then take her life.
The ironing board had collapsed around her like a dead horse, and the smell of burned spray starch was in the air.
The last time I’d seen Rosa, she’d told me how she couldn’t leave her husband because he’d said he’d hunt her down and kill her.
I wished with all my heart she’d taken the baby and run.
Inspector Richard Conklin, Jacobi’s partner, the newest and youngest member of my squad, walked into the kitchen. Rich poured cat food into a bowl for an old orange tabby cat that was mewing on the red Formica table. Interesting.
“He could be alone here for a long time,” Conklin said over his shoulder.
“Call animal control.”
“Said they were busy, Lieutenant.” Conklin turned on the taps, filled a water bowl.
Alonzo spoke up.
“You know what she said, Officer? She said, ‘Get a job.’ I just snapped, you understand?”
I stared at him until he turned away from me, cried out to his dead wife, “I didn’t mean to do it, Rosa.