The 8th Confession - James Patterson [59]
Cindy didn’t know much about my history with Rich, and I wasn’t going to tell her — but maybe he would tell her.
Maybe he had.
Some hesitancy must have passed over my face because Cindy smelled blood. She leaned forward, stuck out her chin, and said, “I get it. Are you two doing it, Lindsay? Is that it? You tell me right now, because if you’re sleeping with him, I will kick that dog to the curb.”
“No. No. We’re not. Don’t want to and never have.”
“Good,” Cindy said. “That’s really great. So tell me again: what’s the problem?”
“It’s a chain-of-command thing, Cindy —”
“Are you ca-razy? I don’t work for you.”
“Conklin does! And he and I talk about stuff that you shouldn’t know — for all our sakes. And I would have liked a chance to remind him.”
“Even if that made sense — which it doesn’t — we don’t talk about you. We don’t talk about your cases. We just have great sex and watch movies in bed.”
My face heated up, and I dropped my eyes to the table. Cindy had just given me way too much information, and I’d completely brought it down on myself.
My beer was climbing into my throat when I heard, “Hey there, girlfriends.”
I looked up to see Claire clearing the aisles as she came toward our table. She had her baby in her arms, my goddaughter, Ruby Rose. And Yuki and Doc were bringing up the rear.
“I’m not finished talking yet,” I growled at Cindy.
“Fine,” Cindy said. “Don’t make me wait too long for your apology.”
Chapter 77
YUKI WAS ALMOST giddy with delight.
They were all jammed together in the booth at Susie’s, and her friends liked Doc. Correction. She could tell by their faces that all of them loved him. He was telling them about his day in the ER, saying, “A female patient comes in, says she’s been doing unaccountable stuff at night since she started taking sleep meds. Apparently she unwittingly went to her medicine chest and swallowed down a whole bottle of pills.
“She shows me the empty bottle,” Doc said.
Claire leaned forward, Yuki getting this great feeling that Claire was glad to have another doctor to talk to. She asked Doc what the pills were.
“Dramamine.”
“For seasickness?” Claire said. “Those can’t kill her.”
Doc grinned, said, “She wanted to have her stomach pumped, but I just told her it wasn’t necessary. I said, ‘Helen, you’re all set. Book a cruise!’ ”
Claire started laughing, and the baby reached out, knocked a bottle of beer into Cindy’s lap, and Lindsay broke up, laughing until tears came out of her eyes.
“I’m sorry for laughing,” Lindsay said to Cindy. “No, I mean it. It’s not funny.”
Claire handed the baby to Doc so she could wipe Cindy down, and the baby pulled on Doc’s nose and called him “Boog-ah.” And he laughed at her, and she gave him a gummy chortle.
And the evening just kept coming on that way, one laugh leading to another even bigger one, Yuki feeling like it was her birthday, maybe the best birthday she’d ever had.
She told her friends about the Stacey Glenn case being over, and Lindsay launched into the story of the “snake who would not die,” Claire expanding her arms to show how long the animal was, coming dangerously close to knocking a beer into Cindy’s lap again.
Doc had said, “But seriously, folks, it’s good to know what kind of snake it was. There’s an antivenin, you know.”
“Antivenom?” Cindy asked.
“Same thing, but ‘antivenin’ is the actual term,” Claire said. “Anyway, it’s not that easy to get, though my patients are past needing it, Doc. Came in handy that Sergeant Boxer can swing an ax.”
The beer kept coming for all but Doc, who inevitably had to go to the hospital. Then came the best part of all. As Yuki stood to say good-bye, he put his arms around her and kissed her, dipping her down until she cracked up and everyone cheered, everyone, even people who weren’t at their table.
“See you this weekend?” he said.
She nodded, thinking about what lingerie she would