The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [100]
The wheelchair had begun to fly. It was something he’d wanted to do for so long, one of his recurring fantasies. Just to fly away.
Only it was sheer terror to be flying, actually flying.
He knew he couldn’t possibly make the chair land on its wheels. The angle to the ground, to the blurry street pavement, was almost sideways. He was going to hit on the bad side, too, where he had already been shot.
There was nothing Stefanovitch could do to control his fate. All he could manage was to go along for the ride.
He struck the ground, and lost consciousness for an instant—not sure if he went out before or after he hit the street. He touched down partially with his left shoulder, partially with the side of his face; then the rest of his body followed. Wildly rolling over and over again. Over and over and over.
“It’s not St.-Germain!” was the next thing he heard. “It’s Burke. He’s dead, Stef. You got Burke.”
Stefanovitch nodded. The words vaguely registered somewhere in his mind.
He’d seen Jimmy Burke with one fast glimpse from the rampaging wheelchair. Burke from Long Beach, and now Sarah’s apartment. Of course, Alexandre St.-Germain hadn’t come himself. He had never given it a thought, had he?
Sarah was with him in the middle of Madison Avenue. So were an awful lot of policemen, and EMS ambulance people.
Some character in a white dress shirt and tuxedo trousers peered down at him through owl-rim glasses. A doctor? Stefanovitch hoped he was.
Sarah held his hand tightly in both of hers. The look on her face was so frightened that it scared him, too.
“I’m glad you’re all right,” he whispered behind a crooked smile. He was amazed at how weak he felt—helpless, yet strangely peaceful, sprawled there in the street.
His face felt out of kilter somehow. It matched his body, which was twisted and bent, lying like a broken doll in the bus lane of Madison Avenue.
Finally, he winked up at Sarah, and then both his eyes closed. His eyes felt so heavy. His head lolled gently to the right, settling on the thick white traffic line.
Fifteen yards farther down Madison Avenue, the sad wreck of Stefanovitch’s wheelchair lay flipped over on its side.
96
Sarah McGinniss; Milton, New York
IT WOULDN’T STOP…
The terror wouldn’t stop coming at her.
For days, Sarah wondered if she might be losing her mind. The relentless pressure of the past weeks had been overwhelming. Now it was even worse. At the same time, she felt that her wits were somehow sharpening again, as if a kind of clarity came with walking through fire.
Whenever she drifted off to sleep, she would bolt awake, terrified by the indescribable images in her head. Her brain would throb with a dull pain; her body was sore all over. She had lost more than ten pounds.
She looked gaunt and felt depressed. There were so many disturbing moments that she couldn’t erase from her mind; so many obsessive thoughts that wouldn’t stop flashing.
Sarah visited New York Hospital a dozen times. No one could, or would, tell her how Stefanovitch was really doing. There were vague, hopeful, and polite niceties—but no one told her the truth. No one would even tell her if he was going to live.
There was no news on Sam either. She wouldn’t allow herself to speculate on the reasons. She closed off certain regions of her mind, like rooms in an overly large house during the dead of winter.
Alexandre St.-Germain seemed to have disappeared from New York again; perhaps he’d fled the country. The police hadn’t been able to reach him for questioning.
The daily newspapers overflowed with stories about the terrible shooting at her apartment. She and Stefanovitch were emblazoned across all the front pages. The scenario had the staccato, slightly unreal feel of Hitchcock melodramas. Or was it more the feeling of an actual nightmare?
The phone call finally came early on Wednesday morning, three days after the vicious attack at her apartment. It was a brief call, not long enough for a police tracer of any kind.
Sarah picked