The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [103]
Is this the end of it, then? she wondered, almost speaking out loud. Was this going to be the finish of everything?
Had they won every point, Alexandre St.-Germain and the Midnight Club? They had won, hadn’t they. They always seemed to win. Sarah wanted to scream.
She left two years’ worth of research and writing for them. She did as she had been instructed.
Their warning had been clear and coldly logical. If there were copies, if the notes were ever reconstructed in any way, she knew the consequences.
As she drove back to New York, she thought she had never felt so drained, so completely used up and unreal. Maybe it was going to stop now. Maybe it could just end.
98
Sarah McGinniss; East Sixty-sixth Street
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER the trip upstate, Sarah was walking in a slow, aimless, and drifting way. She shuffled west on Sixty-sixth Street, moving in the direction of Park Avenue.
After she’d left Milton that afternoon, she’d been filled with hope, even with a kind of strange joy. Since then, Sarah had become almost disconsolate. She’d done exactly as they had asked; she had played by their rules.
What more did they want from her? Where was Sam right now? Was he still alive?
There was something satisfying about not having anything to work on, at least. There was no book, no investigation. Walking around her neighborhood, Sarah had been noticing odd, unimportant things for the first time in months. Slants of sunlight bouncing off the hard city surfaces; colorful flowers growing up out of the sidewalk; a new northern Italian restaurant, a hopeful menu in the window.
The trouble was, there was no one to share it with anymore. She shook her head, to brush away the thought.
She saw the dark gray Mercedes moving along the street toward her, almost as if someone were searching in vain for a parking space.
She felt herself go cold, for maybe the hundredth time in the past few weeks.
Her eyes never left the slow-moving car. Two men were in the front seat. Hulking men in dark suits.
For an instant, Sarah thought about running up the stone stairs, hiding inside the brownstone she had just passed. Were they coming after her now?
The scene seemed to happen in slow motion.
Sarah had a horrible feeling about this car. She had no logical reason, just a gut reaction. They were after her. But why? She’d given them all her writing; the truth as she understood it; her research. It would take her more than a year just to reassemble The Club, and it would never be as strong a book.
The gray sedan stopped alongside Sarah, less than a foot away. She froze. The electric door locks sprung open. The rear door swung toward her.
A tall, gray-haired man stepped out of the Mercedes. It was no one she knew. He stared directly at her, a slightly quizzical look about his eyes. Obviously, he didn’t care whether she could identify him. He operated with no fear. He knew he was in control.
He seemed so respectable. Just a man in a business suit.
“Mrs. McGinniss?” he asked, and she nodded without saying a word. She really couldn’t speak, didn’t want to speak. “None of this happened,” the man said. “Please understand that. We don’t want to read about any of this in any newspaper. We really wouldn’t appreciate that.”
Then Sarah’s mind seemed to disconnect from the rest of her body, from the entire scene on Sixty-sixth Street.
She saw Sam being helped out of the car, but she couldn’t quite make sense of what was happening. It was like looking at a photograph that had come to life. She had never been so completely detached; not at any moment in her life.
“Mommy, Mommy,” Sam cried. She was suddenly afraid that they were going to let her see him, then take him away again, whisk him back inside the car.
Instead, they let Sam go, and he ran straight into her outstretched arms. The gray sedan continued up the narrow street canyons and finally disappeared, as if, indeed, none of this had happened.
But then why would she and Sam be crying in the middle of their street?