The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [108]
The elevator car began to soar upward, resuming its ride as if nothing had happened. A few seconds later, Parker stabbed the stop button again. The elevator halted at the forty-sixth floor.
Isiah Parker jumped out of the car and dropped the Ingram. He ran to an emergency doorway marked “Fire Exit.”
He buttoned his sport coat as he continued to race downstairs. He shook perspiration off his face. He dried his head with his jacket sleeve. He went down past forty-five, forty-four, past forty-three. Don’t panic. Just hurry, he reminded himself.
Finally, he emerged from the fire exit stairway, onto the fortieth floor. He saw policemen waiting with drawn riot shotguns and squawking walkie-talkies. Silence followed in the hallway. Parker told himself, Now be very cool…You’re a cop, too.
“Isiah Parker, Nineteenth Precinct,” he said to the patrolman closest to the fire exit door. Somehow, he managed a blank poker face. “What the hell is going on?” Parker asked.
The patrolman stared at him. Doubt glistened in his sober blue eyes. His bulky riot shotgun was held at chest level, pointed right at Parker’s stomach.
Isiah Parker carefully shook out his portfolio wallet, showing his detective’s shield. He forced a smile, then loosely shrugged his shoulders. “Hey, relax, huh? What the hell’s happening? We heard the elevator take off. What happened?”
A black detective in the hallway spoke up. “Hey, I know him. That’s my man Parker. Hey, Isiah.”
The patrolman with the shotgun finally shook his head. He slowly lowered the Remington. “That’s what we were wondering, too. Where’s the elevator? Where’s St.-Germain?”
More patrolmen and detectives began to swarm out of the fire exit stairway. Isiah moved among them, joining in with the general confusion, contributing his part. They all had the same question—What was going on? Where had the hijacked elevator gone?
After a few minutes on the fortieth floor, Parker started down the fire exit stairway again. This time, he walked in the company of two other detectives. The deserted elevator had been discovered on forty-six. The Grave Dancer was dead inside.
Once he was in the lobby of the Trade Center, Parker continued toward the bright daylight of the street. Outside the soaring twin building, everything was chaos, even worse than up on the forty-sixth floor.
Police blockades had been set up everywhere. EMS ambulances, police cruisers with their turrets blazing red, were parked up on the sidewalk. Several thousand people were assembled behind rows of blue police barricades and street cops in pith helmets.
Escape and survive, Parker thought. Just like after Allure, and Cin-Cin, in Soho.
He continued north on Chambers Street, which was also blockaded with bright blue police sawhorses. He kept walking past the blockades, once or twice showing his detective’s shield along the way.
As he walked north through the city, Isiah Parker wished that the world was still simple. All he had ever wanted was to get Marcus’s murderer. Whether he did that through the police department, or not, didn’t matter. All he had wanted was a little justice.
Parker wound up in the Bowery, somewhere around Grand and Canal streets, with their legions of panhandlers. The trembling stewbums, always looking like they had just wet their pants. The sad and desolate Edmonds Hotel. He stood on the street, thinking about his brother, Marcus, their past, all of the promise and hope destroyed by an insane drug pusher.
Isiah Parker didn’t feel like an assassin anymore. There was no guilt attached to what he had done. He had blasted the Grave Dancer straight back to hell.
He continued to walk north, toward his home. He was a crime-busting detective after all. The best in Harlem. He still liked the idea of that.
EPILOGUE
One Last Dance
104
Sarah McGinniss; New York
ON AN AFTERNOON near the end of April, Sarah found herself skirting along a familiar blue tape line, which led her around the Byzantine corridors on the ground floor at New York Hospital.
She had been coming