The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [86]
Stefanovitch stared at the drug dealer and murderer for a long moment. No one in the dining room looked as if they could possibly belong to the Midnight Club. But nothing was as it seemed anymore.
Stefanovitch finally pushed himself out of the Lotos Club dining room. He was getting to Alexandre St.-Germain. He was sure of it.
82
STEFANOVITCH WENT HOME after the Lotos Club. He felt better than he had at any other time during the St.-Germain investigation. All his instincts told him that they were doing this right. Just right so far.
He took a hot shower, dried off, and popped open a bottle of beer. He called Sarah, and told her about the scene at the Lotos Club. He wanted to talk about everything with her, but he knew enough not to try. He was too worn, absolutely fried, unfit for anybody’s company tonight.
Finally, Stefanovitch dropped off to sleep on his couch, half watching a movie. The late-night feature was Chinatown, Jack Nicholson at his most brilliant and mesmerizing as J. J. Gittes.
Sometime later the phone rang—a jangling up somewhere near the head of the sofa. Stef woke in a disoriented blur.
The room was a cubist puzzle. The picture window was on the wrong side of the bed. All the lights were still on, throwing glaring reflections from the windows back into the room. He finally realized that he was on the couch in the living room, not in his bedroom.
He reached for the phone, nearly pulling it off the stand in the process. He knew it could only be Sarah.
“Hello, this is Stef.” He imitated a phone-answering machine. “When you hear the beep, tell me last night wasn’t a dream. What time is it? Oh yeah, hi.”
There was a strange silence on the other end of the line.
It felt like the physical reality of being somewhere in pitch-blackness. Like falling into a deep tunnel, or drifting into the unfathomable mysteries of death.
A voice finally filtered through the receiver’s tiny black holes. Stefanovitch’s pulse quickened as he listened.
“I wanted you to know one thing, Stefanovitch. I shot her myself. I took the job personally.
“I stood in the hallway of your pathetic little apartment building in Brooklyn Heights. When the front door opened, I fired the shotgun. You can imagine the rest, I’m sure. You get the picture. Good night for now.”
83
John Stefanovitch and Isiah Parker; Central Park West
I WANTED YOU to know one thing…
I shot her myself…
You can imagine the rest…
The unnerving explosions inside Stefanovitch’s head hadn’t stopped since the phone call.
At six-thirty in the morning, he was on East Forty-third Street waiting for the Sports Center to open. He’d been up since four.
For once, Beth Kelly was sympathetic during the workout. She pushed him, but didn’t try to break him. Something about the wounded look on Stef’s face had quieted her down.
By eight o’clock, Stefanovitch and Isiah Parker were back on Central Park West, waiting for Alexandre St.-Germain to come out to his limousine again, for the chase to resume, the real chase. Maybe the final one.
The Grave Dancer had gotten to Stefanovitch with the phone call.
He hadn’t been able to sleep after the call. He lay awake remembering the months of pain, the suffering after Anna’s murder and the shooting at Long Beach.
I wanted you to know one thing …I shot her myself.
He had waited more than two years; now he needed justice, some form of revenge for everything that had happened.
When he had been growing up, there was a lesson a priest in Minersville had taught. It mirrored his current frustration. In order to explain the concept of infinity to children, the priest would ask his classes to think back to the very beginning of infinity. The process always created a tremendous ache in Stefanovitch’s head. Obviously there could be no beginning. No matter how far he went back, billions and billions of years, he could never reach the starting point of infinity.
Stefanovitch felt that same overpowering frustration now. Alexandre St.-Germain’s freedom and