The Quickie - James Patterson [1]
And then, there was Paul.
As I rounded the corner in my Mini Cooper, I saw him leaving his office building, walking with a twenty-something blonde woman.
Paul was leaning in very close to her, chatting, laughing in a way that instantly made me feel very ill.
She was one of those bright, shiny beauties you’re more likely to see in Chicago or Iowa City. Tall, hair like platinum silk. Cream-colored skin that looked just about perfect from this distance. Not a wrinkle or blemish.
She wasn’t completely perfect, though. She tripped a Manolo on a street plate as she and Paul were getting into a taxi, and as I watched Paul gallantly catch hold of the pink cashmere on her anorexic elbow, I felt like someone had hammered a cold chisel right into the center of my chest.
I followed them. Well, I guess followed is too polite. I stalked them.
All the way up to Midtown, I stayed on that taxi’s bumper like we were connected by a tow hook. When the cab suddenly pulled up in front of the entrance to the St. Regis Hotel, on East 55th Street, and Paul and the woman stepped out smiling, I felt an impulse rush from the lizard part of my brain to my right foot, which was hovering over the accelerator. Then Paul took her arm. A picture of both of them sandwiched between the storied hotel’s front steps and the hood of my baby-blue Mini flashed through my mind.
Then it was gone, and so were they, and I was left sitting there crying to the sound of the honking taxis lined up behind me.
Two
THAT NIGHT, instead of shooting Paul as he came through the front door, I allowed him one chance. I even waited until we were eating dinner to talk about what he’d been up to at lunchtime at the St. Regis Hotel in Midtown.
Maybe there was some logical explanation. I couldn’t imagine what it would be, but in the words of a bumper sticker I once saw, Miracles Happen, Too.
“So, Paul,” I said as casually as the liquid nitrogen pumping through my veins allowed me. “What did you do for lunch today?”
That got his attention. Even though I had my head down as I nearly sawed through the plate under my food, I felt his head bob up, his eyes lift, as he looked at me.
Then, after an extended guilty pause, he looked back down at his plate.
“Had a sandwich at my desk,” he mumbled. “The usual. You know me, Lauren.”
Paul lied — right to my face.
My dropped knife banged off my plate like a gong. The darkest paranoid possibilities flooded through me. Crazy stuff that wasn’t really like me.
Maybe his job wasn’t even real, I thought. Maybe he’d had letterhead made up, and from day one he’d been betraying me when he went downtown every day. How well did I really know his co-workers? Maybe they were actors hired to show up whenever I was planning to come by.
“Why do you ask?” Paul finally said, ever so casually. That hurt. Almost as much as seeing him with the stunning blonde in Manhattan.
Almost.
I don’t know how I managed to smile at him, with the cat-five hurricane roaring through me, but somehow I managed to pull the tight muscles of my cheeks upward.
“Just making conversation,” I said. “Just talking to my husband over dinner.”
Part One
THE QUICKIE
Chapter 1
THERE WAS HEAVY TRAFFIC on the Major Deegan south and more on the approach to the Triborough that night, that crazy, crazy night.
I couldn’t decide which was making my eye twitch more as we crawled across the span — the horns from the cars logjammed in both directions around us, or the ones honking from our driver’s Spanish music station.
I was heading to Virginia for a job-sponsored seminar.
Paul was going to apply some face time to one of his firm’s biggest clients in Boston.
The only trip we modern, professional, go-getting Stillwells were going to share this week was the ride to LaGuardia Airport.
At least I had one of the great views of Manhattan outside my window. The Big Apple seemed even more majestic than usual with its glass-and-steel towers glowing against the approaching black thunderheads of a storm.