The Quickie - James Patterson [10]
I checked the answering machine upstairs, but other than my gynecologist’s dispatch on my failing health, it was empty. After another five minutes, spent staring at the empty street, I seriously considered giving Paul a call on his cell to see what was going on. The problem was, I didn’t know exactly how to phrase things.
Hi, Paul? Yeah, it’s me, Lauren. How’s the guy I was screwing behind your back coming along? Is he going to be okay?
I needed to find out what was going on firsthand, I finally decided. But waiting around like this was making me insane.
It was time to face the music.
I needed to go to the hospital. I grabbed my gun, tossed it in my handbag, and ran out the door.
Chapter 15
THANK GOD FOR ABS, I thought as I came centimeters from rear-ending with my Mini Cooper the shiny ambulance parked in front of the Lawrence Hospital ER.
“Where’s the beating victim?” I called to the polished-looking red-haired nurse behind the Plexiglas at the triage desk.
“Oh my God! You were beaten?” she said, spilling the People magazine out of her lap as she stood.
I looked around the waiting room. It was empty. Stranger than that, it was clean. Calming classical music serenaded from the overhead speakers. Bronxville, Yonkers’ extremely wealthy neighbor to the east, was one of the most upscale suburbs in Westchester, I remembered. Lawrence did lacrosse injuries, the occasional Oxy overdose, a debutante who’d fallen off her horse.
I rolled my eyes as I headed back to the parking lot.
A bloody John Doe couldn’t have been left at Lawrence Hospital’s doorstep, I realized, because the entire Bronxville police force wasn’t here. So, where could Paul have taken Scott?
I racked my brain for the next-nearest hospital.
Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center, to the south on the Bronx River Parkway, I decided, as I peeled out into the wet street once again.
Back down in the real Bronx. The one without the ville.
After hammering it down the parkway for ten minutes, I noticed that the center-doored colonials that bookended the parkway had been replaced by less quaint, gritty tenements. Steve McQueen would have been proud of the fishtailing stop I made before I ran into the ER entrance of Our Lady of Mercy on East 233rd Street.
I heard vociferous complaints as I cut to the head of the long triage line in the packed, grimy waiting room.
“Have you had any anonymous beating victims in the last hour?” I yelled to the first nurse I could find.
She replaced the bloody dish towel over the barbecue fork stuck in the hand of the Hispanic woman beside her before she looked up.
“He’s in three,” she said, annoyed. “Who the hell are you?”
More shouts followed me as I rushed through the open door behind her. I found number 3 and ripped back the green plastic curtain around it.
“Ever hear a knockin’, bitch?” a near-naked black kid asked me in a malevolent tone as he attempted to cover himself with the hand not cuffed to the bed rail. A big white bandage was wrapped around his head, and a big white uniformed cop was sitting by his feet.
I felt something shift ominously in my stomach.
If Scott wasn’t here, I thought . . .
Then where the hell was he? And where was Paul?
“Yo, Earth to lady,” the Bronx uniform said to me with a snap of his fingers. “What’s up?”
I was fumbling for a lie when I heard two loud beeps cut from the static of his radio.
He ignored me for a moment as he turned it up. The words were too garbled for me to catch everything, but I heard something about a white male victim, along with an address.
St. James Park. Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue.
White male? I thought. No way. Impossible. Had to be a coincidence.
I closed my gaping mouth as the cop directed his suspicious stare back at me.
“So you’re saying this isn’t where I hand in my urine sample?” I said, backing away.
Minutes later I was flooring it, heading south down the Bronx River Parkway. I’d just swing