The Quickie - James Patterson [18]
I knew my friends and co-workers were reeling, hurting. By telling the truth, I could erase their anxious tension. The thought that somebody else could possibly get hurt out there made me almost physically sick.
I closed my eyes, listening to the crackle of police radio chatter and the rain in the trees.
I didn’t say anything to anyone about what I knew, what had actually happened to Scott.
I kept my head down and my mouth shut.
I looked up only when I saw some commotion alongside the fountain.
A couple of dozen uniforms were arraying themselves in parallel lines from the fountain to the medical examiner’s black station wagon, waiting underneath the rusted el on Jerome.
“They’re taking him out,” I heard one of the uniforms say as he rushed past me to grab a place in the line.
An honor guard of six cops carefully stepped into the water of the fountain and received from the medical examiner’s team the green-black body bag Scott had already been placed in. They handled him as if he were a sick person who was still alive. Oh, God, I wished that were true. I wished I could take this entire night back, every second of it.
Along that stock-still, midnight-blue rank, someone started singing “Danny Boy” in a high, clear, haunting tenor that would have made Ronan Tynan jealous.
You want a definition of forlorn? How about half a dozen cops slowly bearing one of their dead through a dark Bronx tenement valley while the rain falls and the pipes, the pipes are calling. Was Scott even Irish? I didn’t know. All dead cops are Irish, I guess.
I watched the rain splatter like flung holy water against the body bag as the procession passed me. Everywhere men were weeping openly. I watched as even the commissioner, standing beside the ME office’s hearse, cupped a hand over his eyes.
An overhead passing number 4 train sounded out a martial drum snare as Scott was slid into the back of the wagon like a file returned to a drawer.
Tears drained out of my eyes as if my tear ducts had been slit.
Chapter 28
I CAUGHT A WHITE BLUR out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly I was enveloped in a wall of warm Tyvek.
“Oh, Lauren,” an academy classmate of mine, Bonnie Clesnik, whispered in my ear as she hugged me to her side. “This is so horrible. That poor guy.”
Bonnie had been premed at NYU before she dropped out to become a cop, and she was now a sergeant in the Crime Scene Unit. As the only female former professionals in a class filled mostly with twenty-two-year-old, smooth-faced boys from Long Island, we had formed a quick bond. I’d stayed over at “the Bonster” and her partner Tatum’s loft on St. Mark’s Place so many times, they named the futon after me.
Bonnie fished a Kleenex out of her suit and wiped the corners of her eyes, then handed me a tissue, too.
“Look at us,” she said with a laugh. “Badass cops, huh? It’s been — what? A year? You did something to your hair. I like it.”
“Thanks,” Mike said, stepping between us. “I just washed it. And you are?”
“Bonnie, this fool is my partner, Mike,” I said, introducing them. “I thought you worked days.”
“When I heard the news, I came running, just like everybody else,” Bonnie said. “I haven’t seen this many cops in one place since St. Paddy’s. Or Ground Zero.”
She took off the freezer bag that was strapped across her chest beside several cameras.
“I’m glad I did, though, Lauren. I’m really glad. I think I found something.”
I accepted the freezer bag from her, held it up.
Every light in the park and beyond seemed to surge suddenly with a white-hot brightness. The rain felt like it was falling right through me.
I turned Paul’s silver, wired-rimmed glasses slowly in my hand.
“They were in the sheet Scott was wrapped in,” Bonnie said. “I already called one of the guys in his narcotics