The Quickie - James Patterson [25]
But I wasn’t the one who would get punished for it.
It was Paul.
So, what was I supposed to do now?
Chapter 36
I STILL HADN’T FIGURED THAT OUT when I totally collapsed three minutes later in the shower.
One moment I was standing there, shampooing my hair, and the next I was sitting down hard on the cold porcelain, water pinging off my torso and legs.
I pressed my forehead to the wet tile as the sum of the night’s events dripped through me. What made me the sickest was hard to decide. My flat-out betrayal of Paul? Or staring into Scott’s dead face? Or maybe staring into his wife’s face?
Closing my eyes, I longed crazily for the water to melt me, to let me stream down the floor of the tub and disappear with a gurgle into the drain.
After a minute of that not happening, I lifted my head off the tile and opened my eyes.
This wasn’t just going to go away, was it? I needed to do something. But what?
I considered my choices.
First, what would happen if I turned Paul in?
I was an expert on the Bronx criminal justice system. Like any retailer faced with massive volume most of the time, the Bronx DA’s office was willing to make a deal with offenders, offer justice at a reduced rate. But the high-profile nature of Scott’s case, I realized, would be considered a career maker for the prosecution. It would be Paul against the system, and the system would make sure that this was one case they would win, and win with a vengeance.
I thought of the mountains of legal bills. The cost of bail for Paul. If he could get bail.
Even with the obvious plea of self-defense, the best-case scenario we were looking at was manslaughter, five years of state prison. I shook my head. Five years. Whenever I dropped off a prisoner at Rikers, after five minutes I longed to do a hundred laps in a pool of antibacterial soap. I winced as I remembered the cattle line in the search room. The sound of crying babies and the beneath-the-table sex in Visitors.
I imagined Paul looking at me over a scuzzy table, disgust in his blackened eyes.
“What’s the matter, Lauren?” he would say. “I thought you liked quickies.”
And if that wasn’t horror enough to consider, there was the New York press. What could be more salivating to the tabloids than a love triangle gone wrong, where two cops were involved, one of them now dead! We were looking at long-lasting infamy here.
Loser Hall of Fame material.
Mass-media humiliation.
And let’s not forget what would happen to Scott’s family. Right now, Brooke was being regarded as a hero’s wife. But once the truth got out, that Scott was killed by the husband of the woman he was cheating with, it would be bye-bye crying on the commissioner’s shoulder, bye-bye Brooke, bye-bye kids.
My eyes almost bugged out of my head as I considered these particular details.
It would also be so long line-of-duty death benefits for the Thayer family!
I pictured Brooke rocking with her poor daughter. Instead of getting Scott’s pension, she would be left with jack squat.
I stood up in the shower. Tried to catch my breath.
My little decision-making meeting was adjourned.
If this were just about me, I would turn myself in. I would go into my room right now, get dressed, and march into my boss’s office. I would confess.
But it wasn’t just about me. It was about Paul. It was about Brooke.
And most of all her three fatherless kids.
Who was I kidding? There wasn’t any choice, at least not right now.
I had to make everything right again.
The water roared in my ears like thunder as I thrust my face under the spray.
But how could I make everything right?
Chapter 37
PAUL WAS STILL SNORING when I left for work. I would have liked to speak with him. To say we had a lot to deal with was quite the understatement. But since I didn’t think they offered marriage counseling in prison, I decided that instead of waking him up,