The Quickie - James Patterson [52]
And here, on this particular surveillance, he’d stumbled upon a real, unexpected bonus.
I looked at the important lawyer, his bare sack-of-meal belly, the red eyes above his doped-up half smile.
By accident, or maybe not, Scott had captured the one man most capable of hurting him — the district attorney for the borough where he worked and stole. In the most compromising position imaginable. Having an affair and doing coke.
You couldn’t get this kind of backup insurance from Aflac, I thought.
I listened to the rumble of traffic on the highway behind me.
I couldn’t believe it. Lies. Dirty money. Now blackmail. Scott hadn’t been Batman after all. He’d been Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant.
The dirt just kept on coming.
I closed the lid of my laptop as I started my car.
I was in this up to my neck.
Chapter 75
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up with the surprising and somewhat bizarre idea that it was a good time to take a week of saved-up vacation.
And starting Monday, that is exactly what I did. In spite of everything, I actually had a fairly good time. Instead of sex, lies, and videotape, it was sex, food, and jogging, mostly in the reverse order.
I divided my mornings and afternoons between spending quality time with the crane at Tibbetts Brook Park and learning how to cook like Julia Child again. Every night, I made sure Paul came home to a new, knock-his-socks-off homemade meal: red wine pot roast with porcini, roasted duck breast with black truffles, and his personal favorite, grilled dry-aged porterhouse with twice-baked potatoes.
And it wasn’t just his socks that were knocked off usually. Our life in the bedroom was back on track, and maybe even better than ever. Honestly, we couldn’t get enough of each other.
While we hugged in the dark afterward, a kind of fugue would settle over me, and everything — the dark past, the uncertain future — would suddenly go away.
Then the ax finally fell on Thursday of my vacation week.
It came in the form of a phone call out of the blue. It was ten o’clock and I was unlacing my Reeboks when I noticed the blinking message light.
No news had meant good news for so long.
So, who was calling me at home on my vacation? I pressed the message button to find out.
“Detective Stillwell, this is assistant district attorney Jeffrey Fisher from the Bronx County Office. I know you’re on vacation, but we’re going to need you to come in and tie up a few loose ends on the Thayer case. Tomorrow at ten will be good for us. Bronx County Courthouse, second floor.”
I played the message over and over again.
What disturbed me the most was that I had a lot of friends in the Bronx DA’s Homicide office, but I knew Fisher the least. It seemed like maybe he had drawn the short straw on a distasteful task. And what about the semicasual tone of the message? Tie up a few loose ends sounded like it wasn’t a big deal. Which didn’t really make sense when I considered the officious-sounding ordering of the where and when at the end. I’d used the same textbook-law-enforcement implication that something mandatory was voluntary in trying to get witnesses to talk to me.
Witnesses, I thought, closing my eyes.
Not to mention suspects.
For a moment I panicked, beginning to think about what might have happened, where I might have screwed up, what the DA might try to lay on me. But then I stopped myself.
I knew how this game was played, and I knew even in the worst-case scenario, I had the advantage. Because the fact was, even if the DA came out and accused me and Paul of murdering Scott, they still had to prove it. Which was going to be hard, since there were no fingerprints, and Paul had never mentioned to anyone what he had done. Not even to me.
You could know somebody did something and they could still walk. I knew that full well. You had to prove your case in a court of law, and you needed evidence just to get there.
Sitting by my phone, I tried to turn my fear into something