The Quickie - James Patterson [62]
One second Mark Ordonez was standing there, and the next he was simply gone. Erased, like in a magic trick.
The best one I’d ever seen.
Chapter 88
I SAT THERE, blinking at the van’s windshield. The car carrier didn’t stop. Didn’t even hit its brakes. It was as if the driver hadn’t even noticed. A hundred feet or so up the highway, I caught the movement of something sailing end-over-end into the thick roadside brush. Van door or drug dealer, I wasn’t sure.
Maybe God had heard my prayers after all. Or heard somebody’s prayer for me.
Paul was lying on the ground behind his totaled car. I saw his body as I managed to exit the van. My heart was back in my throat again.
“Paul, I’m here,” I said as I ran and knelt down next to him. I prayed he was okay. CPR was going to be a stretch with my hands cuffed behind my back.
“Lauren,” he said. His teeth started chattering. “I saw the taillights leaving, and I —”
“Don’t talk,” I said.
The blood seemed to be coming mostly from the back of Paul’s head, where the drug creep had hit him, probably several times. My breath caught as the words subdural hematoma flashed from my mental Homicide detective Rolodex. I usually saw it on coroner’s reports under cause of death. It seemed like a miracle that Paul was conscious, that either one of us was alive, really.
“Stay still,” I whispered in his ear. “Don’t move.”
Cars whipped past us on the highway as I sat down in the broken glass beside my husband. Blue and red lights started to bubble in the distance. Paul’s blood was warm on my legs.
“You saved me, Paul,” I whispered as two state troopers’ cars zipped out of the traffic and screeched to a stop in front of us.
Again, I thought, but didn’t say. You saved me again.
Chapter 89
“MILK AND SUGAR OKAY?” Trooper Harrington said as she came toward me across the UConn Health Center ER waiting room.
Ever since she and the other statie, Trooper Walker, had seen my badge, they had gone above and beyond. Instead of waiting for an ambulance, they laid Paul down in the back of Harrington’s cruiser and only asked questions as we headed for the nearest hospital at about 110. Trooper Harrington even loaned me a pair of sneakers from her workout bag in the trunk to put on over my bare and cut-up feet.
“How’s your baby and your husband?” she wanted to know.
“The ultrasound showed everything was fine,” I said. “But Paul has a concussion and needed stitches. They want to keep him overnight for observation. The doctor thinks he’s going to be okay, thank God. Thanks to you and your partner.”
“Can’t say the same about that Ordonez fella,” the female trooper said with a shake of her head. “I radioed back to the scene. They found him in the weeds a couple of hundred feet up the road. It was a car carrier that hit him. They said he looks like one of those pennies after you leave it on a railroad track. That’s the downside of looking for trouble, isn’t it? Sometimes you manage to find a little more than you bargained for.
“Hey, important thing is, you came out on top. You and your husband and your baby. Your family is safe. What else is there?”
I looked into the state trooper’s caring face. Her pulled-back blonde hair, her scrubbed cheeks, her alert blue-gray eyes brimming with competence. She was maybe one or two years out of the academy. Had I been that earnest once upon a time? I guess I had been. A million years ago, it felt like. And on another planet. I envied her, admired her, too.
“So, what’s NYC Homicide like?” she said. There was a starstruck glow in her eyes. “What’s it really like? Not like Law and Order, I hope.”
“Don’t listen to a word she says” came a booming voice from behind us. “She lies like a rug.”
I turned around toward a smiling face I hadn’t seen in a while. In way too long, I decided.
It was my partner, Mike.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“One of these Connecticut Chip wannabes called Keane, and he called me,” Mike said as he squeezed my hand. “I came straightaway. The