2nd Chance by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

paws against my leg.
    “So, how was
your
day?” I nuzzled close, smooching her happy face.
    I went into the bedroom and peeled off my work clothes, pulled up my hair, putting on the oversize Giants sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants I lived in when the weather turned cool. I fed Martha, made myself a cup of Orange Zinger, and sat in the cushioned alcove.
    I took a sip of tea, Martha perched in my lap. Out in the distance, a grid of blinking airplane lights descending into SF1 came into view. I found myself thinking about the unbelievable image of Jill as a mom… Her thin, fit figure with a bulging belly… a shower with just us girls. It made me chuckle. I smiled at Martha. “Jilly-bean’s gonna be a mommy.”
    I had never seen Jill look so complete. It was only a few months ago when my own thoughts had run to how much I would have loved to have a baby. As Jill said,
I wanted some of that, too
. It just wasn’t meant to be….
    Parenting just didn’t seem like the natural occupation in my family.
    My mother had died eleven years before, when I was twenty-four and just entering the Police Academy. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and my last two years of college, I helped take care of her, rushing back from class to pick her up at the Emporium, where she worked, preparing her meals, watching over my younger sister, Cat.
    My father, a San Francisco cop, disappeared on us when I was thirteen. To this day, I didn’t know why I had grown up hearing all the stories – that he handed his paycheck over to the bookies, that he had a secret life away from Mom, that the bastard could charm the pants off of anyone, that one day he lost heart and just couldn’t put the uniform back on.
    Last I heard from Cat, he was down in Redondo Beach, doing his own thing, private security. Old-timers down in the Central district still asked me how Marty Boxer was. They still told stories about him, and maybe it was good someone could think about him with a laugh. Marty who once nabbed three perps with the same set of handcuffs… Marty Boxer, who stopped off to lay a bet with the suspect still in the car. All I could think about was that the bastard let me tend and nurse my mother while she was dying and never came back.
    I hadn’t seen my father for almost ten years. Since the day I became a cop. I’d spotted him in the audience when I graduated from the police academy but we hadn’t spoken. I didn’t even miss him anymore.
    God, it had been ages since I had examined these old scars. Mom had been gone for eleven years. I’d been married, divorced. I had made it into Homicide. Now I was running it. Somewhere along the way, I had met the man of my dreams…
    I was right when I told Mercer the old fire was back.
    But I was lying when I told myself I had put Chris Raleigh in the past.

Chapter XVIII
    I T WAS ALWAYS THE EYES that got him.
Naked on the bunk, in the stark, cell-like room, he sat staring at the old black-and-white photographs he had looked at a thousand times.
    It was always the eyes… that deadened, hopeless resignation.
    How they
posed
, even knowing that their lives were about to end. Even with the nooses wrapped around their necks.
    In the loosely bound album, he had forty-seven photos and postcards arranged in chronological order. He had collected them over the years. The first, an old photograph, dated June 9, 1901, his father had given him.
Dez Jones, lynched in Great River, Indiana.
On the border, someone had written in faded script: “This was that dance I went to the other night. We sure played afterwards. Your son, Sam.” In the foreground, a crowd in suit coats and bowler hats, and behind them the limply hanging corpse.
    He flipped the page. Frank Taylor, Mason, Georgia, 1911. It had cost him $500 to get the photo, but it was worth every penny. From the back of a buggy parked under an oak, the condemned man stared, seconds before his death. On his face, neither resistance nor fear. A small crowd of