Beach Road by James Patterson Read Free Book Online

soggy beers.
    After dinner for one, I walk around some more,
killing time,
then drive to even darker, quieter Tribeca.
    I park on Franklin, climb into the back, and stretch out on my foam mattresses.
    With my blacked-out windows cracked for ventilation, sleeping conditions are pretty damn good, and the next time I open my eyes it’s 3:30 a.m. and I have that pounding in my chest you get when your alarm rips you out of sleep in the middle of the night. I rub the gunk out of my eyes, and when the street comes back into focus, I see that the shadows fluttering over the cobblestones are rats. Is that what Frank meant about waking up in a city that never sleeps?
    Without stopping for coffee, I head back to Bed-Stuy, and half an hour after my alarm went off, I pick the lock in the vestibule of Michael Walker’s building. Then I climb the stairs two, three at a time to the fugitive’s roof.
    It’s cool and quiet up here, and at this hour Bed-Stuy looks peaceful as Bethlehem on a starry night, even beautiful.
    When a lone nocturnal civilian finally turns the corner, I climb down the fire escape to Walker’s kitchen.
    I need a break here and I get it. The window is half open, and I don’t have to break it to slip inside. There’s plenty of light to screw the silencer to the end of my Beretta Cougar, which is a beauty, by the way.
    Like I been saying:
killing time.
    A sleeping person is so unbelievably vulnerable it almost feels wrong to stare at him. Michael Walker looks about twelve years old, and for a second I think back to what I was like when I was young and innocent. Wasn’t that long ago, either.
    I cough gently.
    Walker stirs, and then his dark eyes blink open. “What the—”
    “Good morning, Michael,” I say.
    But the bullet flying then bulldozing into the back of his brain is more like good night.
    And I guarantee, Walker had no idea what just happened, or why.
    I don’t need to tell you there’s nothing but crap on TV at this hour. I settle on a
Saturday Night Live
rerun with Rob Lowe as guest host, and he performs his monologue as I carefully wrap Walker’s cool fingers around the handle of my gun. Then I slip it into a sealed plastic bag.
    After I find Walker’s piece in the corner of his closet, the only thing left to do here is drop off Officer Lindgren’s gift—
the red Miami Heat cap
—on the kitchen floor before I step back out onto the fire escape.
    Sunrise is still an hour away when I lower my window on the Brooklyn Bridge and toss Walker’s one-hundred-dollar pistola into the East River.
    I sing that real nice Norah Jones song “Sunrise” most of the way home. Kind of sad what happened to Walker, but actually I don’t feel a thing. Nada.

Chapter 25
    Tom
    EVENTUALLY, I WILL think of this downtime with affection, call it the calm before the shitstorm.
    At work the next day, in my office, I wad up a sheet of printing paper, lean back in my desk chair ($59), and let fly. The paper ball bounces off the slanting dormer ceiling of my second-floor attic office ($650 a month), glances off the side of a beige metal filing cabinet ($39), bounces on the end of my worktable ($109), and drops softly into the white plastic wastebasket ($6).
    The tasteful furnishings are all from IKEA, and the successful shot—nothing but wastebasket—is my eleventh in a row.
    To give you a sense of the breakneck pace of my legal career, that’s not even close to a personal best. I have reached the high fifties on multiple occasions, and one lively afternoon, when I was really feeling it, I canned eighty-seven triple-bankers in a row, a record I suspect will last as long as man has paper and too much time on his hands.
    After two years as the sole owner and employee of Tom Dunleavy, Esquire, Inc., headquartered in a charming wooden house directly above Montauk Books, my paper-tossing skills are definitely world-class. But I know it’s a sorry state of affairs for an educated, able-bodied thirty-two-year-old, and after