Midnight Club by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page A

had dictated the choice of apartments.
    The wife of the man who owned the building had suffered a stroke and now had to face life in a wheelchair herself. The tragedy had sensitized her husband to the predicament of the wheelchair-bound in the city. The two of them had personally examined every walkway and building entrance from the point of view of someone coming or going in a chair.
    Stefanovitch grabbed an hour-and-a-half nap at the apartment late that afternoon. Then he was back in the van, driving out to Coney Island, in Brooklyn.
    At around seven o’clock, he arrived at one of the amusement park’s sprawling parking lots. Several hundred people were already gathered in a blockaded area, which had been closed to regular traffic. Stefanovitch had never seen so many people in wheelchairs.
    His own speed-racing chair had been customized by his father and his brother, Nelson, in Pennsylvania. They had given him the racer that past November. It weighed only twelve pounds. Unlike old-fashioned chairs, which made people look handicapped, the sports chair was sleek and jet black. It had twenty-eight-inch-high tires.
    Stefanovitch’s brother and his father had apparently seen the van heading into the lot. They came running as Stefanovitch was pulling his racer out of the back. They’d driven all the way from Pennsylvania to see him race.
    “Look at this.” Nelson held up a wrinkled Day-Glo T-shirt, an obvious gift for the night’s big event. The shirt said “Mike’s Submarines—Eat the Big One in Minersville.”
    “What race you in, Stef?” his father asked as they started away from the van, headed toward the main-event area.
    All around the crowded parking lot, Stefanovitch observed the victims of accidents, of crippling illness, and of wars, especially Vietnam. Everybody looked so pumped up tonight, excited as hell. Stefanovitch found that he was, too.
    “I’m in the miracle mile. Maybe my stamina will make up for some technique and experience I’m missing. Some of these guys, and the women, are amazing.”
    A handsome, outdoorsy-looking man with sun-bleached blond hair and a beard suddenly came up alongside them. Stefanovitch had met Pierce Oates at his first race, about five months back. Amazingly, John Stefanovitch had come in third in a field of ten, most of them racing vets. He had caught Pierce Oates’s appraising eye right off.
    “You going to give me some competition out there tonight, man?” Pierce had a broad, charismatic grin. His racer was fire-engine red and looked fast.
    “I’ll do my best. Pierce Oates, this is my father, Charles Stefanovitch. My big brother, Nelson. They came all the way from Pennsylvania. My whole family’s nutty like that. The family is a big fan of the family. Same thing happens for a Pillsbury bake-off if my mother has her angel food cake entered.”
    “That’s terrific. I love it. Just to watch me whip your tail?” Pierce’s smile seemed carefree, even after all that had happened to him.
    “How are you, Pierce? Nice to meet you.” Charles Stefanovitch shook hands with the man in the wheelchair next to his son. “You beat Stef, you get to wear the Mike’s Subs T-shirt next race.”
    “That’s all the incentive I need.” Pierce Oates whooped loudly and laughed. The muscular, sun-bronzed man then veered off to mingle with the other racers.
    “He’s a little overexuberant, but he’s great,” Stefanovitch said to his father and brother. “Some of these guys are tremendous athletes. What they go through to be here is incomprehensible. You can’t even imagine.”
    Charles Stefanovitch leaned down close to his son and he spoke to him in confidence. Stefanovitch’s father was a quiet man who had never in his life told Stef that he loved him, never actually used the words. Physically, he was tall and lean, almost noble in his bearing. His son John had once had a similar bearing.
    “Just do the best you can, Stef. Nobody can ever ask for more than that…Win this