The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page A

over her vagina than an ape does.
    Benjamin wasn’t flying back to Michigan with Berryman and his brothers, he’d announced.
    The family advised Thomas Berryman to do the same. Recuperate for a few days. Get the poisons out of his system. Take rhubarb and soda at regular intervals.
    But when Charles and Willy Shepherd stopped to see their brother on their way to the plane, Berryman, though peaked, was packed and dressed to travel with them.
    He was smiling thinly. Puffing on a characteristic cigarillo. But he looked like a man just over a hospital convalescence.
    That much is approximated in a statement filed by Ben Shepherd with the Lake Stevens, Washington, police.
    Pioneer types, Charles and Willy Shepherd fueled and set up their own plane. It was work they liked doing.
    Berryman pitched in where he could, driving a BP fuel truck back and forth from a hangar. The three men worked without speaking.
    It wasn’t until all the work was done that Berryman took Charles Shepherd aside.
    They sat down on a small metal handtruck beside the private jet’s boarding stairs. Berryman was hyperventilating. Charles Shepherd’s hands were dirty as a mechanic’s and he sat with them held out away from his shirt.
    “Whew!” Berryman kept blowing out air and catching his breath as he spoke. “I guess,” he said, “all this
phew
extra running around … set me off again.”
    “Sure it did,” Shepherd agreed. “You should be back in bed. You look pitiful.”
    “Damn stomach’s rolling.”
    “Rhubarb and soda’s the thing.”
    “Fuck me,” Berryman puffed.
    “I told you, you dumbass. Go on back with Ben now.”
    Thomas Berryman continued to swear like a man about to miss out on box seats for a pro football game. “Shee-it,” he said over and over.
    Willy Shepherd stood close by, looking as if he’d suddenly figured something out. He was lighting a cigarette. “Too much running around,” he said to Berryman. “Got to take it easy after these things.”
    “Phew,” Berryman said. He was beet red, blushing. “Fuck me, Willy” were his last words, really, to either of the brothers. He gave both men back-thumping
abrazos.
Then he headed back toward the big house.
    The private plane cruised over Douglas fir tops like a living, looking thing. It was blue, electric blue.
    Thomas Berryman watched through mottled leaves that were hiding his face. Then he turned away and began hiking through woods toward the main state road, away from the house.
    Berryman walked watching the tops of his boots. Watching the underbrush. The bleached hay. Noting greenish grasshoppers. Red ants on stalks of hay. A dead field mouse like a wet, gray mitten.
    Overhead, the blue jet’s wheels slowly tucked into its stomach, and as the wheels folded, the sky cracked like a giant fir splitting all the way up from its roots.
    Berryman knew enough not to look back. Once, sometime in Texas, he’d seen a buck on fire. It hadn’t been pretty, or edifying.
    He walked faster. In deeper woods. In a dark house with a soft needle floor. He kept seeing the burning deer.
    The nose and the belly puffed smoke just about the color of sheep wool. It shot flames that were orange at first. Then just about blue. Then near-invisible in black smoke.
    It smoked ashes. It made shrieking metal-against-metal noises. The entire dark sky seemed to fall into the woods.
    That much was reported by a gas station owner on the Lake Stevens Highway.
    Berryman hiked two miles to a picnic roadstop. The roadstop was simply two redwood tables in a small clearing.
    He got into a rented beige and white camper he’d parked there earlier in the week.
    There were sleeping bags and Garcia fishing poles and tackle in the back. There was a Texaco map of Washington across the front seat. An old pipe was on the dashboard.
    Propped against the pipe was the familiar old sign: GONE-FISHING. Berryman crumpled the message in his hand.
    He turned on the radio. Opened all the windows. Put on a