Hard to kill, p.27
Hard to Kill, page 27
“What?”
“There’s still too much we don’t know,” he says.
He turns to face me. Even in his bar, I imagine a shadow having fallen across his face.
“I gotta ask again: Who was the shooter in the dunes?”
“Maybe somebody who didn’t want Licata to tell us who killed those two families. Maybe McKenzie hung around. Maybe it was Eric Jacobson or Morelli.”
“I need to know,” Jimmy says to me.
“And where’s our friend Mei?”
“Out there,” Jimmy says. “We gotta find her, too.”
“We’ve got time.”
He turns to me and smiles. It’s as if the shadow leaves his face, that quickly. In that moment, I remember just how much I love him.
Jimmy reaches across the table and covers my hand with one of his old, crooked boxer’s hands.
“All the time in the world,” he says.
We all leave early. I get to bed early for a change, feeling as if tomorrow is my equivalent of the first day of school.
When I’m up and showered and I’ve done my face and hair—still hanging in there, God bless it—I get into the new sincerity suit I’ve purchased for today’s appearance in court.
And before I even make myself a cup of coffee, I stand in the middle of my kitchen, ridiculously excited. Feel the thrill of it all, all over again, even if all I will be doing today is interviewing prospective jurors. Asking them questions before Kevin Ahearn and I get to all the questions the trial will answer, the ones I need to answer for myself, and about my client, about who murdered the Carsons of Garden City if he didn’t.
And if he didn’t, who wanted it to look like he did.
Murder, I think, and can’t help myself from smiling.
Still the main event.
And I’m going to be in the middle of it, again, in the middle of the effing action. Nobody killed me in the dunes. Now here I am, feeling this alive again, because I am on my way to court. I’m always talking and thinking about the juice being pumped into me while I do chemo, the juice that’s trying to keep me alive.
But what I’m feeling now, as I stand in my kitchen, this is the juice making me feel alive.
When I finally do make myself the one cup of coffee I’m allowing myself before I get into the car, I walk over to the kitchen window and take a look outside.
I see the hummingbird then.
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About the Authors
JAMES PATTERSON is the most popular storyteller of our time. He is the creator of unforgettable characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Jane Smith, and Maximum Ride, and of breathtaking true stories about the Kennedys, John Lennon, and Tiger Woods, as well as our military heroes, police officers, and ER nurses. Patterson has coauthored #1 bestselling novels with Bill Clinton and Dolly Parton, and collaborated most recently with Michael Crichton on the blockbuster Eruption. He has told the story of his own life in James Patterson by James Patterson and received an Edgar Award, ten Emmy Awards, the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, and the National Humanities Medal.
MIKE LUPICA is a veteran sports columnist—spending most of his career with the New York Daily News—who is now a member of the National Sports Media Association Hall of Fame. For three decades, he was a panelist on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters. As a novelist, he has written seventeen New York Times bestsellers, the most recent of which is The Horsewoman, his first collaboration with James Patterson.
James Patterson, Hard to Kill
