Midnight Club (29 page)

103

HE PULLED THE
emergency-stop button back out. The elevator rumbled and shook to life. The amber indicator lights over the door blinked on and off again.

The elevator car began to soar upward, resuming its ride as if nothing had happened. A few seconds later, Parker stabbed the stop button again. The elevator halted at the forty-sixth floor.

Isiah Parker jumped out of the car and dropped the Ingram. He ran to an emergency doorway marked “Fire Exit.”

He buttoned his sport coat as he continued to race downstairs. He shook perspiration off his face. He dried his head with his jacket sleeve. He went down past forty-five, forty-four, past forty-three. Don’t panic. Just hurry, he reminded himself.

Finally, he emerged from the fire exit stairway, onto the fortieth floor. He saw policemen waiting with drawn riot shotguns and squawking walkie-talkies. Silence followed in the hallway. Parker told himself,
Now be very cool…You’re a cop, too.

“Isiah Parker, Nineteenth Precinct,” he said to the patrolman closest to the fire exit door. Somehow, he managed a blank poker face. “What the hell is going on?” Parker asked.

The patrolman stared at him. Doubt glistened in his sober blue eyes. His bulky riot shotgun was held at chest level, pointed right at Parker’s stomach.

Isiah Parker carefully shook out his portfolio wallet, showing his detective’s shield. He forced a smile, then loosely shrugged his shoulders. “Hey, relax, huh? What the hell’s happening? We heard the elevator take off. What happened?”

A black detective in the hallway spoke up. “Hey, I know him. That’s my man Parker. Hey, Isiah.”

The patrolman with the shotgun finally shook his head. He slowly lowered the Remington. “That’s what we were wondering, too. Where’s the elevator? Where’s St.-Germain?”

More patrolmen and detectives began to swarm out of the fire exit stairway. Isiah moved among them, joining in with the general confusion, contributing his part. They all had the same question—What was going on? Where had the hijacked elevator gone?

After a few minutes on the fortieth floor, Parker started down the fire exit stairway again. This time, he walked in the company of two other detectives. The deserted elevator had been discovered on forty-six. The Grave Dancer was dead inside.

Once he was in the lobby of the Trade Center, Parker continued toward the bright daylight of the street. Outside the soaring twin building, everything was chaos, even worse than up on the forty-sixth floor.

Police blockades had been set up everywhere. EMS ambulances, police cruisers with their turrets blazing red, were parked up on the sidewalk. Several thousand people were assembled behind rows of blue police barricades and street cops in pith helmets.

Escape and survive, Parker thought. Just like after Allure, and Cin-Cin, in Soho.

He continued north on Chambers Street, which was also blockaded with bright blue police sawhorses. He kept walking past the blockades, once or twice showing his detective’s shield along the way.

As he walked north through the city, Isiah Parker wished that the world was still simple. All he had ever wanted was to get Marcus’s murderer. Whether he did that through the police department, or not, didn’t matter. All he had wanted was a little justice.

Parker wound up in the Bowery, somewhere around Grand and Canal streets, with their legions of panhandlers. The trembling stewbums, always looking like they had just wet their pants. The sad and desolate Edmonds Hotel. He stood on the street, thinking about his brother, Marcus, their past, all of the promise and hope destroyed by an insane drug pusher.

Isiah Parker didn’t feel like an assassin anymore. There was no guilt attached to what he had done. He had blasted the Grave Dancer straight back to hell.

He continued to walk north, toward his home. He was a crime-busting detective after all. The best in Harlem. He still liked the idea of that.

EPILOGUE

One Last Dance

104

Sarah McGinniss; New York

ON AN AFTERNOON
near the end of April, Sarah found herself skirting along a familiar blue tape line, which led her around the Byzantine corridors on the ground floor at New York Hospital.

She had been coming regularly to the hospital every day for almost nine months. She knew the place by heart. That included most of the porters, a lot of the nurses and doctors. Linda and Laurie and Robin in the gift shop. Just about everybody knew Sarah, too.

The seventeenth floor, where she was headed, had an eighty-by-forty gray-stone terrace, which looked out over the East River; that big old Pepsi sign; the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens. As hospitals went, it was the most impressive and beautiful one she’d ever been inside.

On that afternoon in the spring, Sarah went directly to Stefanovitch’s room, actually his seventh room so far. Each room had been on a different floor inside the sprawling medical center.

Stef was up and waiting, as she’d expected. His mother and father, Nelson, Nelson’s wife, Hallie, were all crowded into the room.

“Well, this is quite a happy Fizzies party, isn’t it?” he said when Sarah arrived. He had his best smile turned up full. He brought to mind soldiers recovering in army hospitals.

He was peering across the sun-spattered hospital room. He seemed to be carefully studying his visitors. There was a wonderful twinkle in his eyes. Sarah didn’t know how he managed it—especially today.

Finally, Sarah’s eyes found Michael Petito, the tall, balding neurologist who had been to see Stef every day for the past nine months. It was nine months now since three killers had broken into her apartment, and tried to murder both of them. They had succeeded in inflicting two horrifying gunshot wounds, one in Stef’s side, the other in the small of his back.

Dr. Petito had made the decision to operate two days after the shooting. At the time, Stefanovitch had been listed in very critical condition. A half-dozen family members had driven up to New York from Pennsylvania. He hadn’t been expected to live.

Stefanovitch had been in intensive care when his mother and father, Sarah, and Dr. Petito had come to visit. “You don’t look so bad,” Petito had told him. “I’ve seen worse after pro football games.”

Stef had liked the irreverent doctor immediately, maybe because Michael Petito had come up from the streets of New York, and acted a little like it. Or maybe because Petito was the team doctor for the New York Giants, a specialist on back and leg injuries.

He told Stefanovitch that he wanted to operate on his back again, that the new bullets had to come out of there anyway.

“What are the chances?” Stef had asked, struggling with every word.

“About sixty-forty, your way. Let’s say fifty-five—forty-five, that you don’t end up a full quadriplegic.”

“The other doctor said eighty-twenty, the other way. The last time I got shot up like this.”

Petito shrugged. “Overly conservative, in my opinion. Your other doctor was protecting himself, in case he screwed up. I won’t screw up, but those are the real odds. And they’re not great. Especially the prospect of being a quadriplegic.”

Stefanovitch had agreed to sign the necessary releases. He had gone in for the operation, one that could leave him paralyzed from the neck down. As Dr. Petito had said, though, the new bullets had to come out anyway.

Nine months later, he was still in New York Hospital.

The pain following the operation had been unbearable; it seemed to be endless. Petito hadn’t told him about that, the excruciating pain after a second major back operation.

Day after day, Stefanovitch was rolled upstairs to physical therapy, where they thought it was an occasion for champagne if he touched his index fingers together once out of every couple of times, or wiggled his big toe. Every day, as he was wheeled back to his room from therapy, he was soaked to the skin, his entire body screaming from pain.

If he had been forced to do it again, he didn’t think he could. Sarah had been there every day, for nine months straight. Sarah and Sam. Bringing him presents, and dinners from Rusty and Abe’s Steak House, and most of all, hope.

“Sixty-forty my way? Those are the odds?” John Stefanovitch asked now.

His voice suddenly sounded hollow and distant. His family and Dr. Petito were silhouetted against one of the sunny hospital windows.

“I thought I told you fifty-five—forty-five.” Petito’s gaze was steady, his opinion firm.

“Yeah, you did. You know, I was feeling okay this morning, up in physical therapy,” Stefanovitch said. “Now, I’m kind of spacey. Rubbery legs. My adrenaline is mainlining.

“Listen, Sarah.” He smiled, only his brown eyes were mostly glazed and vacant. “I think I need something to motivate me. Would you, uh…why don’t you stand over there. Would you stand right there by the door?”

“Don’t be so bossy. Just because you’ve been laid up doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be cranky,” Isabelle Stefanovitch said. Sarah had watched her operate over the last few months. She could make Stef toe the line; at the same time she was communicating the most touching affection for him.

“I’ll let him boss me around today.” Sarah smiled. The smile felt like a mask being pulled down over her face. She was having difficulty talking.

“You give him an inch, Sarah, he’ll take a mile,” Nelson said from across the room. “He’s always been that way. That’s how he got to be quarterback in high school. Not on his talent. Not with that chicken arm of his.”

The mood in the hospital room was better than it had been moments earlier. Even Dr. Petito smiled at the Stefanovitch clan’s amazingly wrongheaded but healthy defense mechanisms.

“I’m going to stand right here by the door,” Sarah said, as if she’d just thought of it herself.

“If I fall over, let me go,” Stefanovitch said in between deep breaths. He was propped against the edge of his bed now. Some pressure and weight were already being applied to his legs. There was so much going on inside his head that it was overwhelming.

Suddenly, with characteristic stubbornness, he pushed off hard from the hospital bed, almost as if that were the only way to make his family stop talking. “I love all of you,” he whispered as he let go.

Stefanovitch took his first step in more than three years, with the help of a badly quivering aluminum walker. He’d only recently been fitted for the four-legged walker up in physical therapy. He figured it made him look about eighty years old.

He pushed the strange, awkward-looking walker one more step, the pain inscribed all over his face.

He took a third halting step. The pain and exhilaration seemed to be balancing a little better.

There was nothing but the noise of the clanking metal walker echoing inside the room. Not a sound came from Sarah or his family. Then Stefanovitch reached out one arm for Sarah.

Sarah couldn’t have explained or described what it was like to hold him, to grab onto Stef at the end of his miracle walk. She didn’t know which one of them was trembling more.

She wasn’t sure where his body stopped, and hers began. Nelson and his father were right there to help, in case he actually did start to fall at the very end.

Stef didn’t fall, though. His body shook very badly, but he didn’t fall. He wouldn’t let himself go down.

If he had had any energy left, he would have screamed out in joy. Instead, he whispered to Sarah, “I would scream, only I can’t make it happen. Not enough strength.”

The doctors in physical therapy had promised that in another six months he’d be able to use the walker competently. In sixteen to eighteen months, the chief therapist told Stef, he would walk with a severe limp, and the assistance of a bulky metal cane.

“In six months, I’ll be dancing,” Stefanovitch said. No cane. No walker. No nothing. He made the promise to all of them, but especially to Sarah.

105

Isiah Parker; Harlem; Several Months Later

IT WAS A
cold and snow-blown evening, a few days into the new year. Isiah Parker finally left the Nineteenth Precinct station house around eight-thirty. To his surprise, he had returned to his detective duties with energy and dedication missing since before his brother’s death.

He walked down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, listening to a pleasing cacophony of early evening traffic sounds. Certain physical things about the neighborhood made him think back to his youth. The aboveground railroad tracks. Billboards for the latest pomades and preachers. Pawnbroker shops. Men huddled for warmth around a trash-can fire.

Someone stepped out from behind the staircase of a brown-stone a few doors down from the precinct house. Parker had been lost in his thoughts. He’d been careless.

“Turn around nice and easy,” he heard.

Parker turned slowly, a sense of fate already overtaking him.

What he saw couldn’t have surprised him more.

Stefanovitch was standing there, leaning against a sturdy wooden cane. The walking cane had been carved by hand out in Pennsylvania.

“Your eyes are going to fall out of your head,” Stef said to Parker. “Never seen a white guy up in Harlem before?”

“I’m just surprised at how ugly you are up on all fours.”

“You killed him, didn’t you? The Grave Dancer. That was you at the World Trade Center?” Stef asked. Then he smiled. “I came all the way up here to shake your goddamn hand.”

Isiah Parker did better than that. He embraced John Stefanovitch, clasping his back tightly with both hands.

The two detectives stood there grinning in the shadows and winter cold of the Harlem street.

New York—Los Angeles—London

J
AMES
P
ATTERSON
won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. He is the author of four #1 bestsellers featuring Detective Alex Cross.

JAMES PATTERSON—#1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR

“Patterson, among the best novelists of crime stories ever, has reached his pinnacle.”

—USA TODAY

A string of #1 blockbusters from
Along Came a Spider to Cat & Mouse.
Now read James Patterson’s THE MIDNIGHT CLUB.

A stunningly brilliant psychopathic killer who has skillfully eluded the police from London to Paris to New York. A beautiful woman journalist suddenly in grave danger. An unorthodox New York detective whose motive for stopping the killer couldn’t be more personal or emotional.

“Patterson joins the elite company of Thomas Harris and John Sanford in concocting riveting and truly unique serial killers, while creating sleuths who are heroic and fascinating.”

—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER