1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,85

nothing happened. Then the Engineer yanked me by the shoulder, pushing back and downward, pressing me into a kneel. I tried to do it, but my right leg had stiffened way up. I came halfway down instead, landing on my left knee.

At the same moment, a loud popping sound came, like a stun grenade, from out on the lawn. I saw a flash of blue light from the corner of my eye and turned to look. So did the Engineer.

Everything happened fast. I saw the red dot of a laser site appear on his forehead. On instinct, I dove out of the way as much as I could in that small space. It was a blind move and I crashed into my own nightstand, bringing the lamp down on top of me.

At the same time, I heard a small sound of breaking glass. The Engineer’s head cocked back, like someone had punched him in the face. His knees bent first, but the rest of him followed.

“Shot fired!” Keats was saying into his radio. The bedroom door opened and personnel were flooding back in.

Billy was there in a second. He scrambled across the bed to reach me.

“Are you okay?” he practically shouted, shielding me against anything else that might come flying.

“I’m okay!” I said. I really was.

Because over Billy’s shoulder, I could see where the Engineer had come to a rest on the floor. A dark, impossibly round circle showed on his forehead, and his eyes seemed frozen wide open.

He was dead already. The sniper’s bullet had found its mark.

And the longest night of my life was finally over.

CHAPTER 92

THE NEXT SEVERAL minutes are a blur in my memory. There were EMTs to check me out. Billy wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and helped me walk out of the room after I flat-out refused the gurney they wanted to use for me.

He explained a few things as we slowly made our way down the stairs.

“We assumed some kind of home invasion was a possibility as soon as you disappeared,” he said. “Your family was under guard the entire time. It turns out your parents are just as stubborn as you are, and they insisted on keeping up appearances for as long as possible. But it worked.”

The house had been surreptitiously vacated just after lights out, he told me. All of the previous home invasions had taken place between midnight and 4:00 a.m., and this one had been no exception.

As soon as we made it out to the front lawn, my mother, father, and sisters rushed up from the curb to enclose me in the most welcome group hug in the history of group hugs.

“My God, Angela, you’re bleeding!” Mom said.

“I’m okay,” I told her.

“You’re not the judge of that,” she said. A second later, my mother was literally grabbing an EMT to take another look at me. It was my knee that needed attention, but I didn’t say that out loud in front of Mom.

“How are you still alive?” Dad asked, kissing my head over and over, hugging me as gently as he could. My sisters were clinging on either side of me, crying happy tears.

In the midst of that, I caught sight of Eve, laid out on a gurney in the back of an open ambulance. I gently extracted myself from the family cluster and climbed in to see her.

“Look who it is,” she said groggily.

“Billy told me they’re bringing Marlena to the hospital,” I told her. “You’ll see her soon.”

A tear rolled out of the corner of Eve’s eye. It was the first time I’d ever seen her cry, if that even counted. And it broke the seal on my own tears, too.

“Eve … I’m so sorry,” I said, choking it out through a sob. There were no definitive words for what I was feeling. Regret, relief, joy, love, and everything in between.

“Don’t be sorry,” she told me. She put a hand under my chin and got my eyes to meet hers. Maybe it was the narcotics, but she’d never touched me so tenderly before. I waited for some sage piece of wisdom from her.

“Remind me not to get you any more internships,” she said.

I laughed through my tears and blew snot down my shirt without giving a hoot.

“Duly noted,” I said, and kept the rest of my mushy feelings to myself. Like for instance, I sent a little prayer of thanks up to God for bringing Eve Abajian into my life in the first place.

And for making