The Chef - James Patterson Page 0,80

a Hail Mary, but maybe he can help me claw my way out.

“That’s okay,” I say to the valet. “I’m not here to eat.”

I approach the restaurant’s glass façade, cup my hands around my eyes and peer inside. The ornate chandeliers and the house lights are on. The wait staff, typically prim and proper in front of diners, are chatting casually with one another as they sweep the floors and strip the tables.

I give the locked door a few knocks to get the attention of a busboy stacking chairs nearby. He glances at me, then ignores me. I knock again. Harder.

“Hey!” I call through the glass. “You. Yeah, you. Listen, I gotta talk to your boss. Tell Billy Caleb Rooney’s outside. It’s urgent. As in, life or death urgent.”

The busboy’s indifference morphs into concern. He stops stacking chairs, hesitates, then steps away and walks through the dining room toward the kitchen.

Seconds turn to minutes. As I wait, I think. About the winding path that brought me to this desperate moment. And about what exactly I’m going to say to Billy.

How the hell do you tell a man you barely know that, thanks to him, you’ve come to believe his cousin is a terrorist?

Here he comes, emerging from the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron. As Billy unlocks the door and lets me in, his face is a mask of worry.

“Caleb,” he says. “Hi. Is everything all right?”

“Hey, Billy. Why don’t we have a drink. Because it’s not. Not by a mile.”

From the foyer showing the celebrity grip-and-grin pictures and his personal flying photographs, he ushers me over to his restaurant’s shiny mahogany bar. As I take a seat, he steps around behind it.

“I already cut my bartender for the night,” he says. “What can I get you? I’m not much of a mixologist, but I can make a mean Ramos gin fizz if you’re in the mood for—”

“Just the house bourbon. A double. You’ll probably want one for yourself, too.”

He pours our booze and slides onto a stool beside me. He holds up his glass to clink, but I keep mine on the bar. I swirl it, searching for words in the amber liquid.

“When’s the last time you talked to David?” I ask.

He scrunches his brow.

“My cousin?” he asks. “I don’t know. A couple weeks ago, I guess. Why?”

I say, “I don’t get the sense you two are very close. How well do you really know him? And do you have any idea what he’s really capable of?”

“I’m not sure I’m following,” he says, looking puzzled.

I take my first bracing sip of bourbon, the liquid sharp and hot on my tongue.

“After you and I spoke the other day, I started doing some digging,” I say. “Into your family and its troubles. I spoke to Emily up at her horse farm. I pored over your company’s finances. It kept leading me back to David. All of it.”

“What kept leading back to David?” he asks.

“I was working off a good tip. That a terrorist cell was looking to strike on Mardi Gras.”

Now I’ve got his attention, 100 percent. “Oh, my God…”

“I wanted to find out who was behind it,” I ask. “What they were planning. Where their money was coming from. Turns out…”

I swallow another gulp of bourbon.

“It’s a complex web that I still don’t fully understand,” I say. “They’ve got multiple shell companies to hide their cash. Islamic extremists working with white supremacists. I don’t get it. I’ve barely scratched the surface…”

I take the crumpled photograph of David and Farzat out of my pocket and set it down on the wooden bar top.

“…but your cousin keeps popping up at the center of it, again and again.”

He blanches. He picks up the photo like it might bite him and looks at it closely.

“This is one of the bad guys?” he asks.

“Was. A radicalized Islamist who was recently tortured and killed. David was secretly funneling money to him through a crooked nonprofit.”

He’s gently shaking his head in disbelief.

“This…this is…insane!” he says. “Have you confronted David about all this?”

“Plenty of times,” I say. “But he’s a slippery son of a bitch. And that team of Israeli bodyguards he’s got doesn’t make him an easy person to get to.”

“Tell me about it,” he says. “Those guys are nuts. I took David hunting about a year ago on some land I own up in Bossier Parish? A few of them tagged along. They make the Secret Service look like a troop of Girl Scouts. They