The Inn - James Patterson Page 0,66
Bill. I’ve seen her looking at you. I’ve been dodging fireworks across the table all night.”
I felt heat creeping into my collar. “Is it really that obvious? I guess Nick must know, then. Maybe they all know.”
“Is it serious?”
“I don’t—” I laughed, feeling stupid. “I don’t know! I’ve kissed her once. With everything that’s been going on, I haven’t even had the chance to ask her if … if it was just a random moment or … ” I opened my hands. “She said she’d wanted me to. But what does that mean? Was she talking about right then or has she been thinking about it for longer?”
“Look at you.” Malone grinned. “You can’t even talk about it!”
“I can’t talk about it,” I agreed, trying to cool my cheeks with the palms of my hands. He leaned on the rail beside me, and for a moment we looked just like we had years ago, two patrol cops marking time at the end of a night, watching boats in the city harbor.
“You remember that bomb threat we caught at the Meritage?” he asked, already grinning at the memory. I did. Malone and I had been newly assigned partners on patrol, tasked with assisting the Secret Service for the visit of an ex-president to Boston for Veterans Day. The president had been rushed out of the restaurant halfway through his spaghetti marinara when someone spotted a brown paper bag another diner had left under one of the nearby tables. A bomb threat had been called in to the president’s hotel that morning, so the Secret Service agents were taking no chances. The entire building and half the waterfront were evacuated. Malone and I were told to go up to the restaurant and check that everyone was out, and like an idiot, I got curious about the package and decided to see if I could get a glimpse of what was inside the bag.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said now, watching Malone as he tried not to laugh his ass off. “Maybe I thought I might have been able to hear it ticking or something.”
“You were a hero.” Malone laughed. “A true hero of the people.”
I’d gotten very close to the bag on that fateful day, and I was so young and brazen that I’d reached out to see if I could open the bag and see inside. When my fingers were mere inches away, the bag moved.
“When that bag moved—” Malone was slapping the deck railing, laughing so hard he couldn’t finish his sentence.
When the bag moved, I’d fallen back with a terror so sudden and all-consuming I’d almost fainted. The bag contained not a bomb meant to assassinate the president but two huge live Dungeness crabs that someone had obviously bought at the local market and planned to take home for dinner. When I’d recovered enough to stand, Malone and I had taken the crabs, their pincers bound, down to the waterfront to show the former president. The papers got a shot of me kneeling on the dock, clipping the creatures free of their bindings before I released them into the harbor.
While the Globe had been quite mature about it, other newspapers had a good time with the story. One headline read “Cops Catch Crabs; President Scuttles Away.” I still had the newspaper clipping somewhere.
“I wonder if those crabs are alive now,” I said as Malone tried to recover from the hilarity. “How long do crabs live?”
“I don’t know. But if they’re alive, they’re probably still telling that story.”
“Over drinks at their underwater crab bar,” I said. “The Claw, it’s called. I went there once. Nice place. A bit wet.”
“Jesus.” Malone sighed, watching the lights in the distance. “That was so much fun. We had a good time, didn’t we? We were a great team.”
“We’re still a great team.” I nudged him in the ribs, feeling how hard and prominent they were beneath his shirt. As though he could sense my concern, Malone turned to me.
“Look, there’s something I’ve got to tell you,” he said. He took a deep breath. “I didn’t just come up here to hang out, to see the place. I wanted to know you’d forgiven me, because if you hadn’t, I wanted to fix it before it was too late. I’ve got cancer, Bill. It’s terminal.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
I LISTENED TO Malone tell me about his illness for as long as I could, then I crossed the bar to the restrooms to wash my face. I