Liar Liar - James Patterson Page 0,88

were already turning. “Who’s the fifth casualty?” A desperate feeling was growing in my chest. I tried to shift upward, and the cuff around my ankle clanged as it held me in place. I turned, wild-eyed, to the paramedic as she gave the driver the signal to go.

“Who’s the fifth casualty?”

“An older man.” The paramedic hushed me, trying to push me back onto the pillows. “You don’t have to worry about that now.”

One week later

Chapter 114

IT WAS CLEAR to me by the second day in hospital that I was getting special treatment. With no television allowed in my room, and no visitors, I’d amused myself in any way that I could. I lay watching the people passing the door of my single room for hours, counting the breakfast, lunch, and dinner trolleys going by. Breakfast seemed to be little plastic bowls of oats and wafer-thin slices of fruit, jugs of pale orange cordial. When mine came, however, it was not on a plastic tray but in a styrofoam container, and it was fried eggs and thick toast, strips of bacon and a cappuccino. I asked questions, but the nurses only smiled and shrugged, having been directed by the two thuggish police officers outside my door not to speak to me. When dinner came, there was even a slice of pecan pie for dessert, my all-time favorite. I’d stopped wondering about all the strange benefits I was getting until I heard one nurse in the hall outside my room explain to another, “She’s a friend of Mr. Handsome.”

I didn’t know what that meant.

Being a friend of Mr. Handsome had more benefits than just the upgraded hospital cuisine. On the third night, one of the nurses caught my eye as she brought in my dinner tray, setting it on the stand beside my bed. She had a funny look on her face, like a practical joke was about to go down and she wanted me to be aware of it.

“Ward C, room 8,” she whispered.

“Huh?” I asked. She winked and disappeared.

As I ate my dinner, I noticed that dessert tonight was one of the regular little tubs of colored jelly that all the other patients got. That was odd. I examined the tub, noticing the surface of the jelly was uneven and cracked. I tilted it up and saw that a key had been pushed into the jelly and lay at the bottom of the tub.

A handcuff key.

At about midnight, two nurses walking by suddenly became very interested in the officers outside my door. There was a lot of smiling and laughing, and I saw one of the women put her hand on one officer’s chest, slapping him as though he’d said something cheeky. As they all moved off down the hall, I unlocked the cuff around my ankle and slid off the bed.

Chapter 115

THE BULLET WOUND in my calf had been badly infected when I came in, but since then, it had been hit with every drug known to modern medicine. Still, I limped as I made my way down the darkened hall to the elevator, past rooms full of sleeping men and women and blinking machines. The hospital lights had been dimmed, so I walked in a soft gold glow toward ward C, checking the room numbers as I went. The nurses on this floor hardly glanced at me. I turned toward room 8 and pushed open the door.

Pops was lying on his back, propped uncomfortably against the high pillows, both hands folded over his round belly like he’d fallen asleep reading a book. I stood looking at him for a while, at the machines all around him and the whiteboard above his head. When I closed the door, he woke but didn’t seemed alarmed by my presence. As I curled on the blanket beside him, he put an arm out and smiled, shifting his head to give me more room on the pillow.

“Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky,” the old man said.

“I had to see you before there’s bulletproof glass between us,” I said, patting Pops’s chest. “How’s the ticker?”

“It’s still going. They’ve sent me a nice little booklet on retirement from the police force and all the benefits I’ll get. They’re subtle, the top brass.”

I’d learned from a doctor when I arrived at the hospital that Pops had suffered a heart attack. There had been a team of people around me, trying to hold me down so that I could be prepped for surgery on my leg. But I’d made a