Lifeguard by James Patterson Page B

mall, where I tossed the plates into the woods and cleaned out anything that could be traced to me. I walked back into town and stood in front of a tiny Quonset hut that was the town’s bus depot. Man,
paranoia
was now my middle name.
    An hour later, I was on a bus to Fayetteville, North Carolina—headed north.
    I guess I knew where I was going all along. At a lunch counter at the Fayetteville station, I chomped down a desperately needed burger and fries, avoiding the eyes of everyone I saw, as if people were taking a mental inventory of my face.
    Then I hopped a late-night Greyhound heading to all points north: Washington, New York.
    And Boston. Where the hell else would I go?
    That’s where the score started, right?
    Mostly I just slept and tried to figure out what I was going to do when I got there. I hadn’t been home in four years now.
Since my Big Fall from Grace.
I knew my father was sick now, and even before, when he wasn’t, he wasn’t exactly the Rock of Gibraltar. Not if you count convictions of everything from receiving stolen goods to bookmaking, and three stints up at the Souz in Shirley.
    And Mom… Let’s just say she was always there. My biggest fan. At least, after my older brother, John Michael, was killed robbing a liquor store. That left just me and my younger brother, Dave.
You won’t be following in anybody’s footsteps, Ned,
she made me promise early on. You don’t have to be like your father—or your big brother. She bailed me out of trouble half a dozen times. She picked me up from the Catholic Youth Organization hockey practices at midnight.
    That was the real problem now. I didn’t look forward to seeing her face when I sneaked my way home. I was going to break her heart.
    I changed buses twice. In Washington and New York. At every sudden stop my heart would clutch, freeze.
This is it,
I figured. There was a roadblock, and they were going to pull me off! But there never were any roadblocks. Towns and states passed by, and none too fast for me.
    I found myself daydreaming a lot. I was the son of a small-time crook, and here I was returning—wanted, a big-time screwup. I’d even outdone my old man. I’d have surely been in the system growing up, just like Mickey and Bobby, if I didn’t know how to skate. Hockey had opened doors for me. The Leo J. Fennerty Award as the best forward in the Boston CYO. A full ride to BU. More like a lottery ticket. Until I tore up my knee my sophomore year.
    The scholarship went with it, but the university gave me a year to prove I could stay. And I did. They probably thought I was just some dumb jock who would drop out, but I started to see a larger world around me. I didn’t have to go back to the old neighborhood and wait for Mickey and Bobby to get out of jail. I started to read, really read, for the first time in my life. To everyone’s amazement, I actually graduated—with honors. In government. I got this job teaching eighth-grade social studies at Stoughton Academy, a place for troubled youths. My family couldn’t believe it.
They actually pay a Kelly to be in the classroom?
    Anyway, that all ended. In a single day—just like this.
    Past Providence, everything began to grow familiar. Sharon, Walpole, Canton. Places where I had played hockey as a kid. I was starting to get really nervous. Here I was, back home. Not the kid who’d gone off to BU. Or the one who’d been practically run out of town—and wound up in Florida.
    But a hunted man, with a collar on a whole lot bigger than my old man ever managed to earn.
    The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,
I was thinking as the bus hissed to a stop at the Atlantic Avenue terminal in Boston.
Even when you throw it.
    Even when you throw it as far as you can.

Chapter 25
    “SPECIAL AGENT SHURTLEFF put the whole thing together,” Ellie’s boss, George Moretti, said, and shrugged, like,
Can you believe it?
to Hank Cole, the assistant director in charge. The three of them were in his top-floor