Now You See Her by James Patterson Page A

her eyes closed as she drummed on the dashboard to the beat.
    Then the light turned and the tricked-out Mazda peeled off and disappeared into the traffic of upper Duval.
    Still sitting on my buzzing moped, staring at its red running lights, I tried to piece together what I had just seen. For a moment, the fact that I knew everyone involved in the odd encounter gave me a feeling of relief. I actually wondered for a silly second if they were doing all this sneaking around for my benefit, as if they might be planning some kind of surprise party for me.
    Then reality took hold. There was no party. Quite the opposite.
    My husband is a bad cop? I thought.
    No, I realized. It was Elena! Elena was the bad cop. Peter was working a case against her and Teo. I knew for a fact that Teo did coke and he probably dealt it, too. That had to be it!
    That’s when the car behind me laid on its horn.
    I turned the handlebars and throttled to get out of its way, but I must have given it too much gas. The back wheel spun out, the bike tipped, and I went down hard. I lay there for amoment, my elbow and knee in agony, my head in the gutter. Then I scrambled out from underneath the moped and sat on the curb.
    I stared fascinated at my torn-open knee. A thin line of blood rode down the ridge of my shin and took a left as it reached my ankle.
    As I watched myself bleed, the Rick James song “Super Freak” floated out into the street from the crowded bar behind me.
    “When I make my move to her room, it’s the right time,” the drunken crowd sang along. “It’s such a freaky scene.”
    “Hey, you OK? Can I help you?” called a beery male voice from somewhere on the sidewalk behind me.
    I shook my head as I lifted the bike, got back on, and headed home.

Chapter 22
    IT TOOK ME TWENTY MINUTES to get home. I took a shower and bandaged my knee. When I got into bed, I lifted the remote off the night table and turned on the TV. I was determined to stay up until Peter came home, but after only a minute or two I found myself nodding off.
    The sky outside my bedroom sliders was the dark gray of predawn when I woke up. The TV was showing an aerobics program: thin young women with too much makeup, smiling like Miss America as they counted off toe touches.
    Then the doorbell rang.
    I stumbled out of bed. Was it Peter? Did he forget his key?
    I was even more confused when I saw a squad car in the driveway outside the living room window.
    I opened the door. It wasn’t Peter. It was a short female officer in a Key West PD uniform. I thought I knew all of Peter’s fellow cops, but I’d never seen her before.
    “Jeanine Fournier?” she said.
    Even in a dazed fugue, I could tell by her demeanor, by the intense look in her eyes, that something was seriously wrong.
    I suddenly felt tired and powerless, thoroughly unprepared for whatever I was about to be told. Staring at the woman’s hard face, I felt like going back into my bedroom and lying down. The sun broke as I stood there, light rapidly filling the sky.
    “Yes?” I finally said.
    “You need to come with me, Jeanine,” she said.
    What the? What was this?
    “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this,” the lady cop said. “It’s your husband. Peter. He’s been involved in a shooting.”

Chapter 23
    A SHOOTING?!
    That one stupid thought kept repeating in my numb mind as I sat in the passenger seat of the speeding cruiser. Every few seconds, I would try to form another thought, but my indignant, stubborn brain wouldn’t have it.
    A shooting? I thought. A shooting?
    That meant that Peter had been shot, right? I stared down at the cop car’s incident report–covered carpet. It had to. Otherwise, the red-haired lady cop behind the wheel wouldn’t be involving me.
    I needed to talk to Peter. To find out what was going on. Now he’d been shot? I didn’t know what to think as the cop car’s tires cried around a curve. What did it mean?
    If I thought I’d been disoriented riding in the cop car,