Now You See Her by James Patterson Page B

it was nothing compared to the skull slap I felt as we screeched to a stop beside a Shell gas station on North Roosevelt.
    It looked and sounded as if the world was coming to a violent end. Besides a half-dozen siren-screaming patrol cars, there were three ambulances and a fire truck. Yellow evidence tape strung across the pumps wafted in the breeze from the nearby north shore. The whole block around the station looked like a huge present wrapped in the stuff. A crowd of tourists and beach bums stood silently, shoulder to shoulder, behind the yellow ribbon like spectators at a strange outdoor sporting event that was just about to get under way.
    It seemed like every cop in the department was there. I glanced from face to face, marking the people I knew. At our pickup softball games and barbecues, these men had been so happy and laid-back. Now, as they secured the crime scene in their stark black uniforms, they suddenly seemed cold, heartless, angry, almost malevolent.
    What the hell had happened here?
    “She’s here,” a cop and good friend of Peter’s named Billy Mulford said as he saw me.
    The last time I saw Billy, a blond, middle-aged fireplug of a man, he was doing a cannonball off a booze cruise boat at a retirement party. Now he looked about as fun-loving as a concentration camp guard.
    “It’s Peter’s wife, Jeanine. Let her through,” he ordered.
    I was too stupefied to question what was happening as the evidence tape was lifted up, and I was beckoned under. Why were they treating me like a first responder? The deafening siren of yet another arriving ambulance went off as Mulford quickly led me over the sun-bleached asphalt and past the pumps.
    Just inside the door of the food mart, half a dozen EMTswere kneeling down beside someone I couldn’t see. My hands started shaking as I tried to figure out what was happening in all the commotion. I grasped them together in a praying gesture.
    “Come on, come on! Give me some fucking space here,” a big black medic barked as he retrieved a syringe from a bright yellow hard-pack first-aid case.
    “Coming out!” someone else yelled in a high, panicked voice a moment later. There was a tremendous clatter as a trauma stretcher was clicked into rolling position. The crowd of cops and medics began to part in front of it, letting the stretcher through.
    My knees almost gave out when Mulford moved out of my line of sight and I finally saw who was on the stretcher.
    I staggered back, shaking my head.
    Something caved in my chest as Peter was rolled past me, his eyes flat and unfocused, his face and chest covered in blood.

Chapter 24
    COPS MADE A TIGHT CIRCLE around Peter, shielding him from the public as he was rolled toward a reversing ambulance.
    I noticed several things at once. He was sheet white. A thin spiderweb of blood was splattered across his cheek and neck. His uniform shirt had been cut open, and I could see more blackish blood caked on his arm, dripping off his elbow.
    Peter didn’t just look shot, I thought, staring at him as he was lifted into the back of the ambulance. Peter looked dead.
    “Let her through,” Mulford said, dragging me forward. “It’s his wife.”
    “Not now, goddammit,” the burly black medic said, stiff-arming him away.
    “Oh, God. Oh, God,” Mulford said, shaking his head as Peter was borne away. He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Jeanine. This shouldn’t be happening.”
    “What happened?” I said.
    “We’re not sure,” he said, ashen-faced, as he shrugged his shoulders. “I just got here myself. We think Peter came in here to get some coffee during his shift. Walked into the middle of a robbery. Two Jamaican males. They had some kind of machine gun. Our guys were ambushed. We’re looking for them now.”
    Mulford wheeled around as a wiry, startlingly muscular female EMT with bloody sneakers emerged from the food mart door.
    “How is she?” he asked her.
    She? I thought.
    I stepped to my right and looked