Run for Your Life Read online

  Copyright © 2009 by James Patterson

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: February 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04073-0

  Contents

  Prologue: FIGHT THE POWER

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part One: THE TEACHER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Two: PUKE BY THE GALLON

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Part Three: LIFE LESSONS

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Part Four: THE POOR BOX THIEF

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Epilogue: HOCKEY STYX

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  About the Authors

  BOOKS BY JAMES PATTERSON

  Featuring Michael Bennett

  Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge)

  A complete list of books by James Patterson is on pages 376–377.

  For previews of upcoming books by James Patterson

  and more information about the author,

  visit www.JamesPatterson.com.

  For Kathy, Eileen, and Jean

  Prologue

  FIGHT THE POWER

  One

  GETTING STUCK ON a bus in New York City, even under normal circumstances, is a lesson in frustration.

  But when the bus belongs to the NYPD Tactical Assistance Response Unit, and it’s parked at a barricade that’s swarming with cops, and you’re there because you’re the only person in the world who might have a chance at keeping several hostages from being killed, you can cancel your dinner plans.

  I wasn’t going anywhere on that Monday night. Much worse, I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  “Where’s my money, Bennett?” an angry voice shouted through my headset.

  I’d gotten to know that voice really well over the past seven and a half hours. It came from a nineteen-year-old gang hit man known as D-Ray—his real name was Kenneth Robinson—who was the main suspect in a triple drug murder. In truth, he was the only suspect. When police had come after him earlier today, he’d holed up in a Harlem brownstone, now behind police barricades, threatening to kill five members of his own family.

  “The money’s coming, D-Ray,” I said, speaking gently into the headset. “Like I told you, I got Wells Fargo to send an armored truck up from Brooklyn. A hundred thousand dollars in unmarked twenties, sitting on the front seat.”

  “You keep saying that, but I don’t see no truck!”

  “It’s not as easy as it sounds,” I lied. “They run on bank schedules. You can’t just call them like a taxi. They don’t carry that kind of cash around, either—they’ve got to go through a complicated procedure to get it. And drive through traffic, just like everybody else.”

  Hostage situations call for measured calm, something I’m actually pretty good at faking. If it weren’t for the dozen uniformed Emergency Service Unit and Manhattan North Task Force cops listening in, you might have thought I was a priest hearing a confession.

  In fact, the Wells Fargo truck had arrived a good two hours ago and was parked out of sight nearby. I was fighting with everything I had to keep it there. If it drove these last few blocks, that meant I’d failed.

  “You playin’ me?” D-Ray barked. “Nobody plays me, cop. You think I don’t know I’m already lookin’ at life in prison? What I got to lose if I kill somebody else?”

  “I know you’re not playing, D-Ray,” I said. “I’m not, either—that’s the last thing I want to do. The money’s on its way. Meantime, you need anything else? More pizza, soda pop, anything like that? Hey, it must be hot in there—how about some ice cream for your niece and nephew?”

  “Ice cream?” he yelled with a fury that made me wince. “You better get your shit together, Bennett! I don’t see no armored truck in five minutes, you gonna see a body come rolling down that stoop.”

  The line went dead. Wiping sweat from my face, I pulled off the headset and stepped to the window of the NYPD bus. It was parked with a clear view of D-Ray’s brownstone, on 131st Street near Frederick Douglass Boulevard. I raised my binoculars and panned the kitchen window. I swallowed as I spotted an Eracism magnet holding up children’s drawings and a picture of Maya Angelou on the fridge. His niece and nephew were six and eight years old. I had kids those same ages.

  At first, I’d hoped that the situation would be easier because his hostages were his own flesh and blood. A lot of criminals might make this kind of desperate bluff, but they’d back down before they’d harm someone close to
them, especially little kids. D-Ray’s eighty-three-year-old grandmother, Miss Carol, was also in there with them, and she was a neighborhood institution, a powerful and respected woman who ran the rec center and the community garden. If anybody could make him listen, it was Miss Carol.

  But she hadn’t, which was a very bad sign. D-Ray had already proved that he was a killer, and during the hours I’d spent talking to him, I’d sensed his rage rising and his control slipping. I was sure that all along he’d been getting higher on crack or meth or whatever, and by now he was half insane. He was clinging to a fantasy of escape, and he was ready to kill for it.

  I had helped him build that fantasy, and I’d used every trick I knew to keep it going so we could get those people out of there alive—tried to create a bond, talked like a sympathetic friend, even told him my name. But I was out of both tricks and time.

  I lowered the binoculars and scanned the scene outside the bus windows. Behind the sawhorses and the flashing lights of the gathered police vehicles, there were several news vans and maybe sixty or seventy spectators. Some were eating Chinese takeout or holding up cell phone cameras. There were school-age kids zipping around on Razor scooters. The crowd seemed anxious, impatient, like picnickers disappointed that the fireworks hadn’t started yet.

  I turned away from them just as Joe Hunt, the Manhattan North borough commander, sagged back in the office chair beside me and let out a long, deflated breath.

  “Just heard from ESU,” he said. “Snipers think they got a pretty good bead on him through one of the back windows.”

  I didn’t say anything, but Joe knew what I was thinking. He stared at me with his almost sad, world-weary brown eyes.

  “Kid or not, we’re dealing with a violent sociopath,” he went on. “We need to give this to Tactical while those poor people inside still have a chance. I’m calling in the Wells Fargo truck. I want you to get D-Ray back on the phone and tell him to watch for it. Then Con Ed’s going to cut the power, and the snipers will drop him with night vision.” Joe heaved himself to his feet and gave me a rough pat on the shoulder. “Sorry, Mike. You did better than anyone has any right to expect, but the kid flat-out refuses to live.”

  I passed my hands through my hair and scrubbed my own tired eyes. New York City has one of the best reputations in the world for resolving hostage situations nonviolently, and I hated like hell to be a part of changing that fine tradition. But I couldn’t argue with Hunt’s logic. D-Ray definitely wasn’t even trying to help me save him.

  I nodded, defeated. We had to think about his family now. There was no other way.

  I listened to Joe Hunt call the armored truck and order it to start moving toward us. As soon as it came into sight, I’d be talking to D-Ray for the last time.

  We stepped out of the bus for a breath of fresh air while we waited.

  Two

  AS I CLIMBED OUTSIDE, the first thing I noticed was the chanting from a different crowd—at the far end of the block, in front of a housing project over on Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

  It took my brain a second to decipher the words: “Fight the power!”

  Hunt and I exchanged stunned looks. We cops were there to save the lives of their friends and neighbors—including two little children and the much-loved Miss Carol—and we were the bad guys? Talk about a neighborhood in need of some new role models.

  “Fight the power! Fight the power!” The roar kept coming at me while I anxiously searched for the armored truck.

  New role models! my brain yelled back.

  Then, out of nowhere, the two thoughts connected.

  “Hold that truck, Chief!” I hollered at Hunt. I rushed back onto the bus and snatched up my headset, nodding to a uniformed TARU tech to patch me into the brownstone again.

  “D-Ray, it’s Mike Bennett,” I said when he picked up.

  “You got two minutes, cop!” He was practically frothing with agitation.

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said. “Listen to the crowd outside, will you? They’re rooting for you. You’re their hero.”

  “What kind of bullshit you pullin’ now, Bennett?”

  “This isn’t bullshit, D-Ray. Open up a window and listen. You think you’ve got nothing left to live for, but you’re wrong.”

  All the cops and techs on the bus stopped what they were doing and watched the brownstone. After a very long thirty seconds, one of the window sashes rose a few inches. We couldn’t see D-Ray—he was beside or below it—but he was there, listening.

  “Hear that?” I said into the headset. “Fight the power. They’re talking to you, D-Ray. They think you’re a badass for holding us off. Not only that, you know what one of your grandmother’s church-lady friends just told me? You’ve done this neighborhood a great service by getting rid of the Drew Boyz and all their dope-dealing and violence. People hated them, were terrified of them, and you took them out.”

  “Ohhh, man! You serious?” For the first time, D-Ray sounded like what he was, a scared, confused nineteen-year-old kid.

  “I’m damn serious, and I feel the same way they do,” I said. It was another bald-faced lie, but I’d sell him both the George Washington and the Brooklyn bridges if it meant saving lives.

  The crew on the bus were staring at me now. I swabbed my sleeve across my sweaty face and took the next risk.

  “Now, there’s two ways left you can play this, D-Ray,” I said. “You can keep your hostages and try to get away with the money. But you won’t get far, and you know it. Probably you’ll get yourself killed, and maybe your grandma and the little kids, too. Or you can stand up like the hero these people believe you are, and let everybody go.”

  It felt like my heart stopped, and maybe time itself, as D-Ray suddenly cut the connection.

  “D-Ray!” I yelled. “D-Ray, come back, goddammit!”

  The line stayed dead. I tore off the headset and burst out of the hot, bright bus into the cool darkness of the street.

  Three

  I RAN TO THE BARRICADES in front of the brownstone, tensed for the hollow popping sound of gunshots from inside, then the sickening thud of a body being shoved out onto the steps. The crowds at both ends of the block hushed, as if they sensed that this was a critical moment.

  The door at the top of the building’s stoop opened slowly. The first person I saw was a large elderly woman. It was D-Ray’s grandmother, Miss Carol, and she was walking on her own! Better yet, the two other adults—D-Ray’s grand-aunt and -uncle—were flanking her, and I could just make out the small shapes of the niece and nephew behind them. My ruse had worked—they were all alive, and he was releasing them!

  My breath had been locked in my throat. I let it out with a whoosh and started sucking air into my starving lungs. But my joy warped into shock when I realized that they all had their arms linked to form a circle.

  They were making themselves into a protective human shield, with D-Ray crouching in the center.

  “Don’t you shoot my baby!” Miss Carol screeched, loud and clear in the sudden stillness.

  Unreal—even more unreal than the crowd making a hero of D-Ray! His hostages were actually protecting him. First, insane role models, and now, double-insane Stockholm syndrome.

  I gestured toward Commander Hunt to stand down the rooftop snipers as I shoved my radio earphone in place and hurried toward the bizarre human chain making its way along the brownstone steps.

  “It’s me, D-Ray, I’m Mike Bennett,” I called to them. “You’re doing the right thing, D-Ray. You’re making everybody proud of you. Now we need your family to move aside.”

  “Don’t you hurt him!” Miss Carol cried out again. I could see the glimmer of tears in her eyes.

  “He’ll be safe with me, I promise.” I held my hands up high and open to show that they were empty, and as I lowered them, I repeated my stand-down gesture to the nervous cops. “D-Ray, if you have any guns, throw them out on the ground,” I said, putting a little more authority in my voice. “You’ll be fine, don’t worry.
”

  There was another pause that seemed endless before a flat gray pistol clattered out from inside the human circle and onto the sidewalk. It looked like a Glock, probably a .40 or .45 caliber, with a ten- to thirteen-round clip—a whole lot of death in a package smaller than a paperback.

  “Good man, D-Ray,” I said. “Now I’m coming in there to you, and we’re going to walk together to a car.”

  Miss Carol and the others unlinked their arms and parted, revealing a stocky young man wearing below-the-knee athletic shorts and a baseball cap turned to the side. I stepped over the barricade sawhorse and walked toward him.

  Then came a terrible sound that almost made me jump out of my shoes: the boom of a gunshot from somewhere behind me.

  D-Ray fell into the gutter like a chainsawed tree while his family watched, frozen with horror.

  In the next instant, everything changed. Cops tackled asphalt with their weapons ready, and the crowds started milling and shoving in panic.

  “Cease fire!” I yelled, and I piled into Miss Carol, knocking her back into the others so they all went down like dominoes. Then I scrambled on my knees to D-Ray.

  But neither I nor anybody else would be able to help him. There was a bullet hole, trickling blood, neatly centered between his open eyes.

  “Not us, Mike! Stay down!” It was Lieutenant Steve Reno from the ESU tactical squad, calling into my radio earphone.

  “Then who?!” I shouted back.

  “We think it came from the crowd near Frederick Doug-lass. We’re sending a team in there now.”

  A sniper in the crowd—not a cop? Christ! What was going on?

  “Get EMS over here,” I told Reno over the radio squawk. Then I stood up. I knew he was right, that the sniper might be looking for more targets, but I couldn’t just lie there with the chaos erupting around me.

  Instantly I felt like I was swimming in quicksand. The crowd had seen D-Ray fall, and they assumed that the police had shot him. They were turning ugly, jamming up against the barricades, their faces contorted in rage. Other cops were on their feet now, too, running to this area and forming a line to hold them back.

  “They killed that boy! They murdered him!” some woman kept screaming.

  A surge of human beings sent one of the sawhorses tumbling over, knocking down a female NYPD officer. Her partners leaped in to drag her to safety, while others charged along beside them, swinging nightsticks. The earsplitting chatter of sirens ripped through the air as two squad cars drove up onto the sidewalk to reinforce the barrier between us and the mushrooming riot closing in on us.