The 6th Target Read online

  The Novels of James Patterson

  FEATURING ALEX CROSS

  Cross

  Mary, Mary

  London Bridges

  The Big Bad Wolf

  Four Blind Mice

  Violets Are Blue

  Roses Are Red

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  Cat & Mouse

  Jack & Jill

  Kiss the Girls

  Along Came a Spider

  THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB

  The 6th Target (and Maxine Paetro)

  The 5th Horseman (and Maxine Paetro)

  4th of July (and Maxine Paetro)

  3rd Degree (and Andrew Gross)

  2nd Chance (and Andrew Gross)

  1st to Die

  OTHER BOOKS

  The Quickie (and Michael Ledwidge)

  Step on a Crack (and Michael Ledwidge)

  Judge & Jury (and Andrew Gross)

  Maximum Ride: School’s Out — Forever

  Beach Road (and Peter de Jonge)

  Lifeguard (and Andrew Gross)

  Maximum Ride

  Honeymoon (and Howard Roughan)

  SantaKid

  Sam’s Letters to Jennifer

  The Lake House

  The Jester (and Andrew Gross)

  The Beach House (and Peter de Jonge)

  Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas

  Cradle and All

  Black Friday

  When the Wind Blows

  See How They Run

  Miracle on the 17th Green (and Peter de Jonge)

  Hide & Seek

  The Midnight Club

  Season of the Machete

  The Thomas Berryman Number

  For more information about James Patterson’s novels, visit www.jamespatterson.com.

  Our thanks and gratitude to these top professionals, who were so generous with their time and expertise: author and psychiatrist Dr. Maria Paige; Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk, forensic pathologist and ME of Trumbull County, Ohio; top cop Captain Richard Conklin, Stamford, Connecticut, PD; Allen Ross, MD, Montague, Massachusetts; and legal experts Philip Hoffman, New York City; Melody Fujimori, San Francisco; and criminal defense attorney extraordinaire Mickey Sherman, Stamford, Connecticut.

  And special thanks to our excellent researchers, Don MacBain, Ellie Shurtleff, and Lynn Colomello.

  Prologue

  DAY-TRIPPER

  Chapter 1

  A KILLER IN WAITING, Fred Brinkley slumps in the blue-upholstered banquette on the top deck of the ferry. The November sun glares down like a big white eye as the catamaran plows the San Francisco Bay, and Fred Brinkley glares right back at the sun.

  A shadow falls across him, a kid’s voice asking, “Mister, could you take our picture?”

  Fred shakes his head — no, no, no — anger winding him up like a watch spring, like a wire tightening around his head.

  He wants to smash the kid like a bug.

  Fred averts his eyes, sings inside his head, Ay, ay, ay, ay, Sau-sa-lito-lindo, trying to shut down the voices. He puts his hand on Bucky to comfort himself, feeling him through his blue nylon Windbreaker, but still the voices pound in his brain like a jackhammer.

  Loser. Dog shit.

  Gulls call out, screaming like children. Overhead, the sun burns through the overcast sky and turns him as transparent as glass. They know what he’s done.

  Passengers in shorts and visors line the rails, taking pictures of Angel Island, of Alcatraz, of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  A sailboat flies by, mainsail double-reefed, foam flecking the rails, and Fred doubles over as the bad thing whips into his mind. He sees the boom swing. Hears the loud crack. Oh, God! The sailboat!

  Someone has to pay for this!

  Startling him, the ferry’s engines grind into reverse and the deck vibrates as the ferry comes into dock.

  Fred stands, works his way through the crowd, passing eight white tables, lines of scuffed blue chairs, his fellow ferry riders giving him the eye.

  He enters the open compartment at the bow, sees a mother berating her son, a boy of nine or ten with light-brown hair. “You’re driving me crazy!” the woman shouts.

  Fred feels the wire snap. Someone has to pay.

  His right hand slips into his jacket pocket — finds Bucky.

  He slips his finger into the trigger loop.

  The ferry lurches as it bumps the mooring. People grab on to one another, laughing. Lines snake out from the boat, bow and aft.

  Fred’s eyes shoot to the woman who is still belittling her son. She’s small, wearing tan clam diggers, her breasts outlined in the soft skin of her white blouse, nipples pointing straight out.

  “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” she yells over the engines’ roar. “You really piss me off, buster.”

  Bucky is in Fred’s hand, the Smith & Wesson Model 10, pulsing with a life of its own.

  The voice booms, Kill her. Kill her. She’s out of control!

  Bucky points between the woman’s breasts.

  BLAM.

  Fred feels the jolt of the gun’s recoil, sees the woman jump back with a little hurt yelp, a red stain blooming on her white blouse.

  Good!

  The little boy follows his mother’s fall to the deck with his big round eyes, strawberry ice cream plopping out of his cone, pee spreading across the front of his pants.

  The boy did a bad thing, too.

  BLAM.

  Chapter 2

  BLINDING WHITE SAILS fill Fred’s mind as blood spills onto the deck. Trusty Bucky is hot in his hand. Fred’s eyes pan across the deck.

  The voice in his head roars, Run. Get away. You didn’t mean to do it.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Fred sees a big man charge him, rage on his face, hell in his eyes. Fred straightens his arm.

  BLAM.

  Another man, Asian, hard black eyes, a white line for a mouth, makes a grab for Bucky.

  BLAM.

  A black woman stands nearby, locked in place by the crowd. She turns toward him, round cheeked, wide-eyed. Stares into his face and . . . reads his mind.

  “Okay, son,” she says, reaching out a trembling hand, “that’s enough, now. Give me the gun.”

  She knows what he did. How does she know?

  BLAM.

  Fred feels relief flood through him as the mind-reading woman goes down. People in the small forward compartment move in waves, cowering, shifting left, then right as Fred swings his head.

  They are afraid of him. Afraid of him.

  At his feet, the black woman holds a cell phone in her bloody hands. Breath rasping, she presses numbers with her thumb. No, you don’t! Fred steps on the woman’s wrist. Then he bends low to look into her eyes.

  “You should have stopped me,” he says through clenched teeth. “That was your job.” Bucky screws his muzzle into her temple.

  “Don’t!” she begs. “Please.”

  Someone yells, “Mom!”

  A skinny black kid, maybe seventeen, eighteen, comes toward him with a length of pipe over his shoulder. He’s holding it like a bat.

  Fred pulls the trigger as the ship lurches — BLAM.

  The shot goes wide. The metal pipe falls, skitters across the deck, and the kid runs to the woman, throws himself down. Protecting her?

  People dive under the benches, and their screams rise up around him like licks of fire.

  The noise of the engines is joined by the metallic clanking of the gangway locking into place. Bucky stays trained on the crowd as Fred looks over the railing.

  He judges the distance.

  It’s a drop of four feet to the gangway substructure, then a pretty long leap to the dock.

  Fred pockets Bucky and puts both hands on the rail. He vaults over and lands on the flats of his Nikes. A cloud crosses the sun, cloaking him, making him invisible.

  Move quickly, sailor. Go.

  And he does it — makes the leap to the dock and runs toward the farmer’s market, where he dissolves into the throng filling the parking lot.

  He walks, almost casually, a half block to Embarcadero.

  He’s humming when he jogs down the steps to the BART station, still humming as he catches the train home.

  You did it, sailor.

  Part One

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  Chapter 3

  I WAS OFF DUTY that Saturday morning in early November, called to the scene of a homicide because my business card had been found in the victim’s pocket.

  I stood inside the darkened living room of a two-family house on Seventeenth Street, looking down at a wretched little scuzzball named Jose Alonzo. He was shirtless, paunchy, slumped on a sagging couch of indeterminate color, his wrists cuffed behind him. His head hung to his chest, and tears ran down his chin.

  I had no pity for him.

  “Was he Mirandized?” I asked Inspector Warren Jacobi, my former partner who now reported to me. Jacobi had just turned fifty-one and had seen more homicide victims in his twenty-five years on the job than any ten cops should see in a lifetime.

  “Yeah, I did it, Lieutenant. Before he confessed.” Jacobi’s fists twitched at his sides. Disgust crossed his timeworn face.

  “Do you understand your rights?” I asked Alonzo.

  He nodded and began sobbing again. “I shouldn’ta done it, but she made me so mad.”

  A toddler with a dirty white bow in her hair, wet diapers sagging to her dimpled knees, clung to her father’s leg. Her wailing just about broke my heart.

  “W
hat did Rosa do to make you mad?” I asked Alonzo. “I really want to know.”

  Rosa Alonzo was on the floor, her pretty face turned toward the flaking caramel-colored wall, her head split open by the iron her husband had used to knock her down, then take her life.

  The ironing board had collapsed around her like a dead horse, and the smell of burned spray starch was in the air.

  The last time I’d seen Rosa, she’d told me how she couldn’t leave her husband because he’d said he’d hunt her down and kill her.

  I wished with all my heart she’d taken the baby and run.

  Inspector Richard Conklin, Jacobi’s partner, the newest and youngest member of my squad, walked into the kitchen. Rich poured cat food into a bowl for an old orange tabby cat that was mewing on the red Formica table. Interesting.

  “He could be alone here for a long time,” Conklin said over his shoulder.

  “Call animal control.”

  “Said they were busy, Lieutenant.” Conklin turned on the taps, filled a water bowl.

  Alonzo spoke up.

  “You know what she said, Officer? She said, ‘Get a job.’ I just snapped, you understand?”

  I stared at him until he turned away from me, cried out to his dead wife, “I didn’t mean to do it, Rosa. Please. Give me another chance.”

  Jacobi reached for the man’s arm, brought him to his feet, saying, “Yeah, she forgives you, pal. Let’s take a ride.”

  The baby launched a new round of howls as Patty Whelk from Child Welfare came through the open door.

  “Hey, Lindsay,” she said, stepping around the victim, “who’s Little Miss Precious?”

  I picked up the child, took the dirty ribbon out of her curls, and handed her over to Patty.

  “Anita Alonzo,” I said sadly, “meet the system.”

  Patty and I exchanged helpless looks as she jostled the little girl into a comfortable position on her hip.

  I left Patty rummaging in the bedroom for a clean diaper. While Conklin stayed behind to wait for the ME, I followed Jacobi and Alonzo out to the street.

  I said, “See ya,” to Jacobi and climbed into my three-year-old Explorer parked next to six yards of garbage out by the street. I’d just turned the key when my Nextel bleeped on my belt. It’s Saturday. Leave me the hell alone.

  I caught the call on the second ring.

  It was my boss, Chief Anthony Tracchio. An unusual tightness strained his voice as he raised it over the keening sound of sirens.

  “Boxer,” he said, “there’s been a shooting on one of the ferries. The Del Norte. Three people are dead. A couple more wounded. I need you here. Pronto.”

  Chapter 4

  I HAD A REALLY BAD FEELING, thinking ahead to whatever hell had brought the chief out of his comfy home in Oakland on a Saturday. The bad feeling mushroomed when I saw half a dozen black-and-whites parked at the entrance to the pier, and two more patrol cars up on the sidewalk at either end of the Ferry Building.

  A patrolman called out, “This way, Lieu,” and waved me down the south driveway leading to the dock.

  I drove past the police prowlers, ambulances, and fire rigs, and parked outside the terminal. I opened my door and stepped out into the sixty-degree haze. About a twenty-knot breeze had whipped up a stiff chop on the bay, making the Del Norte rock at her mooring.

  The police activity had excited the crowd, and a thousand people shifted between the Ferry Building and the farmer’s market, taking pictures, asking cops what had happened. It was as if they could smell gunpowder and blood in the air.

  I ducked under the barrier tape cordoning off the dock, nodded to cops I knew, looked up when I heard Tracchio call my name.

  The chief was standing at the mouth of the Del Norte.

  He was wearing a leather blazer and Dockers, and sporting his signature Vitalis comb-over. He signaled to me to come aboard. Said the spider to the fly.

  I headed toward him, but before I got five feet up the gangway, I had to back up and let two paramedics pass with a rolling stretcher bouncing between them.

  I dropped my eyes to the victim, a large African American woman, her face mostly covered with an oxygen mask, an IV line running into her arm. Blood soaked the sheet tucked tightly over her body.

  I felt a pain in my chest, my heart catching on a full second before my brain put it together.

  The victim was Claire Washburn!

  My best friend had been shot on the ferry!

  I grabbed the gurney, stopping its forward motion and causing the brassy blond paramedic bringing up the rear to bark at me, “Lady, out of the way!”

  “I’m a cop,” I said to the paramedic, pulling open my jacket to show her my badge.

  “I don’t care if you’re God,” said the blonde. “We’re getting her to the ER.”

  My mouth was hanging open and my heart was pounding in my ears.

  “Claire,” I called out, walking quickly now alongside the stretcher as the gurney rumbled over the gangway and onto the asphalt. “Claire, it’s Lindsay. Can you hear me?”

  No answer.

  “What’s her condition?” I asked the paramedic.

  “Do you understand that we have to get her to the hospital?”

  “Answer me, goddamn it!”

  “I don’t freaking know!”

  I stood helplessly by as the paramedics opened the ambulance doors.

  More than ten minutes had passed since I’d gotten Tracchio’s call. Claire had been lying on the deck of the ferry all that time, losing blood, trying to breathe with a bullet hole ripped into her chest.

  I gripped her hand, and tears immediately filled my eyes.

  My friend turned her face to me, her eyelids fluttering as she forced them open.

  “Linds,” she mouthed. I moved her mask aside. “Where’s Willie?” she asked me.

  I remembered then — Claire’s youngest son, Willie, was working for the ferry line on the weekends. That’s probably why Claire had been on the Del Norte.

  “We got separated,” Claire gasped. “I think he went after the shooter.”

  Chapter 5

  CLAIRE’S EYES ROLLED UP, and she slipped away from me. The knees of the gurney buckled, and the paramedics slid the stretcher out of my grasp and into the ambulance.

  The doors slammed. The siren started up its blaring whoop, and the ambulance carrying my dearest friend headed into traffic toward San Francisco General.

  Time was working against us.

  The shooter was gone, and Willie had gone after him.

  Tracchio put his hand on my shoulder. “We’re getting descriptions of the doer, Boxer —”

  “I have to find Claire’s son,” I said.

  I broke away from Tracchio and ran toward the farmer’s market, scanning faces as I pushed past the slow-moving crowd. It was like walking through a herd of cattle.

  I looked into every fricking produce stall and in between them, raked the aisles with my eyes, searching desperately for Willie — but it was Willie who found me.

  He shoved his way toward me, calling my name. “Lindsay! Lindsay!”

  The front of his T-shirt was soaked with blood. He was panting, and his face was rigid with fear.

  I grabbed his shoulders with both hands, tears welling up again.

  “Willie, where are you hurt?”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t my blood. My mom’s been shot.”

  I pulled him to me, hugged him to my chest, felt some of my terrible fear leaving me. At least Willie was okay.

  “She’s on her way to the hospital,” I said, wishing I could add, She’ll be fine. “You saw the shooter? What does he look like?”

  “He’s a skinny white man,” Willie said as we bumped through the mob. “Has a beard, long brown hair. He kept his eyes down, Lindsay. I never saw his eyes.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Like, maybe a few years younger than you.”

  “Early thirties?”

  “Yeah. And he’s taller than me. Maybe six foot one, wearing cargo pants and a blue Windbreaker. Lindsay, I heard him say to my mom that she was supposed to stop the shooting. That it was her job. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Claire is chief medical examiner of San Francisco. She’s a forensic pathologist, not a cop.

  “You think it was personal? That he targeted your mom? Knew her?”

  Willie shook his head. “I was helping to tie up the boat when the screaming started,” he told me. “He shot some other people first. My mom was the last one. He had a gun right up to her head. I grabbed an iron pipe,” he said. “I was going to brain him with it, but he shot at me. Then he jumped overboard. I went after him — but I lost him.”