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  That was a week ago. Now they’d finally run him down, here in New York in this fancy Pajama Boy gin mill, of all places.

  Devine watched as the hot bartender tossed Pretty Boy another interested glance. Had a woman, even an ugly one, ever looked at him like that? he thought. No. Not even when he gave them the money first. The bitter inequities of the world.

  Yeah, Devine thought, nodding as he looked at Pretty Boy. He was going to enjoy this little piece of work.

  It was about three minutes later when Pretty Boy put down his empty glass and stood up. He was heading toward the can. Devine had been monitoring it. There was no one in there.

  Welcome to an evening at the improv, Devine thought as he suddenly slapped the phone into Therkelson’s lap.

  “C’mon,” he said, already moving as he watched Pretty Boy push open the restroom door.

  He sent Therkelson in by himself while he watched the hall to keep out any civilians. He heard some scuffling behind the door, a muffled grunt. Therkelson knew his orders. Neutralize him, then do a strip search if necessary.

  He waited a full minute, checking his stainless steel Rolex, and then another.

  What the hell was taking him so long? Devine thought.

  He couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed open the door.

  And came face to face with the shocking and unthinkable.

  Therkelson, the incredible Therk himself, was lying unmoving, facedown on the white tile.

  As if that weren’t enough, as Devine stood there still gaping in wide wonder, one of the stall doors slammed open and cracked him right in the forehead.

  An instant later came a searing pain in his neck as Pretty Boy hit him with Therkelson’s stun gun for a buzzing moment. Devine threw up jalapeño peanuts all over himself when Pretty Boy savagely kneed him in the balls. Several times, lightning-quick, like a Thai boxer.

  Before he knew it, Devine was down next to Therkelson on his hands and knees like a baby, seeing stars in the tile work. Pretty Boy leapt him like a track hurdle and exited.

  Palming himself up from his own vomit a few dazed and throbbing minutes later, Devine shook his head as he fished out his phone.

  Here we go again, he thought as he dialed the boss man.

  THE MAN IN black was a serious runner. He ran seventy miles a week on a strict plan. He did tempo runs and speed training. He didn’t just run 5Ks, he usually won them.

  But he was gasping like a day-one Biggest Loser and had sweated clean through the back of his suit jacket by the time he came up the sixteen flights of steps and burst from the stairwell door out onto the hotel’s roof deck.

  He scanned the deck. Dark blue-black sky and cold air. Rattan couches under string lights. A gas fire pit turned off now. No people. No team. They weren’t up here. At least not yet.

  He thought he could find a way out the back of the hotel, but there was only the stairwell. There was no way he could have gone out the front. If Devine and Therkelson were here, they were all here, strung out in a perimeter.

  He was in a slipknot now, which was tightening as he stood there.

  Beyond the fire pit, there was an enclosed rooftop bar with a Reserved sign on a stand in front of its French doors. Through the glass, he could see guests and wait staff and tables set with flowers and white linens. A DJ in a tuxedo shirt bent by a turntable, and then there was a sudden blast of swinging trumpets and Sinatra singing “Come Dance with Me.”

  Clueless civilians. No help in that direction. No time to even ask.

  He went to the roof’s edge and looked down on Broadway. Sixteen stories down. Two lanes of moving traffic. Lights of Lincoln Center. Some people on the sidewalk. No way to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

  He rushed along the roof deck, skirting the building’s perimeter to 67th Street, looking for a fire escape. At the northeastern edge of the building down 67th, he was hoping for another building he could escape onto, but there was nothing except a huge empty dirt lot with a bunch of construction equipment.

  He’d come along the southeastern back corner of the hotel when he finally saw his out.

  Behind the hotel was an old building under renovation. They were doing brickwork and had an outside scaffold set up, a cruciform track running from roof to ground with a movable scaffold forming the horizontal part of the cross. The right-hand end of the scaffold was about fifteen feet away from where he was standing, and about a floor and a half below the level of the hotel roof.

  He looked behind him at the path he’d just come down. If he went back to the other edge of the hotel by 67th, ran full-out and got a little height as he leapt off the top of the waist-high wall, he could do it. He could long jump it.

  Don’t think. Don’t look down. Just do it.

  He made it to the other end of the roof deck and had turned back for his running start when Therkelson came out of the shadow on his right and grabbed him.

  Forgetting his knife, the dark-haired man scrambled with animal panic to break the bigger, stronger man’s iron grip. He bashed the big son of a bitch in his mouth with the heel of his right hand, trying to get a thumb in his eye with his left.

  But Therkelson didn’t let go.

  Gripping the struggling dark-haired man by his lapels, Therkelson lifted him up off his feet and, without preamble, easily and silently threw him hard off the side of the building.

  In that first terrible instant out in the black space and open cold air, the dark-haired man saw the city around him, like an upside-down I♥NY postcard snapshot. Window lights and water towers and the setbacks on the apartment buildings.

  Then he was spinning and falling, the cold air rushing and ripping in his eyes and face.

  No, no, no! Can’t, can’t! Not now! he thought over the blasting of the air and his heart, as he free-fell faster and faster through the cold and black—down, down, down.

  STORIES AT THE SPEED OF LIFE

  www.bookshots.com

  ALSO BY JAMES PATTERSON

  ALEX CROSS NOVELS

  Along Came a Spider

  Kiss the Girls

  Jack and Jill

  Cat and Mouse

  Pop Goes the Weasel

  Roses are Red

  Violets are Blue

  Four Blind Mice

  The Big Bad Wolf

  London Bridges

  Mary, Mary

  Cross

  Double Cross

  Cross Country

  Alex Cross’s Trial (with Richard DiLallo)

  I, Alex Cross

  Cross Fire

  Kill Alex Cross

  Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

  Alex Cross, Run

  Cross My Heart

  Hope to Die

  Cross Justice

  THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB SERIES

  1st to Die

  2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross)

  3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross)

  4th of July (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro)

  7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro)

  8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro)

  9th Judgement (with Maxine Paetro)

  10th Anniversary (with Maxine Paetro)

  11th Hour (with Maxine Paetro)

  12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro)

  Unlucky 13 (with Maxine Paetro)

  14th Deadly Sin (with Maxine Paetro)

  15th Affair (with Maxine Paetro)

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL BENNETT SERIES

  Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Worst Case (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Tick Tock (with Michael Ledwidge)

  I, Michael Bennett (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Gone (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Burn (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Alert (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Bullseye (with Michael Ledwidge)

  PRIVATE NOVELS

  Private
(with Maxine Paetro)

  Private London (with Mark Pearson)

  Private Games (with Mark Sullivan)

  Private: No. 1 Suspect (with Maxine Paetro)

  Private Berlin (with Mark Sullivan)

  Private Down Under (with Michael White)

  Private L.A. (with Mark Sullivan)

  Private India (with Ashwin Sanghi)

  Private Vegas (with Maxine Paetro)

  Private Sydney (with Kathryn Fox)

  Private Paris (with Mark Sullivan)

  The Games (with Mark Sullivan)

  NYPD RED SERIES

  NYPD Red (with Marshall Karp)

  NYPD Red 2 (with Marshall Karp)

  NYPD Red 3 (with Marshall Karp)

  NYPD Red 4 (with Marshall Karp)

  STAND-ALONE THRILLERS

  Sail (with Howard Roughan)

  Swimsuit (with Maxine Paetro)

  Don’t Blink (with Howard Roughan)

  Postcard Killers (with Liza Marklund)

  Toys (with Neil McMahon)

  Now You See Her (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Kill Me If You Can (with Marshall Karp)

  Guilty Wives (with David Ellis)

  Zoo (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Second Honeymoon (with Howard Roughan)

  Mistress (with David Ellis)

  Invisible (with David Ellis)

  The Thomas Berryman Number

  Truth or Die (with Howard Roughan)

  Murder House (with David Ellis)

  NON-FICTION

  Torn Apart (with Hal and Cory Friedman)

  The Murder of King Tut (with Martin Dugard)

  ROMANCE

  Sundays at Tiffany’s (with Gabrielle Charbonnet)

  The Christmas Wedding (with Richard DiLallo)

  First Love (with Emily Raymond)

  OTHER TITLES

  Miracle at Augusta (with Peter de Jonge)

  BOOKSHOTS

  Black & Blue (with Candice Fox)

  Break Point (with Lee Stone)

  Cross Kill

  Private Royals (with Rees Jones)

  The Hostage (with Robert Gold)

  Zoo 2 (with Max DiLallo)

  Heist (with Rees Jones)

  Hunted (with Andrew Holmes)

  Airport: Code Red (with Michael White)

  The Trial (with Maxine Paetro)

  Little Black Dress (with Emily Raymond)

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781786530660

  Version 1.0

  Published by BookShots 2016

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  Copyright © James Patterson, 2016

  Extract from Chase © James Patterson 2016

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  The BookShots name and logo are trademarks of JBP Business, LLC.

  James Patterson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by BookShots

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  ISBN 9781786530653