James Patterson by Season of the Machete

shiny black leather saddlebags. He took out a
West Point
T-shirt and unwrapped the Colt .44.
    It seemed strange, unreal, as he held the old gun. He turned the chamber and saw all eight shells. He examined the gun further, remembered the army shooting ranges at West Point that were hidden in massive gray-stone buildings on a hill above the football field, Michie Stadium. He remembered a seedy shooting range inside a steaming, tin-roofed building in the Cholon section of Saigon.
    Peter slowly raised the long-barreled Colt. Aimed at a mottled banana tree leaf. Aimed at a tiny chattering yellow bird. Aimed at a small green coconut. Finally at a small black snake slithering up a gom-mier tree.
    The tree was a good thirty-five paces away. Thirty-five yards. What pistol enthusiasts regard as trick or showboat shooting.
    Looking like an old-fashioned duelist, aiming ever so carefully, Peter squeezed the trigger gently.
    The distant head of the black snake exploded as if it were rotten inside. The rest of the snake dropped from the gommier like a loose vine.
    In a way, the neat shot pleased and surprised him. He really hadn’t expected the showpiece revolver to be so well balanced. As for the shooter—well, he knew all about the other shooter.
    “Hoo boy!” Peter said out loud to the
deangerous
West Hills. “Now what, hotshot?”

C HAPTER F IFTEEN
    The John Simpson Roses. Strange, blue blood family. Damian’s fourteen-year-old brother was caught cheating on a bloody exam at the Horace Mann School. Teenager swallowed half a beaker of sulfuric acid. Didn’t die because the dose was so high he vomited it all up. He was crippled from his neck down, though. In an institution ever since. Damian’s mother living in an institution year-round, too. Father rides round and round Manhattan and London in a big black limo provided by a multinational bank. Damian planning to kill his father in the limo one day….
    The Rose Diary
    Mercury Landing, San Dominica
    Saturday Afternoon.
    The shoreline at Mercury Landing was pretty and very secluded.
    Black cliffs rose high on either side of a silver of gleaming white sand. There was a glen of royal palm trees. Yellow birds. Flocks of parrots, as in an open-air pet store. A big red sun over the sea like God’s angry eye.
    There was a big white house over the sea, too. And on one side of the house, a dark green sedan was hidden in the shadows of casuarina trees.
    There could be no doubt about one thing: San Dominica was a paradise on this earth.
    Down on the beach at Mercury. Landing, a man and woman were walking in the nude. Without her clothes, Carrie Rose’s legs seemed a little too long, a little bowed. Her feet were slightly too large and too flat.
    These were nitpicks, however, because the slender young woman was quite beautiful without clothes.
    Walking beside her, Damian was almost as impressive to look at. The tall blond man wore nothing, but he had an expensive terry-cloth jumpsuit draped over one arm. He had broad shoulders and well-muscled legs. A hard, flat stomach. Pretty blond hair.
    A long, sun-tanned cock hung out of the light, curly hair between Damian’s legs.
    “The killing should all be over now,” Carrie was saying to him, with the little midwestern twang always in her voice. “It’s taking too long, Damian. A week is too long.”
    Damian just smiled at her. He glanced out at a boat coming over a distant reef. A gray smudge on a wiggly black line. “You just want the tension you’re feeling to be over,” he said in a soft, detached voice. “It isn’t taking too long at all. It’s perfect so far. This island is as insane and paranoid as a madhouse…. Besides, in two days or so you get to leave. You can even start to spend all our money. Buy yourself a few cars or something, Carrie.”
    Carrie Rose slipped her arm around her husband’s firm waist. “I want you to leave with me. I think it will be better that way. Will you do that, Damian? Leave with me?”
    “If