The 6th Target by James Patterson, Maxine Paetro Page B

“You got yourself bumped down to the street
and
you told Joe to hit the bricks — at the same time? I’m worried about you, Lindsay. Are you sleeping? Taking vitamins? Eating right?”
    No. No. No.
    I threw myself back into the armchair as a nurse came in, bearing a tray with Claire’s medication and dinner.
    “Here you go, Dr. Washburn. Down the hatch.”
    Claire slugged down the pills, pushed her tray away once the nurse had gone. “Slop du jour,” she said.
    Had I eaten today?
I didn’t think so. I appropriated Claire’s meal, mashing the overcooked peas and meatloaf together on the fork, getting to the ice-cream course before telling her that we had identified Paola Ricci’s body.
    “The kidnappers shot the nanny within a minute of taking her and the child. Couldn’t get rid of her fast enough. But that’s all I’ve got, Butterfly. We don’t know who did it, why, or where they’ve taken Madison.”
    “Why haven’t those shits called the parents?”
    “That’s the million-dollar question. Way too long without a ransom request. I don’t think they want the Tylers’ money.”
    “Damn.”
    “Yeah.” I dropped the plastic spoon onto the tray and leaned back in the chair again, staring out at nothing.
    “Lindsay?”
    “I’ve been thinking that they’d shot Paola because she’d witnessed Madison’s kidnapping.”
    “Makes sense.”
    “But if Madison witnessed Paola’s murder . . . they’re not going to let the child live after that.”
     
Part Three
THE ACCOUNTING
     
Chapter 49
     
    CINDY THOMAS LEFT her Blakely Arms apartment, crossed the street at the corner, and began her five-block walk to her office at the
Chronicle
.
    Two floors above Cindy’s apartment, facing the back of the building, a man named Garry Tenning was having a bad morning. Tenning gripped the edges of the desk in his workroom and tried to stifle his anger. Down in the courtyard, five floors below, a dog was barking incessantly, each shrill note stabbing Tenning’s eardrums like a skewer.
    He knew the dog.
    It was Barnaby, a rat terrier who belonged to Margery Glynn, a lumpen, dishwater-blond single mother of god-awful Baby Oliver, all of them living on the ground floor, usurping the back courtyard as if it were
theirs
.
    Again, Tenning pressed on his special Mack’s earplugs, soft wax that conformed exactly to the shape of his ear holes. And still he could hear Barnaby
yappa-yappa-yipping
through his Mack’s.
    Tenning rubbed the flat of his hand across the front of his T-shirt as the dog’s brainless yapping ripped the fabric of his repose. The tingling was starting now in his lips and fingers, and his heart was palpitating.
    God
damn
it.
    Was a little quiet too much to ask?
    On the computer screen in front of him, neat rows of type marched down the screen — chapter six of his book,
The Accounting: A Statistical Compendium of the Twentieth Century
.
    The book was more than a conceit or a pet project.
The Accounting
was his raison d’être and his legacy. He even cherished the rejection letters from publishers turning down his book proposal. He lovingly logged these rejections into a ledger, filing the originals in a folder inside his lockbox.
    He’d get his laugh when
The Accounting
was published, when it became a critical reference work for scholars all over the world — and for generations to come.
    Nobody would be able to take that away from him.
    As Tenning
willed
Barnaby to shut the hell up, he ran his eyes down the line of numbers — the fatal lightning strikes since 1900, the inches of snowfall in Vermont, the verified sightings of cows sucked into the air by tornadoes — when a garbage truck began its halting clamor up the block.
    He thought his fricking skull would crack open.
    He wasn’t crazy, either.
    He was having a perfectly reasoned response to a horrific assault on the senses. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the squeals, screeches, galvanized shimmies, came through —
and they set off