Thriller by James Patterson Page A

paralytic sickness that made me want to crawl into a ball.
    I stayed in the front seat and watched as he exited the car and
    sidled up to the fence. As he took his glasses off and wiped them
    on the pocket of his pants. As he scoped out the crowd of elementary-school kids flowing out the front gate. As his attention
    seemed to fixate on one particular boy—a fourth-grader maybe,
    a sweet-looking kid who reminded me of someone. As he began
    to follow this boy down the street, edging closer and closer the
    way lions separate calves from the herd. I watched and felt every
    bit as powerless and inert as I did back when my brother
    bounded down the steps of our house on the way to his first communion.
    I couldn’t move.
    He stepped up behind the boy and began conversing with him.
    I didn’t have to see the boy’s face to know what it looked like.
    The man reached out and grabbed the boy by the arm and I still
    sat there in the front seat of my car.
    It was only when the boy broke away, when he turned and ran,
    when the man took a few halting steps toward him and then
    slumped, gave up—that I actually moved.
    Anger was my enemy. Anger was my long-lost friend. It
    came in one red-hot surge, sending the sickness scurrying
    away in terror, propelling me out of the car, ready to finally protect him.
    Joseph, I whispered.
    My brother’s name.
    The man slipped back into his car and drove away. I stood
    there with my heart colliding against my ribs.
    That night, I told Kelly what I was going to do.
    We lay in bed covered in sweat, and I told her that I needed to
    do this. The anger had come back and claimed me, wrapped me
    in its comforting bosom and said, You’re home.
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    I waited at the school the next afternoon, and the one after
    that. I waited all week.
    He came the next Monday—parking his Volvo directly across
    from the playground.
    When he got out, I was standing there to ask him if he could
    point me toward Fourth Street. When he turned and motioned
    over there, I placed the gun up against his back.
    “If you make a sound, you’re dead.”
    He promptly wilted. He mumbled something about just taking his money, and I told him to shut up.
    He entered my car as docile as a lamb.
    A mother stared at us as we drove away.
    I went to a place in the valley that I’d used before, when the
    redness came and made me do certain things to suspects with
    big mouths and awful résumés. Things that got me tossed off the
    force and into mandated anger management where the class applauded when I said I’d learned to count to ten and avoid my triggers. Triggers were the things that set me off—there was an
    entire canon of them.
    Men in collar and vestment. That was trigger number one.
    We had to walk over a quarter of a mile to the sandpit.
    They’d turned it into a dumping ground filled with water the
    color of mud.
    “Why?” he said to me when I made him stand there at the lip
    of the pit.
    Because when I was eight years old, I was turned inside out. Be-
    cause I killed my brother as surely as if I’d tied that belt around his
    neck and kicked away the chair. That’s why.
    His body flew into the subterranean tangle of junk and disappeared.
    Because you deserve it.
    When I showed up at work the next day, she wasn’t there.
    I wanted to let her know; I wanted to ease her burden.
    When I called her cell—she didn’t answer.
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    I asked hotel personnel for her address—we’d always slept at
    my place because she had a roommate. Two days later I went to
    her second-floor flat in Ventura and knocked on the door.
    No answer.
    I found the landlord puttering around the backyard, mostly
    crabgrass, dandelions and dirt.
    “Have you seen Kelly?” I asked him.
    “She’s gone,” he said without really looking up.
    “ Gone? Gone where? Gone to the store?”
    “No. Gone . Not here anymore.”
    “What are you talking about? Where’d she go?”
    He shrugged. “She didn’t leave an address. Her and the kid
    just