Lifeguard

by James Patterson

  They did what I asked, and then I scurried around, picking up the guns. I backed over to the sliding door and hurled them into the woods behind my house. Now, what the hell to do? I looked at my mom and gave her a half-hearted smile. “Guess I need to borrow the car.”

  “Neddie, please . . .” My mother was begging again. She had already lost one son in a shoot-out. Poor John Michael.

  I was dying inside, knowing how much I was hurting her. I went over to the pretty FBI agent. I could almost pick her up with one arm. As much as she was trying to look brave, I could see she was scared. “What’s your name?”

  “Shurtleff.” The agent hesitated. “Ellie.”

  “I’m sorry, Ellie Shurtleff, but you’re coming with me.”

  The agent on the floor rose up. “No way. You’re not leaving with her. You take anyone, take me.”

  “No,” I backed him down with the gun. “It’s her. She’s coming.”

  I took her by the arm. “I’m not going to hurt you, Ellie, if this goes right.” Even in that crazy moment, I gave her the edge of a smile.

  “I know this doesn’t mean much,” I said, turning back to the guy on the floor, “but I didn’t do what you came here to get me for.”

  “There’s only one way to prove that,” the FBI man said.

  “I know,” I said, nodding, “that’s why I’m doing this. I’ve got something to prove—I’m innocent.”

  I took Agent Shurtleff by the arm and shoved open the door. The two other agents hung back as if they were suspended in midair. “I just want five minutes,” I said. “That’s all I ask. You’ll have her back as good as new. Her clothes won’t even be wrinkled. I didn’t kill those people down there. What happens next is up to you.”

  I turned to my mom. “Guess it’s fair to say I won’t be around for dinner anytime soon.” I winked a good-bye. “Love you, Mom.”

  Then we backed out the door, my arm locked on Agent Shurtleff’s. I took her down the steps. The FBI guys were already at the windows, one of them pulling out his phone. I opened the door to the 4Runner and pushed her in. “I’m just praying the keys are there.” I actually smiled. “Usually, they are.”

  They were, thank God! I backed out the driveway. A few seconds later we were careening down Perkins, across the tracks, onto Main.

  No lights yet. No sirens. There were a few ways out of town, and I figured the best way was north on Route 24.

  I glanced behind and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Nice work. You’ve just added kidnapping a federal agent to your résumé.

  Chapter 30

  “YOU SCARED?” this thug Ned Kelly turned and asked her, gunning the 4Runner north on Route 24. He held the gun loosely in his lap, pointed her way.

  Scared? Ellie hesitated. The guy is wanted for questioning in a quadruple homicide!

  Her mind ran through the hostage scenarios. There was probably some textbook thing she should say. Stay calm. Start a dialogue. She was sure there was an APB out on the car already. Every cop within fifty miles of Boston would be on the lookout. Finally, she just went with what she felt.

  “Yeah, I’m scared,” Ellie said with a nod.

  “Good,” he said, nodding back, “’cause I’m scared, too. Never done anything like this before. But you can relax. Honest. I’m not going to hurt you. I just needed to get out of there. I’ll even unlock the car. You can jump out the next time we stop. . . . I’m not kidding. Good as my word.”

  To Ellie’s amazement, she heard the automatic locks lift. There was an exit approaching, and he slowed at the upcoming ramp.

  “Or”—he looked sort of helpless—“you can stick around for a while longer. Help me figure out how I’m going to get out of this mess.”

  Kelly brought the car to a stop and waited for her to move.

  “Go on. I figure I’ve got, what, about three minutes before every exit on this highway is covered with cops?”

  Ellie looked at him, a little stunned. She placed her hand on the door latch. You’re being handed a gift, said a voice inside her. Take it! She’d been to the house in Lake Worth. She’d seen the blood and the slaughtered bodies. This guy was connected to the victims. He’d fled.

  But something held her back. The guy had this scared, fatalistic smile.

  “I wasn’t lying, what I said back there. I’m no killer. I had nothing to do with whatever went on down in Florida.”

  “Taking a federal agent hostage doesn’t exactly strengthen your case,” Ellie said.

  “They were my friends, my family. I’ve known all of them my whole life. I didn’t steal any paintings and I didn’t kill anyone. All I did was set off some alarms. Look”—he waved the gun—“I don’t even know how to use this fucking thing.”

  It did look that way, Ellie thought. And she did recall a series of house alarms being triggered at mansions around town just prior to the theft. They assumed it was a diversion.

  “Go on, get out.” Kelly took a look back. “I’m expecting company.”

  But Ellie didn’t get out. She just sort of held there, looking at him. He didn’t seem so crazy all of a sudden. Just confused, scared. In way, way over his head. And somehow she didn’t feel so threatened. Cops were on their way. Maybe she could talk him in. Jesus, Ellie . . . This is a long way from the Rare Prints Department at Sotheby’s!

  “Two,” Ellie looked at him, slowly releasing the door handle. “You’ve got about two minutes. Before every cop car south of Boston is here.”

  Ned Kelly’s face seemed to brighten. “Okay,” he said.

  “You tell me everything that happened down there,” Ellie said. “Maybe I can do something. Names, contacts. Everything you know about the robbery. You want to get out of this mess? That’s the only way.”

  A halting smile crossed Ned Kelly’s face. In it, Ellie didn’t see some cold-blooded killer, just a guy who was as nervous as she was, who had dug himself a very deep hole he might never pull himself out of. She thought maybe she could gain his trust. Talk the guy in, with no one getting hurt. If the cops caught up to him now, she wasn’t sure what would happen.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And if I were you, I’d keep that gun pointed at me every once in a while,” Ellie said. She couldn’t believe she was doing this. “They do teach us ways to disarm someone, you know.”

  “Right.” Ned Kelly grinned nervously. He gunned the 4Runner up the ramp. “First thing we’d better do is ditch my mom’s car.”

  Chapter 31

  WE SWITCHED THE 4RUNNER for a Voyager minivan left running in a supermarket parking lot.

  An old maneuver. Growing up, I’d watched Bobby pull it off a dozen times. The owner was just wheeling her shopping cart back to the market. With everything that was going on, I figured I had at least an hour before anyone would respond to the call.

  “I can’t believe I just did that.” Ellie Shurtleff blinked, amazed, as a minute later we were cruising back on Route 24. The look on her face read, It’s one thing to stay with this guy, another thing entirely to be part of stealing someone’s car.

  An evergreen car freshener was dangling from the rearview mirror. A yellow notepad fastened to the dash. On it was scribbled, Groceries. Manicure. Pick up the kids at 3:00. A bag of groceries bounced up in the back. Pizza puffs. And Count Chocula.

  We looked at each other and almost laughed as the thought hit us at the same time: a wanted killer driving a minivan.

  “Some getaway car,” she said, shaking her head. “A real Steve McQueen!”

  I had no idea where to go next. But I figured the safest place was my little motel room back in Stoughton. Fortunately, it was a motor lodge, so I could get around to the room without going through the lobby.

  I locked the door to the room behind us and shrugged. “Look, I have to pat you down.”

  She rolled her eyes at me, like, What, are you kidding? Now?

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I never take advantage of an FBI agent on the first date.”
<
br />   “You think if I was trying to apprehend you, I wouldn’t have done it by now?” Ellie Shurtleff said.

  “Sorry,” I said, a little embarrassed. “Just a formality, I guess.”

  I was lucky that if I had to abduct an FBI agent, I had stumbled onto Ellie Shurtleff and not some Lara Croft type who would’ve had my arm twisted out of its socket by now. Truth was, I would never have pinned her for a fed. An elementary-school teacher, maybe. Or some MBA. With wavy, short brown hair and a couple of freckles on her cheek, a button nose. And nice blue eyes, too, behind the glasses.

  “Arms up”—I waved the gun—“or out to the side, whatever it is.”

  “It’s up against the wall,” she said turning, “but what the hell. . . .”

  She extended her arms. I knelt, patting her pants pockets and thighs. She was wearing a tan pantsuit with a white cotton T-shirt underneath, which she filled out pretty nicely. Some kind of green, semiprecious stone hanging from her neck.

  “You know, it wouldn’t exactly take much to drive an elbow into your face right now.” I could see she was losing patience. “They do teach us stuff like that, you know.”

  “I’m not exactly a pro at this.” I edged away from her. I didn’t like that “elbow to the face” comment.

  “You might as well check the ankles while you’re down there. Most of us keep something strapped there when we’re in the field.”

  “Thanks.” I nodded.

  “Just a formality,” Ellie Shurtleff said.

  I didn’t find anything, except some keys and breath mints in her purse. I sat down on the bed. All of a sudden I realized what I’d just done. This wasn’t a movie. I wasn’t Hugh Jackman and this wasn’t Jennifer Aniston, and this scene wasn’t exactly moving toward a happy ending.

  I placed my forehead in my hands.

  Ellie sat on a chair, facing me.

  “What do we do now?” I asked. I flicked on the tinny TV, just to hear the news. I tried to moisten my mouth, but it stayed as dry as the Sahara Desert.

  “Now,” Ellie Shurtleff said with a shrug, “now we talk.”

  Chapter 32

  I TOLD ELLIE SHURTLEFF everything.

  Everything I knew about the art heist down in Florida. I left out nothing.

  Except the part about meeting Tess. I didn’t know how to tell her about that, and have her believe me about everything else. Besides, I found it really hard to even think about what had happened to Tess.

  “I know I’ve done some stupid things in the past few days,” I said looking at Ellie, earnestly. “I know I shouldn’t have run back in Florida. I know I shouldn’t have done what I did today. But you have to believe me, Ellie . . . killing my friends, my cousin . . .” I shook my head. “No way. We didn’t even take that art. Someone set us up.”

  “Gachet?” Ellie asked, making a few notes.

  “I guess,” I said, frustrated. “I don’t know.”

  She looked at me closely. I was praying she believed me. I needed her to believe me. She switched gears. “So why did you come up here?”

  “To Boston?” I put the gun down on the bed. “Mickey didn’t have connections down there. At least, not the kind who could set up that kind of heist. Everyone he knew was from up here.”

  “Not to locate a fence for the art, Ned? You know people up here, too.”

  “Look around, Agent Shurtleff. You see any art here? I didn’t do those things.”

  “You’re going to have to come in,” she said. “You’re going to have to talk about whoever your cousin knew and worked for. Names, contacts, everything, if you want my help. I can soften the blow on the abduction thing, but that’s your only way out. You understand that, Ned?”

  I nodded resignedly. I had a sour taste in my mouth. Truth was, I didn’t know Mickey’s contacts. Who was I going to give up, my father?

  “So how’d you know where I was headed, anyway?” I asked. I figured Sollie Roth had called the police when I ran.

  “There aren’t that many old Bonnevilles out there,” Ellie said. “When we found it in South Carolina, we had a pretty good idea where you were headed.”

  No shit, I said to myself. Sollie never turned me in.

  We ended up talking for hours. It started out about the crimes, but Ellie Shurtleff seemed to want to go through every detail of my whole life. I told her what it was like growing up in Brockton. The neighborhood and the old gang. How my ticket out had been the hockey scholarship to BU.

  That seemed to surprise her. “You went to BU?”

  “You didn’t know you were talking to the 1995 Leo. J. Fennerty Award winner. Top forward in the Boston CYO,” I grinned with a self-deprecating shrug. “Graduated,” I said. “Four years. A BA in government. You probably didn’t figure me for the academic type.”

  “Somehow when you were trolling around the supermarket parking lot, searching for a car to steal, I just never went there.” Ellie smiled.

  “I said I didn’t kill anyone, Agent Shurtleff.” I smiled back. “I never said I was a saint!”

  That actually made Ellie Shurtleff laugh.

  “Want another surprise,” I said, leaning back on the bed, “as long as I’m doing the résumé? I actually used to teach for a couple of years. Eighth-grade social studies, at this middle school for troubled kids, here in Stoughton. I was pretty good. I may not have been able to give you chapter and verse on every constitutional amendment, but my kids could relate to me. I mean, I’d been there. I’d faced the same choices.”

  “So, what went wrong?” Ellie asked, putting down her notepad.

  “You mean, how does a hotshot like me end up as a lifeguard down in Palm Beach? That’s the million-dollar question, right?”

  She shrugged. “Go on.”

  “My second year, I took an interest in one of my students. A girl. She was from south Brockton, same as me. Dominican kid. She was running with a rough crowd. But she was smart as a whip. She tested well. I wanted her to do well.”

  “What happened?” Ellie leaned forward. I could see this wasn’t about Florida anymore.

  “Maybe I scared her, I don’t know. You have to understand, teaching that class meant everything to me. She accused me of something. A grade for a favor, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, no.” Ellie pulled back. She looked at me warily now.

  “There was nothing to it, Ellie. Maybe I did a few stupid things. Like drive her home a couple of times. Maybe she got trapped in a lie about me, and it just snowballed. All of a sudden her story grew. Suddenly I had accosted her. In my classroom after school, right on school grounds. They gave me a hearing. But that kind of thing—it doesn’t go away. They gave me a chance to stay, in some sort of lesser capacity, an admin job. I quit, walked away.

  “A lot of people gave up on me. My dad . . .”

  “Your father’s got a record, right?” Ellie injected.

  “A record? More like his own cell up at the Souza Correctional Center in Shirley permanently on reserve. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, I remember him saying, like I proved him right. Imagine, he was the one who gave up on me. A few years before, he got his own goddamn son killed. My older brother. You know what the real joke was, though?”

  Ellie shook her head

  “About a month after I left, the girl recanted. I got a nice letter of apology from the school. But by then, the damage was done. I couldn’t be a teacher.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ellie said.

  “But you know who didn’t give up on me, Agent Shurtleff? My cousin Mickey didn’t. And Bobby O’Reilly. Or Barney or Dee. For a bunch of Brockton losers, they understood how that teaching job meant everything to me. And you think I’d kill those guys. . . .” I tapped my chest, close to my heart. “I’d kill myself if it would bring them back. Anyway”—I smiled, feeling that I’d gotten a little emotional—“you think if I had sixty million in stolen art, I’d be talking to you in a fleabag motel like this?”

  Ellie smiled, too. “Maybe you’re more
clever than you look.”

  Suddenly a news bulletin interrupted the TV show. Breaking news . . . A report of today’s abduction. My eyes got wide. Here we go again. My face was on the screen. Jesus Christ . . . My name!

  “Ned,” Ellie Shurtleff said, seeing the panic on my face, “you’ve got to come in with me. It’s the only way we can work this out. The only way.”

  “I don’t think so.” I took the gun and grabbed her by the arm. “C’mon, we’re getting out of here.”

  Chapter 33

  I TOSSED MY FEW BELONGINGS into the back of the minivan. I’d managed to locate a screwdriver in a tool kit and switched the Massachusetts plates with Connecticut ones off another car in the lot.

  And I had to get rid of the van now, too. They would’ve found the 4Runner by now. And I had to ditch Ellie Shurtleff. But what I couldn’t do was turn myself in. Not until I found out who’d set us up and murdered my friends. Not until I found fucking Gachet.

  I hopped in the van, nervously driving around. “Where we going?” Ellie asked, sensing that everything had changed.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You want me to help you, Ned,” Ellie said, “you have to let me take you in. Don’t do something even more stupid than you’ve already done.”

  “I think it’s too late for that,” I said. I was searching for a place I could drop her.

  I found a quiet section on Route 138, between a granite yard and a used-car dealership. I turned off the main road and pulled up to a quiet spot hidden from view.

  Ellie was getting alarmed. I could see it in her eyes. It was clear we weren’t headed where she thought we were. What was I going to do?

  “Please, Ned,” she said. “Don’t do something stupid. There’s no other way.”

  “There’s one other way.” I put the van in park. I nodded—like Go on, out the door.

  “They’re going to find you . . . ,” she said. “Today. Tomorrow. You’re going to get yourself killed. I’m serious, Ned.”

  “Everything I told you is true, Ellie.” I looked into her eyes. “I didn’t do these things. And I didn’t do some other stuff you may eventually hear about. Now, go on, get out.”