Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 2: 15 Seconds, Killing Hour, The Blue Zone. Andrew Gross
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Название: Andrew Gross 3-Book Thriller Collection 2: 15 Seconds, Killing Hour, The Blue Zone
Автор: Andrew Gross
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Полицейские детективы
isbn: 9780007557530
isbn:
Kate looked into Emily’s room. Photos were still taped to the walls. Arcade snapshots with her school friends. Her squash team from the Junior Maccabean games. They’d had to rush out so quickly. These were important.
How were these left behind?
One by one, Kate started to untape them. Then she sat down on the bed and looked up at the blue, starry ceiling.
She realized she was going to miss seeing her little sister grow up. She wasn’t going to see her go to her prom. Or watch her graduate. Or see her kick ass playing number one for her school. They wouldn’t even have the same last name anymore.
The tears rolled down Kate’s cheeks, angry and unexplainable. Greg came bounding up the stairs. “Hey, where are you? Look at this!” he called.
He came into Em’s room holding large masks of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, from some Halloween party her parents had gone to the year before. He saw Kate’s face and stopped.
“Jeez, Kate.” He sat down next to her and took her in his arms.
“I can’t help it!” she said. “I’m just so goddamn fucking mad. He had no right to do this to us. He stole our family, Greg.”
“I know.… I know.…” he said. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. You want to go?”
Kate shook her head. “We’re here. Damn it. Let’s do this.”
She picked up Emily’s pictures and before they went downstairs opened the door to her parents’ bedroom. There were tons of boxes in there. Clothes, perfumes, pictures. All packed. Ready to go.
A dresser drawer was open, and Kate noticed something inside. A leather folder crammed with old stuff she’d never seen before. It must have been her father’s. It was filled with old pictures and documents. Early photos of him and Sharon, when he was at NYU and she was a freshman at Cornell. Some gemological certificates. A photo of his mother, Rosa. Letters … How could he just leave them behind?
She bundled the folder up and tossed in Em’s pictures. These were all Kate had.
They went downstairs and stood in the high-ceilinged vestibule one last time.
“You ready?” Greg asked eventually. Kate nodded.
“You want to take these?” He grinned, holding out the Bill and Monica masks.
“Nah, my father hated Clinton. That was just his dumb idea of a joke.”
He tossed them in a trash bucket by the door.
Kate turned around one last time.
“I don’t know what to feel,” she said. “I’m going to walk out this door and leave my entire past.” A wave of sadness came over her. “I don’t have a family anymore.”
“Yes you do,” Greg said, and pulled her toward him. “You have me. Let’s get married, Kate.”
“Right.” She sniffed. “You know how to hit a girl when she’s down. Screw the big wedding, right?”
“No, I’m serious,” he said. “We love each other. In eighteen months I’ll be practicing. I don’t care if it’s just you and me. Let’s do this, Kate—get married!”
She stared at him, struck silent, with glistening eyes.
“I’m your family now.”
FOURTEEN MONTHS LATER …
“Hey, Fergus … c’mon, boy, let’s go!”
It was a crisp autumn morning as Kate jogged through the entrance of Tompkins Square Park with Fergus, the six-month-old Labradoodle she and Greg had adopted. He was chasing a squirrel on his run-leash a short distance behind.
The terrible events of the past year seemed a long way away.
She was Kate Herrera now. She and Greg had gotten married eight months earlier at City Hall. They lived in a loft on the seventh floor of a converted warehouse building over on Seventh Street, just a few blocks away. Greg was finishing his last year of residency now.
Kate ran with Fergus pretty much every morning before she headed to work. And she also rowed early on two other mornings, Wednesdays and Saturdays, up at the Peter Jay Sharp Boathouse on the Harlem River. She was still working at the lab. In another year she’d have her master’s. After that, she didn’t know. Greg had applications out. It all came down to the question of where he would end up practicing. In the past year, they’d had to pull away from a lot of their old friends.
Kate still had no idea where her family was. Somewhere out west … that was all she knew. She got e-mails and letters every couple of weeks, the occasional phone call routed through a neutral WITSEC site. Em was playing squash again and starting to think about college. And Justin was having trouble adjusting to a new school, new friends. But it was her mom she was worried about. Hiding out in this new place, not exactly making friends, was taking its toll. Since he’d been released, Kate had heard that things had gotten pretty tense between Mom and Dad.
Kate had seen her father only once. Just before the trial. The WITSEC people had arranged it—secretly. They didn’t want her to be seen attending the proceedings. Only a few weeks before, one of the key government witnesses, a bookkeeper from Argot—a forty-year-old woman with two kids—had been shot dead, right on Sixth Avenue. At rush hour. It had made all the papers and news broadcasts and stirred up a whole new round of fear. That’s why they’d gotten the dog, they joked. But of course it wasn’t funny. It was scary as shit.
And anyway, all Fergus would ever do was lick you to death if anyone ever tried anything.
“C’mon, buddy!” Kate pulled Fergus over to a bench. A street mime was performing on the path, going through his routine. Something was always going on here.
In the end, Concerga, the Colombian guy from Paz, the one everybody wanted, had fled the country before trial. The other, Trujillo, was released, because with the key witness gone, the government could not make its case. Harold Kornreich was convicted. Dad’s friend. That’s why her family has been ripped apart. Her father put in jail. Dad’s golfing buddy … he was in a federal prison now, serving twenty years.
Kate glanced at the time. It was already after eight. She had to be at the lab by nine-thirty. She had to get going. She watched the performer a minute more, breaking off a piece of a PowerBar to boost her sugar level. Fergus seemed amused as well.
“He is good, yes?”
The voice came from the bench across СКАЧАТЬ