Worst Case (2 page)

Read Worst Case Online

Authors: James Patterson

For Susan Maloney, Sue Najork, Marlene Stang,
and Kary Tangredi—J.P.
For Mary Ann O’Donnell, World’s Greatest Adviser
.
Special thanks to “Uncle” Ed Kelly and Judge Joe Len—M.L.
WORST CASE
James Patterson
&
Michael Ledwidge
CENTURY  •  LONDON
Prologue
GIVE PEACE A CHANCE . . . OR ELSE
One
THE STOCKY MAN with the salt-and-pepper hair felt light-headed as he crossed beneath the marble arch into Washington Square Park. He dropped his backpack, took off his circular glasses, and blotted the sudden tears in his eyes with the sleeve of his ancient jeans jacket.
He hadn’t planned on breaking down, but My God, he thought, wiping at his rugged, lined face. Now he knew how Vietnam veterans felt when they visited their Wall down in Washington, DC. If veterans of the antiwar movement had a monument—a Wall of Tears—it was here, where it all began, Washington Square Park.
Staring out over the windy park, he remembered all the incredible things that had occurred here. The antiwar demonstrations. Bob Dylan in the 4th Street basement clubs, singing about which way the wind was blowing. The candlelit faces of his old friends as they passed bottles and smoke. The whispered promises they had made to one another to change things, to make things better.
He looked out over the Friday-afternoon crowd by the center fountain, the people hovering over the chess tables, as if he might find a familiar face. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? he thought with a shrug. They’d all moved on, like he had. Grown up. Sold out. Or were underground. Figuratively. Literally.
That time,
his
time, was almost completely faded now, just about dead and gone.
Just about, he thought as he knelt and removed the box of flyers from his knapsack.
But not quite.
On each of the five hundred sheets was a three-paragraph message entitled
LOVE CAN CHANGE THE WORLD
.
Who says you can’t go home? he thought. A quote from Keith Richards popped into his head as he stacked the sheets.
“I got news for you. We’re still a bunch of tough bastards. String us up and we still won’t die.”
You said it, Keith, he thought, giggling to himself. Right on, brother. You and me both.
More and more over the last year, his thoughts kept coming back to his youth. It was the only time in his entire life when he’d felt like he meant something, when he’d felt he was making a positive difference.
Was coming back now after all this time a midlife crisis? Maybe. He didn’t care. He’d decided he wanted that feeling again. Especially in light of recent events. The world now was in even more dire straits than the one he and his friends had fought to affect. It was time to do it again. Wake people up before it was too late.
That’s why he was here. It had worked once. They had, after all, stopped a war. Maybe it could happen again. Even if he was a lot older, he wasn’t dead yet. Not by any means.
He licked his thumb and took the first sheet from the stack. He smiled, remembering the countless flyers he’d handed out in Berkeley and Seattle, and in Chicago in ’68. After all this time, here he was. Unbelievable. What a crazy life. Back in the saddle again.
Two
“HI THERE,” he said, offering the flyer to a young black woman pushing a toddler in a stroller.
He smiled at her, making eye contact. He was good with people, always had been. “I have a message here that I think you should take a look at, if it’s not too much trouble. It concerns, well, everything.”
“Leave me the hell alone with that nonsense,” she said with surprising vehemence, almost smacking it out of his hand.
Had to expect a little of that, he thought with a nod. Some people were a hard sell. Came with the territory. Unfazed, he immediately walked over toward a group of teenagers skateboarding by the statue of Garibaldi.
“Afternoon, guys. I have a message here that I’d like you to read. Only take a second out of your day. If you’re concerned about the state of affairs and about our future, I think it’s something you should really consider.”
They stared at him, dumbfounded. Up close, he was surprised to see the crow’s-feet around their eyes. They weren’t teenagers. They were in their late twenties and early thirties. Hard-looking. Kind of mean, actually.
“Holy shit! It’s John Lennon!” one of them said. “I thought somebody shot you. Where’s Yoko? When you getting back with Paul?”
The rest of them burst into sharp laughter.
Jerks, he thought, heading immediately over toward the center fountain, where a street comedian was giving a performance. Yeah, the fate of the world was a real rip, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t let those assholes get to him. He just needed to hit on the right person and things would start rolling. Persistence was the name of the game.
People averted their eyes as he approached them. Not one person would take a flyer. What the hell was this? he wondered.
It was fifteen fruitless minutes later when a petite woman walking past took the flyer from his hand. Finally, the man thought. His smile collapsed as the woman crumpled it and dropped it to the paved path. He ran forward and scooped it up before he caught up to her.
“The least you could do was wait until you were out of sight before you threw it out in a garbage can,” he said as he whirled in front of her. “You have to litter, too?”
“I’m . . . sorry?” the woman said, pulling the white iPod buds from her ears. She hadn’t heard a word he’d said. Were all young people today idiots? Didn’t they see where everything was heading? Didn’t they care?
“You certainly are,” he mumbled as she walked off. “You
are
sorry. A sorry excuse for a human being.”
He stopped dead when he got back to the park’s entrance. Someone had kicked over the stack, and most of the flyers were wafting away under the arch, over the sidewalk, whipping north up Fifth Avenue.
He ran out of the park and chased them for a while. He finally stopped. He felt completely drained and idiotic as he sat on the curb between a couple of parked cars.
He held his head in his hands as he wept. For twenty minutes he cried, listening to the wind, watching the relentless roll of traffic in the street.
Flyers? he thought, sniffling. He thought he could change things with a sheet of paper and a concerned expression? He looked down at the antique jeans jacket he’d taken from the back of his closet. So proud that it still fit. He really was a complete fool.
There was only one thing that could get people to sit up straight, only one thing that would open their eyes.
Only one thing then.
And only one thing now.
He nodded, finally resolving himself. He wasn’t going to be getting any help. He had to do it himself. Fine. Enough of this nonsense. The clock was ticking. He didn’t have any more time to fool the fuck around.
He discovered he was still holding on to a crumpled flyer. He smoothed it out on the cold pavement beside him, took out a pen, and made a vital correction. It snapped like an unfurled flag as he let the wind take it from his fingers.
The broad man with the graying hair wiped his eyes as the sheet he’d written on caught high on the corner lamppost behind him.
The word
LOVE
in the title had been X’ed out. Against an ash-gray sky above him it now said,
Blood
CAN CHANGE THE WORLD
!
Part One
ASHES TO ASHES
Chapter 1
BOUND IN THE dark, Jacob Dunning thought about all the things he would give for a shower.
All his possessions? Done. One of his toes? In a heartbeat. One of his fingers? Hmmm, he thought. Did he really need his left pinkie?
Unidentified mudlike filth stuck to his cheek, his hair. Wearing only his NYU T-shirt and boxers, the handsome brown-haired college freshman lay on a soiled concrete floor in a very tight space.
An angry industrial hum raged in the vague distance. He was blindfolded, and his hands were cuffed to a pipe behind him. A gag around his mouth was knotted tight against the hollow indentation at the base of his skull.
The indentation was called the
foramen magnum
, he knew. It was where your spinal cord passed into your skull. Jacob had learned about it in anatomy class a month or so ago. NYU was step one in his lifelong dream to become a doctor. His father had an 1862 edition of
Gray’s Anatomy
in his study, and ever since he was a little kid, Jacob had loved going through it. Kneeling in his father’s great padded office chair with his chin in his hands, he’d spend hours poring over the elegant, fascinating sketches, the topography of the human body shaded and named like distant lands, like treasure maps.
Jacob sobbed at the safe, happy memory. A drop of lukewarm water landed on the back of his neck and dripped down his spine. The itch of it was unbearable. He would get sores soon if he wasn’t able to stand. Bedsores, staph infection, disease.
The last thing he remembered was leaving Conrad’s, an Alphabet City bar that didn’t care about fake IDs. After a monstrously long chem lab, he’d been trying to chat up Heli, a stunning Finnish girl from his class. But after his fifth mojito, his tongue was losing speed. He’d called it a night when he noticed she was talking more to the male model of a bartender than to him.
His memory seemed to stop at the point when he stepped outside. How he got from there to here he couldn’t recall.
For the billionth time, he tried to come up with a scenario in which everything turned out all right. His favorite was that it was a fraternity thing. A bunch of jocks had mistaken him for some other freshman, and this was a really messed-up hazing incident.
He started weeping. Where were his clothes? Why would somebody take his jeans, his socks and shoes? The scenarios in his head were too black to allow light to enter. He couldn’t fool himself. He was in the deepest shit of his young life.
He banged his head on the pipe he was chained to as he heard a sound. It was the distant boom of a door. He felt his heart boom with it. His breath didn’t seem to know if it wanted to come in or go out.
He was pretty much convulsing when he made out a jangle interspersed with the steady approach of footsteps. He suddenly thought of the handyman at his parents’ building, the merry jingle of keys that bounced off his thigh. Skinny Mr. Durkin, who always had a tool in his hand. Hope gave him courage. It was a friend, he decided. Somebody who would save him.
“Hppp!” Jacob screamed from behind the gag.
The footsteps stopped. A lock clacked open, and cool air passed over the skin of his face. The gag was pulled off.
“Thank you! Oh, thank you! I don’t know what happened. I—”
Jacob’s breath blasted out of him as he was hit in the stomach with something tremendously hard. It was a steel-toed boot, and it seemed to knock his stomach clear through his spine.

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