12 Months to Live by James Patterson

Author:James Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2023-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Fifty-Five

Jimmy

MICKEY DUNNE IS ALREADY on the Long Island Expressway, at Exit 50 he says, when he calls Jimmy and tells him he has a day off and, what the hell, he thought he’d come out and see how Jimmy and the rest of the fancy people live.

“You must have a reason,” Jimmy says.

“I do. Something you should see.”

“What?”

“Tell you when I see you. I’m getting as geeked about talking on the phone as you are.”

“You better not be screwing with me, partner,” Jimmy says.

“By making a trip all the way out to you I don’t need to make? In what world?”

Jimmy tells Mickey to meet him at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton, Jimmy’s favorite diner in the area, good enough to be the kind of breakfast joint you see every couple of blocks in the city, one with homemade ice cream, too. Cash only. Old-school.

Jimmy is waiting in a booth in an otherwise empty back room, the place having thinned out the way it always does in the late morning. Mickey is wearing baggy blue jeans and a black short-sleeved polo shirt with a logo Jimmy doesn’t recognize. A NEVER FORGET baseball hat. As usual, he orders like he’s going to the chair: eggs and bacon and home fries and a stack of pancakes on the side.

Jimmy tells him about his night.

“When’s the last time you took a bullet?” Mickey says.

“Been a while.”

“Still feel the same?”

“What do you think?”

“Guy shoots you and not her. How does that figure?”

“I will make sure to ask him when I find him,” Jimmy says.

Mickey reaches down into the ancient leather satchel he has with him, a gift from Jimmy about a thousand or so years ago, places a notebook on the table between them, Crime Scene Log written in Magic Marker on the cover.

The book is about six inches long, maybe four wide—that size so it can fit into the side pocket of police pants. Something else that’s old-school. Nowadays, Jimmy knows, the notes from a crime scene are typed into an electronic copy of the report. Just not back in the day, when you wrote it all down in great detail by hand if you were doing your job, usually the junior officer on the scene, and then the most relevant pages would be torn out of the book and copied again into the detectives’ case file.

Mickey tells it his way, at his own speed, like always.

“Charlie Culligan was the junior officer on the day in question,” he says. “The senior guy was Ernie Gottlieb, now deceased. They’re the ones who caught the case.”

Jimmy opens the notebook. Mickey taps the page with a stubby finger, the name he wants Jimmy to see clearly written at the bottom.

“As luck would have it, I ran into Charlie the other day. He’s about six months from putting in his papers. I told him I was with you, what you got going, not just the thing with the trial but the other thing. And he tells me about this.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.