Ыоуве Been Warned   ::   Patterson James

Chapter 89



I STAND UP from my computer, having had more than enough of this. I’m woozy and in a daze. If Frank Delmonico’s no longer alive, whom have I been talking to the past few days?

Impulsively, I reach into my pocket and pull out Delmonico’s card. I think back to when he handed it to me outside the hotel. I can picture it clearly.

Wait.

That’s it!

I rush to my darkroom and the pictures lining nearly every inch of wall space. I shot so many that morning outside the hotel. I covered every angle twice over. All the commotion. All the people. Police, paramedics – there’s no way he could’ve escaped my lens.

Grabbing my loupe, I begin to search. It’s my own desperate version of Where’s Waldo? I move left to right across every photo, looking for that gray suit, those unmistakable eyes. Where’s Delmonico?

I can’t find him in any of the pictures.

So what do I do? I start over. I go slower, inch by inch, top to bottom. The sweat from my face and arms is sticking to the photo paper. My head is throbbing; my eyes are killing me.

C’mon, where are you, Delmonico? I know you’re here somewhere.

But he isn’t.

Taking a giant step back, I breathe in deep and try to think. Dead or alive, real or imagined, what does Detective Frank Delmonico have to do with me? I’d never heard of him before, never seen him until that first time at the Fálcon. What does it mean that he wasn’t there when the four bodies were carried out but afterward he was Frankie-on-the-spot, investigating me? That’s something, but what does it mean?

Just then, I feel a pair of eyes on me and I nearly jump out of my skin.



Chapter 90



I TURN TO SEE my father staring down coldly from behind his thick glasses.

Next to the picture of him is the one of Dr. Magnumsen. They certainly have a connection with Delmonico. They’re dead. At least they’re supposed to be.

I study the image of my father on the streets of New York, his body such a startling contradiction: the square jaw versus the hunched shoulders; a strong man beaten down by an unfair world. My dad was a gifted carpenter, a volunteer fireman. Once, he rescued a little boy from a flooded ravine by tying a loop in his belt and hanging upside down from a bridge.

But being the town hero didn’t pay well, and when his carpentry jobs started to dry up during the recession of the eighties, money in our house got tight. Ironic, really.