Free The Quickie by James Patterson

sheets to the wind, as they say. Maybe four.
    How bad I was feeling tonight wasn’t a fraction of what was going on with Paul, I realized, staring at his troubled, unconscious face.
    I knocked off the last shot in his bottle before I tried to shake him awake. No response.
    One of his eyes flipped open when I tugged his earlobe. I pulled at his right hand until he stood.
    He mumbled something, but I couldn’t make it out as I brought him into the house. I’d never seen him so drunk.
    I almost threw my back out, trying to steer him into our bedroom. I finally laid him on top of the bed, and I brought over the wastebasket in case he was sick.
    I was just able to make it into the bathroom myself before all the pent-up stress exploded out of me in violent sobs.
    Where the hell was all this going? What did I think I was doing, playing dumb in the investigation? This wasn’t a game.
Scott Thayer was dead.
Few things on this earth bring down more scrutiny than an NYPD cop getting murdered. Did I think I could bluff my way through this? Was I crazy?
    I thought about Brooke Thayer again. Her autistic daughter. The two other kids. I felt poisoned. Evil. I wanted to turn myself in. At this point, I would do just about anything to take this black burden off myself.
    But I wasn’t the one who would get punished for it.
    It was Paul.
    So, what was I supposed to do now?

Chapter 36
    I STILL HADN’T FIGURED THAT OUT when I totally collapsed three minutes later in the shower.
    One moment I was standing there, shampooing my hair, and the next I was sitting down hard on the cold porcelain, water pinging off my torso and legs.
    I pressed my forehead to the wet tile as the sum of the night’s events dripped through me. What made me the sickest was hard to decide. My flat-out betrayal of Paul? Or staring into Scott’s dead face? Or maybe staring into his wife’s face?
    Closing my eyes, I longed crazily for the water to melt me, to let me stream down the floor of the tub and disappear with a gurgle into the drain.
    After a minute of that not happening, I lifted my head off the tile and opened my eyes.
    This wasn’t just going to go away, was it? I needed to do something. But what?
    I considered my choices.
    First, what would happen if I turned Paul in?
    I was an expert on the Bronx criminal justice system. Like any retailer faced with massive volume most of the time, the Bronx DA’s office was willing to make a deal with offenders, offer justice at a reduced rate. But the high-profile nature of Scott’s case, I realized, would be considered a career maker for the prosecution. It would be Paul against the system, and the system would make sure that this was one case they would win, and win with a vengeance.
    I thought of the mountains of legal bills. The cost of bail for Paul.
If
he could get bail.
    Even with the obvious plea of self-defense, the best-case scenario we were looking at was manslaughter, five years of state prison. I shook my head.
Five years.
Whenever I dropped off a prisoner at Rikers, after five
minutes
I longed to do a hundred laps in a pool of antibacterial soap. I winced as I remembered the cattle line in the search room. The sound of crying babies and the beneath-the-table sex in Visitors.
    I imagined Paul looking at me over a scuzzy table, disgust in his blackened eyes.
    “What’s the matter, Lauren?” he would say. “I thought you liked quickies.”
    And if that wasn’t horror enough to consider, there was the New York press. What could be more salivating to the tabloids than a love triangle gone wrong, where two cops were involved, one of them now dead! We were looking at long-lasting infamy here.
    Loser Hall of Fame material.
    Mass-media humiliation.
    And let’s not forget what would happen to Scott’s family. Right now, Brooke was being regarded as a hero’s wife. But once the truth got out, that Scott was killed by the husband of the woman he was cheating with, it would be bye-bye crying on the