Free Now You See Her by James Patterson

this?! Morley was watching the house now? Watching me?
    I backed away from the window in disbelief, fighting for breath. My back hit a chair, and I collapsed onto the Mexican tile.

Chapter 28
    IT WAS SUNSET when the sound of seagulls woke me from the living room couch. Two of them were fighting over something along the backyard seawall. I watched them with horrific fascination as they cawed and hacked at each other with their beaks.
    I gulped down a glass of water at the sink. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I was opening the fridge when I heard a car and the crunch of wheels in our crushed-shell driveway.
    I ran to the living room window in a full-blown panic. Morley’s black-and-white Bronco was gone, but instead, there was a police cruiser pulling into the driveway.
    The cruiser’s passenger door opened, and I almost passed out.
    The cruiser backed out of the driveway as Peter, his left arm stiff, walked to the door.
    Peter?
    Why was he here? Wasn’t he supposed to be in a frigging hospital bed!? Why the hell would they let him come home so soon? He’d been shot!
    I backed away from the window, swallowing hard as his keys jingled at the door.
    The lock clicked open as the knob turned.
    Peter stopped like a kid playing freeze tag when he spotted me from the doorway.
    I was frozen as well. Everything was strange, slightly off kilter. Even the light was wrong. It didn’t feel like sunset. It felt like the morning.
    Peter closed the door behind him. Then his keys dropped from his hand as his blue eyes beaded with tears. He squatted and then collapsed onto the front hall tile.
    “Those assholes at the hospital told me to stay, but no way,” he said, squinting up at the ceiling. “Soon as I woke up, I pulled that shit out of my arm and left. Fuck them and fuck those assholes who tried to kill me. I made it. I win. They lose. I’m home, Jeanine.”
    I thought about everything then. All the strange things I’d seen. Everything Peter had been keeping from me. I knew that what Peter was up to probably wasn’t by the book, but I also knew that whatever it was, there had to be a good reason behind it.
    Maybe he was in over his head, I thought suddenly. He did the finances. Maybe he’d made a bad investment and was trying to make up for it by doing something not exactly legal. Couldn’t his nocturnal activity be his way of trying to protect us?
    After all, I, of all people, knew he wasn’t exactly a by-the-book sort of guy. Peter was a risk taker. He’d certainly taken a risk on me. If I didn’t like it, I shouldn’t have married him, right?
    A pang of love and sympathy for him went through me then. I didn’t want him to go to work ever again. I wanted him to stay here in our house, where it was safe. To stay here in our sanctuary, where bad things were kept away and all mistakes were forgotten.
    I walked over and sat down beside him. I held his hand as he buried his face in my hair and cried.
    “I was so afraid, Peter,” I said. “I thought I lost you.”

Chapter 29
    ELENA’S WAKE was the following evening at the Dean-Lopez Funeral Home on Simonton Street. Peter and I were instantly swamped by the block-long line of dress-uniformed law enforcement on the sidewalk.
    Peter, too, was wearing his crisply ironed uniform, his hat pulled low over his eyes, his dress blue coat draped over his wounded shoulder like a cape. I walked beside him in my somber black dress, holding on to his good arm.
    Hundreds of hands patted Peter softly on the back as we walked through the parted crowd.
    “We’ll catch those bastards, man,” a bald state trooper with a twirly circus-strongman mustache said.
    “Hang in there, buddy,” said a short black female cop in a Marathon PD uniform.
    Down the other side of the block, a crowd of saddened black people were also filing into the funeral home. I spottedyoung black boys in starched white shirts and bow ties, young girls in what looked like Communion dresses. There was