Free NYPD Red 4 by James Patterson

Kylie led the convoy across town, toward the FDR Drive. “Your average taxpayer might think that’s excessive.”
    She looked over her shoulder at him. “That’s because your average taxpayer’s never been shot at,” she said.
    Davis and Ryder lived downtown, on Rivington Street. We parked our vehicles around the corner on Suffolk and met up with one of the cops from the three units we’d dispatched as soon as we had the address.
    “That’s the building, over there,” he said, pointing to a five-story gray-brick building. The facade from the second floor to the roof was covered with a cluster of metal fire escapes that probably dated back to the first half of the twentieth century. There was a storefront at street level, but it was boarded up, and the window had become a canvas for a graffiti artist who had done a remarkably good likeness of the Notorious B.I.G.
    “Nobody in or out since we got here,” the cop said.
    I gave a hand signal, and a dozen cops poured out into the street, weapons at the ready. The team leader opened the front door and stopped.
    “Blood,” he whispered. He threw a light on the floor, and I could see it. A trail of blood leading to the inside door. He turned the knob. It didn’t give.
    One of his men took a Hooligan Tool and cracked the lock like it was an egg.
    There were more bloodstains on the stairs. We followed the trail to Davis’s apartment door, on the third floor.
    “We’ve got probable cause to enter,” I whispered to Sandusky, pointing at the bloody floor. “Leave the building. Now.”
    He looked both relieved and disappointed, but he didn’t argue. He left.
    “Open it,” I said to the team leader.
    One of his men had a universal skeleton key: a thirty-five-pound steel battering ram. One swing and the wooden door splintered.
    There was a man sprawled facedown on the floor, and I held a gun on him as the team stormed the apartment. They checked the bedroom and the closets, and within seconds I heard a volley of “Clear, clear, clear.”
    I holstered my gun. The man on the floor was unmistakably dead.
    “Roll him,” I said.
    Two of the cops flipped the body over.
    It was Raymond Davis, his face ashy gray, his eyes bugged open in wide surprise, a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

CHAPTER 21
    It was the kind of crime scene that nerds like Chuck Dryden live for. A dead murder suspect with a bullet in his brain, a second bullet embedded in the pockmarked plaster on the opposite side of the room, and a wall covered with bright red high-velocity blood spatters that were the clues to the dirty little details of Raymond Davis’s last moments on earth. For Chuck it was the equivalent of forensic porn.
    Kylie and I left him to his fun and went out to canvass the area.
    We went back to the bloody trail that had led us to the apartment and followed it down the stairs, out the front door, and onto the street. A half block from the building it ended abruptly.
    “He must have figured out he was leaving bread crumbs,” Kylie said. “You think Teddy Ryder is our bleeder?”
    “I doubt if he’s our shooter,” I said. “These guys were BFFs.”
    “It wouldn’t be the first relationship that was dissolved by a bullet.”
    “But Teddy is gun-shy. His parents were con artists. In their line of work the only reason to carry a piece is if you’re hoping for a stiffer sentence when you get busted. Besides, we know that Raymond was trolling the bars, looking for a buyer.”
    “I guess he found one,” Kylie said. “So, two shots fired in apartment 3A. How many of the tenants do you think heard anything?”
    I laughed. New Yorkers in general are reluctant to come forward and get involved—especially in a crime of violence. And I was willing to bet that Raymond Davis’s neighbors would be even less inclined to talk to the cops. With twelve apartments in the building, at least somebody would have to have heard the two gunshots. And yet no one had called 911. We