Free The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson Page B

for a little crisis, a little pesonality change for the better.
    Sometimes, Toy considered the psychiatrist certifiable herself. But she dispensed tranquilizers like vitamin pills, and Ben Toy believed in Valium, in Stelazine and Thorazine. They had a proven track record. They worked for him.
    When he left Reva Baumwell’s apartment building that day he had a prescription for twenty milligrams of Stelazine in the pocket of his peach nik-nik shirt. Basically, he was feeling pretty good about life.
    Then he saw Harley Wynn again.
    This time Wynn didn’t run away. He was leaning against a silver Mercedes parked in front of the building’s awning. The smug look on his face brought to mind F.B.I. agents harassing hippie dope dealers.
    The two of them met under the building’s long shadow.
    “I saw you on East End Avenue too,” Wynn said in a drawl that seemed to be thickening. “You see, I’ve been thinking about last week. I decided you were a little too abrupt with me … So I’ve been following you around. I’ve seen Berryman.”
    Ben Toy’s impulse was to sucker-punch Wynn right there. To smash his head across the car hood.
    “I want to talk to him,” the southern man continued. “Face to face … we have things to discuss about Jimmie Horn.”
    Toy lighted up a cigarette, “Where did you see Berryman?” he asked.
    “Outside of Eighty Central Park South,” Harley Wynn said. “He was with this tall girl. Foxy lady. They caught a cab.”
    “All right,” Toy said.
    Together, they started walking toward 72nd Street. Toy stopped at a corner phone booth on 72nd and called Berryman.
    Berryman listened to the whole story before he said a word.
    “That’s his fuck-up,” was what Toy remembered him saying first. “I’d have to say it’s your fuck-up too,” he went on. “I think you know the alternatives. I hope you do anyway.”
    Berryman hung up on him, but Toy held the receiver to his ear an extra minute or two. His head was reeling.
    Then Toy swung open the phone booth door and smiled at the young southerner for the first time. What he said was, “Everything’s cool. Berryman said it was my fuck-up … He wants to talk to you this afternoon.”
    A little after three o’clock that afternoon, Ben Toy sat beside the slightly younger Wynn in the crackling red leather seat of an Olds 98.
    Toy was thinking that his mind was going to snap. Crack like somebody’s backbone.
    The shiny black sedan was parked in bright sun in a Flushing junkyard near La Guardia Airport. It was all flat, baking weeds over to dismal, sagging high-risers a mile or so away.
    Harley Wynn kept saying that Berryman was late. Five minutes late. Ten minutes late. Fifteen minutes late.
    A white Chevy came barrel-assing down the dirt road leading into the junkyard. It was doing seventy or eighty, then it skidded and u-turned. Kids. Joy-riders.
    “Y’see Tom Berryman is real concerned with his own safety,” Ben Toy explained to Wynn. “He’s a real brain. Takes zip chances. He’s obsessed sometimes. But he’ll be here. Don’t worry. Stop worrying.”
    Wynn had his arm across the back of the leather seat and he was looking off at the apartment buildings. His head was at a good angle for a portrait. He was showing his nice white teeth just right.
    “I’m sure Berryman doesn’t take chances,” he said.
    The two men were sitting around, talking like that, and then Ben Toy very suddenly reached out of his jacket, and shot Harley Wynn in the side of the forehead.
    The action was completed totally on impulse. Toy kept saying
now, now, now, now,
and when it felt real, when he believed it somewhere in his body, a small black .38 flashed out, the trigger snapped back. The sound was deafening, a sound Toy would never forget. Pink flesh and blood splatted onto the vinyl roof and the windshield. Wynn’s head went out the open window and hung there.
    Toy left the southerner spreadeagled across a pink flowered box spring in the junkyard. His