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Back The Outside Man Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
  1. Cover Page
  2. EARLY BIRD BOOKS
  3. Praise for the Writing of Richard North Patterson
  4. Title Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. One
  8. Two
  9. Three
  10. Four
  11. Five
  12. Six
  13. Seven
  14. Eight
  15. Nine
  16. Ten
  17. Eleven
  18. Twelve
  19. Thirteen
  20. Fourteen
  21. Fifteen
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-one
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. About the Author

I awoke panicky with the sense of lost time. It was dark. Seconds passed as I recognized my garage, replayed the surreal drift of the drive home, a collage of strobe-light beams, curves that shifted and distances that shrank abruptly, leaping shadows. The luminous blue of my wristwatch became numbers again. I relaxed; I had lost perhaps fifteen minutes.

I got out, moving from muscle memory through the garage and into the backyard. The night moved. Fluorescent moonlight yellowed the grass and oaks and the pathway of mossy stones leading to the sunroom. Its windows were dark. Inside the house was total darkness.

Stumbling from stone to stone I ran toward the house, slipping, falling palms forward on the slippery moss of the stone in front of me, smelling its dankness. Crablike, I pushed at the slimy rocks and then the whine came and bits of rock flew into my face.

The second bullet struck the tree behind me. Kris Ann, I thought frenziedly. I came up running off balance with the third shot, headed for the sunroom window. Ten feet, five feet. A fourth shot. Arms across my face, I hurtled through the window amidst a hail of shattering glass and hit the floor, blacking out for the last time.

Twenty-six

TWENTY-SIX

I awoke staring up at the antique fan. Stinging cuts covered my hands. The house was dark and silent and no one stood over me. I couldn’t remember Kris Ann’s Audi parked in the garage.

I got up.

Glass crunched beneath my first step. The step took too long. My brain was a box of light unable to send signals through its walls. Inside the box I knew someone could kill me, but my feet were stone.

I took a slow second step. My head felt melon soft.

The third step was easier, and the fourth. I got used to the numbness and to making noise that they could hear.

The living room was empty.

I stopped to let my eyes adjust. In the dining room ahead, moonlight caught the hard polish of mahogany. Its corners were stained by darkness. But when I went there nothing happened. The windows were cracked open and through the screens came cricket sounds in a chorus of rising and falling, moving like the night had moved. The lot next door, tangled and overgrown, was full of them. I realized that the shots had come from there. Still I heard no footsteps but mine.

I edged to the kitchen door, back to the wall until my head turned the corner.

Nothing. Nothing but two barstools at the counter, a coffee cup and dirty ashtray, thin shadows on the wall. Slowly, silent now, I moved to the drawers for a carving knife.

It was smooth, balanced in my hand. I began reaching for the light switch, then stopped. Light would help them.