James Patterson Read Online Free

simply watching. He reached inside his back pocket and produced a black beret for his sweaty head. At fifteen he fancied himself part Huey P. Newton, part Selassie, part Che.
    During the mad courtroom screaming, he turned to Franklin Smith and told the older man to shut his “black nager-boy mout.”
    Strangely, the thirty-year-old man did as he was told.
    Outside the cigar-box courthouse, the reggae singer Bob Marley was being blasted from loudspeakers on top of a rainbow-colored VW van.
    Marley and his Wailers also yelled out of oversize transistor radios along the crowded palm-tree-lined sidewalks.
    Angry black faces screamed at the courthouse building as if it were alive. Rude boys in the crowd carried posters promoting the cause of the revolutionary colonel Monkey Dred, and also of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Pretty, innocent-faced schoolchildren waved beautiful hand-painted banners— GO HOME ADMIRAL NELSON, GO HOME LAURENCE ROCKEFELLER; SAN DOMINICA A BLACK REPUBLIC.
    Shiny-faced city policemen marched up Court Street behind see-through riot shields. People threw ripe fruit at the police. Mangoes, green coconuts, small melons.
    A nut-skinned man in army fatigues ran up to a TV camera and made a bizarre, contorted face into the lens. “Aaahh deangerous!” he shouted, and became famous across the world.
    At 11:15 a row of five Hertz rentals was blown up with plastique at Robert F. Kennedy Airport outside Coastown.
    At 11:30 the three black murderers were led out onto the shiny white courthouse porch.
    The San Dominican terrors were about to begin in earnest.
    Fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet had on a Day-Glo flowered shirt and dark Tonton Macoute sunglasses. His black beret was tipped slightly over one eye. Deangerously.
    At first Rachet smiled broadly as he waved his handcuffed hands high over his head like a prizefight winner. Then, as the police shoved him down the glaring white steps, the boy began literally to scream at the sky.
    “Dred kill yo’, mon! Monkey kill al you’! Slit al yo’ troats.” Over and over the boy screamed out the name of an island revolutionary.
    “Monkey Dred slit me own auntie’s troat. Ay-ee! Ay-ee!”
    Suddenly a well-dressed black man in the crowd screamed out above all the other noise. “Gee-zass, mon. Oh, Gee-zass Ky-rist!”
    Someone had thrown a sun-catching, silver Fris-bee high up into the air. It curved down into the crowd around the handcuffed murderers.
    As fifteen-year-old Leon Rachet reached the bottom of the courthouse steps, where the back door of a black police Rover was flung open to receive him, his eyes turned up toward the suddenly descending silver Frisbee—and a white man in a Panama suit and hat stepped out of the crowd and fired three shots into the mad boy’s face.
    Carrie Rose watched the strange, possessed teenager crumple up and fall. She was among the large group of white tourists behind police lines. She hoped the rest of the terrors would go as smoothly as this one had.
    Robert F. Kennedy Airport; Coastown, SanDominica
    Tuesday Evening.
    At 9:45 that night, an American Airlines Boeing 727 began its light, feathery approach down into San Dominica’s Robert F. Kennedy Airport.
    The massive silver plane glided in amazingly low over the blue-black Caribbean.
    Big red lights blinked at one-second intervals on the plane’s wings and tail. The red lights reflected beautifully off the dark blue sea.
    Hidden in blackness beside a filling station near runway two, Damian Rose watched the pretty landing with considerable interest. He ran through his final plan one more time.
    Meanwhile, out on runway one, the tires of the 727 were already touching down with the slightest bump and grind. A half-stoned calypso band began to play up near the main terminal.
    The airplane’s wheels screeched as its brakes and thrust-reversal system took hold.
    As the plane reached a point halfway to its landing mark, Damian Rose was forced to make a decision. Raising an