Beach Road by James Patterson Page A

the beer mug, and he goes down like a shot and stays down. I think his nose is broken. It could be worse.
    “
C’mon!
” I yell at Martell, but he just backs away from me. I may not be Dante Halleyville’s size, but I’m six three and over two hundred, and I know how to scrap.
    “C’mon! Anybody!” I yell at the other cowards in the room. “Take your best shot! Somebody?”
    But only Jeff comes forward. He tucks me under his beefy arm and pushes me toward the back door.
    “Same old Tommy,” he says, once we’re in his truck. “Same hothead.”
    I stare out the windshield, still steaming as Jeff steps on the gas and we roar out of the parking lot.
    “Not at all,” I say. “I’ve mellowed.”

Chapter 43
    Tom
    THE NEXT DAY, at the Riverhead Correctional Facility, I place my wallet, watch, and keys in a small locker, then step through a series of heavy barred doors, one clanging shut behind me as another slides open in front.
    The difference between the life of a visitor and those locked inside is so vast it chills me to the bone. It’s like crossing from the land of the living into the land of the dead. Or having a day pass to hell.
    To the right, a long, hopeless corridor leads to the various wings of the overflowing fifteen-hundred-bed jail.
    I’m led to the left into a warren of airless little rooms set aside for inmates and their lawyers.
    I wait patiently in one of them until Dante is led into the room. He’s been inside a little less than a week but already seems harder and more distant. There’s no trace of a smile.
    But then he clasps my hand and bumps my chest and says, “Good to see you, Tom. It means a lot.”
    “It means a lot to me too, Dante,” I say, surprisingly touched by his greeting. “I need the work.”
    “That’s what Clarence says.” And his two-hundred-watt smile finally cracks through the shell.
This kid is no murderer. Anyone should be able to see that, even the local police.
    I really do need the work too. It feels like the first day of high school as I take out a new pack of legal pads and a box of pens.
    “Other than the fact that I will believe everything you tell me,” I say, “today’s going to be like being in that box with the detectives, because we’re going through that day and that night again and again. And we’re doing it until every detail you can remember is on these pads.”
    I have him start by telling me everything he knows about Kevin Sledge, Gary McCauley, and Dave Bond, his three other teammates that day. He tells me where they live, work, and hang out. He gives me their cell phone numbers and tells me how to track them down if they try to avoid me.
    “All have been in some scrapes,” says Dante, “but that doesn’t mean much where I’m from. McCauley’s on probation for drugs, and Bond served ten months right in here for armed robbery. But the real gangster is Kevin, who has never spent a day in jail.”
    “How did they react to Michael pulling the gun?”
    “They thought it was wack. Even Kevin.”
    We talk about what happened the night of the murder. Unfortunately, his grandmother was visiting relatives in Brooklyn, so she hadn’t seen him before or after the shootings. Dante swears to me that he didn’t know where Michael Walker was hiding.
    I’d forgotten how tedious this kind of work can be. Hartstein, my professor at St. John’s, used to call it “ass in the chair” work because that’s what it comes down to, the willingness to keep asking questions and the persistence to go through events again and again even if it only yields a few crumbs of new, probably useless, information.
    And it’s twice as hard in here because Dante and I have to do it without caffeine or sugar.
    Nevertheless, we keep on slogging, turning our attention to what he and Michael Walker saw and heard when they arrived to meet Feifer that night. These few minutes are the key to everything, and I keep pressing Dante for more details. But it’s not until our