NYPD Red 4 by James Patterson

glamorous as it looks,” I said.
    He laughed and said good night. I got in the elevator. It had been hours since I’d walked out on Cheryl without saying a word, and I wondered if she’d still be there when I got upstairs.
    Angel probably knew. But I was too embarrassed to ask him if my new live-in girlfriend had moved out with all her stuff while I was away.

CHAPTER 24
    Annie Ryder was a night owl. As her husband, Buddy, loved to say, “Annie never goes to sleep on the same day she wakes up.” So when her cell rang at ten minutes after midnight, she didn’t panic. She just figured it was one of her insomniac neighbors who wanted to stop by for a cup of tea and an earful of gossip.
    The screen on her iPhone said Private Caller, but that didn’t bother Annie either. Caller ID was a two-way street, and since she always blocked her name and number from popping up, she couldn’t fault anyone else. She muted the TV and answered the phone with a crisp “Hello. Who’s this?”
    “Ma,” a weak voice on the other end said.
    She stood up and pressed the phone to her ear. “Teddy, are you all right? What’s wrong?”
    “I got shot.”
    “Oh Jesus. Where?”
    “In my apartment, but I’m not there now. I ran like hell.”
    “Teddy, no—not where were you when you got shot. Where did the bullet hit you?”
    “Oh. He shot me in the stomach.”
    Annie was good in emergencies, but this was a crisis. She instinctively moved over to the sideboard and rested her hand on Buddy’s urn for strength.
    “Listen to me,” she said. “Get yourself to a hospital. Now.”
    “Ma, are you crazy? I go to the hospital with a gunshot wound, and they call the cops.”
    “Teddy, I’d rather visit you in jail than identify your body at the morgue. A bullet to the abdomen can be lethal. God knows how many of your organs got torn up. Get your ass to an ER before you bleed to death internally.”
    “My organs are fine,” Teddy said. “You’re thinking like I got shot in the belly button. That’s not what happened. It’s more like the bullet went through the fat parts that hang off the side.”
    “Love handles?” Annie said.
    “Yeah. That’s not so bad, right?”
    “Of course it’s bad. You want to get an infection and die of sepsis? We have to treat it right away. Where are you?”
    “I just got off the subway. I’m standing outside the station.”
    Annie gritted her teeth. The subway. The station. Teddy had never mastered the art of spelling out details. “ Which station?” she demanded.
    “Yours, Ma. I took the N train to Astoria Boulevard. I’m right here under the el by the Pizza Palace on 31st Street.”
    “Jesus, you’re right around the corner?”
    “Yeah, but I didn’t want to just come up to the apartment in case the cops are watching it.”
    “Smart thinking, kiddo,” she said.
    The catchphrase was a throwback to Teddy’s grade-school days, when he was a permanent fixture in the slow learners’ class.
    Early on, Buddy came up with a plan. “The kid may not be too bright,” he said, “but we can’t be the ones to reinforce it. Our job is to con him into thinking he’s smarter than he is.”
    From that day forward, whenever Teddy did or said something that would be normal for an average kid, Annie and Buddy rewarded him, sometimes with a sweet treat, sometimes a little gift. But the positive feedback that always made Teddy the happiest was those three little words: Smart thinking, kiddo.
    It still worked. “Thanks, Ma,” Teddy said. “So what do I do now?”
    “I’ll come for you,” she said, lifting the lid of the trunk where Buddy had kept the tricks of his trade. “First I’ve got to find something for you to wear so nobody recognizes you. Now just promise me you’ll stay out of sight till I get there.”
    “I’m starved.”
    “Promise, damn it.”
    “Okay, okay, I promise.”
    She hung up the phone. “The boy is in deep shit this time, Buddy,” she called out to the urn containing