Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

by Patterson, James

  Nickelodeon. Childrenk TV. Damon and Jannie loved it. In a way, so did I. Nickelodeon was about families, and it probably infuriated Danny Boudreaux.

  He grinned at me! He had such a fiendish, madhouse look.

  Then he spoke quietly, as I just had. He expertly mimicked my concern for him. His instincts were sharp and cruel. It scared me again. It also made me want to rush him and punch his lights out.

  “You don't have to whisper. Nobody's sleeping in here. Well, nobody except George the Doorman.”

  He laughed, reveling in his crazy, creepy inappropriateness.

  Here was the real psychopathic deal. Danny was a thrill killer in the flesh, even at thirteen.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Christine again.

  “No. Not really,” she whispered.

  “Shut the hell up!” Boudreaux yelled at both of us. He pointed his gun at Christine, then back at me. “When I say something, I mean it.”

  I realized I wasn't going to get the gun away from the boy. I had to try something else. He looked close to the breaking point, way too close.

  I decided to make a move immediately.

  I concentrated on the boy, trying to gauge his weaknesses. I watched him without seeming to watch.

  I took a couple of slow, deliberate steps toward the living room window. An ancient African milking stool sat there. I glanced outside at the police lines staggered across the front lawn, keeping their distance. I could see riot shields and Plexiglas masks, battle dress uniforms, flak vests, guns everywhere. Jesus, what a scene. This mad boy had caused all this.

  “Don't get any funny ideas,” he told me from across the room.

  I already had afunny idea, Dannyboy. I already made my move.

  It done! Can you figure it out? Are you as smart as you think you are, creep?

  “Why not?” I asked him. He didn't answer me. He was going to kill us. What more could he do?

  There was a real good reason for me to be near the window. I was going to position myself and Christine Johnson on opposite sides of the living room.

  I'd done it. I had already made the move.

  Boudreaux didn't seem to notice.

  “What do you think of me now?” he snarled. “How do I stack up against those assholes Jack and Jill? How about against the great Gary Soneji? You can tell me the truth. Won't hurt my feelings. Because I don't have any feelings.”

  “I'm going to tell you the truth,” I said to him, “since that's what you want to hear. I haven't been impressed by any killers and I'm not impressed by you, either. Not in that way.”

  His mouth twisted and he snarled, “Yeah? Well, I'm not impressed by you, either, Dr. Hotshit Cross. Who's got the gun, though?”

  Danny Boudreaux stared at me for a long, intense moment.

  His eyes looked crossed behind the lenses of his glasses. The pupils were pinpointed. He looked as if he were going to shoot me right then. My heart was racing. I looked across the room at Christine Johnson.

  “I have to kill you. You know that,” he said as if it made all the sense in the world. Suddenly, he was speaking in a bored voice. It was disconcerting as hell. “You and Christine have to go down.”

  He glanced around at her. His eyes were dark holes. “Black bitch! Sneaky, manipulative bitch, too. You dissed me bad at that stupid school of yours. How dare you disrespect me!” he flared again.

  “That's not true,” Christine Johnson said. She spoke right up. “I was trying to protect those kids out in the yard. It had nothing to do with you. I had no idea who you were. How could I?”

  He stamped one black-booted foot hard. He was petulant, impatient, unforgiving. He was a mean little prick in every way, “Don't tell me what the hell I know! You can't tell what I'm thinking! You can't get inside my head! Nobody can.”

  ' “Why do you think you have to kill anybody else?” I asked Boudreaux.

  He flared at me again. Pointed his gun. “Don't fucking try to shrink-wrap me! Don't you dare.”

  “I wouldn't do that.” I shook my head. “Nobody likes lies, or people trying to pull cheap tricks. I don't.”

  Suddenly, he swung the Smith & Wesson toward Christine.

  “I have to kill people because... that's what I do.” He laughed again, cackled, and wheezed like a fiend.

  Christine Johnson sensed what was coming. She knew something had to be done before Danny Boudreaux exploded.

  The boy turned to me again. He swiveled his hips and almost seemed to be preening. He watching himself act like this, I realized. He's loving this.

  “You've been trying to trick me,” he said. “That's why the calm Mr. Rogers voice. Backing off from me, so you're not so almighty big and threatening. I see right through you.”

  “You're right,” I said, "but not completely right. I've been talking like this... real softly... to distract you from what I'm really doing. You blew your own game. You just lost! You little chump.

  You weasly little son of a bitch."

  “YOU CAN'T SHOOT both of us,” I told Danny Boudreaux.

  I spoke in a clear, firm voice. At the same time, I angled my body sideways. Gave him less of a target.

  I took another step toward my side of the large living room. I widened the distance between Christine Johnson and me.

  “What the hell do you mean? What are you talking about, Cross? TALK TO ME, CROSS! I DEMAND IT!”

  I didn't answer him. Let him figure it out. I knew that he would.

  He was a smart bad boy Daniel Boudreaux stared at me, then quickly back at Christine.

  He got the message. He finally saw the trap, subtle as it was.

  His eyes bore deeply into my skull. He knew what I'd done.

  One of us would get to him if he shot at the other. He couldn't have his final blaze of glory.

  “You dumb piece of shit,” he growled at me. His voice was low and threatening. “You're the one who gets it first then!”

  He raised the Smith & Wesson. I was staring down the barrel at him. “TALK TO ME, YOU BASTARD!”

  “That's enough!” Christine shouted from the other side of the room. She was unbelievable under the pressure, the circumstances.

  “You've killed enough,” she said to Boudreaux.

  Danny Boudreaux was starting to panic. Wild eyes stared out from a head that seemed to be on a swivel. “No, I haven't killed enough fucking useless robots. I'm just getting started!” His skin was stretched tight against the bones of his face.

  He swung the Smith & Wesson toward Christine. His arms were stretched ramrod straight. His whole body was shaking and canted to the left.

  "Danny? I yelled his name and started to move on him.

  He hesitated for an instant. Then he jerked the gun and fired.

  A deafening muzzle blast in close quarters.

  He fired at Christine!

  She tried to spin out of the way I couldn't tell if she had.

  I kept coming, then I was in the air.

  Danny Boudreaux swung the semiautomatic back at me. His eyes were filled with terror and intense hatred. His body shook with rage, fear, desperation. Maybe he could get us both.

  I moved a lot faster than he thought I could. I was inside the radius of his arm and the outstretched gun.

  I crashed into Danny Boudreaux as if he were a full-grown man, an armed and dangerous one. I crushed him with a full body-blow. I relished the contact.

  Danny Boudreaux and I were down in a sprawling heap. We were tangled up, a mass of flying arms and twitching, kicking legs. The revolver went off again. I didn't feel any blinding pain yet, but I tasted blood.

  The boy screamed in his high-pitched wall. He wailed! I wrenched the gun out of his hand. He tried to bite me, to rip into my flesh. Then the boy growled.

  He began to have a seizure, possibly from the drug withdrawal.

  A major surge of brain activity was being discharged in his body He was thrashing his arms and his legs. His pelvis thrust forward as if he were dry-humping my leg.

/>   His eyes rolled back, and his body suddenly went limp. Foam spewed from his mouth. His arms and legs continued to flail and twitch. He might have lost consciousness for a second or two.

  He continued to drool, to make choking and gurgling SOUnds.

  I flipped him on his side. His lips were dusky blue. His eyes finally rolled back into place. They started to blink rapidly. The seizure had ended as quickly as it had come. He lay limp on the floor, a pool of wild bad boy.

  The police had heard the shots. They were all over the living room. Riot shotguns, drawn pistols. Lots of shouting and squawking radio-receivers. Christine Johnson went to her husband.

  So did two of the EMS medics.

  The next time I looked, Christine was kneeling beside me. She didn't seem to be hurt. “Are you all right, Alex?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

  I was still holding down Danny Boudreaux. He seemed unaware of his surroundings. He was streaming with cold, oily sweat. The Sojourner Truth School killer now looked sad, lost, and unbearably confused. Thirteen years old. Five homicides.

  Maybe more.

  “Grand mal?” Christine asked.

  I nodded. “I think so. Maybe just too much excitement.”

  Danny Boudreaux was trying to say something, but I couldn't hear what it was. He sputtered, still drooling the bubbling white foam.

  “What did you say? What is it?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and my throat hurt. I was shaking and covered with sweat myself.

  He spoke in a tiny whisper, almost as if there were no one inside him anymore. “I'm afraid,” he told me. “I don't know where I am. I'm always so afraid.”

  I nodded at the small, horrifying face looking up at me. “I know,” I said to the young killer. “I know what you're feeling.”

  That was the scariest thing of all.

  THE DRAGONSLAYER lives, but how many lives do I have left?

  Why was I taking chances with my life? Physician, heal thyself.

  I stayed at the Johnson house for more than an hour, until the Boudreaux boy and the body of George Johnson were taken away There were questions I had to ask Christine Johnson for my report.

  Then I called home and spoke to Nana. I told her to please go to bed. I was safe and basically sound. For tonight, anyway

  “I love you, Alex,” she whispered over the phone. Nana sounded almost as tired and beat-up as I was.

  “! love you, too, old woman,” I told her.

  That night, miracle of miracles, she actually let me get in the last word.

  The crowd of ambulance-chasers on Summer Street finally broke up. Even the most persistent reporters and photographers left. One of Christine Johnson's sisters had arrived to be with her in this terrible time. I hugged Christine hard before I left.

  She was still trembling. She had suffered a horrible, unspeakable loss. We had both spent a night in hell. “I can't feel anything. Everything is so unreal,” she told me. “I know this isn't a nightmare, and yet I keep thinking that it has to be one.”

  Sampson drove me home at one in the morning. My eyes felt lidless. My brain was still going at a million miles an hour, still buzzing loudly, still overheated.

  What was our world coming to? Gary Soneji? Bundy? The Hillside Strangler? Koresh? McVeigh? On and on and on. Gandhi was asked once what he thought of Western civilization. He replied, “I think it could be a good idea.”

  I don't cry too much. I can't. The same is true for a lot of police officers I know. I wish I could cry sometimes, let it all out, release the fear and the venom, but it isn't that easy Something has gotten blocked up inside.

  I sat on the stairs inside our house. I had been on my way to my bedroom, but I hadn't made it. I was trying to cry, but I couldn't.

  I thought about my wife, Maria, who was killed in a drive-by shooting a few years back. Maria and I had fit together beautifully That wasn't just selective memory on my part. I knew how good love could be -- I knew it was the best thing I'd ever done in my life -- and yet here I was alone. I was taking chances with my life. I kept telling everybody that I was all right, but I wasn't.

  I don't know how long I stayed there in the darkness with my thoughts. Maybe ten minutes, maybe it was much more than that. The house was quiet in a familiar, almost comfortable way, but I couldn't be soothed that night.

  I listened to sounds that I had been hearing for years. I remembered being a small boy there, growing up with Nana, wondering what I would become someday Now I knew the answer to that question. I was a multiple-homicide expert who got to work the biggest, nastiest cases. I was the dragonslayer.

  I finally climbed the rest of the stairs and stopped in at Damon and Jannie's room. The two of them were fast asleep in the bedroom they share in our small house.

  I love the way Damon andJannie sleep, the trusting, innocent ways of my young son and daughter. I can watch them for long stretches, even on a howling-bad night like this one. I can't count how many times have peeked in and just stood in the doorway.

  They keep me going, keep me from flying apart some nights.

  They'd gone to sleep wearing funky, heart-shaped sunglasses like the ones the kids wear in the singing group called Innocence.

  It was cute as hell. Precious, too. I sat on the edge of Jannie's bed.

  I quietly took off my boots and carefully lay them on the floor without making any noise.

  Then I stretched myself out across the bottom of both their beds. I listened to my bones crack. I wanted to be near my kids, to be with them, for all of us to be safe. It didn't seem too much to ask out of life, too much reward for the day I had just lived through.

  I gently kissed the rubber-soled slipper-sock of Jannie's pajamas.

  I lay my hand very lightly against Damon's cool bare leg.

  I finally closed my eyes, and I tried to push the rushing scenes of murder and chaos out of my mind. I couldn't do it. The monsters were everywhere that night. They truly were all around me.

  There are so goddamn many of them. Wave upon wave, it seems, Young and old, and everything in between. Where are these monsters coming from in America? What has created them?

  Lying there alongside my two children, I finally was able to sleep somehow. For a few hours, was able to forget the most horrifying thing of all, the reason for my extreme sorrow and upset.

  I had heard the news before I left the Johnson house. President Thomas Byrnes had died early that morning.

  I WAS HOLDING and gently petting Rosie the cat. I had the kitchen door open and peered outside, squinted at Sampson.

  He stood in a freezing-cold rain. He looked like a big, dark boulder in the teeming rainstorm, or maybe it was hail that he was weathering so stoically

  “The nightmare continues,” he said to me. A simple declarative sentence. Devastating.

  “Year, doesn't it, though? But maybe I don't care about it anymore.”

  “Uh-huh. And maybe this is the year the Bullets win the NBA championship, the Orioles win the World Series, and the raggedyass Redskins go to the Super Bowl. You just never know.”

  A day had passed since the long night at the Johnson house, since the even longer morning in New York City. Not nearly enough time for any kind of healing, or even proper grieving.

  President Edward Mahoney had been sworn in the day before.

  It was necessary according to law, but it almost seemed indecent to me.

  I had on dungarees and a white T-shirt. Bare feet on a cold linoleum floor. Steaming coffee mug in hand. I was convalescing nicely. I hadn't washed off my whiskers, as Jannie calls the act of shaving. I was almost feeling human again.

  I hadn't asked Sampson in yet, either.

  “Morning, Sugar,” Sampson persisted. Then he rolled back his upper lip and showed off some teeth. His smile was brutally joyful. I finally had to smile back at my friend and nemesis.

  It was a little past nine o'clock and I had just gotten up. This was late for me. It was shameful behavior by Nana's standards. I was still sleep-deprived,
trauma-shocked, in danger of losing the rest of my mind, throwing up, something shitty and unexpected.

  But I was also much better. I looked good; I looked fine.

  “Aren't you even going to say good morning?” Sampson asked, pretending to be hurt.

  “Morning, John. I don't even want to know about it,” I said to him. “Whatever it is that brings you here this cold and bleak morning.”

  “First intelligent thing I've heard out of your mouth in years,” Sampson said, “but I'm afraid I don't believe it. You want to know everything. You need to know everything, Alex. That's why you read four newspapers every damn morning.”

  “I don't want to know, either,” Nana contributed from behind me in the kitchen. She had been up for hours, of course. “I don't need to know. Shoo, fly Go fry some ice. Take a long walk off a short dock, Johnnyboy”

  “We got time for breakfast?” I finally asked him.

  “Not really,” he said, careful to keep his smile turned on, “but let's eat, anyway Who could resist?”

  “He invited you, not me,” Nana warned from over by her hot stove.

  She Was kidding Sampson. She loves him as if he were her own son, as if he were my physically bigger brother. She made the two of us scrambled eggs, homemade sausage, home fries, toast. She knows how to cook and could easily feed the entire Washington Redskins team at training camp. That would be no problem for Nana.

  Sampson waited until we had finished eating before he got back into it, whatever it was, whatever had happened now. His dark little secret. It may seem odd--but when your life is filled with homicides and other tragedies, you have to learn to take time for yourself. The homicides will still be there. The homicides are always there.

  “Your Mister Grayer called me a little while ago,” Sampson said as he poured his third cup of coffee. “He said to let you have a couple days off, that they could handle this. Them, like the great old horror flick that used to scare the hell out of us.”

  “That, what you just said, makes me suspicious and fearful right away. Handle what?” I asked.

  I was finishing the last of half a loaf of cinnamon toast made from thick homemade bread. It was, honestly, quite seriously, a taste of heaven. Nana claims that she's been there, stolen several recipes. I tend to believe her. I've seen and tasted the proof of her tale.