“Dr. Cross?” the superintendent called after me. “Where are you going?”
I ignored him and charged to the edge of the dripping pines, scanning the ground and seeing a scuff mark that looked fresh, not yet beaten down by the rain. I pushed my way into the trees.
The forest was thick there, crowded with young saplings with wet branches that bent away and wet needles that slid past my clothes. I stopped, unsure where to go, but then noticed a broken branch on the ground.
The inner wood looked bright and new. So did the broken branch to my left at ten o’clock. I went that way for fifty, maybe seventy-five yards, and then broke into an expanse of older trees, more than ten feet high, and growing in long straight rows, a pine plantation.
Despite the fog, I soon spotted dark, discolored spots on the mat of dead needles that covered the forest floor. I went to them, and saw where he’d kicked up the duff as he’d run down one of those lanes through the trees.
I ran after him, wondering if I could catch up, and numerous times whether I’d lost the way. But then I’d find some disturbance in the pine needles and push on one hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards deeper into the barrens.
What direction was I going? I had no idea, and it didn’t matter. As long as Soneji was leaving signs, I was staying with him. I thought I’d cross a logging road or trail at some point, but didn’t. There was just the monotony of the plantation pines and the swirling fog.
Then the way began to climb up a hill. I could clearly see where he’d had to dig in the edges of his shoes to keep his footing, and more broken branches.
When I hit the top of the knoll, there was a clearing of sorts with a jumble of tree trunks to one side, as if a windstorm had blown them over. I skirted the jumble, crossed the hilltop, and found myself looking down into a long, broad valley of mature pines.
The forest had been thinned there, as if some of the trees had already been harvested. Despite the fog, I could see down a dozen lanes and deeper into the woods than at any other time since I’d entered it. Nothing moved below me.
Nothing at—
A rifle cracked. The bark of a tree next to me exploded and I dove for the ground behind one of those downed tree trunks.
Where was he?
The shot came from the valley. I was sure of it. But where down there?
“Cross?” he called. “I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.”
If it wasn’t him, he’d studied Soneji’s voice, right down to the inflection.
When I didn’t answer, he shouted, “Hear me, Cross?”
He sounded to my right and below me, no more than seventy yards. Raising my head as high as I dared, I scanned the valley there. The fog was in and out, but I thought I’d see him move or adjust his angle if he wanted another shot at me.
But I couldn’t make him out.
“I know I didn’t hit you,” he called, his voice cracking weirdly. “I did, you would have gone down like the shit bag you are.”
I decided not to engage, to let him think he’d gotten lucky, taken me out with one bullet. And it was odd the way his voice had cracked, wasn’t it? Gone to a higher pitch?”
Tense moments passed, a minute and then two, while my eyes darted back and forth, trying to spot him, hoping he’d come in to make sure of the kill.
“How’s your partner?” he called, and I heard him chuckle hoarsely. “He took a hit, didn’t he? What I hear, best-case scenario, he’ll be a veg.”
It took every fiber of my being, but I did not engage with him, even then. I just lay there and waited, scanning and scanning and scanning.
I never saw him go, or heard anything like a distant twig breaking to suggest he was on the move again. He never said another word, and nothing told me he’d left but the time that kept ticking away.
I lowered my head after ten minutes and dug out my phone. No service.
The rain started in earnest then, drumming, beating down the fog and revealing the plantation. Nothing moved but a doe a hundred yards out.
I wanted to get up and go down there, look for him. But if he was waiting, I’d be exposed again. After fifteen more minutes of watching, I crawled back in the direction I’d come until I was well down the backside of the hill.
There was a bitter taste in my mouth when I got to my feet and started back toward the cemetery.
I hadn’t gotten halfway there when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket.
A text from Billie.
“Alex, wherever you are, come. John’s taken a bad turn. We’re on deathwatch here.”
Chapter 21
By the time I reached the cemetery, the superintendent had already loaded the casket into the FBI van that would take it to Quantico for examination. I explained the urgency of my situation, and left.
I called ahead to New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland state police dispatchers, asking for help. When I reached I-95, there were two Jersey state trooper cruisers waiting. One in front, the other behind, they escorted me to the border, where two Delaware cruisers met me. Two more waited when I reached the Maryland line. At times we were going more than a hundred.
Less than two hours after I’d read the text, I got off the elevator to the ICU at GW Medical Center, still in damp clothes and chilled as I ran down the all-too-familiar halls to the waiting area. Billie sat at the back, her feet drawn up under her. Her elbows rested across her knees and she had a skeptical, faraway look in her eye, as if she couldn’t believe that God was doing this to her.
Bree sat at her left, Nana Mama on her right.
“What happened?” I asked.
“They decided to bring him up out of the chemical coma,” Billie said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“He flatlined. They had to paddle him,” Bree said. “He came back, but his vitals are turning against him.”
“Billie’s called in the priest,” Nana Mama said. “He’s giving John the last rites.”
Whatever control I’d maintained until that point evaporated and I began to grieve in gasps of disbelief and an explosion of sorrow and tears. It was real. My best friend, the indestructible one, Big John Sampson, was going to die.
I sank into a chair and sobbed. Bree came over and hugged me. I leaned into her and cried some more.
The priest came in. “He’s in God’s hands now,” he said, consoling us. “The doctor says there’s nothing more they can do for him.”
“Can we go in?” Billie asked.
“Of course,” he said.
Nana Mama, Billie, and Bree got up. I looked at them, feeling numb.
“I can’t do it,” I said, feeling helpless. “I just can’t watch this. Can you forgive me?”
“I don’t want to either, Alex,” Billie said. “But I want him to hear my voice one last time before he goes.”
Nana Mama patted me on the shoulders as she followed Billie into the ICU. Bree asked if I wanted her to stay, and I shook my head.
“Going in there scares me more than anything has in my entire life,” I said. “I need to take a walk, get my courage up.”
“And pray,” she said, kissed me on the head, and went inside.
I got up and felt like a coward walking toward the men’s room. I went inside and washed my face, trying to think of anything but John and all the good times we’d had over the years, playing football and basketball, attending the police academy, and finding our way through the ranks to detective and partners against crime.
That would never happen again. John and me would never happen again.
I left the restroom and wandered off through the medical complex, sure that any minute now I’d get a text that he was gone. Guilt built up in me at the thought that after all we’d been through, I wouldn’t be there at Sampson’s side when he passed.
I stopped and almost turned around. Then noticed I was standing outside the plastic surgery offices. A beautiful Ethiopian-looking woman in a white jacket came out the door.
She smiled at me. Her teeth
gleamed and her facial skin was so taut and smooth she could have been thirty. Then again, she could have been sixty and often under the knife.
“Dr. Coleman?” I said, reading her badge.
She stopped and said, “Yes?”
I showed her my badge, said, “I could use your help.”
“Yes?” she said, looking worried. “How so?”
“I’m investigating the shooting of a police officer,” I said. “We want to know, how difficult would it be to make one person look almost exactly like another?”
She squinted. “You mean, good enough to be an imposter?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is it possible?”
“That depends,” Dr. Coleman said, glancing at her watch. “Can you walk with me? I have to give a lecture about twenty minutes from here.”
“Yes,” I said, glad for the diversion.
We walked through the medical center and out the other side, ending up on the George Washington University campus. Along the way, the plastic surgeon said that similar facial structure would be key to surgically altering a person to look like someone else.
“The closer the subject was to looking like the original to begin with, the better the results,” she said. “After that it would all be in the skill of the surgeon.”
“So, even the similar bone structure wouldn’t guarantee success for your everyday surgeon?”
Dr. Coleman smiled. “If the end product is as close to the original as you say it is, then there is no way an average boob-job surgeon did it. You’re looking for a scalpel artist, Detective.”
“What kind of money are we talking?”
“Depends on the extent of surgical alteration required,” she said. “But I’m thinking this is a hundred-thousand-dollar job, maybe less in Brazil.”
A hundred thousand dollars? Who would spend that much to look like Gary Soneji? Or go to Brazil to get it done?
I felt my phone buzz in my pocket, and sickened.
“Here I am,” Dr. Coleman said, stopping outside one of the university’s many buildings. “Any more questions, Detective?”
“No,” I said, handing her a card. “But if I do, can I call?”
“Absolutely,” she said, and hurried inside.
I swallowed hard and then got out my phone.
The text was from Bree: “Come now or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
I started to run.
Ten minutes later, I went through the door of the ICU, trying to keep my emotions from ruining me all over again.
When I reached the doorway to John’s room, Billie, Bree, and Nana Mama were all sobbing.
I thought I’d come too late, that I’d done my best friend and brother the ultimate disservice, and not been there when he took his last breath.
Then I realized they were all sobbing for joy.
“It’s a miracle, Alex,” Bree said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Look.”
I stepped inside the crowded room. A nurse and a doctor were working feverishly on John. He was still on his back in bed, still on the ventilator, still hitched up to a dozen different monitors.
But his eyes were open and roving lazily.
Chapter 22
We sat with John for hours as more of the drugs wore off. They removed his breathing tube, and he came more and more to consciousness.
John did not acknowledge his name when Billie called it softly, trying to get him to turn his head to her. At first Sampson seemed not even to know where he was, as if he were lost in some dream.
But then, after the first nap, he did hear his wife, and his face lolled toward her. Then he moved his fingers and toes on command, and lifted both arms.
When I sat beside him and held his hand, his lips kept opening as if he wanted to talk. No sound came out, and he appeared frustrated.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I said, holding tight. “We know you love us.”
Sampson relaxed and slept again. When he awoke, Elizabeth Navilus, a top speech-language pathologist, was waiting. She was part of a team of specialists rotating through the room, performing the various exams on the JFK Coma Recovery Scale, a method of diagnosing the extent of brain damage.
Navilus ran Sampson through a brief battery of tests. She found that John’s cognitive awareness as expressed through his language comprehension was growing by the moment. But he was having trouble speaking. The best he could do was chew at the air and hum.
It crushed me.
Out in the waiting area, Navilus told us to take hope from the fact that head trauma patients often exhibit understanding before being able to respond.
Later, when Nana Mama had left for home to cook dinner, and Bree to the office, and Billie to the cafeteria, I sat by John’s side.
“I was there when you were shot,” I told him. “It was Soneji. Or someone who looked just like him.”
Sampson blinked, and then nodded.
“I came close to catching him this morning,” I said. “He was watching when we dug up Soneji’s body.”
He looked away and closed his eyes.
“I’m going to get him, John,” I said. “I promise you.”
He barely nodded before sagging off to sleep.
Sitting there, watching him, I felt better, stronger, and more humbled and in debt to my Lord and savior than ever before. The idea of Sampson dying must have been as much of an abomination to God as I thought it was.
If that wasn’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.
Chapter 23
I stayed at the hospital until nine, promised Billie I’d be back in the morning, and headed home. Given what had happened the last time I’d exited GW Medical Center and looked for a cab, my head was turning three-sixty.
I saw no threat, however, and stepped to the curb. As I did, Soneji’s voice from earlier in the day echoed back to me.
I’m coming for you, even from the grave if I have to.
It sounded so much like Gary, it was scary. I’d had multiple conversations with him over the years, and Soneji’s tone and delivery were unmistakable.
After I’d gotten into the cab and given the driver my home address, I almost pushed these thoughts aside. But then I blinked, remembering how his voice had cracked weirdly and turned hoarse when he said, “I know I didn’t hit you. I did, you would have gone down like the shit bag you are.”
It sounded like he had something wrong in his throat. Cancer? Polyps? Or were his vocal cords just straining under the tensions wound up inside him?
I tried to remember every nuance of our encounter in the pine barrens, the way he’d swaggered into the trees, finger held high. Where was the gun then? Had he been trying to lure me in for a shot?
In retrospect, it felt like he had, and I’d fallen for it. Where was all the training I’d done? The protocol? I’d reacted on emotion, charging into the pines after him. Just the way Soneji had wanted me to.
That bothered me because it made me realize that Soneji understood me, could predict my impulses the way I could predict his a dozen years before. I mean, how else would he have known to be at the cemetery when I was there to exhume his body? What or who had tipped him?
I had no answers for that other than the possibility Soneji or The Soneji had us bugged. Or had it just seemed the rational thing to do at some point, given the fact that I’d seen someone who looked just like him at least three times now?
These unanswerable questions weighed on me the entire ride home. I felt depressed climbing from the taxi and waiting for the receipt. Soneji, or whoever, was thinking ahead of me, plotting, hatching, and acting before I could respond.
Climbing the porch stairs, I was beginning to feel like I was a fish on a hook with some angler toying with me, messing with my lip.
But the second I stepped inside the house, smelled something savory coming from Nana Mama’s kitchen, and heard my son, Ali, laughing, I let it go. I let everything about the sonofabitch go.
“Dad?” Jannie said, coming down the stairs. “How’s Joh
n?”
“He’s got a fight and a half ahead of him, but he’s alive.”
“Nana Mama said it’s, like, a miracle.”
“I’d have to agree,” I said, and hugged her tight.
“Dad, look at this,” Ali called. “You can’t believe how good this looks.”
“The new TV,” Jannie said. “It’s pretty amazing.”
“What new TV?”
“Nana Mama and Ali ordered it off the internet. They just installed it.”
I stepped into our once cozy television room to see it had been transformed into a home theater, with new leather chairs, and a huge, curved 4K resolution HD screen on the far wall. Ali had on a repeat of The Walking Dead, one of his favorites, and the zombies looked like they were right there in the room with us.
“You should see when we switch it to 3D, Dad!” Ali said. “It’s crazy!”
“I can see that,” I said. “Does it do basketball?”
Ali took his eyes off the screen. “They’re right in the room with you.”
I smiled. “You’ll have to show me after dinner.”
“I can do that,” Ali said. “Show you how to run it from your laptop.”
I gave him the thumbs up, and then wandered through the dining room to the kitchen upgrade and great room addition we’d put on two years before.
Nana Mama was bustling at her command-center stove.
“Roast chicken, sweet potato fries, broccoli with almonds, and a nice salad,” she said. “How’s John?”
“Sleeping when I left,” I said. “And dinner sounds great. Nice TV.”
She made a deep inhaling sound, and said, “Isn’t it? I can’t wait to see Masterpiece Theatre on there. That Downton Abbey show.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.
Nana Mama looked over her shoulder, gave me a sour, threatening look, and said, “Don’t you be mocking me, now.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Nana,” I said, trying to hide the smile that wanted to creep onto my face. “Oh, I thought you said you weren’t going to let the lottery money change our lives.”