Bell screeched. “What the fuck are you doing? Stop the car. Stop!”
Three things happened, all at about the same time. Michael Bell’s gun went off; I felt a universe of pain explode in my right shoulder; and the car started to plummet—almost straight downhill.
Chapter 118
SUDDENLY THE PAIN SEEMED TO BE EVERYWHERE in my body, and it was nothing if not extreme. I was only semiconscious of thick fir trees and underbrush giving way to the car as it rocked and rolled and caromed out of control, threatening to flip.
We probably fell for only four or five seconds. Still, the eventual impact was enough to jam my chest with incredible force against the steering wheel. The seat belt probably saved me from going through the windshield. I knew Bell hadn’t been wearing his, and could only hope that he was badly hurt. If I was lucky, maybe he was unconscious, or dead, in the backseat.
I already had my hand on the door handle, and I rolled out of the car as best and fast as I could manage.
My whole body throbbed with a numbing ache that made it hard to move quickly. My right arm hung useless at my side.
I saw James Truscott’s body, facedown and spread-eagle in the dirt. Apparently he’d been thrown loose in the crash.
Then Michael Bell moaned in the backseat. He was alive inside. Too bad. With a great mustering of resources, I managed to get up on one knee. Suddenly my shoulder screamed with pain; I knew it had to be broken.
I took a halting step forward, expecting flat ground—but there was an almost invisible bank of tangled brush.
I went down, landing in half a foot of water. I’d been totally unaware of the stream until now.
It was shallow here, but the water stretched out farther across than I could see in the dark. The icy water sent an electric current of shock right through me.
I hadn’t thought the pain could get worse, but I saw a wash of white before my sight partially returned.
Again, I started to push myself up, only to be knocked back down. This time, it was Bell. He pushed down on my neck and head, and he was strong as hell. Then I felt his foot pressing down on my back. Water rushed up into my nose and mouth.
“Where the fuck do you think—” he was yelling.
I didn’t give him a chance to finish. I scissored my legs hard against his ankle, and it took most of the rest of my strength just to do that. It caught him off guard though, and he fell backward off of me. I heard two splashes, and hoped one was his gun.
Half in, half out of the water, leaning hard on my good left hand, I raised myself up enough to launch at him. I managed a ground tackle, and then a left hook before he could respond.
He reached up and laid a heavy grip on my face, digging in with his fingers. Michael Bell was about my height, but a super heavyweight; despite his weight loss in the past few weeks, he had at least thirty pounds on me.
I got a hand on his throat, dug in, and pushed as hard as I could. He gagged some, but didn’t let go.
Leverage was the only thing I might be able to increase, but when I moved my foot, it hit a slick of algae.
The sudden shift of weight sent me lurching with an agonizing twist of my body, and I landed back in the freezing cold water.
God, it was cold—but I almost didn’t care.
Michael Bell stood up faster than I did this time. Not a good sign. He had a second wind. The dead weight of my aching right arm slowed me down.
I saw him in vague silhouette, picking up what looked like a flat rock about the size of an encyclopedia. He raised the rock high in both hands as he came toward me again.
“You stupid fuck!” he yelled. “I’ll kill you! That’s my plan, all right. That’s how the story ends. This is how it ends!”
I scrabbled back and away from Bell as best I could, but I knew it wasn’t enough. My hand landed on something hard in the shallow water. Not rock, at least I didn’t think so. Metal?
“You die!” Bell yelled at me. “How’s that for a plan? How’s that for an ending?”
The metal object. I knew what it had to be. I yanked Bell’s gun out of the water and fumbled with the trigger. “Bell, no!” I screamed.
He kept on coming with the enormous rock held over his head. “Die!”
So I fired.
I couldn’t tell exactly what happened in the moonlit woods. I had no idea where he was hit, but he grunted noisily and stopped for a second.
Then he charged forward again. I fired a second time. And a third. Both upper-chest shots, at least I thought so.
The heavy rock he was holding fell back into the water. Suspended for a moment by some invisible force, Bell staggered away two or three drunken steps. Then he fell over face first into the water, making a loud splash.
Then nothing. Silence in the woods.
Trembling badly, uncontrollably, I kept the gun trained on Bell with my good hand. It took incredible effort just to get over the slick rocks to where he lay.
By the time I reached him, there was no movement. I took his arm, held it up. I checked, but he had no pulse. I checked it again—nothing, nothing but the silence of the woods, and the awful cold.
Michael Bell was dead, and so was Mary Smith. And very soon, in these freezing wet clothes, I would be, too.
Chapter 119
MY SLOW CLIMB UP and out of the gully from the crash site was hellish, nothing but excruciating pain, dizziness, and nausea. The only blessing was that I barely remembered any of it.
Somehow, I managed to get out to the main road—where an alarmed college student in a Subaru picked me up. I never even got his name. I guess I passed out in the backseat of his car.
By the next morning, Michael Bell’s body had been recovered from the stream, and I was resting in a bed at Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington. Resting is probably the wrong word, though. Local police came and went from my room continually. I spent hours on the phone with my office in Washington, the L.A. Bureau office, and Jeanne Galletta, trying to piece together everything that had happened from the start of the murder spree.
Bell’s plan had been a feat of convolution and madness, but his cover was ultimately simple—diversion. And he’d succeeded until the very end. As Jeanne pointed out to me, Michael Bell wrote and produced stories for a living. Plot was his thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one ended up as a screenplay, written by someone else. The writer would probably change everything, though, until the movie carried the fishy title “based on a true story.”
“Who’s going to play you?” Jeanne kidded me over the phone.
“I don’t know. I don’t much care. Pee-wee Herman.”
As for Mary Constantine, I wasn’t sure how to feel about her. The cop in me had one response, but the shrink had another. I was glad she’d be getting back into the kind of treatment and care she needed. If Dr. Shapiro was right, maybe Mary was ultimately headed toward some kind of recovery. That was how I wanted to think about it for right now.
Around four o’clock, the door to my room creaked open, and none other than Nana Mama poked her head inside.
“There’s a sight for bed-sore eyes,” I said, and started to grin. “Hello, Nana. What brings you to Vermont?”
“Maple syrup,” she cracked.
She came in timidly, especially for her, and winced when she saw the truss around my shoulder.
“Oh, Alex, Alex.”
“Looks worse than it is. Well, maybe not,” I said. “Did you have any trouble getting a flight?”
“No trouble at all. You go to the airport. You pay money.”
She reached out to put a cool hand on my cheek. It felt familiar and so comforting. What would I do without this ornery old woman? I couldn’t help thinking. What will I do?
“They said you’re going to be fine, Alex. I suppose that’s a relative concept, though, isn’t it?”
I’d been shot before. It’s traumatic—there’s no way around that—but not irreversible, at least not so far.
“I’ll be fine,” I told Nana. “
Body and soul.”
“I told the children to wait outside. I want to say something to you, and then put it behind us.”
“Uh-oh. I’m in trouble again, aren’t I? Back in the doghouse.”
She didn’t return my smile, but she did take my hand in both of hers.
“I thank God for you every single day of my life, Alex, and I thank him for letting me raise you, and see you turn into the man you did. But I want you to think about why you came to me in the first place, what was going on between your poor parents before they died. Simply put, Jannie and Damon and Ali deserve better than you had.”
Nana stopped to make room for what was coming next. “Don’t make them orphans, Alex.”
Chapter 120
I STARTED TO SPEAK my piece, but Nana Mama went on, gently raising her voice. “I’m the first of us to go. Don’t you dare argue with me.”
Finally, I just shrugged, which hurt my shoulder and neck.
“What can I say?”
“Nothing. You say nothing. You just listen to my wisdom, wisdom of the ages. You listen, and maybe one day you’ll finally learn something.”
We shared a long look into each other’s eyes. A lump rose in my throat, although what I felt wasn’t sadness. It was more like gratitude, and the most incredible love for this small, amazingly powerful woman—who was, indeed, wise beyond her years, and certainly mine.
“Believe it or not, I always listen to you,” I said.
“Yes, and then you go and do whatever you were going to do in the first place.”
Sounds from the hospital corridor came into the room as the door opened halfway. I looked over to see Damon’s eager face, and my heart did a little hop.
“Look who it is!” I wiped my eyes. “The man of the house has arrived.”
“They told us Jannie can’t come in ’cause she’s under twelve,” he said.
I sat up in bed. “Where is she?”
“I’m right here.” Jannie’s indignant tone came through clearly from behind the door.
“Well, then get in here before anyone sees you. C’mon. Nobody’s gonna arrest you. Except me, if you stay outside for one minute longer.”
The two of them came in and rushed over to the bed, stopping short at the sight of my collection of bandages. I reached out with my free arm and took them both in at the same time.
“How long do you have to be here?” Jannie asked into my good side.
“Should be going home in a couple of days,” I told her.
“Looks worse than it is,” said Nana.
Damon stood up again and looked at the truss. “Did it hurt really bad?”
“Badly,” Nana muttered.
“I’ve had worse,” I said. They both looked at me with the same neutral, almost reproachful expression. Who was the parent here, anyway? Somehow they seemed older than the last time I’d seen them. I felt a little older myself.
These two were going to grow and change, whether or not I was around to watch. Such an obvious thing, but the truth of it—the reality of it—suddenly inhabited me.
I finally gave in. “Yeah,” I said. “It did. It hurt a lot.”
And then, that terrible thought again—don’t make them orphans, Alex—and I held my kids so tight, even as my shoulder ached, but I couldn’t let them go, and I couldn’t let them know what I was thinking, either.
Chapter 121
I STAYED AT THE FLETCHER ALLEN HOSPITAL in Vermont for nearly a week, which was my longest hospital stay to date, and maybe another warning to me. How many warnings did I get?
Around 6:00 in the evening on Friday, I received a call from Detective Jeanne Galletta out in L.A. “Alex, has anyone told you the news yet?” she asked. “I assume they have.”
“What news, Jeanne? That I’m being released from the hospital tomorrow?”
“I don’t know anything about that. But yesterday, Mary Wagner confessed to the murders here in L.A.”
“She didn’t commit those murders. Michael Bell did.”
“I know that. Even Maddux Fielding knows it. Nobody believed her, but she confessed. Then, sometime last night, poor Mary Wagner hung herself in her cell. She’s dead, Alex.”
I sighed and shook my head a couple of times. “I’m really sorry to hear that. It’s just another death Bell is responsible for. Another murder.”
The following morning, and much to my surprise, I was released from the hospital. I called home with the news, and I even managed to get on a flight to Boston. From Boston I caught the hourly shuttle to D.C. Never been so happy to get on a crowded commuter plane in my life.
It was easiest to get a cab at the airport, and as I rode into Southeast around 7:00 that night, I felt a soft, warm glow spreading inside my body. There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. I know that isn’t true for everybody, but it is for me, and I also know how lucky it makes me.
The cab pulled up in front of the house on Fifth, and suddenly I was running across the small front lawn, then taking two long strides up the paint-faded front steps.
I grabbed Little Alex up in my arms, and I spun him up high in the air. It hurt, but it was worth it. I called back at the cabbie, who was leaning out his side window, a little befuddled, but even he was smiling some, in his slightly jaded D.C.-cabbie way. “I’ll be right there!” I told him. “Be right with you.”
“No problem. Take your time, buddy. The meter’s running anyway.”
I looked at Nana Mama, who had come out on the porch with my young son.
“What?” I whispered. “Tell me what happened.”
“Ali is home,” she said in a quiet voice. “Christine brought him here, Alex. She changed her mind again. She’s not staying in the east either. Ali is home for good. Can you believe it? Now how about you? Are you home?”
“I’m home, Nana,” I said. Then I looked into the beautiful eyes of my small son. “I’m home, Ali. I promise you.”
And I always keep my promises.
Alex Cross faces the deadliest psychopath of them all—his wife’s killer.
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“I’M PREGNANT, ALEX.”
Everything about the night is so very clear to me. Still is, after all this time, all these years that have passed, everything that’s happened, the horrible murderers, the homicides solved and sometimes not.
I stood in the darkened bedroom with my arms lightly circling my wife Maria’s waist, my chin resting on her shoulder. I was thirty-one then, and had never been happier at any time of my life.
Nothing even came close to what we had together, Maria, Damon, Jannie, and me.
It was the fall of 1993, a million years ago it seems to me now.
It was also past two in the morning, and our baby Jannie had the croup something terrible. Poor sweet girl had been up for most of the night, most of the last few nights, most of her young life. Maria was gently rocking Jannie in her arms, humming “You Are So Beautiful,” and I had my arms around Maria, rocking her.
I was the one who’d gotten up first, but I couldn’t seem to get Jannie back to sleep no matter what tricks I tried. Maria had come in and taken the baby after an hour or so. We both had work early in the morning. I was on a murder case.
“You’re pregnant?” I said against Maria’s shoulder.
“Bad timing, huh, Alex? You see a lot more croup in your future? Binkies? More dirty diapers? Nights like this one?”
“I don’t like this part so much. Being up late, or early, whatever this is. But I love our life, Maria. And I love that we’re going to have another baby.”
I held on to Maria and turned on the music from the mobile dangling over Janelle’s crib. We danced in place to “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
Then she gave me that beautiful partly bashful, partly goofy smile of hers, the one I’d fallen for, maybe on the very first night I ever saw her. We had met in the emergency room at St. Anthony’s, during an emergency. Maria h
ad brought in a gangbanger, a gunshot victim, a client of hers. She was a dedicated social worker, and she was being protective—especially since I was a dreaded metro homicide detective, and she didn’t exactly trust the police. Then again, neither did I.
I held Maria a little tighter. “I’m happy. You know that. I’m glad you’re pregnant. Let’s celebrate. I’ll get some champagne.”
“You like being the big daddy, huh?”
“I do. Don’t know why exactly. I just do.”
“You like screaming babies in the middle of the night?”
“This too shall pass. Isn’t that right, Janelle? Young lady, I’m talking to you.”
Maria turned her head away from the wailing baby and gave me a sweet kiss on the lips. Her mouth was soft, always inviting, always sexy. I loved her kisses—anytime, anywhere.
She finally wriggled out of my arms. “Go back to bed, Alex. No sense both of us being up. Get some sleep for me too.”
Just then, I noticed something else in the bedroom, and I started to laugh, couldn’t help myself.
“What’s so funny?” Maria smiled.
I pointed, and she saw it too. Three apples—each one with a single childlike bite out of it. The apples were propped on the legs of three stuffed toys, different-colored Barney dinosaurs. Toddler Damon’s fantasy play was revealed to us. Our little boy had been spending some time in his sister Jannie’s room.
As I got to the doorway, Maria gave me that goofy smile of hers again. And a wink. She whispered—and I will never forget what she said—“I love you, Alex. No one will ever love you the way I do.”
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Alex Cross gets a presidential request:
“Please find my kids!”
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