James Patterson - Cross Justice

Moving slowly, guarding my ribs, I followed him down the gravel path to a grassy flat area by the banks of the Stark River. Moonlight bathed the place, which featured two large pools almost bisected by an outcropping of granite that looked like a chess bishop laid on its side.

Pinkie turned off the spotlight after we walked out on the ledge. Where the channel narrowed and flowed around the round knob of the outcropping, the current was swift. But in the pools, it was much stiller, and the moon reflected off them brightly. A quarter mile upriver you could make out the wall of the ridge and hear the roar of the water spilling out the mouth of the gorge.

“You ever hear of anyone falling into the gorge and surviving?” I asked.

Pinkie said nothing for several beats before replying, “They got kayakers in there all the time nowadays.”

“I meant a swimmer. Have you ever heard of someone swimming out of the gorge after falling from the arched bridge?”

Pinkie didn’t reply for several long moments. I turned and looked at him in the moonlight. He was staring at the water.

“Only one, Alex,” he said quietly. “Your dad.”

With the pain in my ribs and the shot I’d taken to the head earlier in the night, I was sure I’d misheard him.

“Did you say my dad?”

Pinkie still wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded.

My stomach fluttered. I tasted bile. I saw dots glistening in front of my eyes and felt like I was going to pass out. Then an irrational anger seized control of me. I grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Pinkie said, sounding guilty. “Uncle Cliff swore me to secrecy about it years ago.”

I stared at my cousin in disbelief. “You’re saying my father didn’t die that night? He made it through the gorge?”

“Crawled out somewhere right around here,” Pinkie said. “Cliff found him passed out on this ledge long before dawn and long before the police came looking for his body. Your father was seriously busted up.

“Cliff got him out of here, took him to his fishing cabin up on the lake,” my cousin went on. “He nursed him back to health.”

“And told no one?” I asked incredulously.

“Just me,” Pinkie said.

“Why you?”

“Years later, we were up at his cabin. I was probably eighteen. Cliff was away from Aunt Hattie and drinking sour mash. A lot of it. He started getting all sad. And then he started crying, and then he started talking. Once he did, it was like a dam bursting. It all came out.”

Uncle Cliff told Pinkie about finding my dad and getting him to the cabin. He told him how my father had decided it was best if no one but Cliff ever knew he was alive. Nana Mama wasn’t to know. Me and my brothers weren’t to know.

“Why?” I asked, still bewildered and unsure of my emotions, which kept surging all over the place.

“I guess because he did kill your mother,” Pinkie said. “It was an act of mercy, but he killed her, suffocated her. No matter how you looked at it, though, in rural North Carolina, all those years ago, your father was facing a murder charge. Once he healed up, he decided to head south, disappear into a whole other life.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Yes,” Pinkie replied.

My heart started to hammer in my chest. My father? Alive?

“Where did Uncle Cliff say he went?”

“Florida.”

“Where in Florida?”

“All Cliff knew was that he lived somewhere around Belle Glade, that he worked in agriculture, and that he belonged to a church for a while,” Pinkie said.

“So you’re saying he’s alive?” I asked.

Pinkie sighed and shook his head. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m sorry, Alex. From what I understand, he committed suicide two years after he left Starksville.”

That hit me harder than the kick I’d taken earlier in the evening. One second I was letting the fantasy of actually finding my father build a strange kind of hope in my heart, and the next second I was a grief-stricken boy all over again.

Suicide?

“Thirty-three years ago?” I said, aware of the bitterness in my voice.

Pinkie nodded. “Uncle Cliff said he got a call one night from a woman. She said she’d found Uncle Cliff’s phone number among the effects of a man named Paul Brown who’d committed suicide behind her church. Uncle Cliff said he asked her where she was and she said Belle Glade.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Pinkie said. “I don’t know if Uncle Cliff even knew. He was just torn up at your dad killing himself after everything he’d been through.”

I suddenly felt weak and reached out for Pinkie. He grabbed me under the arm, said, “You okay?”

“Not really.”

“Kind of a lot to absorb,” Pinkie said.

“It is,” I said.

“Let’s get you home, have a look at those ribs.”

“Probably a good idea.”

But as I followed him off the ledge, I kept pausing to look at the moon shining on the surface of the upstream pool, and I felt hollow and robbed of something I hadn’t even known I’d had.

“Time for bath and bed, pumpkin,” he said, wiping chocolate frosting from the corners of the little girl’s mouth.

“Tell me a story, Grandfather?” she asked.

“A good one, Lizzie,” he promised. “You go to Grandma and take your bath. After you get in your jammies, Grandfather will tuck you in and tell you the best story you ever heard.”

“About magical princesses?” She beamed, clasping her hands. “And fairies?”

“What else?”

She kissed her grandfather on the cheek and scampered out of his office and down the hallway. Was there anything better than these moments? Could there be a stronger bond? He thought not. They were more father and daughter than grandfather and granddaughter. It was like they were emotionally welded together in a way that sometimes shocked him.

A phone rang in one of the drawers, broke into his thoughts.

He retrieved the phone, answered, said, “Wait.”

He went to the doorway and heard giggling voices and running water in the bathroom down the hall. Shutting the door, he said, “Talk.”

“They had Cross dead to rights, and they let him get away.”

Lizzie’s grandfather rubbed at his brow, wanted to break something.

“Idiots,” he said. “How difficult can it be?”

“He’s tough.”

“Cross is a goddamned threat to everything we’ve built.”

“Agreed.”

He thought several moments, said, “We need to go professional.”

“You got a player in mind?”

“Contact that woman we used last year. She’ll get it done right.”

“She’s expensive.”

“There’s a reason. Let me know.”

Lizzie’s grandfather broke the burn phone and threw it in the trash. Then he left the office and padded down the hall toward the bathroom. With every step, he turned his thoughts toward magical princesses and fairies.

Belle Glade, Florida

Early the next morning, Detective Sergeant Pete Drummond drove an unmarked vehicle to the west side of the county, far from the megamansions and the deep blue sea.

Detective Richard S. Johnson looked out the window as they passed what used to be a hospital, and what used to be a grocery store, and a boarded-up shop that used to sell clothes. Some blocks, there were so many abandoned, windowless buildings pocked with bullet holes, it looked like parts of Afghanistan Johnson had seen serving in the Marine Corps.

They crossed a canal and took the Torry Island Road out into agricultural fields south of Pelican Bay on Lake Okeechobee, cane mostly, and corn, and celery. Johnson could see people out there picking in the infernal heat.