James PATTERSON: Cross Fire

Now, when he held up the large hand mirror for Kyle to see his reflection, the effect was stunning. The implants, especially, were like a miracle of change.

Max – not Kyle – smiled back from the mirror. He felt a slight sting at the corners of his mouth, which didn’t move quite the same way as before. In fact, he didn’t recognize himself at all. It was a total mind fuck, in the best possible way. There had been other disguises in the past, including some very expensive prosthetics that had gotten him out of prison. But they were nothing compared to this.

“How long will the bruising last?” he asked. “And this swelling around my eyes?”

Cruz handed him a folder of aftercare information. “With proper rest, you should be looking completely normal in seven to ten days.”

The remaining changes, he could do for himself – shave and dye his hair down to a dark buzz cut and put in a simple pair of colored contacts. If there was any disappointment at all, it was that Kyle Craig had been so much better looking than Max Siegel.

But screw it. He needed to consider the larger picture here. Next time, he could be Brad Pitt if he wanted to.

He left the clinic in an excellent mood and took another cab straight to Jose Marti International Airport. From there, he caught a flight back to Miami, with a connection to Washington, DC, that same afternoon. For the main event.

Already, his thoughts had begun to coalesce around one idea: meeting up with his old friend and sometimes partner Alex Cross. Had Alex forgotten the promises Kyle had made to him over the years? That didn’t seem possible. But had Cross grown just a little complacent in the meantime? Maybe so. In any case, the “great” Alex Cross was going to die, and die badly. There would be pain, but even more than that – regret. It would be a finale worth waiting for, no question.

And in the interim, Kyle was going to have some fun. After all, as the new and improved Max Siegel, he knew better than anybody that there was more than one way to take another man’s life.

ANOTHER MANHOLE COVER had exploded in Georgetown, blowing nearly forty feet in the air. It was a strange little epidemic, as the city’s aging infrastructure reached some kind of critical mass.

Over time, underground wires had frayed and smoldered, filling the space beneath the streets with flammable gas. Ultimately – and more frequently these days – the exposed wires created an electrical arc, lighting a fireball in the sewer and sending another three-hundred-pound iron disk flying up into the air.

This was the weird, scary stuff Denny and Mitch lived for. Every afternoon, they would gather up their papers to sell and hoof it over to the library to check the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) website for wherever rush-hour traffic was at its worst. Logjams were their meat.

Even on an ordinary day, the Key Bridge lived up to its nickname, the Car Strangled Spanner, but today the M Street approach was somewhere between a parking lot and a circus. Denny worked his way up the middle of the traffic, and Mitch took the outside.

“True Press, only a dollar. Help the homeless.”

“Jesus loves you. Help the homeless?”

They were an odd pair, to look at them – Denny, a six-feet-something white guy with bad teeth and stubble that never quite hid his sunken chin, and then Mitch, a brother with a boyish, dark black face, a husky body that topped out at five six, and stubby little baby dreads on his head to match.

“This is a perfect metaphor right here, ain’t it?” Denny was saying. They talked to each other over the tops of the cars – or, rather, Denny talked and Mitch played a sort of straight man for the customers.

“You got pressure building, way down low where no one’s looking, ’cause it’s all just rats and shit down there, and who cares, right? But then one day–” Denny puffed out his cheeks and made a sound like a nuclear explosion. “Now you gotta pay attention, ’cause the rats and shit, they’re everywhere, and everyone wants to know why somebody else didn’t do something to stop it. I mean, if that ain’t Washington to a tee, I don’t know what the hell is.”

“To a tee, bro. To a P, Q, R, S, tee,” Mitch said, and laughed at his own dumb joke. His faded shirt read, IRAQ: IF YOU WEREN’T THERE, SHUT UP! His pants were baggy camos, like Denny’s, only cut off around the calf.

Denny kept his shirt up over his shoulders to show off a half-decent six-pack. It never hurt to put a little eye candy on the table, and his face wasn’t exactly his strong suit. “It’s the American way,” he went on, loud enough for anyone with an open window to hear. “Keep doing what you always did, so you keep gettin’ what you always got. Am I right?” he asked a pretty business suit in a BMW. She actually smiled and bought a paper. “God bless you, miss. Now that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is how we do it!”

He continued to fleece the crowd, getting more and more drivers to reach out their windows with cash in hand.

“Yo, Denny.” Mitch chinned at a couple of street cops working their way over from Thirty-fourth. “I don’t think these two are feeling us too much.”

Denny shouted over before the cops could talk first. “Panhandling ain’t illegal, officers. Not outside federal parklands, and last I checked, M Street ain’t no park!”

One of them gestured around at the snarl of traffic, Pepco trucks, and fire department vehicles. “You’re kidding me, right? Let’s go. Clear out.”

“Come on, man, you gonna deny a couple of homeless vets the right to make an honest living?”

“You ever been in Iraq, man?” Mitch added. People were starting to stare.

“You heard the officer,” the second cop told him. “Move along. Now.”

“Hey, man, just ’cause you got an asshole don’t mean you gotta be one,” Denny said, to a few laughs. He could feel the captive audience coming over to his side.

Suddenly there was some pushing. Mitch didn’t much like to be touched, and the cop who tried went down on his ass between the cars. The other one got a hand on Denny’s shoulder and, like a lightning bolt, Denny knocked it away.

Time to go.

He slid across the hood of a yellow cab and started toward Prospect with Mitch right behind.

“Stop right there!” one of the cops shouted after them.

Mitch kept running, but Denny turned around. There were several cars between Denny and the officers now. “What are you going to do, shoot a homeless vet in the middle of traffic?” Then he spread his arms wide. “Go ahead, man. Take me out. Save the government a few bucks.”

People were honking, and some of them yelled from their cars.

“Give the guy a break, man!”

“Support the troops!”

Denny smiled, gave the officer a crisp salute with his middle finger, and ran to catch up with Mitch. A second later, they were sprinting up Thirty-third Street and were soon out of sight.

THEY WERE STILL LAUGHING when they got back to Denny’s ancient Suburban, parked in Lot 9 by Lauinger Library on the Georgetown campus.

“That was awesome!” Mitch’s doughy face was shiny with sweat, but he wasn’t even out of breath. He was the type whose muscles looked a lot like fat. “‘What are you going to do?’” he parroted. “‘Shoot a homeless vet in the middle of traffic?’”

“True Press, one dollar,” Denny said. “Lunch at Taco Bell, three dollars. The look on po-po’s face when he knows you got him? Priceless. Wish I had a picture.”

He plucked a bright-orange envelope from under his wiper blade and got in on the driver’s side. The car still smelled of chain-smoked cigarettes and burritos from the night before. Pillows and blankets were bunched up in a ball on one half of the backseat, next to a lawn-and-leaf bag full of returnable cans.