James Patterson - Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

Nicholson’s eyes opened but didn’t focus. Diana leaned in closer to him and whispered, “I love you, Barry,” before his eyes closed again.

She didn’t whisper softly enough. Fowler heard it too, and it destroyed whatever doubt and whatever hope I might have sown in his disturbed mind.

Fowler lifted the shotgun, and fired…right through the ceiling, almost directly over his head. It was deafening, and it made a gaping hole.

“Get away from him right now, Cross, or you’re going to have a hole in you.”

The phone rang. I grabbed it and shouted: “ No one is hurt! This is Cross.”

I tossed the phone and returned to Nicholson, hearing Fowler run the pump action on the shotgun. “Who said you could answer the phone?” he said.

“Give me a minute with him, Henry, and then the attention will be right back where you want it. Please?”

I don’t know if it was the word please or the promise of undivided attention, but something brought Fowler back to a few seconds of sanity.

“Do what you want,” he said, returning to the coffee table and the remaining lines of meth. “Take the bullet out with a steak knife and a fork, for all I care.”

I poured vodka on my hands, took the shirt from Diana, and ripped it in half. I unbuckled the belt that held the throw pillow to Nicholson’s back, and his wife and I rolled him up onto his side so I could pour vodka into the exit wound; I prayed that the alcohol would kill some of the bacteria that had to be spreading in the doctor’s abdomen. The pillow was wet with blood as well as a yellowish fluid, which couldn’t be good. I hit the area with an extra dose of vodka. Then I drenched the rag, folded it, and pressed it to the wound.

As I did, I heard Fowler snorting the last of his meth. Good, I thought. He’ll be about as unbalanced chemically as he can be when I try to really unbalance him. We set Nicholson down gently and then dressed the entry wound with the second vodka-soaked piece of the shirt.

“You think your Boy Scout first aid is going to help him?” Fowler jeered. “You just wasted perfectly good vodka on him.”

He was probably right. What I’d done was Civil War-era medicine.

“Why, hello, offspring,” Fowler said, and then started to sing. “‘Welcome, welcome, Christmas Day.’”

I turned and saw him standing a few feet from the twins, holding the shotgun and one of the semiautomatic rifles. His children cowered, crouched against the fireplace.

“Don’t be scared, boys and girls,” he said. “We’re all in Whoville. And we need everyone to sing and greet Christmas.”

“Henry,” I said.

He ignored me and shouted, “On your feet! We’ve got to sing so the Grinch comes down from the mountain!”

Crying, the twins stood up. So did Trey, who turned as pale as a ghost when his father fired the rifle toward the drapes and screamed: “Sing!”

The phone rang again.

This time Fowler took it. “We’re fine!” he yelled and hung up. Then he looked at his children, who’d stopped singing.

“Again!” their father yelled. “Louder! It’s got to be heard way up the mountain in the Grinch’s cave!”

Fowler was really getting into it now; he’d launched into a second chorus when I stood up and shouted, “Counselor!”

The former civil defense attorney stopped and looked at me dumbly while his children’s terrified singing dwindled to sniffling.

“What?” he said. “Don’t like Dr. Seuss on Christmas morning, Cross?”

“I love Dr. Seuss on Christmas morning, or on any morning. It’s just time for a little cross-examination.”

For a moment there was indecision in Fowler’s face, then he set the rifle against the fireplace and said, “Sorry, trial’s over.”

“Call this an appeal, then,” I said.

“No appeals!” he shouted, reaching into his pocket and feeding something into his mouth. “There are no appeals in this courtroom.”

“But judgments can be overturned,” I said, moving toward him.

“There will be no stays of execution.”

I looked at him and said softly, “Was it the Huntington’s drug case…or the vaccine for hepatitis A?”

“You never told her?” I asked Fowler. “Diana doesn’t know about those two cases?”

I could see the rage in him building toward release, the rhino about to run. He put the tip of his shotgun right under my chin.

“What don’t I know?” Diana cried. “Henry?”

Fowler winced at her voice and then stepped away from me to point the weapon at her. “Shut up, Diana.”

“No,” she said with withering anger. “I will not shut up. And if my husband is going to die, and my children, I think I deserve to know why.”

“It was the lawsuits, Henry,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

Fowler said nothing, just stared at his wife as if she were a black hole he would never really fathom.

“What about them?” Diana asked. “Henry? What about the lawsuits?”

Fowler just stood there, a man unhinged, chewing on the source of his own destruction, unable or unwilling to describe its bitterness.

I said, “In one or maybe both of those lawsuits, I believe your husband came into possession of evidence that might have changed the verdicts.”

“What?” Diana said, frowning, still looking at her ex-husband. “Is that true? What kind of evidence, Henry?”

He wouldn’t look at her.

“Data, medical records, who knows?” I said. “But Henry knew something, and he never revealed the evidence to the people suing the companies he represented. He violated ethics. He broke laws. He destroyed lives. But in the process, he became a very, very wealthy man. And that was good.

“So he tried to compartmentalize, to bury what he’d done, but the problem is that deep down, your ex-husband is a good man, a man of conscience, and it began to eat at him. So he started using liquor and drugs to calm the guilt, and it all went to hell and self-loathing. Is that about right, Henry?”

The anger boiled again in Fowler, setting off a twitch and a tic that seemed to ripple through his entire body. “You’re off by twenty or thirty degrees, Cross.”

“Put us straight, then.”

He shot Diana a venomous look. “Don’t think you’re not responsible, don’t think that you won’t be held accountable for what you’ve done.”

“Henry,” I said. “Tell us the truth.”

Fowler said, “I won the first suit fair and square. But afterward…a year after we won the suit involving the Huntington’s drug, I came across data that I’d never seen before, and case files that had never made their way into the proceedings. There was sufficient evidence that the drug accelerated mortality.”

“But you never told anyone?”

“And tarnish my stellar reputation?” he asked caustically. “Ruin the family fun? Decrease the speed with which my bitch of a wife was spending the fortune they were paying me? Two million that year. Two million!”

He looked at Diana like he wanted to throttle her. “Every single day I’d come home and hear the gargantuan list of crap she’d bought from this shop or that. Or from a catalog. Or off the Web. Or I’d hear about the cabinetmakers she’d had in. Or the granite-countertop guy. On and on and on!”

Fowler glared at me. “I was trapped.”

“But it got worse when you began to represent the hepatitis A vaccine manufacturer?”

He set his jaw and nodded. “That case was almost like you described it, Cross. We were well into trial, and I get this report from an investigator I’d hired to find people who’d taken the hepatitis A vaccine but who weren’t part of the class-action suit.”