Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross Kill

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.

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.

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?