Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross Kill

Soneji was hit hard. He was crying, dying there on the canvas-room floor where I couldn’t see him.

My pistol still up, I took an uncertain step toward Soneji, and another. A third and fourth step and I saw him lying there, no gun in his hand or around him, looking at me with a piteous expression.

In a high, whimpering voice, he said, “Why did you shoot me? Why me?”

Before I could answer, Soneji went into a coughing fit that turned wet and choking. Then blood streamed from his lips, his eyes started to dull, and the life went out of him with a last hard breath.

“Oh, my God!” Binx screamed behind me. “What have you done?”

“Soneji’s gone,” I said, feeling intense, irrational pleasure course through me. “He’s finally gone.”

Binx was crying. I started to turn toward her. She saw the gun in my hand, turned terrified, and leaped out of sight.

Binx had led me into a trap, I thought. Binx had led me here to die.

I ran after her into the main room, saw her running crazily back the way we’d come in, and heard her making these petrified whining sounds.

“Stop, Ms. Binx!” I yelled after her.

As I did, I caught a shift in the shadows of an alcove at the far end of the room. I looked toward it, shocked to see that beyond two fifty-five-gallon drums, Gary Soneji stood there in the mouth of the alcove, same clothes, same hair, same face, same nickel-plated pistol in hand.

How was that...?

Before I could shake off the shock of there being two Sonejis, he fired at me. His bullet pinged off the post of one of those spotlights trained on the paintings. On instinct, I threw myself toward him, gun up and firing.

My first shot was wide, but my next one spun the second Soneji around just before I landed hard on the cement floor. Doubled over, he went down too, gasping, groaning, and trying to crawl back into the alcove.

I scrambled to my feet, and charged his position. A spotlight went on above the alcove, trying to strike me in the eyes again. But I got my free hand up before it could blind me.

From high and to my right, a gun went off. The bullet blew a chunk of cement out of the floor at my feet.

I dove behind the fifty-five-gallon drums, glanced at the second Soneji, who was still crawling, and leaving a trail of dark blood behind him.

The voice in my head screamed at me to use my phone and call it in. I needed sirens coming now.

Then I heard the sirens, distant but distinct, before another gunshot sounded from up high and to my right again. It smacked the near barrel, the slug making a clanging noise as it ricocheted inside.

I winced, rolled over, and peered up through the narrow gap between the barrels, seeing a third Gary Soneji standing on the roof of the alcove above the exhumation painting. He was trying to aim at me with a nickel-plated pistol.

Before he could fire, I did.

The third Soneji screamed, dropped his gun, and grabbed at his thigh before toppling off the roof. He fell a solid ten feet, hit the cement floor hard enough to make cracking sounds. He screamed feebly, then lay there moaning.

I stood up then, shaking with adrenaline, and feeling that beautiful rage explode through me all over again, searing-hot and vengeful.

“Who’s next?” I roared, feeling almost giddy. “C’mon, you bastards! I’ll kill every single Soneji before I’m done!”

I swung all around, my pistol aiming high and low, finger twitching on the trigger, anticipating another Soneji to appear on the roof of the alcove or from the darkness of the three remaining anterooms.

But nothing moved, and there was no sound except for the moans of the wounded and of Kimiko Binx, who sat in the far corner of the main room, curled up in a fetal position, and sobbing.

Kimiko Binx was still crying and refusing to talk to me or to the patrol officers who arrived first on the scene, or to the detectives who came soon after.

Not even Bree could get Binx to make any kind of statement, other than to say sullenly, “Cross didn’t have to shoot. He didn’t have to kill them all.”

The fact was, I had not killed them all. Two of the Sonejis were alive, and there were EMTs working feverishly on them.

“Three Sonejis?” Bree said. “Makes it easy for them to cover ground.”

I nodded, seeing how one of them could have shot Sampson, while another staked out Soneji’s grave, and the third could have driven by Bree and me outside GW Medical Center.

“You okay, Alex?” Bree asked.

“No,” I said, feeling incredibly tired all of a sudden. “Not really.”

“Tell me what happened,” Bree said.

I did to the best of my abilities, finishing with “But all you really need to know is they set up an ambush, lured me, and I walked right into it.”

Bree thought about that, and then said, “There’ll be an investigation, but from what you said, it’s cut-and-dry. Self-defense, and justified.”

I didn’t say anything because somehow it didn’t seem quite right to me. Justified, yes, but cut-and-dry? They’d tried to kill Sampson, and me, twice. But some of the threads of what had happened just didn’t—

“By the way,” Bree said, interrupting my thoughts. “The labs came back on the exhumation.”

I looked at her, revealing nothing. “And?”

“It was him in the coffin,” she said. “Soneji. They compared DNA to samples taken when he was in federal custody the first time. He’s dead, Alex. He’s been dead more than ten years.”

One of the EMTs called out to us before I could express my relief. We went to the Soneji in the far alcove, then the one who’d been crawling away, leaving blood like a snail’s track. They’d shot him up with morphine and he was out of it. They’d also cut off his shirt and found the raised latex edge of a mask that could have been crafted by one of Hollywood’s finest.

After photographing the mask, we sliced and peeled it off, revealing the ashen face of Claude Watkins, painter, performance artist, and wounded idolizer of Gary Soneji.

The second Soneji was up on a gurney and headed for an ambulance when we caught up to him.

We tore open his shirt, found the latex edge of an identical mask, photographed it, and then had the EMTs slice it off him. The man behind the mask was in his late twenties and unfamiliar to us. But as they wheeled him out, I had no doubt that, whoever he was, he’d been worshipping Gary Soneji for a long, long time.

We waited for the medical examiner to arrive and take custody of the dead Soneji before we cut off the third mask.

“It’s a woman,” Bree said, her hands going to her mouth.

“Not just any woman,” I said, stunned and confused. “That’s Virginia Winslow.”

“Who?”

“Gary Soneji’s widow.”

“Wait. What?” Bree said, staring at the dead woman closely. “I thought you said she hated Soneji.”

“That’s what she told me.”

Bree shook her head. “What in God’s name possessed her to impersonate her dead husband and then try to kill you? Did she shoot John? Or did Watkins? Or that other guy?”

“One of them did,” I said. “I’ll put money one of the pistols matches.”

“But why?” she said, still confused.

“Binx and Watkins and, evidently, Virginia Winslow made Soneji into a cult, with me being the enemy of the cult,” I said, and thought about Winslow’s son, Dylan, and the picture of me on his dartboard.

Where was the kid in all of this? Seeing Binx being led out, I thought that if we leaned on her hard enough, she’d eventually want to cut a deal and tell all.

“You look like hell, you know,” Bree said, breaking my thoughts again.

“Appreciate the compliment.”