Patterson, James - Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

Alex Cross 3 - Jack and Jill

PART 1

TOMORROW AGAIN

OH NO, it's tomorrow again.

It seemed as if I had no sooner fallen asleep than I heard banging in the house. It was loud, as disturbing as a car alarm.

Persistent. Trouble too close to home?

“Shit. Dammit,” I whispered into the soft, deep folds of my pillow. “Leave me alone. Let me sleep through the night like a normal person. Go away from here.”

I reached for the lamp and knocked over a couple of books on the table. The Generalk Daughter and My American Journey and Snow Falling on Cedars. The mishap jolted me fully awake.

I grabbed my service revolver from a drawer and hurried downstairs, passing the kids' room on the way. I heard, or thought that I could hear, the sound of their soft breathing inside. I had been reading them Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit the night before. Don't go into Mr. McGregork garden: Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.

I clutched the Glock even more tightly in my right hand. The banging stopped. Then started up again. Downstairs.

I glanced at my wristwatch. It was three-thirty in the morning.

Jesus, mercy The witching hour again. The hour I often woke up without any help from outside forces, from things that go BANG, BANG, BANG in the middle of the night.

I continued down the steep, treacherous stairs. Cautious, suspicious.

Suddenly, it was quiet all around me.

I made no sound myself. My skin felt electrified in the darkness.

This was not the recommended way to start the day, or even the middle of The night. Don't go into Mr. McGregor garden: Your father had an accident....

I continued into the kitchen -- my gun drawn -- where I suddenly saw the source of the banging. The day's first mystery was solved.

My friend and partner was lurking at the back door like some high-octane version of a neighborhood hugger-mugger.

John Sampson was the noisemaker; he was the trouble in my life; the day's first disturbance, anyway. All six foot nine, two hundred forty pounds of him. Two-John as he's sometimes called.

Man Mountain.

“There's been a murder,” he said as I unlocked, unchained, and opened up for him. “This one is a honey, Alex.”

“OH, JESUS, JOHN. You know what time it is? You have any concept of time? Please get the hell away from my house. Go home to your own house. Bang on your own door in the middle of the night.”

I groaned and slowly shook my head back and forth, working nasty sleep-kinks out of my neck and shoulders. I wasn't quite awake yet. Maybe this was all a bad dream that I was having.

Maybe Sampson wasn't on the back porch. Maybe I was still in bed with my pillow-lover. And maybe not.

“It can wait,” I said. “Whatever the hell it is.”

“Oh, but it can't,” he answered, shaking his head. “Believe me, Sugar, it can't.”

I heard a creaking noise behind me in the house. I swung around quickly, still a little spooked and jumpy My little girl was standing there in the kitchen. Jannie was in her electric-blue-butterfly pajamas, in her bare feet, with a frightened look on her face. The latest addition to our family, a beautiful Abyssinian cat named Rosie, trailedJannie by a step or two. Rosie had heard the noise downstairs, too.

“What's the matter?”Jannie asked in a sleepy whisper, rubbing her eyes. “Why are you up so early? It's something bad, isn't it, Daddy?”

“Go back to sleep, sweetheart,” I told Jannie in the softest voice I could manage. “It's nothing,” I had to lie to my little girl.

My work had followed me home again. “We'll go upstairs now, so you can get your beauty sleep.”

I carried her up the stairs, softly nuzzling her cheek on the way, whispering sweet nonsense, dream talk. I tucked her in and checked on my son, Damon. Soon the two of them would be heading off to their respective schools -- Damon at Sojourner Truth, Jannie at Union Street. Rosie the cat continually crisscrossed between my legs as I performed my ministrations.

Then I got dressed, and Sampson and I hurried to the early-morning crime scene in his car. We didn't have far to go.

This one is a honey, Alex.

Just four blocks from our house on Fifth Street.

“I'm awake now, whether I like it or not, and I don't like it. Tell me about it,” I said to Sampson as I watched the glittering red and blue lights of police cars and EMS trucks come into focus up ahead.

Four blocks from our house.

A lot of blue-and-whites were clustered at the end of a tunnel of leafless oak trees and red-brick project buildings. The disturbance appeared to be at my son Damon's school. (Jannie's school is a dozen blocks in the opposite direction.) My body tensed all over. There was a roaring, wintry shitstorm inside my head.

“It's a little girl, Alex,” Sampson said in an unusually soft voice for him. “Six years old. She was last seen at the Sojourner Truth School this afternoon.”

It was Damon's school. We both sighed. Sampson is almost as close to Damon and Jannie as I am. They feel the same way about him.

A lot of people were already gathered outside the Federal-style two-story building that was the Sojourner Truth Elementary School. Half the neighborhood seemed to be up at four in the morning. I saw angry and shocked faces everywhere in the crowd. Some folks were in bathrobes, others wrapped in blankets.

Their frosty breath poured out like car exhaust all over the school yard. The Washington Post had reported that more than five hundred children under the age of fourteen had died in D.C.

during the past year alone. But the people here knew that. They didn't have to read it in the newspaper.

A little six-year-old girl. Murdered at or near Damon school, the Truth School. I couldn't have imagined a worse nightmare to wake up to.

“Sorry about this, Sugar,” Sampson said as we climbed out of his car. “I figured you had to see this, though, to be here yourself.”

MY HEART was hammering and felt as if it were suddenly too big for my chest. My wife, Maria, had been shot down and killed not far from this place. Memories of the neighborhood, memories of a lifetime. I'll always love you, Maria.

I saw a dented and rusting truck from the morgue in the school yard, and it was an unbelievably disturbing sight for me and everybody else. Rap music with a lot of bass was playing from somewhere on the edge of the bright police lights.

Sampson and I pushed and angled our way through the frightened and uneasy crowd. Some wiseass muttered, “What's up, Chief?” and risked finding out. There was yellow crime-scene tape everywhere on the school grounds.

At six three, I'm not as large as Man Mountain, but we are both big men. We make quite the pair when we arrive at a crime scene: Sampson with his huge shaved skull and black leather car Coat; me usually in a gray warm-up jacket from Georgetown. Shoulder holster under the coat. Dressed for the game that I play, a game called sudden death.

“Dr. Cross is here,” I heard a few low rumbles in the crowd.

My name uttered in vain. I tried to ignore the voices as best I could. Block them out of my consciousness. Officially, I was a deputy chief of detectives, but I was mostly working as a street detective these days. It was the way I wanted it for now. The way it had to be. This was definitely an “interesting” time for me. I had seen enough homicide and violence for one lifetime. I was considering going into private practice as a shrink again. I was considering a lot of things.

Sampson lightly touched my shoulder. He sensed this was bad for me. He saw it was maybe too close to the bone. “You okay, Alex?”