Patterson, James - Alex Cross 1 - Along Came A Spider

“Yes. He was a friend of mine.”

“Is he still a friend of yours?”

“I want to see Gary get the help he needs.”

“And so do 1, ” said Nathan. “So do 1. ”

Anthony Nathan fired his first real salvo late on Friday of the trial's second week. It was as dramatic as it was unexpected. It started with a side-bench conference Nathan and Mary Warner had with Judge Kaplan.

During the conference, Mary Warner raised her voice for one of the few times during the trial.

I object! I must object to this.. "Your Honor,

- stunt. This is a stunt!"

The courtroom was already buzzing. The press, in front-row seats, was alert. Judge Kaplan had apparently ruled in favor of the defense.

Mary Warner returned to her seat, but she had lost some of her composure. “Why weren't we informed of this beforehand?” she called out. “Why wasn't this revealed in pretrial?”

Nathan held up his hands and actually quieted the room. He gave everyone the news. “I call Dr. Alex Cross as a defense witness. I am calling him as a hostile and uncooperative witness, but a witness for the defense nonetheless. ”

I was the "stunt.,,

T'

Part Four remember

Maggie Rose i I a

Along Came A Spider

CHAPTER 60

ET'S WATCH the movie again, Daddy,“ Damon said to me. ”I'm serious about this now."

“Shush up. We're going to watch the news,” I told him. “Maybe you'll learn something about life beyond Batman.”

“The movie's funny.” Damon tried to talk some sense into me.

I let my son in on a little secret. “So is the news.”

What I didn't tell Damon was that I was unbelievably tense about testifying in court on Monday, testifyingfor the defense.

On television that night, I had seen a news piece reporting that Thomas Dunne was expected to run for the Senate in California. Was Thomas Dunne trying to piece together his life again? Or could Thomas Dunne somehow be involved in the kidnapping himself? By now I was ruling nothing out. I'd become paranoid about too many things related to the kidnapping case. Was there more to the report from California than what

321 seemed? Twice, I had requested permission to go to alifomia to investigate. Both times the request was denied. Jezzie was helping me out. She had a contact in California, but so far nothing had come of it.

We watched the news from the living-room floor. Janelle and Damon were snuggled up beside me. Before the news, we had reviewed our tape of Kindergarten Cop for the tenth, or twelfth, or maybe it was the twenti- eth time.

The kids thought I should be in the movie instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I thought Arnold was turning into a pretty good comic actor myself. Or maybe I just preferred Schwarzenegger to another turn with Benji or The Lady and the Tramp.

Nana was out in the kitchen, playing pinochle with Aunt Tia. I could see the phone on the kitchen wall. The receiver was dangling off the hook to stop calls from coming in from reporters and other cranks du jour.

The phone calls I had taken from the press that night all eventually got around to the same questions. Could I hypnotize Soneji/Murphy in a crowded courtroom? Would Soneji ever tell us what had happened to Maggie Rose Dunne? Did I think he was psychotic, or a sociopath? No I wouldn't comment.

Around one in the morning, the front doorbell sounded. Nana had gone upstairs long before that. I'd put Janelle and Damon to bed around nine, after we'd shared some more of David Macaulay's magical book Black and White. I went into the darkened dining room and pulled back the chintz curtains. It was Jezzie. She was fight on time.

I went out to the porch and gave her a hug. “Let's go, Alex,” she whispered - She had a plan. She said her plan was “no plan,” but that was seldom the case with Jezzie.

Jezzie's motorcycle truly ate up the road that night. We moved past other traffic as if it were standing still, frozen in time and space. We passed darkened houses, lawns, and everything else in the known world. In third gear. Cruising.

I waited for her to slip it up into fourth, then fifth. The BMW roared steadily and smoothly beneath us, its single headlamp piercing the road with its beckoning light.

Jezzie switched lanes easily and frequently as we hit fourth, then rose to the pure speed of fifth gear. We were doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour on the George Washington Parkway, then a hundred and thirty on 95. Jezzie had once told me that she'd never taken the bike out without getting it up to at least a hundred. I believed her.

We didn't stop hurtling through time and space until we came down, until we landed at a run-down Mobil gas station in Lumberton, North Carolina.

It was almost six in the morning. We must have looked as crazed as the local gas jockey ever got to see. Black man; blond white woman. Big-assed motorcycle. Hot time in the old town tonight.

The attendant at the station looked kind of out of sorts himself. He had skateboard pads over his farrner-gray blue jeans. He was in his early twenties, with one of those spiked or “skater” haircuts you're more likely to see on the beaches of California than in this part of the country. How had the hairdo gotten to Lumberton, North Carolina, so quickly? Was it just more madness in the air? Free flow of ideas?

“Morning, Rory.” Jezzie smiled at the boy.

She peeked between two of the gas pumps and winked at me.

“Rory's the e to-seven s i here. Only station open for fifty miles either way. Don't tell anybody you're not sure about.” She lowered her voice. “Rory sells ups and downs around these parts. Anything necessary to get you through the night. Bumblebees, black beauties, diazepam?”

She had slipped into a slight drawl, which sounded pretty to the ear. Her blond hair was all blown out, which I liked, too. “Ecstasy, methamphetamine hydrochloride?” she went on with the menu.

Ror. y shook his head at her, as if she were crazy. I could tell that he liked her. He brushed imaginary hair away from his eyes. “Man oh man,” he said. A very articulate young man.

“Don't worry about Alex.” She smiled again at the as jockey. His spiked hair made him three inches taller. 1g, He's okay. He's just another cop from Washington."

“Oh, man! Jezzie, goddamn you! Jee-zus! You and your cop friends. ” Rory spun on his engineer's boot heels as if he'd been burned by a torch. He'd seen plenty of crazy out here, working the emergency-room shift off the interstate. The two of us were crazy for sure. Tell me about it. What other cop friends?

Less than fifteen minutes later, we were at Jezzie's lake house. It was a small A-frame cottage sitting right on the water, surrounded by fir and birch trees. The weather was near perfect. Indian summer, later than it ever ought to come. Global warming marches on.

“You didn't tell me you were landed gentry,” I said as we sped down a picturesque winding road toward the cottage. - “Hardly, Alex. My grandfather left this place to my mother. Grandpop was a local scoundrel and thief. He made a little money in his day. The only one in our family who ever did.. Crime seems to pay.”

“So they say.”

I hopped off the bike, and immediately stretched out my back muscles, then my legs. We went inside the house. The door had been left unlocked, which stretched my imagination some.

Jezzie checked out the fridge, which was generously stocked. She put on a Bruce Springsteen tape, then she wandered outside.

I followed her down toward the shimmering, blueblack water. A new dock had been built on the water. A narrow walkway went out to a broader deck set up with bolted-down @hairs and a table. I could hear music from the Nebraska album playing.

Jezzie pulled off her boots, then her striped-blue knee socks. She dipped one foot in the perfectly still water.