Cross Read online

“Alex, I’m not supposed to talk about this over the phone. You should get down here to the hospital as soon as you can. Can you come right now?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Chapter 75

  NANA WAS STILL AT HER CLASS, but it only took a couple of minutes for me to get Naomi Harris from next door over to stay with the kids. I jumped into my car and sped the whole way. A siren would have helped.

  The drive to the hospital was fast; that’s all I really remember about it, and that Kayla was on my mind the whole way. When I pulled up outside the emergency room, her car was parked under the canopy by the entrance.

  The driver’s door hung open, and as I ran past and looked inside, I saw blood on the front seat. Jesus, she drove herself here! Somehow, she got away from him.

  The waiting room was crowded, as it always is at St. Anthony’s. There was a line of forlorn, raggedy-looking people at the front desk. The walking wounded and their friends and relations. Maria had been pronounced dead here.

  “Sir, you can’t—”

  But I was already sliding through the doors to the treatment area before they could close. Once inside, I saw it was another very busy night at St. Tony’s. Paramedics were wheeling gurneys; doctors, nurses, and patients crisscrossed every which way around me.

  A young male lay on a cot with a gash in his hairline, leaking blood onto his forehead. “Am I gonna die?” he kept asking everybody who passed.

  “No, you’ll be fine,” I told him, since nobody else was stopping to talk to him. “You’re all right, son.”

  Where was Kayla, though? Everything was moving way too fast. I couldn’t find anyone to ask about her. Then I heard a voice call out my name.

  “Alex, over here!”

  Annie was waving to me from down the hall. When I reached her, she took my arm and ushered me into a trauma room—a bay with two beds partitioned by a green plastic curtain.

  Several medical personnel stood in a horseshoe around the bed. Their hands were moving quickly, many of them in bloodstained gloves.

  Other hospital people came and went, pushing past me as if I weren’t even there.

  That meant Kayla was alive. I assumed that the goal here would be to stabilize her if possible, then get her to the operating room.

  I craned my neck to see as much as I could, and then I saw Kayla. She had a mask over her mouth and nose. Someone was just lifting a red-soaked compress from her belly where they had already cut her shirt away.

  The head physician, a woman in her thirties, said, “Stab wound, abdomen, questionable spleen injury.”

  Other voices in the room blended together, and I tried to make sense of them as best I could, but everything was turning foggy on me.

  “BP seventy, pulse one twenty. Respiration thirty-four.”

  “Give me some suction here, please.”

  “Is she okay?” I blurted out. I felt like I was in a nightmare where no one could hear me.

  “Alex—” Annie’s hand was on my shoulder. “You need to give them some room. We don’t know very much yet. As soon as we do, I’ll tell you.”

  I realized I’d been pushing forward to get closer to the bed, to Kayla. My God, I ached for her and was finding it hard to breathe.

  “Call the seventh floor, tell them we’re ready,” said the woman doctor who seemed in charge of everyone else in the room. “She has a surgical belly.”

  Annie whispered to me, “That means the stomach’s hard, no digestion going on.”

  “Let’s go. Hurry up, people.”

  I was being pushed from behind, and not with any kindness. “Move, sir. You have to move out of the way. This patient is in trouble. She could die.”

  I stepped sideways to make room as they wheeled her gurney into the corridor. Kayla’s eyes were still closed. Did she know I was there? Or who had done this to her? I followed the procession as near as I could get. Then just as quickly as they had done everything else, they loaded her onto an elevator, and the metal doors slid shut between us.

  Annie was right there at my side. She gestured toward another elevator bank. “I can take you to the waiting room upstairs if you want. Believe me, everybody’s doing the best they can. They know Kayla’s a doctor. And everybody knows she’s a saint.”

  Chapter 76

  THIS PATIENT IS IN TROUBLE. She could die. . . . Everybody knows she’s a saint.

  I spent the next three hours in the waiting room, alone and without any further word about Kayla. My head was filled with disturbing ironies: Two of my kids had been born at St. Anthony’s. Maria had been pronounced dead here. And now Kayla.

  Then Annie Falk was with me again, down on one knee, speaking in a quiet, respectful voice that scared me like nothing else could right then.

  “Come with me, Alex. Come, please. Hurry. I’ll take you to her. She’s out of the OR.”

  At first, I thought Kayla was still asleep in the recovery room, but she stirred when I came near. Her eyes opened, and she saw me—recognized me an instant later.

  “Alex?” she whispered.

  “Hey there, you,” I whispered back, and gently took her hand in both of mine.

  She looked very confused and lost for a moment; then she squeezed her eyes shut. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and I almost started up myself, but I thought if Kayla saw me that way it might scare her.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s over now. You’re in recovery.”

  “I was . . . so scared,” she said, sounding like a young girl, an endearing part of Kayla I had never seen before.

  “I’ll bet you were,” I said, and I pulled over a chair without letting go of her hand. “Did you really drive yourself here?”

  She actually smiled, though her eyes stayed slightly unfocused. “I know how long it can take to get an ambulance in this neighborhood.”

  “Who did this to you?” I asked then. “Do you know who it was, Kayla?”

  In response to the question, she shut her eyes again. My free hand tightened into a fist. Did she know who attacked her, and was she afraid to say? Had Kayla been warned not to talk?

  We sat quietly for a moment—until she felt ready to say more. I wouldn’t push her on this, the way I had pushed poor Mena Sunderland.

  “I was on a house call,” she finally said, eyes still closed. “This guy’s sister called. He’s a junkie. He was trying to detox at home. When I got there, he was just about out of his mind. I don’t know who he thought I was. He stabbed me. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. I smoothed her hair and put the back of my hand against her cheek. I’ve seen how fragile life can be, but it’s not something you ever get used to, and it’s different when it’s somebody you care for, when it sticks this close to home.

  “Will you stay with me, Alex? Until I fall asleep? Don’t go.”

  It was her young girl’s voice again. Kayla had never seemed as vulnerable to me as she did right then, in that fleeting moment in the recovery room. My heart broke for her and what had happened when she was trying to do some good out there.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Chapter 77

  “I’VE BEEN DEPRESSED FOR A WHILE, as you know. You of all people know this.”

  “More than ten years. That’s a while, I guess, Alex.”

  I sat across from my favorite doctor, my personal shrink, Adele Finaly. Adele is also my mentor from time to time. She’s the one who encouraged me to start up my practice again, and she even got me a couple of patients. “Guinea pigs,” she likes to call them.

  “I need to tell you a few things that are bothering me a lot, Adele. This may require several hours.”

  “No problem.” She shrugged. Adele has light-brown hair and is in her early forties, but she doesn’t seem to have aged since we met. She isn’t married right now, and every so often I think about the two of us together, but then I push it out of my mind. Way too dumb, too crazy.

  “As long as you can fit several hours
of your bullshit into fifty minutes,” she continued, ever the wise girl, which is exactly the right tone to take with me.

  “I can do that.”

  She nodded. “Better get going, then. I have the clock on you. It’s ticking.”

  I started by telling her what had happened to Kayla and how I felt about it, including the fact that she had gone to her parents’ home in North Carolina to recuperate. “I don’t think it’s my fault. So I’m not feeling guilty about the attack on Kayla . . . not directly anyway.”

  Adele couldn’t help it, good as she is—her eyebrows rose and betrayed her inner thoughts. “And indirectly?”

  My head moved up and down. “I do feel this generalized guilt—like I could have done something to stop the attack from happening.”

  “For instance?”

  I smiled. Then so did Adele.

  “Just to use one example, eliminating all of the crime in the DC area,” I said.

  “You’re hiding behind your sense of humor again.”

  “Sure I am, and here’s the really bad part. Rational as I make myself out to be, I am feeling some guilt over the fact that I could have protected Kayla somehow. And yes, I know how ridiculous that is, Adele. To think. And to say it out loud. But there it is anyway.”

  “Tell me more about this ‘protection’ you could have afforded to Kayla Coles somehow. I need to hear this, Alex.”

  “Don’t rub it in. And I don’t think I used the word protection.”

  “Actually, you did. Anyway, talk it out for me, please. You said you wanted to tell me everything. This is probably more important than you think.”

  “I couldn’t have done a damn thing to help Kayla. Happy now?”

  “I’m getting there,” Adele said—then she waited for more from me.

  “It all goes back to that night with Maria, of course. I was there. I watched her die in my arms. I couldn’t do anything to save the woman I loved. I didn’t do anything. I never even caught the son of a bitch who killed her.”

  Adele still said nothing.

  “You know the worst thing? I’ll always wonder if that bullet was meant for me. Maria turned into my arms . . . then she was hit.”

  We sat in silence for a long time then, even for us, and we’re pretty good at enduring silences. I had never admitted that last part to Adele until now, never said it out loud to anybody.

  “Adele, I’m going to change my life somehow.”

  She didn’t say anything to that, either. Smart and tough, the way I like my shrinks, and what I aspire to be myself someday, when I grow the hell up.

  “Don’t you believe me?” I asked.

  She finally spoke. “I want to believe you, Alex. Of course I do.” Then she added, “Do you believe yourself? Do you think any of us can really change? Can you?”

  “Yes,” I told Adele. “I do believe I can change. But I get fooled a lot.”

  She laughed. We both did.

  “I can’t believe I pay for this shit,” I finally said.

  “Me either,” said Adele. “But your time is up.”

  Chapter 78

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON I FOUND MYSELF in St. Anthony’s Church—St. Tony’s, as I’ve called it since I was a kid growing up nearby in Nana’s equally revered house. The church is about a block from the hospital where Maria died. I’d moved my spiritual care from head doctor to head of the universe, and I hoped it was an upgrade but figured it might not be.

  I knelt in front of the altar and let the overly sweet smell of incense and the familiar scenes of the nativity and the crucifixion wash over me and do their dirty work. The most striking thing about beautiful churches, to me, is that they were mostly designed by people who were inspired by a belief in something larger and more important than themselves, and this is how I try to lead my own life. I gazed up at the altar, and a sigh escaped my lips. As far as God goes, I believe. It’s as simple as that and always has been. I guess I feel it’s a little odd, or presumptuous, to imagine that God thinks as we do; or that God has a big, kind human face; or that God is white, brown, black, yellow, green, whatever; or that God listens to our prayers at all times of the day or night, or anytime at all.

  But I said a few prayers for Kayla in the front row of St. Tony’s—asking not just that she would survive her wounds but that she would mend in other important ways. People react differently to life-threatening attacks on their persons, on their family members, on their homes. I know about that firsthand. And now, unfortunately, so did Kayla.

  While I was in a prayerful mood, I said some private words for Maria, who had been in my thoughts so much lately.

  I even talked to Maria, whatever that means. I hoped she liked the way I was raising the kids—a frequent subject between us. Then I said a prayer for Nana Mama and her fragile health; prayers for the kids; and even a few words for Rosie the Cat, who had been suffering from a severe cold, which I was afraid might be pneumonia. Don’t let our cat die. Not now. Rosie is good people too.

  Chapter 79

  THE BUTCHER WAS IN GEORGETOWN TO LET OFF a little pent-up steam—otherwise things might not go so well when he got back to Caitlin and the kiddies, to his life on the straight and narrow. Actually, he had learned a long time ago that he enjoyed living a double life. Who the hell wouldn’t?

  Maybe another game of Red Light, Green Light was in order today. Why not? His war with Junior Maggione was creating a lot of stress for him.

  The 3000 block of Q Street, where he walked briskly now, was nicely tree-lined and dominated by attractive townhouses and even larger manorlike homes. It was mostly an upscale residential area, and the parked cars spoke to the social status and tastes of those who lived here: several Mercedes, a Range Rover, a BMW, an Aston Martin, a shiny new Bentley or two.

  For the most part, pedestrian traffic was limited to those entering and leaving their homes. Good deal for his purposes today. He had on earphones and was listening to a band from Scotland that he liked, Franz Ferdinand. Finally, though, he turned off the music and got serious.

  At the redbrick home on the corner of Thirty-first and Q, some kind of elaborate dinner party was apparently being prepped for that evening. Assorted overpriced goodies were being transported from a stretch van marked “Georgetown Valet,” and the faux gas lamps in front of the house were being tested by the yardmen. The lights seemed to work just fine. Twinkle, twinkle.

  Then the Butcher heard the click-clack of a woman’s high heels. The inviting, even intoxicating sound came from up ahead of him on the sidewalk, which was brick rather than pavement and wound through the neighborhood like a necklace laid out flat on a table.

  Finally, he saw the woman from behind—a fine, shapely thing, with long black hair hanging halfway to her waist. An Irisher like himself? A pretty lassie? No way to tell for certain from the back view. But the chase was on. Soon he’d know as much as he wanted to about her. He felt he was already in control of her fate, that she belonged to him, to the Butcher, his powerful alter ego, or perhaps the real him. Who could say?

  He was getting closer and closer to the raven-haired woman, checking out the narrow alleyways that ran behind some of the larger houses, the patches of woods, looking for a good spot—when he saw a store up ahead. What was this? The only place of business he’d encountered for blocks. It almost seemed misplaced in the neighborhood.

  SARAH’S MARKET, said the sign out front.

  And then the dark-haired beauty turned inside. “Curses—foiled,” the Butcher whispered, and grinned and imagined twisting a villain’s mustache. He loved this kind of game, this dangerous and provocative cat-and-mouse sort of thing in which he made up all the rules. But his smile instantly faded away—because he saw something else at this Sarah’s Market, and that something else was not to his liking.

  Newspapers were on display—copies of the Washington Post. And you know what? He suddenly remembered that Mr. Bob Woodward himself lived somewhere in the area—but that wasn’t the sticky part.

  His
face was the problem, an approximation anyhow, a line drawing of the Butcher that wasn’t half-bad. It was situated above the fold of the daily news, right where it shouldn’t be.

  “My God, I’m famous.”

  Chapter 80

  THIS WAS NO LAUGHING MATTER, though, and Michael Sullivan quickly made his way back to where he’d parked on Q Street. Actually, what had happened was just about the worst development he could imagine. Nothing much seemed to be going his way lately.

  He sat and calmly pondered the unfortunate situation in the front seat of his Cadillac.

  He thought about the likely “suspects,” about the woman who must have told tales out of school about him. Possibly given the police a description. He considered that he was being attacked from a couple of sides at once, by the Washington police and the Mafia. What to do, what to do?

  When a partial solution came, it was satisfying and even exhilarating, because it felt like a new game to him. Another twist of the dial.

  The DC police thought that they knew what he looked like, which could be serious trouble but might also make them sloppy and even overconfident.

  Mistake.

  Theirs.

  Especially if he made the proper countermoves right now, which he definitely planned to do. But what, exactly, were those defensive actions he needed to take?

  The first step took him to Wisconsin Avenue, near Blues Alley—right where he remembered the small shop to be. A barber named Rudy had a chair open for him in midafternoon, so Sullivan settled in for a haircut and shave.

  It was relaxing and mildly enjoyable actually, wondering what he’d look like afterward, whether he’d like the new him.

  Another ten to twelve minutes and the deed was done. Take off the bandages, Dr. Frankenstein. The smallish, rotund barber seemed pleased with himself.

  If you messed up, you’re dead. I’m not kidding, Rudy, the Butcher thought to himself. I’ll cut you to ribbons with your own straight razor. See what the Washington Post has to say about that!