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  He passed the back entrance of a steakhouse, then a French bistro, and some kind of greasy burger joint spewing smoke.

  He noticed another guy entering the alley—then two guys—coming his way, too.

  What the hell was this?

  What was going down here now?

  But he thought he knew what it was, didn’t he. This was the end of the road. Somebody had finally gotten a step ahead of him instead of the other way around. Leather car coats. Squared-off, bulky types. Definitely not Georgetown students taking a shortcut to get a bite of cow at the Steak & Brew.

  He turned back toward Thirty-first—and saw two more guys.

  Mistake.

  Big one.

  His.

  He had underestimated John Maggione.

  Chapter 86

  “MR. MAGGIONE SENT US,” called one of the toughs who was headed Michael Sullivan’s way, walking with plenty of strut and attitude from the entrance into the alley on Wisconsin. The hoods were moving fast now, and they had him penned in. So much for mystery and intrigue, not to mention that a couple of the goons had their guns out already, hanging loosely at their sides, and the Butcher wasn’t armed except for the surgeon’s scalpel in his boot.

  No way in hell he could take out four of them, not with a blade. Probably not even if he had a gun on him. So what could he do? Take their picture with his camera?

  “He misspoke, Butcherman. Mr. Maggione doesn’t want to see you,” said an older guy. “He just wants you to disappear. The sooner the better. Like today. Think you could do that for Mr. Maggione? I’ll bet you can. Then we’ll find your wife and three kids and make them disappear too.”

  Michael Sullivan’s brain was reeling through all the permutations and possibilities now.

  Maybe he could take the one guy out, the loudmouth; then it wouldn’t be a total loss anyway. Shut his ugly hole once and for all. Cut him bad, too.

  But what about the other three?

  Maybe he could get two of them, if he was good and lucky. If he could get them close enough to use his blade, which wouldn’t happen. They were probably stupid, but not that stupid. So how could he make something happen? He didn’t want to go down without a fight.

  “You man enough to take me out yourself?” he called to the bigmouth. “Ay, babbo?” He used the mob term for idiot, for some useless underling. He was trying to get under his skin if he could. Hell, he’d try anything right now. He was going to die in the next minute or so, and he just wasn’t ready to go yet.

  The killer’s mouth twisted into a grim smile. “No doubt about it. I could take you out myself. But guess what, guess who’s the babbo today? Give you a hint. You probably wiped his ass this morning.”

  The Butcher reached into the pocket of his sweatshirt, and he kept his hand there.

  The bigmouthed hood immediately had second thoughts and put his free hand up. The others stopped walking. They all had their guns out, but they weren’t coming any closer to the legendary Butcher.

  The big talker gestured for the men behind Sullivan to move to the right, while he and the fourth man moved left. That gave everybody a clear line of fire. Smart thinking.

  “You stupid Mick. Messed up this time, didn’t you? Question for you: You ever think it’d end like this?”

  Sullivan had to laugh at that one. “You know what? I never thought it would end. Never occurred to me. Still hasn’t actually.”

  “Oh, it’s gonna end all right. Right here, right now. Just keep watching the movie until the houselights go out for you!”

  Which was obviously the truth, no doubt about it—but then the Butcher heard something that was hard for him to believe.

  It came from behind, so he had to turn around to check it out, to see if it was real or some cruel joke being played on him.

  Somebody was shouting at the far end of the alley—this had to be some kind of seriously messed-up miracle.

  Or it was the luckiest day of his life.

  Maybe both.

  The cavalry had arrived!

  Look who was here to save the day.

  Chapter 87

  “DC POLICE! EVERYBODY PUT THE GUNS DOWN. Do it now! We’re police officers. Guns down on the ground.”

  Sullivan saw the cops, and they looked like detectives, two buff-looking black guys in street clothes.

  They were coming up behind the Mafia hoods who were standing near Thirty-first Street and trying to figure out what the hell to do next, their next move.

  So was he.

  What a sight the two cops were, though, and Sullivan wondered, Could they be part of the task force put into Georgetown to catch the rapist, to catch him?

  Hell, he’d bet a bundle that’s what they were, and if it was true, he was the only one in the alleyway who had figured it out so far.

  One of the cops was already calling in for help. Then the two mob guys near Wisconsin just turned around—and they walked away.

  The detectives had their guns out, but what were they going to do? Realistically, what could they do?

  Sullivan almost began to laugh as he turned slowly and walked toward Wisconsin too.

  Then he began to run, a full-out sprint toward the busy street. Madman that he was, he started laughing his ass off. He’d decided to brazen it out, just run. Like in the old days back in Brooklyn when he was a kid making his bones in the game.

  Run, Mikey, run. Run for your life.

  What could the DC metro cops do? Shoot him in the back? For what? Running? Being the potential victim of four armed men in an alleyway?

  The cops were yelling, threatening him, but all they could do was watch him get away. Funniest thing he’d seen in years, maybe ever. The cavalry had come to the rescue—his.

  Huge mistake.

  Theirs.

  Chapter 88

  HALF A DOZEN UNIFORMS WERE MOVING in and out of the station house on Wisconsin when Sampson and I got there that afternoon. A detective named Michael Wright had finally made the connection that he and his partner might have just missed capturing the Georgetown rapist, that he’d maybe missed the biggest deal of his career. Still, they were holding two men in the cage who might know what was going on. They needed a closer.

  Sampson and I passed inside a ten-foot-high bulletproof partition and headed for the interrogation rooms, which were beyond the detectives’ cubicle area. The work space looked familiar—scarred, badly littered desks, old computers and phones from another era, overhead storage bins filled to overflowing.

  Before we entered the interrogation room, Wright told us that the two men in there hadn’t said a word so far, but they’d been armed with Berettas, and he was sure they were killers. “Have fun,” Wright said; then John and I walked inside.

  Sampson spoke up first. “I’m Detective John Sampson. This is Dr. Alex Cross. Dr. Cross is a forensic psychologist involved in the investigation of a series of rapes in the Georgetown area. I’m a detective on the case.”

  Neither of the men said a word, not even a wisecrack, to break the ice. Both of them looked to be in their early thirties, bodybuilder types, with permanent smirks on their faces.

  Sampson asked a couple more questions; then we just sat there in silence across the table from the two men.

  Eventually an administrative assistant knocked on the door and entered. She handed Sampson a couple of faxes, hot from the machine.

  He read the pages—then handed them to me.

  “I didn’t think the Mafia was active in the DC area,” Sampson said. “Guess I was wrong. You’re both soldiers in the mob. Either of you have anything to say about what was going down in that alley?”

  They didn’t, and they were annoyingly smug about not answering our questions and pretending we weren’t even there.

  “Dr. Cross, maybe we can work this out without their help. What do you think?” Sampson asked me.

  “We can try. It says here that John ‘Digger’ Antonelli and Joseph ‘Blade’ Lanugello work for Maggione out of New York Cit
y. That would be Maggione Jr. Maggione Sr. was the one who hired a man named Michael Sullivan, also known as the Butcher, to do a hit in DC several years back. You remember that one, John?”

  “I do. Took out a Chinese drug dealer. Your wife, Maria, was also murdered right around that time. Mr. Sullivan is now a suspect in this case.”

  “This same Michael ‘the Butcher’ Sullivan is also a suspect in a series of rapes in Georgetown, and at least one murder connected to the rapes. Was Sullivan the man you had cornered in Blues Alley?” I asked the Mafia hitters.

  Not a word came from either of them. Nothing at all. Real tough guys.

  Sampson finally stood up, rubbing his chin. “So I guess we don’t need Digger and Blade anymore. Well, what should we do with them? Wait, I have an idea. You’ll like this one, Alex,” Sampson said, and chuckled to himself.

  He motioned for the Mafia soldiers to get up. “We’re finished here. You can come with me, gentlemen.”

  “Where?” Lanugello finally broke his silence. “You ain’t charged us yet.”

  “Let’s go. Got a surprise for you.” Sampson walked in front of the two of them, and I walked behind. They didn’t seem to like having me at the rear. Maybe they thought I might still be harboring a grudge about what had happened to Maria. Well, maybe I was.

  Sampson signaled a guard at the end of the hall, and he used his keys to open a cell door. The holding area was already filled with several prisoners awaiting arraignment. All but one of them was black. John led the way inside.

  “You’ll be staying here. If you change your mind and want to talk to us,” Sampson said to the Mafia guys, “give a holler. That is if Dr. Cross and I are still in the building. If not, we’ll check in on you in the morning. If that’s the case, have a nice night.”

  Sampson tapped his shield a few times against the bars of the holding pen. “These two men are suspects in a series of rapes,” he announced to the other prisoners. “Rapes of black women in Southeast. Be careful, though, these are tough guys. From New York.”

  We left, and the lockup guard slammed the cell door behind us.

  Chapter 89

  FOUR O’CLOCK ON A COLD, rainy morning, and his two younger boys were crying their eyes out in the backseat of the car. So was Caitlin up in front. Sullivan blamed Junior Maggione and La Cosa Nostra for everything, the huge, ugly mess that was happening now. Somehow, Maggione was going to pay for this, and he looked forward to the day of retribution.

  So did his scalpel and his butcher’s saw.

  At two thirty in the morning he had piled his family into the car and snuck away from a house six miles outside Wheeling, West Virginia. It was their second move in as many weeks, but he had no choice in the matter. He’d promised the boys they would return to Maryland one day, but he knew that wasn’t true. They wouldn’t ever go back to Maryland. Sullivan already had an offer on the house there. He needed the cash for their escape plan.

  So now he and the family were running for their lives. As they left their “Wild West Virginny Home,” as he called it, he had a feeling that the mob would find them again—that they could be right around the next bend in the road.

  But he rounded the next curve, and the curve after that, and made it out of town safe and sound and in one piece. Soon they were singing Rolling Stones and ZZ Top tunes, including about a twenty-minute version of “Legs,” until his wife put her foot down about the nonstop high-testosterone noise. They stopped at Denny’s for breakfast, at Micky D’s for a second bathroom break, and by three in the afternoon, they were somewhere they had never been before.

  Hopefully, Sullivan had left no trail to be followed by a crew of mob killers. No bread crumbs like in “Hansel and Gretel.” The good thing was, neither he nor his family had ever been in this area before. It was virgin territory, with no roots or connections.

  He pulled into the driveway of a shingle-style Victorian house with a steep roof, a couple of turrets, even a stained-glass window.

  “I love this house!” Sullivan crowed, and he was all fake smiles and hyperenthusiasm. “Welcome to Florida, kiddos,” he said.

  “Very funny, Dad. Not,” said Mike Jr. from the backseat, where all three boys were looking grim and depressed.

  They were in Florida, Massachusetts, and Caitlin and the kids groaned at another of his dumb jokes. Florida was a small community of less than a thousand, situated high in the Berkshires. It had stunning mountain views, if nothing else. And there were no Mafia hit men waiting in the driveway. What more could they ask for?

  “Just perfect. What could be better than this?” Sullivan kept telling the kids as they started to unpack again.

  So why was Caitlin crying as he showed her their new living room with the sweeping views of big bad Mt. Greylock and the river? Why was he lying to her when he said, “Everything is going to be all right, my queen, light of my life”?

  Maybe because he knew it wasn’t true, and probably, so did she. He and his family were going to be murdered one day, maybe in this very house.

  Unless he did something dramatic to stop it. And fast. But what could that be? How could he stop the Mafia from coming after him?

  How could you kill the mob?

  Chapter 90

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, the Butcher was on the move again. Just him. One man.

  He had a plan now and was traveling south to New York City. He was uptight and nervous but singing along with Springsteen, Dylan, the Band, Pink Floyd. Nothing but Oldies and Greaties for the four-hour ride south. He didn’t particularly want to leave Caitlin and the boys at the house in Massachusetts, but he figured they’d probably be safe there for now. If not, he had done the best he could for them. Better than his father ever did for him, or for his mother and brothers.

  He finally pulled off the West Side Highway at around midnight; then he went straightaway to the Morningside Apartments on West 107th. He’d stayed there before and knew it was just out of the way enough to suit his purposes. Convenient too, with four different subway lines going through the two nearby stations.

  No air-conditioning in the rooms, he remembered, but that didn’t matter in November. He slept like a baby safe in a mother’s womb. When Sullivan woke at seven, covered in a light sheen of his own sweat, his mind was focused on a single idea: payback against Junior Maggione. Or maybe an even better idea: survival of the fittest and the toughest.

  Around nine that morning he took a subway ride to check out a couple of possible locations for murders he wanted to commit in the near future. He had a “wish list” with several different targets and wondered if any of these men, and two women, had an idea that they were as good as dead, that it was up to him who lived and died, and when, and where.

  In the evening, around nine, he drove over to Brooklyn, his old stomping grounds. Right into Junior Maggione’s neighborhood, his turf in Carroll Gardens.

  He was thinking about his old buddy Jimmy Hats and missing him some, figuring that Maggione’s father had probably popped Jimmy. Somebody had, and then made the body disappear, as if Jimmy had never been born. He’d always suspected it had been Maggione Sr., so that was another score for the Butcher to settle.

  It was building up inside him, this terrible rage. About something. Maybe about his father—the original Butcher of Sligo, that piece of Irish scum who had ruined his life before he was ten years old.

  He turned onto Maggione’s street, and he had to smile to himself. The powerful don still lived like a mildly successful plumber or maybe a local electrician, in a yellow-brick two-family house. More surprising—he didn’t spot any guards posted on the street.

  So either Junior was seriously underestimating him, or his people were damn good at hiding themselves in plain sight. Hell, maybe somebody had a sniper rifle sight pinned on his forehead right now. Maybe he had a couple of seconds to live.

  The suspense was killing him. He had to see what was going on here. So he hit his car horn once, twice, three times, and not a goddamn thing happened.


  Nobody shot him through the skull. And for the first time, the Butcher let himself think, I might win this fight after all.

  He’d figured out the first mystery: Junior Maggione had moved his family out of the house. Maggione was running too.

  Then he stopped that train of thought with just one word—mistake.

  He couldn’t make any—not one misstep from now until this was all over. If he did, he was dead.

  Simple as that.

  End of story.

  Chapter 91

  IT WAS LATE, AND I DECIDED to go for a drive in the R350. I was loving the car. The kids felt the same way. Even Nana did, praise the Lord. I found myself thinking about Maria again. The long investigation into her murder I had conducted and failed at. I was messing with my own mind, trying to picture her face, trying to hear the exact sound of her voice.

  Later that night, back at home, I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. It got so bad that I went downstairs and watched Diary of a Mad Black Woman again. Actually, I found myself cheering like a crazy person at the flickering TV screen. Tyler Perry’s movie matched up perfectly with my frame of mind.

  I called up Tony Woods at the director’s office around nine the next morning. Then I swallowed my pride and asked Tony for some help on the rape and murder case. I needed to find out if the Bureau had anything on the contract killer called the Butcher, anything that might be helpful to Sampson and me—maybe something classified.

  “We knew you’d call one of these days, Alex. Director Burns is eager to work with you again. You up for some consulting? Just light stuff. It’s your call what and where, especially now that you’re taking on cases again.”

  “Who said I’m taking on cases? This is a special situation,” I told Tony. “The Butcher probably murdered my wife years ago. It’s the one case I can’t leave unsolved.”