Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24) Page 26

  Sampson took a longer look from the opposite angle. His face almost immediately screwed up.

  “Two wounded,” he hissed. “The cook, Theresa, and a nun I’ve never seen before.”

  “How bad?”

  “There’s blood all over Theresa’s white apron. Looks like the nun’s hit in the leg. She’s sitting up against the stove with a big pool below her.”

  “Femoral?”

  Sampson took another look and said, “It’s a lot of blood.”

  “Cover me,” I said. “I’m going in low to get them.”

  Sampson nodded. I squatted down and threw my shoulder into the door, which swung away. Half expecting some unseen gunman to open fire, I rolled inside. I slid through the slurry of two dozen eggs, and came to a stop on the floor between two prep counters.

  Sampson came in with his weapon high, searching for a target.

  But no one shot. No one moved. And there was no sound except the labored breathing of the cook and the nun who were to our left, on the other side of a counter, by a big industrial stove.

  The nun’s eyes were open and bewildered. The cook’s head slumped but she was breathing.

  I scrambled under the prep counter to the women, and started tugging off my belt. The nun shrank from me when I reached for her.

  “I’m a cop, Sister,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross. I need to put a tourniquet on your leg or you could die.”

  She blinked, but then nodded.

  “John?” I said, observing a serious gunshot wound to her lower thigh. A needle-thin jet of blood erupted with every heartbeat.

  “Right here,” Sampson said behind me. “Just seeing what’s what.”

  “Call it in,” I said, as I wrapped the belt around her upper thigh, cinching it tight. “We need two ambulances. Fast.”

  The blood stopped squirting. I could hear my partner making the radio call.

  The nun’s eyes fluttered and drifted toward shut.

  “Sister,” I said. “What happened? Who shot you?”

  Her eyes blinked open. She gaped at me, disoriented for a moment, before her attention strayed past me. Her eyes widened, and the skin of her cheek went taut with terror.

  I snatched up my gun and spun around, raising the pistol. I saw Sampson with his back to me, radio to his ear, gun lowered, and then a door at the back of the kitchen. It had swung open, revealing a large pantry.

  A man crouched in a fighting stance in the pantry doorway.

  In his crossed arms he held two nickel-plated pistols, one aimed at Sampson and the other at me.

  With all the training I’ve been lucky enough to receive over the years, you’d think I would have done the instinctual thing for a veteran cop facing an armed assailant, that I would have registered Man with gun! in my brain, and I would have shot him immediately.

  But for a split second I didn’t listen to Man with a gun! because I was too stunned by the fact that I knew him, and that he was long, long dead.

  IN THAT SAME instant, he fired both pistols. Traveling less than thirty feet, the bullet hit me so hard it slammed me backward. My head cracked off the concrete and everything went just this side of midnight, like I was swirling and draining down a black pipe, before I heard a third shot and then a fourth.

  Something crashed close to me, and I fought my way toward the sound, toward consciousness, seeing the blackness give way, disjointed and incomplete, like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.

  Five, maybe six seconds passed before I found more pieces, and I knew who I was and what had happened. Two more seconds passed before I realized I’d taken the bullet square in the Kevlar that covered my chest. It felt like I’d taken a sledgehammer to my ribs, and a swift kick to my head.

  In the next instant, I grabbed my gun and looked for …

  John Sampson sprawled on the floor by the sinks, his massive frame looking crumpled until he started twitching electrically, and I saw the head wound.

  “No,” I shouted, becoming fully alert, and stumbling over to his side.

  Sampson’s eyes were rolled up in his head and quivering. I grabbed the radio on the floor beyond him, hit the transmitter, and said, “This is Detective Alex Cross. Ten-Zero-Zero. Repeat. Officer down. Monroe Avenue and 12th, Northeast. St. Anthony’s Catholic School kitchen. Multiple shots fired. Ten-Fifty-Twos needed immediately. Repeat. Multiple ambulances needed, and a Life Flight for officer with head wound!”

  “We have ambulances and patrols on their way, Detective,” the dispatcher came back. “ETA twenty seconds. I’ll call Life Flight. Do you have the shooter?”

  “No, damn it. Make the Life Flight call.”

  The line went dead. I lowered the radio. Only then did I look back at the best friend I’ve ever had, the first kid I met after Nana Mama brought me up from South Carolina, the man I’d grown up with, the partner I’d relied on more times than I could count. The spasms subsided and Sampson’s eyes lolled and he gasped.

  “John,” I said, kneeling beside him and taking his hand. “Hold on now. Cavalry’s coming.”

  He seemed not to hear, just stared vacantly past me toward the wall.

  I started to cry. I couldn’t stop. I shook from head to toe, and then I wanted to shoot the man who’d done this. I wanted to shoot him twenty times, completely destroy the creature that had risen from the dead.

  Sirens closed in on the school from six directions. I wiped at my tears, and then squeezed Sampson’s hand, before forcing myself to my feet and back out into the cafeteria, where the first patrol officers were charging in, followed by a pair of EMTs whose shoulders were flecked with melting snowflakes.

  They got Sampson’s head immobilized, then put him on a board and then a gurney. He was under blankets and moving in less than six minutes. It was snowing hard outside. They waited inside the front door to the school for the helicopter to come, and put IV lines into his wrists.

  Sampson went into another convulsion. The parish priest, Father Fred Close, came and gave my partner the last rites.

  But my man was still hanging on when the helicopter came. In a daze I followed them out into a driving snowstorm. We had to shield our eyes to duck under the blinding propeller wash and get Sampson aboard.

  “We’ll take it from here!” one EMT shouted at me.

  “There’s not a chance I’m leaving his side,” I said, climbed in beside the pilot, and pulled on the extra helmet. “Let’s go.”

  The pilot waited until they had the rear doors shut and the gurney strapped down before throttling up the helicopter. We began to rise, and it was only then that I saw through the swirling snow that crowds were forming beyond the barricades set up in a perimeter around the school and church complex.

  We pivoted in the air and flew back up over 12th Street, rising above the crowd. I looked down through the spiraling snow and saw everyone ducking their heads from the helicopter wash. Everyone except for a single male face looking directly up at the Life Flight, not caring about the battering, stinging snow.

  “That’s him!” I said.

  “Detective?” the pilot said, his voice crackling over the radio in my helmet.

  I tugged down the microphone, and said, “How do I talk to dispatch?”

  The pilot leaned over, and flipped a switch.

  “This is Detective Alex Cross,” I said. “Who’s the supervising detective heading to St. Anthony’s?”

  “Your wife. Chief Stone.”

  “Patch me through to her.”

  Five seconds passed as we built speed and hurtled toward the hospital.

  “Alex?” Bree said. “What’s happened?”

  “John’s hit bad, Bree,” I said. “I’m with him. Close off that school from four blocks in every direction. Order a door-to-door search. I just saw the shooter on 12th, a block west of the school.”

  “Description?”

  “It’s Gary Soneji, Bree,” I said. “Get his picture off Google and send it to every cop in the area.”

  There was silen
ce on the line before Bree said sympathetically, “Alex, are you okay? Gary Soneji’s been dead for years.”

  “If he’s dead, then I just saw a ghost.”

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  Epub ISBN: 9781473505469

  Version 1.0

  Published by Century 2016

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  Copyright © James Patterson 2016

  Excerpt from Cross Kill copyright © James Patterson 2016

  ALEX CROSS is a trademark of JBP Business, LLC

  Cover photography © Colin Thomas/Arcangel/Getty Images

  James Patterson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century

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  ISBN 9781780892689