Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

“Stupid bitch,” he muttered, anger beginning to build, boiling away all that good feeling. “Don’t you read? Don’t you listen?”

He backed off, telling himself that this wasn’t the time or the place.

But as he entered a long, slow, easterly curve in the four-lane highway, Mercury realized that, except for the Taurus, the southbound lanes were clear in front and behind him.

He made a split-second decision and zipped open his jacket. With his right hand he twisted the throttle, and with his left, he drew the pistol.

The motorcycle sped up until it was right beside the Taurus. The stupid bitch driving didn’t look at him, and she wasn’t looking at the road ahead.

She was texting on an iPhone while driving sixty-two miles an hour.

Years of practice had made Mercury an ambidextrous shot. He was about to pull the trigger when Ms. Textaholic actually took her eyes off the goddamned screen.

She looked over. She saw the gun.

She dropped the iPhone and twisted as he shot.

The tail end of the Taurus swung violently into his lane, almost knocking over the motorcycle, and then it veered back the other way, did a 360-degree spin, ran up an embankment, and flipped over onto its roof.

He put away the pistol and drove on at a steady sixty-three, two miles below the speed limit.

No need to draw any attention now that the traffic laws were being obeyed and a sense of balance, a sense of order, had been restored.

Chapter

37

That afternoon after we talked to Condon, we went to Bree’s office and gave her our report.

“So Condon threatened two law enforcement officers?” she asked, looking as stressed and tired as I’ve ever seen her.

“Oh yeah,” Sampson said.

“In a manner of speaking, anyway,” I said. “He’s highly intelligent. Knew what we were up to the second we mentioned the massacre.”

“You ask him where he was on the night in question?”

“He wouldn’t answer,” Sampson said. “Said he’d learned the hard way never to talk with an investigator of any kind without an attorney present.”

“But you put him on notice that he’s a suspect,” Bree said. “That can be a good thing.”

“It can,” I said. “But we can’t exactly put him under surveillance from here, and we don’t have evidence to support a search warrant.”

“Find me one thing that links Condon to th

at factory, and I’ll call in some favors with the state police in Maryland. Have them put him under surveillance.”

“I find one thing that links Condon to that factory and I think Mahoney will take over and call in the FBI cavalry, and it will be out of our hands.”

Sampson said, “I’m going to check if Condon has a Tannerite waiver. If not, he’s stockpiling explosives and we can walk in his front door with an army behind us.”

“Good,” Bree said.

We started to leave, but Bree called after me, “Alex? Can we talk?”

“Fine,” Sampson said. “I know when I’m not wanted.”

He closed the door as he left. Bree sagged back in her chair.