Cross Country (Alex Cross 14)

“You okay?” I asked.

She didn’t look up. “He was maybe twelve, Alex. Maybe that old. He ran suicide for the prick adult.”

“Was he alive when you got to him?” I asked her. Bree nodded.

“He say anything?”

“Yeah.” She finally looked up at me. “He told me to fuck myself. His last words on this earth.”

Chapter 20

I DIDN’T SLEEP more than a couple of hours that night. An officer and two civilians were dead—not to mention one of the boy killers, the “world’s youngest terrorist,” according to a Washington Post headline the next morning. On top of everything else, I had an eight o’clock psych client to see at St. Anthony’s.

Ever since the Tyler Bell case the year before, when I was literally stalked in my own office, I’d had to seriously reevaluate my life. The upshot: I’d decided my criminal cases were too high-profile too often for me to keep the private in private practice anymore. Now, I saw only two or three patients a week, usually pro bon

o, and I was satisfied with that. Most days, anyway.

But I didn’t want to see this particular patient—not today.

It was ironic that I had a session with Bronson “Pop-Pop” James that morning. He was eleven years old and probably the most advanced sociopath at that age I’d ever seen. Four months before, he’d made headlines when he and a seventeen-year-old beat two homeless men half to death. They had used a cinder block. It was Pop-Pop’s idea. The district attorney hadn’t figured out how to try the case yet, and Bronson was being held in juvenile custody. The one thing he had going for him was a very good social worker from Corrections, who made sure he got to his appointments with me.

At first I thought it best to keep the events of the last night out of my head. Once the session got going, though, I changed my mind.

“Bronson, you hear about what happened at the service plaza in Virginia last night?”

He sat across from me on a cheap vinyl couch, fidgeting the whole time, hands and feet always in motion. “Yeah, right, I heard. They was talking ’bout that shit on the radio. What of it?”

“The boy who died . . . he was twelve.”

Bronson grinned and put two fingers to his head. “Heard he got X-Boxed.”

His confidence was prodigious; it gave him a strange adult quality—while his feet dangled about six inches off the floor in my office.

“You ever think something like that might happen to you?” I asked him.

He snorted. “Every day. It’s no thing.”

“That’s okay with you, though? Makes sense? That’s how the world should be?”

“That’s how the world be. Bam.”

“So then”—I looked around the room and back at him—“why bother to sit here and talk to me about it? That doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“ ’Cause that bitch Lorraine fuckin’ make me come.”

I nodded. “Just because you come here doesn’t mean you have to say anything. But you do. You talk to me. Why do you think that is?”

He made a thing of getting all impatient. “You the witch doctor, you tell me.”

“You envy kids like the one who died? Working for a living? Running around with guns?”

He squinted at me, pulled the Lebron James Cleveland Cavaliers sweatband around his head a little lower. “Whaddya mean?”

“You know, are you jealous of them?”

He smiled again, but only to himself. Then he slouched down on the couch and reached out with a toe to casually tip over the orange juice I’d given him. It spilled across the table between us. “Yo, they got any Skittles in the machine downstairs? Go get me some Skittles!”

I did no such thing. After the session, I escorted Pop-Pop out to his social worker and told the boy I’d see him on Friday. Then I went home and picked up Nana.