Pop Goes the Weasel (Alex Cross 5)

t back at Two-John, who is six-nine and about two hundred fifty pounds.

Sampson reached out and took the baby from me. Alex nearly disappeared in his hands, which are the size of catcher’s mitts. Then Sampson laughed and began to talk to the baby in total gibberish.

Christine appeared from the kitchen. She joined the three of us. So far, she and Alex Jr. were living apart from us. We hoped they would come join Nana, Damon, Jannie, and me in this house. Just one big family. I wanted Christine as my wife, not just as a girlfriend. I wanted to wake little Alex in the mornings, then put him to sleep at night.

“I’m going to walk around the party with little Alex. Shamelessly use him to pick up pretty women,” Sampson said. He walked off with Alex cradled in his arms.

“You think he’ll ever get married?” Christine asked.

“Little Alex? The Boy? Sure he will.”

“No, your partner in crime, John Sampson. Will he ever get married, settle down?” It didn’t sound like it bothered her that we weren’t.

“I think he will—someday. John had a bad family model. His father walked out when John was a year old—eventually died of an overdose. John’s mother was a drug addict. She lived in Southeast until a couple of years ago. Sampson was practically raised by my Aunt Tia, with help from Nana.”

We watched Sampson cruise the party with little Alex in his arms. He hit on a pretty lady named De Shawn Hawkins, who worked with Christine. “He really is using the baby to hit on women,” Christine said in amazement. “De Shawn, be careful,” she called to her friend.

I laughed. “Says what he’s going to do, does what he says.”

The party had started around two in the afternoon. It was still going strong at nine-thirty. I had just sung a duet with Sampson, Joe Tex’s “Skinny Legs and All.” It was a howling success. We got a lot of laughs and playful jeers. Sampson was starting to sing “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything.”

That was when Kyle Craig from the FBI arrived. I should have told everybody to go home—the party was all but over.

Read an extended excerpt and learn more about Roses Are Red.

Alex Cross gets a presidential request:

“Please find my kids!”

For an excerpt from the new Alex Cross novel,

turn the page.

IT BEGAN WITH PRESIDENT COYLE’S CHILDREN, ETHAN AND ZOE, BOTH high-profile personalities since they had arrived in Washington, and probably even before that.

Twelve-year-old Ethan Coyle thought he had gotten used to living under the microscope and in the public eye. So Ethan hardly noticed anymore the news cameramen perpetually camped outside the Branaff School gates, and he didn’t worry the way he used to if some kid he didn’t know tried to snap his picture in the hall, or the gymnasium, or even the boys’ bathroom.

Sometimes, Ethan even pretended he was invisible. It was kind of babyish, kind of b.s., but who cared. It helped. One of the more personable Secret Service guys had actually suggested it. He told Ethan that Chelsea Clinton used to do the same thing. Who knew if that was true?

But when Ethan saw Ryan Townsend headed his way that morning, he only wished he could disappear.

Ryan Townsend always had it in for him, and that wasn’t just Ethan’s paranoia talking. He had the purplish and yellowing bruises to prove it—the kind that a good hard punch or muscle squeeze can leave behind.

“Wuzzup, Coyle the Boil?” Townsend said, charging up on him in the hall with that look on his face. “The Boil havin’ a bad day already?”

Ethan knew better than to answer his tormenter and torturer. He cut a hard left toward the lockers instead—but that was his first mistake. Now there was nowhere to go, and he felt a sharp, nauseating jab to the side of his leg. He’d been kicked! Townsend barely even slowed down as he passed. He called these little incidents “drive-bys.”

The thing Ethan didn’t do was yell out, or stumble in pain. That was the deal he’d made with himself: don’t let anyone see what you’re feeling inside.

Instead, he dropped his books and knelt down to pick them back up again. It was a total wuss move, but at least he could take the weight off his leg for a second without letting the whole world know he was Ryan Townsend’s punching and kicking dummy.

Except this time, someone else did see—and it wasn’t the Secret Service.

Ethan was stuffing graph paper back into his math folder when he heard a familiar voice.

“Hey, Ryan? Wuzzup with you?”

He looked up just in time to see his fourteen-year-old sister, Zoe, stepping right into Townsend’s path.