Boudreaux suddenly laughed into his megaphone—a highpitched girlish giggle. Spooky as hell. A few people in the crowd of onlookers and ambulance-chasers laughed along with the boy. Nice to know you have friends out there.
“Well, it’s about time, Detective Alex Cross. It’s so nice that you can fit me into your busy schedule. Mrs. Johnson thinks so, too. We’re here waiting, waiting, waiting for you… so c’mon in the house. Let’s have a party.”
The boy was openly challenging me and my authority. He needed to be the one in charge. I was charting everything in my head, keeping track of his every move, but also the sequence. Paranoid schizophrenic was a possible diagnosis. Bipolar or conduct disorder was a better guess. I needed to talk to him to find out the rest.
Danny Boudreaux seemed coherent, anyway. He appeared to be following actions in real time. I wondered if he might be taking his Depakote again.
A voice close behind me said, “Alex, come over here, goddammit. I want to talk to you. Alex, come here.”
I turned around and faced the music. Sampson was scowling from ear to ear. “We don’t need another hostage in there,” he said in no uncertain terms. He was angry with me already. His eyes were dark beads, his brow deeply furrowed. “You didn’t hear him raving before, through most of last night. The bad boy is real crazy. The boy is crazy as shit, Alex. All he wants to do is kill somebody else.”
“I think I’ll be all right with him,” I said. “He’s my type of boy. Gary Soneji, Casanova, Danny Boudreaux. Besides, I don’t have a choice.”
“You have a choice, Sugar. You just don’t have any good sense.”
I looked back at the house. Christine Johnson was in there with the killer. If I didn’t go in, he’d kill her. He’d said so, and I believed him. What choice did that leave me? Besides, no good deed goes unpunished, right?
Chief Pittman signaled that I had the go-ahead from him. It was up to me. Doctor-Detective Cross.
I sucked in a deep breath and began to walk across the wet, springy front lawn to the house. The news photographers took a flurry of flashshots in the few seconds it took me to move to the front door. Suddenly, all the TV cameras were aimed at me.
I was definitely concerned about Danny Boudreaux. He was incredibly dangerous right now. He’d been on a killing spree. Five indiscriminate murders within the last few weeks. Now he was cornered. Even worse, he had cornered himself.
My hand reached out for the front doorknob. I was feeling numb and a little out of it. My vision was tunneled. I focused on the whitewashed door and nothing else.
“It’s open.” A voice came from behind the door.
A boy’s voice. A little raspy. Small and fragile without the megaphone to amplify it.
I pushed open the front door and finally saw the Truth School killer in all of his insane glory.
Danny Boudreaux wasn’t much more than five three or four. He had thin, squinty eyes like a rodent’s, large ears, a bad buzz haircut. He was an odd-looking boy, clearly an outcast, a freak. I sensed that other kids wouldn’t like him much, that he was a loner, and had been for all his life.
He had a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic aimed chest-high at me.
“Military school,” he reminded me. “I’m an expert marksman, Detective Cross. I have no difficulty with human targets.”
CHAPTER
99
MY HEART was clanging around inside the tight metal cage that was supposed to be my chest. The loud buzzing sound in my head was still there, like irritating static on a radio. I didn’t feel much like a police hero. I felt scared. It was worse than usual. Maybe because the killer was thirteen years old.
Danny Boudreaux knew how to use the semiautomatic clenched in his hand, and sooner or later, he would. The only thing in the universe that mattered to me right then was to get that Smith & Wesson away from him.
The image before me commanded all my attention: a thin, pimply thirteen-year-old boy with a powerful, deadly handgun. A semiautomatic was pointed at my heart. Although Boudreaux’s hand was steady enough, he appeared to be more mentally and physically out of it than I had thought. He was probably decompensating. His behavior was likely to become increasingly more bizarre. His instability was obvious and scary to confront. It was in his eyes. His eyes darted about like birds caught in a glass bubble.
He was weaving slightly as he stood in the foyer of the Johnson house. He waved the gun in small circles at me. He was wearing a strange sweatshirt with the printed message HAPPY, HAPPY. JOY, JOY.
His short hair was dripping wet with perspiration. His glasses were slightly fogged around the edges. Behind the glasses, his eyes were glazed and shiny-wet. He looked the part of the Truth School killer. I doubted that anyone had ever liked Danny Boudreaux too much. I didn’t.
His wiry body suddenly snapped rigidly to attention. “Welcome on board, Detective Cross, sir!”
“Hello, Danny,” I spoke to him in a
s low-key and non-threatening a way as I could. “You called, and now I’m here.” I’m the one who’s going to take your ass down.
He kept his distance. He was a jangle of raw nerves and incredible, pent-up anger. He was a puppet without a puppeteer. There was no way to predict how this was going to go from here.