Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

Danny Boudreaux was trying to say something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. He sputtered, still drooling the bubbling white foam.

“What did you say? What is it?” I asked. My voice was hoarse and my throat hurt. I was shaking and covered with sweat myself.

He spoke in a tiny whisper, almost as if there were no one inside him anymore. “I’m afraid,” he told me. “I don’t know where I am. I’m always so afraid.”

I nodded at the small, horrifying face looking up at me. “I know,” I said to the young killer. “I know what you’re feeling.”

That was the scariest thing of all.

CHAPTER

102

THE DRAGONSLAYER lives, but how many lives do I have left? Why was I taking chances with my life? Physician, heal thyself.

I stayed at the Johnson house for more than an hour, until the Boudreaux boy and the body of George Johnson were taken away. There were questions I had to ask Christine Johnson for my report. Then I called home and spoke to Nana. I told her to please go to bed. I was safe and basically sound. For tonight, anyway.

“I love you, Alex,” she whispered over the phone. Nana sounded almost as tired and beat-up as I was.

“I love you, too, old woman,” I told her.

That night, miracle of miracles, she actually let me get in the last word.

The crowd of ambulance-chasers on Summer Street finally broke up. Even the most persistent reporters and photographers left. One of Christine Johnson’s sisters had arrived to be with her in this terrible time. I hugged Christine hard before I left.

She was still trembling. She had suffered a horrible, unspeakable loss. We had both spent a night in hell. “I can’t feel anything. Everything is so unreal,” she told me. “I know this isn’t a nightmare, and yet I keep thinking that it has to be one.”

Sampson drove me home at one in the morning. My eyes felt lidless. My brain was still going at a million miles an hour, still buzzing loudly, still overheated.

What was our world coming to? Gary Soneji? Bundy? The Hillside Strangler? Koresh? McVeigh? On and on and on. Gandhi was asked once what he thought of western civilization. He replied, “I think it could be a good idea.”

I don’t cry too much. I can’t. The same is true for a lot of police officers I know. I wish I could cry sometimes, let it all out, release the fear and the venom, but it isn’t that easy. Something has gotten blocked up inside.

I sat on the stairs inside our house. I had been on my way to my bedroom, but I hadn’t made it. I was trying to cry, but I couldn’t.

I thought about my wife, Maria, who was killed in a drive-by shooting a few years back. Maria and I had fit together beautifully. That wasn’t just selective memory on my part. I knew how good love could be—I knew it was the best thing I’d ever done in my life—and yet here I was alone. I was taking chances with my life. I kept telling everybody that I was all right, but I wasn’t.

I don’t know how long I stayed there in the darkness with my thoughts. Maybe ten minutes, maybe it was much more than that. The house was quiet in a familiar, almost comfortable way, but I couldn’t be soothed that night.

I listened to sounds that I had been hearing for years. I remembered being a small boy there, growing up with Nana, wondering what I would become someday. Now I knew the answer to that question. I was a multiple-homicide expert who got to work the biggest, nastiest cases. I was the dragonslayer.

I finally climbed the rest of the stairs and stopped in at Damon and Jannie’s room. The two of them were fast asleep in the bedroom they share in our small house.

I love the way Damon and Jannie sleep, the trusting, innocent ways of my young son and daughter. I can watch them for long stretches, even on a howling-bad night like this one. I can’t count how many times I have peeked in and just stood in the doorway. They keep me going, keep me from flying apart some nights.

They’d gone to sleep wearing funky, heart-shaped sunglasses like the ones the kids wear in the singing group called Innocence. It was cute as hell. Precious, too. I sat on the edge of Jannie’s bed. I quietly took off my boots and carefully laid them on the floor without making any noise.

Then I stretched myself out across the bottom of both their beds. I listened to my bones crack. I wanted to be near my kids, to be with them, for all of us to be safe. It didn’t seem too much to ask out of life, too much reward for the day I had just lived through.

I gently kissed the rubber-soled slipper-sock of Jannie’s pajamas.

I laid my hand very lightly against Damon’s cool bare leg.

I finally closed my eyes, and I tried to push the rushing scenes of murder and chaos out of my mind. I couldn’t do it. The monsters were everywhere that night. They truly were all around me.

There are so goddamn many of them. Wave upon wave, it seems. Young and old, and everything in between. Where are these monsters coming from in America? What has created them?

Lying there alongside my two children, I finally was able to sleep somehow. For a few hours, I was able to forget the most horrifying thing of all, the reason for my extreme sorrow and upset.