Jack & Jill (Alex Cross 3)

The circus was definitely in town.

Two of them.

Two completely different kinds of murder pattern. I had never seen anything like it, nothing even close to this chaos.

I didn’t need Nana Mama to remind me that I wanted to be out on the street right now. As she had said, Someone is killing our children.

I was certain that the unspeakable monster was going to kill again. In contrast to Jack and Jill, there was rage and passion in his work. There was a raw, scary craziness, the kind I could almost taste. The killer’s probable amateur status wasn’t reassuring, either.

Think like the killer. Walk in the killer’s shoes, I reminded myself. That’s how it all starts, but it’s a lot tougher than it sounds. I was gathering as much information and data as I possibly could.

I spent part of the afternoon ambushing several of the local hangarounds who might have picked up something on the murders: convivial street people, swooning pipeheads, young runners for the rock and weed dealers, a few low-level rollers themselves,

store owners, snitches, Muslims selling newspapers. I gave some of them a tough time, but nobody had anything useful for me.

I kept at The Job anyway. That’s the way it goes most days. You just keep at it, keep your head down and screwed on straight. About quarter past five, I found myself talking to a seventeen-year-old homeless youth I knew from working the soup kitchen at St. Anthony’s. His name was Loy McCoy, and he was a low-level crack runner now. He had helped me once or twice in the past.

Loy had stopped coming by for free food once he had started moving nickel and dime bags of crack and speed around the neighborhood. It’s hard to blame kids like Loy, as much as I would like to some days. Their lives are unbelievably brutal and hopeless. Then one day someone comes along and offers them fifteen or twenty bucks an hour to do what’s going to happen anyway. The more powerful emotional hook is that their dope bosses believe in them, and in many cases nobody has believed in any of these lost kids before.

I called Loy over, away from the posse of fools he was hanging with on L Street. They all wore black, machine-knit wool caps pulled low over their eyes and ears. Gold toothcaps, hoop earrings, baggy trousers, the works. His gang was talking about the movie based on the old Flintstones cartoon, or maybe about the actual cartoons. Yabba dabbas was one of the catchphrases used to describe police patrolmen and detectives in the ’hood. Here comes the yabba dabba. Or, he’s a yabba dabba doo motherfucker. I had recently read a sad statistic that seventy percent of Americans got nearly one hundred percent of their information from television and the movies.

Loy smirked as he slow-shuffled up at me at the street corner. He was maybe six one, but about only a hundred and forty pounds. He had on baggy, layered winter clothes, artfully torn, and he was “grittin” me today, trying to stare me down, put me down.

“Yo, you say c’mon over, I got to come?” Loy asked in a defiant tone that I found both irritating and monumentally sad. “Whysat? I pay my taxes,” he rapped on. “I ain’t holdin’. Ain’t none of us holdin’.”

“None of your bullshit attitude works on me,” I told him. “You better lose it right now.” I knew that his mother was a heroin addict and that he had three little sisters. All of them lived at the Greater Southeast Community Hospital shelter, which was like having the tunnels under Union Station as your home address.

“Say your business, an’ I get back to my business,” Loy said, remaining defiant. “My time’s money, unnerstand? Axt me what you got to axt.”

“Just one question for you, Loy. Then you can go back to your big money business dealings.”

He kept “grittin” me, which can get you shot in this neighborhood. “Why I have to answer any questions? What’s in it for me? What you have to deal?”

I finally smiled at Loy and he cracked a half-smile himself, showing off his shiny gold caps. “You give me something, maybe I’ll remember. Then maybe I’ll owe you one sometime,” I said.

“Yo,” he came right back at me. “Wanna know a big fat secret, Detective? I don’t need your markers. And I don’t much care about these murdered kids’ homo-cides you lookin’ into.” He shrugged as if it were no big deal on the street. I already knew that.

I waited for him to finish his little speech, and also to process my offer. The sad thing was that he was bright. Crazy smart. That was why the crack boss had hired him. Loy was smart enough, and he probably even had a decent work ethic.

“I can’t talk to you! Don’t have to, neither!” He finally did a little exasperated spin and threw up both his skinny arms. “You think I owe you ’cause once upon a time you fed us Manhandler soup-slop at the po’boy kitchen? Think I owe you? I don’t owe you shit!”

Loy started to strut away. Then he looked back at me, as if he had just one more irritating wisecrack to hurl my way. His dark eyes narrowed, caught mine, and held on for a second, Contact. Liftoff.

“Somebody saw an old man where that little girl got kilt,” Loy blurted out. It was the biggest news we had so far on the Truth School case. It was the only news, and it was what I had been looking for all these days working the street.

He had no idea how fast I was, or how strong. I reached out and pulled him close to me. I pulled Loy McCoy very close. So close I could smell the sweet peppermint on his breath, the scent of pomade in his hair, the mustiness of his badly wrinkled winter clothes.

I held him to my chest as if he were a son of mine, a prodigal son, a young fool who needed to understand that I wasn’t going to allow him to be this way with me. I held him real tight and I wanted to save him somehow. I wanted to save all of them, but I couldn’t, and it was one of the big hurts and frustrations of my life.

“I’m not fooling around here, now. Who told you that, Loy? You talk to me. Don’t fuck with me on this. Talk to me, and talk to me now.”

His face was inches from mine. My mouth was almost pressed against his cheek. All of his swagger and the attitude had disappeared. I didn’t like being a tough guy with him, but this was important as hell.

My hands are large and scarred, like a boxer’s, and I let him see them. “I’m waiting for an answer,” I whispered. “I will take you in. I will ruin your day and night.”

“Don’t know who,” he said between wheezing breaths. “Some people in the shelter be sayin’ it. I just heard it, you know. Old homeless dude. Somebody saw’m hangin’ in Garfield. White dude in the park.”

“A white man? On the southeast side of the park? You sure about that?”