Cat and Mouse (Alex Cross 4)

“You’re nervous now, and so am I. God, am I nervous,” she said quietly. “I know I’ve hurt your feelings, and I don’t like that. It’s the last thing I meant to do. You don’t deserve to be hurt.”

Christine was shivering a little. Her voice was shaking, too, as she spoke. “Alex, my husband died because of the kind of violence you have to live with every day. You accept that world, but I don’t think I can. I’m just not that kind of person. I couldn’t bear to lose someone else I was close to. Am I making sense to you? I’m feeling a little confused.”

Everything was becoming clearer to me now. Christine’s husband had been killed in December. She said that there had been serious problems in the marriage, but she loved him. She had seen him shot to death in their home, seen him die. I had held her then. I was part of the murder case.

I wanted to hold her again, but I knew it was the wrong thing to do. She was still hugging herself tightly. I understood her feelings.

“Please listen to me, Christine. I’m not going to die until probably in my late eighties. I’m too stubborn and ornery to die. That would give us longer together than either of us has been alive so far. Forty-plus years. It’s also a long time to avoid each other.”

Christine shook her head a little. She continued to look into my eyes. Finally, a smile peeked through.

“I do like the way your crazy mind works. One minute, you’re Detective Cross — the next minute you’re this very open, very sweet child.” She put her hands up to her face. “Oh, God, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

Everything inside me said to do it, every instinct, every feeling. I slowly, carefully, reached out and took Christine into my arms. She fit so right. I could feel myself melting and I liked it. I even liked that my legs felt shaky and weak.

We kissed for the first time and Christine’s mouth was soft and very sweet. Her lips pushed against mine. She didn’t pull away, as I’d expected she might. I ran the tips of my fingers along one cheek, then the other.

Her skin was smooth and my fingers tingled at the tips. It was as if I had been without air for a long, long time and suddenly could breathe again. I could breathe. I felt alive.

Christine had shut her eyes, but now she opened them. Our eyes met, and held. “Just like I imagined it,” she whispered, “times about four hundred and fifty.”

Then the worst thing imaginable happened — my pager beeped.

Chapter 22

AT SIX o’clock in New York City, police cruisers and EMS van sirens were wailing everywhere in the always highly congested five-block radius around Penn Station. Detective Manning Goldman parked his dark blue Ford Taurus in front of the post office building on Eighth Avenue and ran toward the multiple-murder scene.

People stopped walking on the busy avenue to watch Goldman. Heads turned everywhere, trying to find out what was going on, and how this running man might fit in.

Goldman had long, wavy caramel-and-gray hair and a gray goatee. A gold stud glinted from one earlobe. Goldman looked more like an aging rock or jazz musician than a homicide detective.

Goldman’s partner was a first-year detective named Carmine Groza. Groza had a strong build and wavy black hair, and reminded people of a young Sylvester Stallone, a comparison he hated. Goldman rarely talked to him. In his opinion, Groza had never uttered a single word worth listening to.

Groza nonetheless followed close behind his fifty-eight-year-old partner, who was currently the oldest Manhattan homicide detective working the streets, possibly the smartest, and definitely the meanest, grumpiest bastard Groza had ever met.

Goldman was known to be somewhere to the right of Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh when it came to politics but, like most rumors, or what he called “caricature assassinations,” this one was off the mark. On certain issues — the apprehension of criminals, the rights of criminals versus the rights of other citizens, and the death penalty, Goldman was definitely a radical conservative. He knew that anyone with half a brain who worked homicide for a couple of hours would come to exactly the same conclusions that he had. On the other hand, when it came to women’s right to choose, same-sex marriages, or even Howard Stern, Goldman was as liberal as his thirty-year-old son, who just happened to be a lawyer with the ACLU. Of course, Goldman kept that to himself. The last thing he wanted was to ruin his reputation as an insufferable bastard. If he did that, he might have to talk to up-and-coming young assholes like “Sly” Groza.

Goldman was still in good shape — better than Groza, with his steady diet of fast foods and high-octane colas and sugary teas. He ran against the tide of people streaming out of Penn Station. The murders, at least the ones he knew about so far, had taken place in and around the main waiting area of the train station.

The killer had chosen the rush hour for a reason, Goldman was thinking as the train-station waiting area came into view. Either that, or the killer just happened to go wacko at a time when the station was jam-packed with victims-to-be.

So what brought the wacko to Penn Station at rush hour? Manning Goldman wondered. He already had one scary theory that he was keeping to himself so far.

“Manning, you think he’s still in here someplace?” Groza asked from behind.

Groza’s habit of calli

ng people by their first name, as if they were all camp counselors together, really got under his skin.

Goldman ignored his partner. No, he didn’t believe the killer was still in Penn Station. The killer was on the loose in New York. That bothered the hell out of him. It made him sick to his stomach, which wasn’t all that hard these days, the past couple of years, actually.

Two pushcart vendors were artfully blocking the way to the crime scene. One cart was called Montego City Slickers Leather, the other From Russia With Love. He wished they would go back to Jamaica and Russia, respectively.

“NYPD. Make way. Move these ashcarts!” Goldman yelled at the vendors.

He pushed his way through the crowd of onlookers, other cops, and train-station personnel who were gathered near the body of a black man with braided hair and tattered clothing. Bloodstained copies of Street News were scattered around the body, so Goldman knew the dead man’s occupation and his reason for being at the train station.

As he got up close, he saw that the victim was probably in his late twenties. There was an unusual amount of blood. Too much. The body was surrounded by a bright red pool.