The Big Bad Wolf (Alex Cross 9)

“I mean you. You’re crazy! What a ride.”

We saw Brendan Connolly lurch out of the damaged Porsche. He held a handgun aimed our way. Connolly fired off two quick shots. He wasn’t good with a gun, but he was shooting real bullets.

“Son of a bitch!” Mahoney fired a shot and hit the Porsche—just to show Connolly that we could shoot him if we wanted to.

“Put the gun down,” Mahoney shouted. “Put the gun down!”

Brendan Connolly started to run down the hill, but he was stumbling a lot. Mahoney and I kept gaining on him until we were only thirty yards or so behind.

“Let me,” I said.

Brendan Connolly looked back over his shoulder just then. I could tell he was tired, scared, or both. His legs and arms were pumping in a disjointed rhythm. He might work out in some gym, but he wasn’t ready for this.

“Get back! I’ll shoot!” he shouted—almost right into my face.

I hit him, and it was like a speeding tractor-trailer back-ending a barely moving compact. Connolly went down, rolling crazily. I stayed upright. Didn’t even lose my balance. This was the good part. It almost made up for some of our misses and failures.

Connolly’s ignominious roll finally stopped after twenty feet, but then he made his biggest mistake—he got back up.

I was on him in a second. I was all over Sphinx, and it was where I wanted to be. Mano a mano with this bastard. He had sold his own wife—the mother of his children.

I threw a hard right-handed shot into the bridge of Connolly’s nose. The perfect shot, or close to it. Probably broke it, from the crunch I heard. He went down on one knee—but he got up again. Former college jock. Former tough guy. Current asshole.

His nose was hanging to one side. Good deal. I threw an uppercut into the pit of Connolly’s stomach and liked the feeling so much I threw another. I crunched another right into his gut, which was softening to the touch. Then a quick, hard hook to his cheek. I was getting stronger.

I jabbed his broken nose and Connolly moaned. I jabbed again. I looped a roundhouse at his chin, connected, bull’s-eye. Brendan Connolly’s blue eyes rolled back into his forehead. The lights went out and he dropped into the mud and stayed there, where he belonged.

I heard a voice behind me. “That how it’s done in D.C.?” Mahoney asked from a few yards up the hill.

I looked up at him. “That’s how it’s done, Natty Bumppo. Hope you took notes.”

Chapter 109

THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS were quiet—disturbingly, maddeningly so. I found out I was being assigned to headquarters in Washingt

on, as deputy director of Investigations under Director Burns. “A big fat plum,” I was told by everybody. It sounded like a desk job to me, and I didn’t want that. I wanted the Wolf. I wanted the street. I wanted action. I hadn’t come over to the Bureau to be a desk jockey in the Hoover Building.

I was given a week off, and Nana, the kids, and I went everywhere together. There was a lot of tension in the house, though. We were waiting to hear what Christine Johnson was going to do.

Every time I looked at Alex my heart ached; every time I held him in my arms or tucked him into bed at the end of the day, I thought about his leaving the house for good. I couldn’t let that happen, but my lawyer had advised me it could.

The director needed to see me in his office one morning during my week off. It wasn’t too much of a problem. I stopped in after I had dropped the kids off at school. Tony Woods, Burns’s assistant, seemed particularly glad to see me.

“You’re something of a hero for the moment. Enjoy it,” he said, sounding, as always, like an Ivy League prof. “Won’t last long.”

“Always the optimist, Tony,” I said.

“That’s my job description, young man.”

I wondered how much Ron Burns shared with his assistant, and also what the director had in mind this morning. I wanted to ask Tony about this plum job I was slated for. But I didn’t. I figured he wouldn’t tell me anyway.

Coffee and sweet rolls were waiting in Burns’s office, but the director wasn’t there. It was a little past eight. I wondered if he’d even gotten to work yet. It was hard to imagine that Ron Burns had a life outside the office, though I knew he had a wife and four children, and lived out in Virginia, about an hour from D.C.

Burns finally appeared at the door in a blue dress shirt and tie, with his shirtsleeves rolled up. So now I knew he’d had at least one meeting before this one. Actually, I hoped this meeting wasn’t about another case that he wanted me to dive into. Unless it involved the Wolf.

Burns grinned when he saw me sitting there. He read my look instantly. “Actually, I have a couple of nasty cases for you to work on. But that isn’t why I wanted to see you, Alex. Have some coffee. Relax. You’re on vacation, right?”

He walked into the room and sat down across from me. “I want to hear how it’s going so far. You miss being a homicide detective? Still want to stay in the Bureau? You can leave if you want to. The Washington PD wants you back. Badly.”