Cross Fire (Alex Cross 17)

“Lorraine? What’s happened?”

She started to explain, and then she just broke down in tears. Lorraine was tall and very thin, but I’d seen her hold her own with some very rough characters. This could mean only that the worst kind of thing had happened.

I ushered her into the office, and we sat down on the vinyl couch where Bronson usually perched for our sessions.

I finally had to ask, “Lorraine, is he dead?”

“No,” she said, wiping her eyes. “But he’s been shot, Alex. He’s in the hospital with a bullet in his head, and they don’t think he’s going to wake up.”

I was stunned. I shouldn’t have been, but I was. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d always tried not to think of as an inevitability for Bronson. It was also why I had tried my best not to care too much about the boy, and had failed.

“What happened?” I asked. “Tell me everything. Please.”

Slowly, Lorraine choked out the rest of the story. He had apparently made a robbery attempt on a liquor store in Congress Heights — a place called Cross Country Liquors, she said. The name — Cross — was enough of a coincidence that I noticed, but I didn’t make too much of it. My mind was on Bronson, and little else.

This was the boy’s first actual armed-robbery attempt, as far as either of us knew. He’d brought a handgun into the store, but the owner had one, too — no surprise. Congress Heights was one of MPD’s designated hot spots for violent crimes. Part of the problem was that the locals had gotten fed up and started fighting back — in the street, at home, and in their places of business.

There had been an argument. Bronson fired first and missed. The man returned fire and struck Bronson in the back of the head. Pop-Pop was lucky just to be alive, if that’s what you could call it.

“Where is he, Lorraine? I have to go see him.”

“He’s at Howard, but I don’t know where Medicaid’s going to land him. The whole foster system’s in a state of flux, as you know. It’s a mess.”

“What about the gun? Do we have any idea where he got it?”

“Take your pick,” she said bitterly. “Alex, he never even had a chance.”

It was true, in more ways than one. If I had to guess, I’d say this was a gang initiation, and whoever sent him in there knew exactly what his chances were. That’s how it worked. If he could pull it off, they’d want him in their crew, and if he couldn’t, then he was no use to them anyway.

Damn it, I hated this city sometimes. Or maybe I just loved Washington too much and couldn’t stand what it had become.

Chapter 39

DENNY STOOD AT THE EDGE of Georgetown Waterfront Park, scoping the scene, while Mitch shifted from foot to foot, finishing off a Big Gulp Mountain Dew.

“What are we doing here, Denny? I mean, I like it fine and all.”

“All part of the big picture, bud. Keep an eye out for anyone surfing the Net.”

This whole stretch, from the Key Bridge down to Thompson Boat Center, was hopping with tourists, locals, and students, all taking advantage of the spring weather before the real humidity set in. Some inevitable number of them were bent over their laptop computers, and some number of those, no doubt, had satellite Internet connections.

Mitch and Denny would kill two birds while they were here: split up to sell their papers while they looked for a good mark.

After about half an hour, some goofball frat boys Denny had his eye on got up from their stuff to play a little Ultimate on the lawn. He sat down in the grass nearby and motioned to Mitch, who took up a position on the fence by the river.

Once the game had moved about as far from Denny as it was going to get, he gave Mitch the next signal — a scratch on the top of his head — and Mitch went into his crazy dance.

He screamed at the top of his lungs. He flapped his arms. He grabbed on to the fence and shook it back and forth like a crazy man in a cage. And for at least thirty seconds, every eye in the immediate area was on him.

Denny worked fast. He slipped one of the frat boys’ laptops — a sweet little MacBook Air — into his stack of papers, stood up, and hurried away. A second later, he was walking a straight line out of the park.

As he passed under the Whitehurst Freeway, he could still hear Mitch going at it, way longer than he needed to. No harm done there — they’d have a good laugh about it later, at least the big guy would. Jeez, he loved to laugh.

The Suburban was parked halfway up the hill, on a side street near the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Denny climbed in, fired up the computer, and got right to work.

Ten minutes later, he was back out of the car, with only one thing on his mind.

He walked around the block to a rickety wooden staircase that led down to the old canal, twenty-five feet below street level. The crushed-gravel towpath that ran alongside it was popular with joggers, but it didn’t take more than half a cigarette before he got a few moments’ privacy.