Cross My Heart (Alex Cross 21)

“I always do,” Mulch said, and pulled the trigger.

Chapter

109

There was a sound like an artillery shell going off in my head, and a wicked electrical pain that fragmented into different arms of excruciating energy that spiked out with fingers in all directions, as if Mulch had shot me with a lightning bolt and not a .30-06.

The lightning came not through that gaping bullet hole I expected on the left side of my head, but from low and at the back of my head, right where someone had hit me in the crack house.

Then I smelled ammonia and jerked toward confused consciousness.

“Alex?”

Wincing at the pulsing pain at the back of my head, I felt my eyes come open blurrily, seeing three figures that soon became Ava, John Sampson, and Ned Mahoney. We were all in my bedroom. The door was shut.

“What…?” I started to say. “How…?”

Sampson tossed a smelling salt capsule away and threw a thumb at Ava, saying in a low voice, “Real smart girl here, Alex. You don’t know the half of it, but eventually she came and got us.”

I blinked, felt fire in my eyes. “Eventually? What time is it? What day?”

“Easter Sunday,” Mahoney said. “Six in the evening. You’ve been out about thirteen hours.”

Almost a day had passed since Nana Mama died, I thought, wanting to cry again, realizing that each coming

hour would bring one tragic reminder after another.

“Mulch killed them all,” I said to Sampson and Mahoney. “Executed them with a hunting rifle in cold blood.”

“Maybe,” Ava said. “Maybe not.”

Suddenly and irrationally angry, I twisted my pounding head at the teenager and snapped, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ava shrank, started to move toward the door.

“Hear her out, Alex,” Mahoney said. “She’s got us convinced.”

“Convinced of what?” I demanded. “That Mulch had a partner who performed the executions?”

“No, Alex,” Sampson said. “Ava’s convinced us that your family’s still alive.”

Chapter

110

I refused to believe it. The idea that they had somehow all survived gunshots to the head required more hope than I had left in my heart, maybe more hope than was left in the universe.

But then Ava explained that she’d left me passed out on the bed, intending to take off and then call 911 down the road. As she passed the doorway into the television room, however, she saw my phone lying on the carpet.

As dark as it sounds, Ava wanted to see the pictures I’d described, and she picked up the phone. Mindful of Mulch’s camera trained on her from the bristles of the fireplace broom, she’d gone halfway up the stairs and started to look at them.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, irritated again.

“I dunno,” Ava said, shrugging. “Interested?”

“Whatever, it’s a damn good thing she did, Alex,” Mahoney said.

Sampson nodded. “Though we would have figured it out eventually.”