Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

I’d been nodding, but now I knitted my brow. “Chief?”

“Alex, for your own good, and because I respect you so much, I’m placing you on medical leave.”

That made no sense. “What?”

“For the time being, I want you to take a break from this investigation, let us work on your behalf for once. I’m sorry, Alex, but I need your gun and badge.”

For a moment, even those words didn’t penetrate, but then they did and it felt like I was being tossed overboard.

“Chief, you can’t do that,” I pleaded. “I’m good. I’m handling this.”

“No one in your situation could be good,” Wallace said. “You showed up at your kid’s school crying and then you ranted at the principal. You mistreated a cooperative witness this afternoon—hit him, as I understand it.”

I looked at Sampson, not believing what was being said, and whispered, “You can’t do this. I have to find—”

Captain Quintus shook his head, said, “Alex, we’re all afraid that the injury to your head and the pressure of all that’s happened to you is too enormous to be dealt with while trying to work. We want you to go to a hospital to meet with a neurologist who’s waiting to do a baseline—”

“That’s not happening,” I said. “Not now.”

“Alex,” Ned Mahoney began.

“You think I asked for this?” I demanded, feeling the heat rise in my face. “Who asks for his family to be taken? Who asks for his wife to be cut to pieces? Who asks to be pounded and pounded and—”

Only then did I realize I’d been shouting at them.

“They say that’s part of it, shug,” Sampson said. “The anger. Coming from the concussion as much as from Mulch. You need help. You see that, don’t you?”

“Of course he does, John,” Mahoney said. “He knows the statistics.”

“Gun and badge, Detective,” the chief said sadly, holding out his hand.

CHAPTER

19

THE FIGHT WENT OUT of me then, like a liquid draining from my core in a matter of seconds. I handed my badge and gun to Chief Wallace, said, “Appreciate your concern.”

“We’ll get these back to you as soon as the doctors say it’s okay,” Wallace reassured me. “You’re an incredible asset to this department and we know it.”

I nodded, stood, went to my desk, and picked up a framed picture of my family and some mail. But I also managed to palm something valuable from the back of my department-issue laptop.

With the photograph in my right hand and the mail and flash drive in my jacket pocket, I headed for the plastic sheeting. Sampson and Mahoney fell in on either side of me.

“I’m not going to tip over, you know,” I said as we went back through that demolition site.

“Just making sure you go to the GWU hospital,” Sampson said.

“See the neurologist,” Mahoney added.

I shrugged, said, “You’re right.”

We rode the elevator in silence. Sampson and I got out on one. Mahoney went to the basement to retrieve his car.

“Can I take a leak without you peeking over my shoulder?” I asked.

My partner thought about it, said, “I wouldn’t put that duty on my worst enemy.”

I managed a laugh and then walked around the corner and into a hallway that ran back toward the crime lab. I pushed the door to the men’s room open loudly, kicked off my shoes, picked them up, and jogged down the hall in my socks, taking several turns before the staircase that led to the parking garage.