Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

62

SUNDAY SIPPED A DOUBLE espresso and kept his eyes on the highway. It was already half past ten; he was ten miles out of Little Rock, and he had a long ride ahead of him. But he welcomed the journey. It’s the drifter and the hunter in me, he thought. I am simply one of those men born to roam and kill.

He was also like the philosopher Epicurus, seeing good and evil linked with pleasure and pain. A good meal was pleasurable, and therefore good. A hangover showed the evil potential of wine.

But his thoughts about the pleasure that could be derived from pain were more complex and contradictory. Indeed, as his mind drifted toward Acadia Le Duc, he drove on, feeling the pleasure of her coming pain and knowing that was going to be good.

Very, very good.

A smile crossed Sunday’s face and he glanced over at Cochran’s laptop computer. It was the only thing he’d taken from the truck.

Before leaving the rig, he’d wiped the interior down completely, shut the drapes, and then waited for an upsurge in activity at the truck stop. He left the truck idling, as sleeping drivers often do, doors locked, and strolled behind the convenience store, looking for cameras.

Seeing none there, Sunday slipped into the scrub pines that abutted the truck stop and headed south. He walked five miles and then trashed his trucking cap before calling a cab, which had brought him to an Enterprise.

While waiting for the pickup he’d rented to be serviced, he’d gotten on the Internet using Cochran’s laptop and started monitoring four of his bank accounts as well as all activities on his credit cards. In the past few hours, nearly twelve thousand dollars in cash had been taken from the accounts via ATMs in Memphis and across the river in Arkansas.

Worse, close to one hundred and eighty thousand dollars had been wire-transferred to accounts in Mexico he’d never heard of. There was only one person who could have pulled this off, only one person who could have gotten copies of his ATM cards, the passwords, and the bank account numbers and routing information for those wire transfers.

Acadia.

She was a bright, larcenous creature, wasn’t she?

He’d seen that she’d dropped the Malibu with Avis at the Memphis airport and then somehow gotten across the river to make the withdrawals. But how? He assumed she was using her own credit cards, but unfortunately he had no way of getting into her accounts. That pissed him off. She thought to find out my numbers, he fumed, but I didn’t think to learn hers. Which meant it was a crapshoot as to which of the three places he thought she might run to she’d actually gone.

Before he could consider them each again, he heard a phone ring. It was his legitimate cell phone, the one he used in his professional and writing life. He dug it from his pocket, saw an unfamiliar number on the screen, wondered if it might be Acadia, and punched Answer.

“Marcus Sunday?” a man said.

“You’re talking to him.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt your evening, but I got your number from your publicist in Los Angeles, and—”

“Whom do you write for?” Sunday asked. He’d had a flurry of stories written about him when the book came out, but none in months.

“I don’t write for anyone. This is Alex Cross. Do you remember me?”

CHAPTER

63

FOR THREE SLOW BEATS, time stood still for Sunday, and for once in his life, no thoughts flickered in his brain.

“Dr. Sunday?” Cross said. “Hello?”

Then time and Sunday’s mind lurched back into sync. Talk to Cross? Now, this was interesting.

“Right here, Special Agent Cross,” Sunday said. “And of course I remember you.”

“I’m not with the Bureau anymore.”

“No?” Sunday said, feeling excited, dueling. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“Look, I know you’ve got reason not to talk to me after the review I gave your book, but are you aware of my situation?”

“Situation?” Sunday said with slight imperiousness. “No. I’ve been overseas and have only just returned. What is your situation?”

“A guy named Thierry Mulch has killed several people in the DC area and has taken my family hostage.”