Hope to Die (Alex Cross 22)

It seemed smart, so I nodded and accepted a radio from the sheriff. We moved silently up the road, Deputy Shields and Maxwell leading the way to a narrow, muddy two-track. The trees and vines rustled in the stiff breeze and spit rainwater at us as we trudged single file and without lights toward Le Duc’s cabin. At the first sight of lights ahead through the forest, we stopped, and Gauvin instructed four of his men to stay at this distance from the house and loop around it to the north. Then one pair would peel off and approach from directly behind the cabin, and the other would go to the opposite side of the yard.

“You’re just looking, for now,” the sheriff said quietly. “That’s it. Looking, and then calling in what you see to me. We clear?”

The four deputies nodded as if this were the most exciting thing they’d ever done on their job. As they set off, Maxwell perked up and whined softly.

“What is it, boy?” Deputy Shields said.

Maxwell panted and then whined again.

“He doesn’t like something,” the handler said.

“Then I don’t like it either,” Gauvin said, and he turned and headed straight for the lights with Maxwell and Shields right on his heels.

He slowed to a stop when the cabin and the yard were visible. Nothing moved in the soaked yard, which smelled of mud and decay. From inside the cabin, maybe on the radio, came the voice of a preacher of some sort ranting about salvation and damnation. The door to the house was ajar. There were several outbuildings, sheds mostly, that looked about as sturdy as toddlers. But they could hold kidnap victims, couldn’t they? I supposed, but I figured the cabin to be the most likely place.

Guns drawn, the sheriff and I stood just outside the screened-in porch. Several reports came in over his radio. From what the deputies could see through the windows that weren’t curtained, there was no movement inside.

“Marcus Sunday and Acadia Le Duc!” I roared. “You are surrounded! Lay down whatever weapon you have and surrender!”

We heard nothing but the radio.

Gauvin and I watched Deputy Shields open the porch’s screen door and send Maxwell inside. He hesitated on the porch, and then bounded into the house. Ten seconds later, he barked furiously.

“He’s got someone at bay in there,” Shields said.

Gauvin, Aaliyah, and I went in first, the deputy trailing.

There was a comatose pit bull in the corner of the porch. We walked through the cabin’s open door and entered a pack rat’s den where the halls were built of stacks of People magazines and piles of Diet Coke cans.

We followed the sounds of barking to a lit doorway and found Maxwell sitting at the foot of a blood-soaked bed. Acadia Le Duc’s mother’s throat had been slashed ear to ear, the same way Mulch had killed his own mother.

Shields quieted the dog with a sharp command.

Then, over the radio’s din, came a woman’s ungodly screaming.

CHAPTER

77

IN SITUATIONS WHERE THE sane flee from danger, law enforcement officers sprint to engage it. That night was no different.

But I had more skin in the game than anyone else there, and I almost ran over Aaliyah and Shields trying to get outside, every cell in my body bellowing, Bree, Jannie, Nana, Damon, Ali! I rocketed off the porch and into the clearing and sprinted toward the bayou. The screams stopped sharply and then rose again in a wail of agony.

Pounding past the deputies, who were advancing more cautiously, I rounded a clump of trees and found a hidden part of the yard that slanted to an old wooden dock. Two cones of light came into view off to my right toward a backwater slough.

As if running into an invisible brick wall, I slammed to a staggering halt when I saw unfolding in those cones of light the most disturbing scene I’d ever witnessed, so shocking that for a beat, I was frozen in place, slack-jawed, unable to process or act.

In the soft light thrown by gas lanterns, an alligator crouched over Acadia Le Duc, who writhed, screamed, and shuddered as if she’d been plugged into something electric. The beast had bitten out a significant chunk of her right thigh.

A second creature circled the one feeding, looking for its own angle of attack. A third was scrambling up the bank toward her feet.

Maxwell came flying down the hill, barking, and went straight at the alligator closest to Le Duc. The reptile had been about to take another bite, but instead it turned its head to the dog, opened its bloody mouth, and let go with a hiss that sounded like a dozen alarmed snakes.

Maxwell did not hesitate but continued his charge, snapping his teeth and letting loose with savage growls and barking. For a second there, I thought the alligator would abandon its position.

Instead, when the police dog got within range and darted in from the flank, the alligator snapped its long armored tail like a two-hundred-pound whip and lashed Maxwell across his right shoulder and the side of his head.

It was like seeing a boxer knocked out. One second the dog was distracting the alligator, looking sure to drive it off, and the next he had been pummeled into the mud, where he lay twitching and senseless.