Cross Justice (Alex Cross 23)

I picked up a plate on the kitchen table and began to load it with fried rabbit, potato salad, a green-bean-and-mushroom dish, and thick slices of homemade bread, the source of one of those delicious odors I’d smelled.

“How long since you knew?” I asked.

“That Cliff was suffering from dementia?” Hattie asked. “Five years since the diagnosis, but more like nine since he started forgetting things.”

“You his sole caregiver?”

“Connie Lou helps,” she said. “And Stefan, this last year or so he’s been home.”

“How’re you getting by?”

“Cliff’s railway pension and the Social Security.”

“Enough?”

“We make do.”

“Hard on you, though.”

“Very,” she said, and pushed back at her hair. “And now all this with Stefan…” Hattie stopped, threw up her hands, and choked out, “He’s my miracle baby. How could my miracle baby…”

I remembered Nana Mama telling me that the doctors said Hattie and Cliff would never have children, and then, in her thirties, she’d suddenly gotten pregnant with Stefan.

I put my plate down and was about to go over to console her when Ali ran in, said, “Dad! I swear to God, there’s like a gazillion lightning bugs outside!”

Chapter

8

When I stepped out onto the front porch, it was long past dark, and through the screen I could see fireflies everywhere, thousands of them, like I hadn’t seen since I was a boy. I flashed on images of Uncle Clifford teaching me and my brothers how to catch them with glass jars, remembered how amazed I’d been to see just how much light two or three of them could generate.

As if reading my mind, Aunt Hattie said, “You want me to get him a jar, Alex?”

“That would be fine.”

“Got a big Skippy jar in the recycling,” she said, and she turned to fetch it.

We all went outside into Aunt Hattie’s yard and watched the fireflies dance and blink like so many distant stars. I felt warm seeing Ali learn how to catch them, grounded by something I’d thought I’d lost all those years ago.

Bree hooked her arm through mine, said, “What are you smiling about?”

“Good memories,” I said, and I gestured at the fireflies. “They were always here in the summer. It’s…I don’t know.”

“Comforting?” Nana Mama asked.

“More like eternal,” I said.

Before my wife could respond, the shouting began down the street.

“You fuck with us, that’s what you’ll get!”

I turned to a searing image that locked me up tight.

Well down the block, beneath one of the few streetlights on Loupe Street, two African American boys in their teens struggled against wrist bonds that led to a rope line controlled by three older boys dressed hip-hop. The two at the front were white. The one at the back was black. All three seemed to be taking sadistic pleasure in dragging the two younger boys along, taunting them and telling them to move if they knew what was good for them. It smacked of a chain gang and that galled me.

I glanced at Bree, who looked as wronged as I felt.

“Don’t you go sticking your nose in there now, Alex,” Aunt Connie warned. “That’s a hornet’s nest, that’s what that is. Just ask Stefan.”