Along Came a Spider (Alex Cross #1)(109)

As the adrenaline rush slowed, I felt weak and weary and disoriented. I climbed the stone stairs out of the underground.

Night people were coming and going from the Metro paper store and from Fox’s all-night diner. I must have been a sorry sight. Blood was spattered all over me. No one stopped, though. Not a single person. They had all seen too much of this ghoulish stuff in the nation’s capital.

I finally stepped in front of a truck driver dropping off a bundle of Washington Posts. I told him I was a police officer. I was feeling a little high with the loss of blood. Slightly giddy now.

“I didn’t do nothin’ wrong,” he said to me.

“You didn’t shoot me, motherfucker?”

“No, sir. What’re you, crazy? You really a cop?”

I made him take me home in his paper-delivery truck. For the whole six-block ride, the man swore he’d sue the city.

“Sue Mayor Monroe,” I told him. “Sue Monroe’s ass bad.”

“You really a cop?” he asked me again. “You ain’t a cop.”

“Yeah, I’m a cop.”

Squad cars and EMS ambulances were already gathered at my house. This was my recurring nightmare—this very scene. Never before had the police and medics actually come to my house.

Sampson was already there. He had a black leather jacket over a ratty old Baltimore Orioles sweatshirt. He wore a cap from the Hoodoo Gurus tour.

He looked at me as if I were crazy. Crimson and blue emergency lights twirled behind him. “Wuz up? You don’t look so good. You all right, man?”

“Been stabbed twice with a hunting knife. Not as bad as the time we got shot over in Garfield.”

“Uh huh. Must look worse than it is. I want you to lie down here on the lawn. Lie down now, Alex.”

I nodded, and walked away from Sampson. I had to finish this. Somehow, it had to be over with.

The EMS people were trying to get me down on the lawn. Our tiny lawn. Or get me on their stretcher.

I had another idea. The front door had been left wide open. He’d left the door to the house open. Why had he done that?

“Be right with you,” I said to the medics as I walked past them. “Hold that stretcher, though.”

People were yelling at me, but I pushed forward, anyway.

I moved silently and purposefully through the living room and into the kitchen. I opened the door that’s catty-cornered to our back door, and hurried downstairs.

I didn’t see anything in the basement. No movement. Nothing out of order. The cellar was my last good idea.

I walked over to a bin near the furnace where Nana dumps all the dirty laundry for the next washload. It’s the farthest corner of the basement from the stairs. No Soneji/Murphy in the dark basement.

Sampson came running down the cellar stairs. “He’s not here! Someone saw him downtown. He’s down around Dupont Circle.”

“He wants to make one more big play,” I muttered. “Son-of-a-bitch.” Son of Lindbergh.

Sampson didn’t try to stop me from going with him. He could see in my eyes that he couldn’t, anyway. The two of us hurried to his car. I figured I was all right. I’d drop if I wasn’t.

A young punk from the neighborhood looked at the sticky blood down the front of my shirt. “You dying, Cross? That be good.” He gave me my eulogy.

It took us ten minutes or so to get down to Dupont Circle. Police squad cars were parked everywhere—flashing eerie red and blue in the dawn’s earliest light.

It was late in the night shift for most of these boys. Nobody needed a madman on the loose in downtown Washington.

One more big play.

I Want to Be Somebody.

During the next hour or so nothing happened—except that it got light out. Pedestrians began to appear around the circle. The traffic thickened as Washington opened up for business.

The early risers were curious and stopped to ask the police questions. None of us would tell them anything, except to “please keep moving along. Just keep walking, please. There’s nothing to see.” Thank God.

An EMS doctor treated my wounds. There was more blood than actual damage. He wanted me to go straight to the hospital, of course. That could wait. One more big play. Dupont Circle? Downtown Washington, D.C.? Gary Soneji/Murphy loved to play in the capital.

I told the EMS doc to back off, and he did. I hit him up for a couple of Percodan. They did the trick for the moment.

Sampson stood by my side, sucking on a cigarette. “You’re gonna just fall over,” he said to me. “You’ll just collapse. Like some big African elephant had a sudden heart attack.”

I was savoring my Percodan buzz. “Wasn’t a sudden heart attack,” I said to him. “Big African elephant got knifed a couple of times. Wasn’t an elephant, either. It was an African antelope. Graceful, beautiful, powerful beast.”

I eventually started to walk back toward Sampson’s car.

“You got an idea?” he called after me. “Alex?”

“Yeah. Let’s ride, no good standing around here at Dupont Circle. He’s not going to start shooting up rush-hour traffic.”

“You sure about that, Alex?”

“I’m sure about it.”

We rode around downtown Washington until just before eight. It was getting hopeless. I was starting to get real sleepy in the car.