Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(45)

I smiled. “The holiday argument gets me every time.”

Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found Damon.

“Hey!” I cried, and I stood to hug him. “Look who snuck up!”

“Hi, Dad,” he said, grinning from ear to ear and hugging me back.

There was a round of hugs and kisses. We heard about orientation, and Ali got a Coke and a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips, and life was good and grounded and solid. The pressure of Bree’s new job drained away too. I could see that in the way she laughed at one of Damon’s tales.

She felt at ease. I did too. A rare thing in those days.

“Hey, Dad?”





CHAPTER


52


JANNIE WAS CALLING to me from the fence, so I got up and started down toward her.

“Jannie, you got this,” Damon said, following me. “My friends on my hall are coming to see you smoke them all.”

Jannie laughed, and punched the air before hugging Damon. She has never had stage fright, at least not when it comes to running. In the past year, she’d faced women running for NCAA Division 1 schools, and she’d run well enough to be here.

“You good?” I asked.

“Always,” she said, relaxed. “Coach McDonald’s got good meet and race strategies worked out.”

“What’s the difference?”

“You’ll see. Love you both.”

“Love you too,” I said. “Nana Mama said to run like God gave you a gift and you are grateful for every stride of it.”

She smiled but with some confusion. “Tell Nana Mama I’ll try, Dad. Coach Mac’s up behind you, by the way.”

She trotted off. We climbed back up into the stands.

Clad in his trademark gray warm-ups and a blue hoodie and wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck, Ted McDonald was moving nervously from one running-shoed foot to the other as he spoke to Bree and Nana Mama. In his fifties, with a shock of reddish-gray hair that defied gravity, Coach McDonald had a straightforward style that I appreciated.

“Dr. Cross,” McDonald said, shaking my hand.

“Dr. McDonald,” I said. He had a doctorate in exercise physiology.

“Ready to see a little history made today?” McDonald asked.

Ali had been listening to his podcast, but he tugged out his earbuds and asked, “What history?”

Jannie’s coach said, “Anything can happen under race conditions, but I’ve been tracking her workout times. They’re impressive. She could do something here that would really make people stand up and take notice.”

“Like which people?” Nana Mama said.

McDonald gestured across the track. “Like those folks over there with the hand timers. All of them are D-One coaches. Oregon. Texas. Georgetown. Cal. Stanford. Every one of them is going to watch Jannie run.”

“Does she know this?” I asked.

“No. I’ve got her running against the clock and herself.”

“What’s that mean?” Bree asked.

“I’ll tell you if it happens,” the coach said, looking back to the track and clapping his hands. “Here we go. Nice and easy.”

Jannie lined up on the stagger in lane four. At the starter’s gun, she broke into her long flowing stride and kept pace with two high school seniors from California and another from Arizona.

She was third when they crossed the finish line and didn’t look winded at all.

“Eighty percent,” McDonald said after looking at his stopwatch. He leaned over to me and said in a low voice, “With that run she’s got every coach over there interested enough to start giving her calls in the coming months, maybe even make a few house visits.”

“But she’s a sophomore,” I said.

“I know,” McDonald said. “But later on, if she runs the way she did the other day in training, you could have every coach over there camped out in your front yard.”

I didn’t ask him for more. No particulars. The entire conversation had me nervous in a sour-gut sort of way, and proud, and nervous all over again.

We used the two-hour break to have lunch with Damon and two of his new friends, his roommate, William, and fellow basketball player Justin Hahn, from Boston. Both were good guys, both were very funny, and both were capable of eating a staggering amount of food. Damon too. They ate so much, we almost missed the finals.

Jannie and seven other girls were heading into the blocks when we hurried to our seats. She drew lane three of eight. The girls took their marks. The gun went off.

Jannie came up in short choppy strides, tripped, stumbled, and fell forward onto her hands and knees.

“No!” we all groaned before she sprang up and started running again.

“Oh, that sucks,” Damon said.

“There goes the scholarship,” his roommate said, which annoyed me but not enough to make me lower my binoculars.

Ali said, “What happened?”

“She got off balance,” said Coach McDonald, who was also watching through binoculars. “Kicked her heel and … she’s maybe twenty yards in back of Bethany Kellogg, the LA girl in lane one. Odds-on favorite.”

The runners in the outer lanes were almost halfway down the back straight when Jannie finally came out of the curve in dead last. But she didn’t look upset. She was up to speed now, running fluidly, efficiently.