Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(84)

I nodded. Mom looked like she was high on something, but she did know her nutrition.

“This sucks,” her son said. “I want a doughnut. I want two doughnuts!”

“Go on, there,” his mom said, and pushed him toward Sampson.

“Kind of overkill for a church cafeteria,” said the man who followed her. He was in his late twenties, and dressed in baggy jeans, Timberland boots, and a big gray snorkel jacket.

I realized he was talking to me and looked at him, puzzled.

“Bulletproof vest?” he said.

“Oh,” I said, and shrugged at the body armor beneath my shirt.

Sampson and I are major case detectives with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. Immediately after our shift in the soup kitchen, we were joining a team taking down a drug gang operating in the streets around St. Anthony’s. Members of the gang had been known to take free breakfasts at the school from time to time, so we’d decided to armor up. Just in case.

I wasn’t telling him that, though. I couldn’t identify him as a known gangster, but he looked the part.

“I’m up for a PT test end of next week,” I said. “Got to get used to the weight since I’ll be running three miles with it on.”

“That vest make you hotter or colder today?”

“Warmer. Always.”

“I need one of them,” he said, and shivered. “I’m from Miami, you know? I must have been crazy to want to come on up here.”

“Why did you come up here?” I asked.

“School. I’m a freshman at Howard.”

“You’re not on the meal program?”

“Barely making my tuition.”

I saw him in a whole new light then, and was about to say so when gunshots rang out and people began to scream.





DRAWING MY SERVICE pistol, I pushed against the fleeing crowd, hearing two more shots, and realizing they were coming from inside the kitchen behind Sampson. My partner had figured it out as well.

Sampson spun away from the eggs and bacon, drew his gun as I vaulted over the counter. We split and went to either side of the pair of swinging industrial kitchen doors. There were small portholes in both.

Ignoring the people still bolting from the cafeteria, I leaned forward and took a quick peek. Mixing bowls had spilled off the stainless-steel counters, throwing flour and eggs across the cement floor. Nothing moved, and I could detect no one inside.

Sampson took a longer look from the opposite angle. His face almost immediately screwed up.

“Two wounded,” he hissed. “The cook, Theresa, and a nun I’ve never seen before.”

“How bad?”

“There’s blood all over Theresa’s white apron. Looks like the nun’s hit in the leg. She’s sitting up against the stove with a big pool below her.”

“Femoral?”

Sampson took another look and said, “It’s a lot of blood.”

“Cover me,” I said. “I’m going in low to get them.”

Sampson nodded. I squatted down and threw my shoulder into the door, which swung away. Half expecting some unseen gunman to open fire, I rolled inside. I slid through the slurry of two dozen eggs, and came to a stop on the floor between two prep counters.

Sampson came in with his weapon high, searching for a target.

But no one shot. No one moved. And there was no sound except the labored breathing of the cook and the nun who were to our left, on the other side of a counter, by a big industrial stove.

The nun’s eyes were open and bewildered. The cook’s head slumped but she was breathing.

I scrambled under the prep counter to the women, and started tugging off my belt. The nun shrank from me when I reached for her.

“I’m a cop, Sister,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross. I need to put a tourniquet on your leg or you could die.”

She blinked, but then nodded.

“John?” I said, observing a serious gunshot wound to her lower thigh. A needle-thin jet of blood erupted with every heartbeat.

“Right here,” Sampson said behind me. “Just seeing what’s what.”

“Call it in,” I said, as I wrapped the belt around her upper thigh, cinching it tight. “We need two ambulances. Fast.”

The blood stopped squirting. I could hear my partner making the radio call.

The nun’s eyes fluttered and drifted toward shut.

“Sister,” I said. “What happened? Who shot you?”

Her eyes blinked open. She gaped at me, disoriented for a moment, before her attention strayed past me. Her eyes widened, and the skin of her cheek went taut with terror.

I snatched up my gun and spun around, raising the pistol. I saw Sampson with his back to me, radio to his ear, gun lowered, and then a door at the back of the kitchen. It had swung open, revealing a large pantry.

A man crouched in a fighting stance in the pantry doorway.

In his crossed arms he held two nickel-plated pistols, one aimed at Sampson and the other at me.

With all the training I’ve been lucky enough to receive over the years, you’d think I would have done the instinctual thing for a veteran cop facing an armed assailant, that I would have registered Man with gun! in my brain, and I would have shot him immediately.

But for a split second I didn’t listen to Man with a gun! because I was too stunned by the fact that I knew him, and that he was long, long dead.