Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,86

headed not toward Capitol Hill but deeper into Southeast DC, toward the Navy Yard and eventually Anacostia.

In general, Southeast wasn’t as dangerous as it was back when crack cocaine was king and violence erupted at all hours on every corner. But parts of Southeast remained mean streets by anyone’s definition.

I should have been swiveling my head, on the lookout for potential threats. Instead, I drank the whiskey and wandered aimlessly.

Shortly before eleven that night, I went into a liquor store and bought a pint to refresh my go-cup. That’s when things started to go hazy for me.

I walked through one dark, nameless alley, stumbled into another, and then went down a third. At one point in one of those alleys, I tripped and fell. I almost stayed down, but then I heard voices, people arguing.

I got up, drank more, and moved toward the voices, but they soon stopped. I finally came to a halt by a dumpster, and I held on to it, barely able to stand. I hallucinated Ali ahead of me in the shadows, and M menacing behind him, faceless, soulless.

“C’mon,” I slurred. “C’mon, M. I’m not armed, and I’m the one you really want. I’m right here. You don’t have to hurt Ali. He’s just a little boy, like you once were. Take me instead. Get it over with. Right here. Right now. Take me instead.”

But nothing moved in the shadows. And no one spoke.

Enraged, I lumbered toward the spot and swung wild haymakers at the night.

“C’mon,” I shouted. “Be a man.”

But there was nothing, and I felt more lost and hopeless than I had when I’d gotten home earlier in the evening. I wasn’t helping Ali. Unable to cope with the threat of losing my youngest child, I was numbing myself. I was a fraction of what I’d once been.

“That’s it,” I said. “I’m done.”

I pressed my back against a chain-link fence, slid down, and sat in trash, uncaring.

“You win, M,” I mumbled as my mind fell into a dark void. “I am a broken man.”

CHAPTER 98

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG I was passed out in that alley, lost in the darkness. Then air brakes squeaked and sighed close to me. Lights played over my face.

My head was burning. I squinted my eyes and saw in double vision a garbage truck coming for the dumpster, its headlights on.

My brain felt so boiled that at first, I didn’t know where I was or how I’d gotten there. And then some reptilian part of my brain said, Go home, Alex. Sleep it off.

I lurched to my feet, dizzy, still drunk, although I somehow knew the direction of home. I staggered past the garbage truck.

“Get some help, brother,” the driver called out his open window. “I been there, and you can find help if you want it.”

I waved at him, said nothing, and kept on toward the mouth of the alley. Dawn glowed. The city was just waking when I turned north.

Passing shops not yet open for the day, I couldn’t help seeing myself in the windows: shuffling, unsteady, filthy, a drunken bum, a shattered man who hung his head and wouldn’t look at passing strangers.

“Gotta stop,” I said at one point when the pounding in my head became too much. “Go to detox.”

I knew where to go for that, but the GPS in my brain kept sending me toward Fifth Street and home. I was almost there when I heard a boy laughing through an open window, and I sobered into the waking nightmare of Ali all over again.

From there it was one step after another until I was in front of my house. I climbed the porch steps, hearing thunder rumble in the distance. The wind was picking up, bringing the smell of spring rain.

As I fumbled for my keys, I was blearily aware of a fluttering piece of pink surveyor’s tape tied to the lower bars of the scaffolding between our house and the neighbor’s place. The lower outer wall had been sandblasted to reveal the natural brick beneath, and the scaffolding had been raised to the roofline.

My stomach soured as I opened the front door. I went inside, felt sicker, and rushed to the bathroom beyond the kitchen.

The whiskey came up, which helped my stomach but made my head ache all the more. I guzzled two full glasses of water in the kitchen before I noticed my phone, forgotten on the counter.

I looked for messages, saw none, and put it down again. I needed