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 to clean myself up and sleep before driving to the shore.
But when I got to the top of the stairs outside my bedroom, I felt a stiff breeze coming from my attic office. I must have left one of the windows open, I thought, and there was a storm coming.
I climbed the stairs like a zombie and ducked under the low doorway into my office. But then I stopped short, jolted stone-cold sober by a surge of adrenaline.
A man divorced from his soul sat behind my desk.
He was aiming a silenced pistol at my chest from point-blank range.
“Good morning, Dr. Cross,” he said. “I see you’ve been having a tough time of it. A real pity. For years, I’ve thought of this moment, and I was honestly hoping for so much more from you when your boy’s life was on the line.”
Chapter 99
He was in his mid-forties, athletically built, with pale skin and facial bruises. He wore an olive workman’s shirt flecked with sawdust. A white hard hat rested on the desk near his right elbow. There was a carpenter’s tool belt beside it.
His neck was thick. His pale head was completely bald, his lashes were fine and blond, and his steady eyes were ice blue. I had never seen the man before in my life, but I knew who he was just the same.
“M,” I said. “Where’s my son?”
M took me in with those eyes, which spoke of violent desire and something profoundly evil. “He’s buried deep. The bugs are probably already on him.”
My worst fear hit me like a blow to the solar plexus. My knees jellied. Ali? Gone? “No,” I mumbled. “Why?”
M said nothing, just tilted his head slowly left and then right, studying me. It was as if he were mentally recording every twitch and ripple of grief passing through my body. The longer he gazed at me, the more his eyes brightened. The barest smile came to his lips.
I understood. The man was enjoying himself. He was a sadist, and in my experience, sadists liked to play with their prey. It was part of the power trip.
Feeling stronger for that understanding, I straightened up, said, “You’re lying.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
He shrugged. “When I left Ali, he was doomed. It really doesn’t matter when he goes for good, not him or your grandmother or your wife or your daughter out there at Ned’s beach house in Delaware. In my mind, Cross, you and yours are already bittersweet memories.”
He’s equivocating, I thought, feeling another surge of hope. Ali had been alive when M left him. I just had to keep him talking to find out where and how long ago. “What’s your real name?”
“It’s whatever I’m calling myself at any given moment. I have found that a name really doesn’t matter in the long run.”
I glanced beyond him at the thin curtains billowing as the wind and rain came in the open window. He must have come out of the Morses’ house and across the scaffolding.
M reached back and shut the window. The thin curtains settled.
“You’re here to kill me?” I said.
“Hate to say it again, but you are a big disappointment. Time to move on to new and bigger challenges.”
“Who are you really? Why are you doing this? I think the doomed man has a right to know before he dies.”
He smiled outright. “Who am I really? Why am I doing this? I am a multitude of names and purposes, Cross. But all the world really needs to know is that I bested the greatest detective on the planet, the Sherlock Holmes of his time, at his own game and on his own turf. And too many times to count.”
My mind raced back years and years, and I remembered a Washington Post Magazine profile of me and the writer saying something ridiculous like that.