Hope to Die (32 page)

MY FEAR AND BEWILDERMENT
must have shown, because Sunday began to crow, “That will break you, won’t it? That will be the proof!”

Jannie said, “Is he for real?”

“Oh, I am real, young lady,” Sunday said. “In the end, I’m the only real that will matter.”

I saw the mad conviction in his expression and was so shaken by the possibility of seeing my family murdered before me that I didn’t know what to say and almost didn’t catch the movement behind him.

Bree’s arm was out from under one of the straps, and with her hand she was making a circular motion toward the rear wall. I tried not to look, but then I saw Damon doing the same thing. Ali seemed to be moving too.
They’re awake, playing possum, and—what? Telling me to keep him talking? Telling me to get him closer?

But would either of those things help the situation? He had the guns, and as far as I knew, there was no one looking for us here.

Or was there? Lester Frost and Madame Minerva seemed to have been following me back there at the ferry. Maybe they had already called the police, and help was on the way. Maybe hope had not really died.

“So who should enjoy my skills first?” Sunday asked. “Your awake, nubile, and athletic daughter? Or your comatose, ripe, and buxom wife?”

I said nothing as he reached around and tucked the Ruger in his waistband. Then he switched the .357 to his left hand and moved it toward Jannie.

“Don’t!” she yelled. “You frickin’ creep!”

Sunday laughed. “Feisty, aren’t you?”

I said, “He’s not a creep, Jannie. He’s a wallowing pig.”

You’d have thought I’d slapped him, the way his face turned red and his expression hardened. “You have no idea who I am or what I am capable of,” he said in the coldest voice I’d ever heard. “I am limitless.”

“I know who you are and I know your limitations,” I shot back. “When it comes down to it, Mulch, you’re just the kid who smelled like pig shit in school. It was why you killed Alice Littlefield, right? Because she commented on your piggish odor in class?”

Sunday took two long strides and kicked me hard in the stomach. It blew the wind out of me, and I fell to my side, gasping for air.

“You shut up and watch now,” he said calmly, but in a West Virginia accent, before turning and walking past Jannie. “I’m gonna tear your heart right out of your chest, Alex Cross.”

He went toward my wife then, pressed the pistol muzzle to the side of her head, and looked back at me.

My stomach turned inside out, but I tried to show Sunday no reaction.

Bree’s hand was still free—he hadn’t seemed to notice—but the gun against her skull effectively neutralized her threat. My mind flashed on the corpse of the woman at the construction site who’d looked like Bree. I felt the bottomless grief of that moment again and wondered if I could bear seeing her actually die right in front of me. No fake photos. No look-alike. For real.

I had to act. I had to do something.

Do I continue to attack him?

Or plead for Bree’s life?

SUNDAY MADE UP MY
mind for me. With his free hand, he drew down the sheet covering her breasts, glanced at them, and then winked at me.

“My, oh my, Alex Cross,” he said, and whistled. “Must have been something to have this fine woman in your bed every night. Yes, sir. Yes siree.”

“Leave her alone, asshole!” Jannie cried. “She’s drugged, defenseless.”

“Oooh, that helps,” Sunday said, nodding. “Keep it up there, girlie-girl. Stir that pot!”

He lazily traced his index finger around my wife’s nipples, watching me and smacking his lips as if he were savoring a meal of my misery and a wine of my hatred.

“Shall we see more?” Sunday asked, teasing the sheet down over her belly. “If I remember, no Brazilian-wax fan down there. Uh-uh, Bree’s got the prettiest little trim job. I like that, fits perfectly with a man in your line of work. Leave a little mystery, right?”

Remembering how he’d lost it when I brought up his life as Thierry Mulch, I attacked there again.

“Baby Boar,” I shot back. “That’s what they called you, right? At home, anyway. But at school? I heard it was just Pig Boy and Little Piggy-Shit Boy.”

His shoulders hunched. For a second, I thought he was going to come for me again. Instead, he watched the action of his fingers on Bree’s breast, saying in that Thierry Mulch accent, “You best hush, you know what’s good for you, Alex Cross.”

Sunday’s fingers traveled toward my wife’s throat as if he might choke her or hold her down when he sent the bullet into her brain.

“Soooweee!” I called to him in a high, thin tone. “Isn’t that how they taunted you, Thierry? Soooweee! Here, piggy, piggy, piggy that smells like shit!”

Sunday flushed purple and began softly smearing his free hand over Bree’s face as he hissed, “You keep it up now, Cross. Just makes my job easier.”

“And your mom? Did she abandon you because of your stench?”

Sunday laughed acidly. “That traitorous bitch sure knew who she was when she died. She went out squealing and choking.”

“And Alice Monahan?”

“And all their young’ns,” he said. “Same way before they got the knife.”

Then his nostrils flared in deep amusement. He studied me while twiddling three of his fingers just above Bree’s slack jaw and open mouth.

“Listen for it, you hear, Cross?” Sunday said. “Even out cold, this sow of yours is gonna squeal ’fore she dies.”

A LOW, THROBBING NOISE
grew outside the container car.

Sunday looked to the roof in alarm.

And then the sonofabitch let loose with an absolutely bloodcurdling scream.

Sunday struggled and screeched trying to get his fingers out of Bree’s mouth. But she’d bitten into him hard and she held on like a crazed terrier until he pistol-whipped the side of her head.

He staggered back against Damon’s bunk, staring in shock at his wounds. The pinkie and ring fingers were almost completely severed above the second knuckle. His middle finger was spurting blood and was bent grotesquely.

For me, the next few moments unfolded in slow motion. I just couldn’t get there fast enough, but I saw every second of it with a weird clarity.

As I lurched to my feet, Sunday’s pain and disbelief turned to rage. He screamed something incomprehensible at Bree, who was dazed and smiling weakly, his blood trickling from her mouth.

He aimed the gun at her point-blank and screeched, “Die, you fucking—”

Damon’s elbow smashed the back of Sunday’s neck and unbalanced him. He lurched to his left. Damon’s second swing at him just missed.

“Get him, Dad!” Ali yelled as I barreled past with my hands still duct-taped behind my head.

Sunday seemed not to hear me coming; he shook off Damon’s blow and made a bizarre clacking sound with his teeth before trying to aim at Bree again.

Out of his peripheral vision, he caught me charging and tried to swing the gun my way. But I dropped my shoulder under his line of fire, exploded from my knees, and smashed all my weight and momentum into his rib cage.

The impact knocked Sunday off his feet.

He hit the container floor so hard, the .357 flew from his hand, ricocheted off the rear wall, and went skittering under Nana Mama’s bunk.

The force knocked me down at an odd, twisting angle, and I hit the container floor hard, face-first and then left shoulder. I saw stars and felt bones break.

“Kill him, Dad!” Ali yelled. “Kill him!”

Pain pulsed like fire and radiated in my shoulder and face. But the hit must also have triggered some kind of full-on adrenaline response, because instead of lying there in shock, I went insane with fury.

Sunday’s back was to me. He was hurt but trying to get to his feet.

I kicked him high in the hamstring, just below his ass cheeks. He stumbled and hit his head against the container wall. Ignoring the agony of my blown shoulder and fractured face, I squirmed forward and lashed out with my foot, trying to kick him in the back of his knee, his calf, his ankle, anything.

I missed.

“Dad, watch out!” Damon yelled.

In a single motion, Sunday pushed away from the wall, pivoted, and hauled off and kicked me in the ribs just below my bad arm, blowing the air out of me and making me curl up like a whipped dog. He jumped over me, spun, and kicked me even harder in the kidney.

Sunday might as well have hit me with a Taser because it felt like a lightning bolt passed through me, and I puked. Then he looped his belt around my neck and cinched it tight.

“No!” Ali yelled. “Don’t!”

“You just don’t learn, do you, Cross?” Sunday snarled, and he wrenched me up off the ground by my neck, the belt right up under my jaw. “You’ll never learn, will you?”

“Never,” I choked, fighting not to pass out.

He dragged me against him and pulled even tighter on the belt, cutting off my air and the blood supply to my brain.

“Incorrigible, I can see that, and I admit defeat with you.” He grunted. “But let’s see if your family learns better. Let’s let them see what life’s all about.”

Sunday yanked again, and I strained against the strangler, whipping my head side to side.

“It’s meaningless!” he crowed. “It’s all so meaningless!”

I stopped struggling, and my eyes sought my family.

Bree watched me, blinking slowly, blood from the head wound streaking her cheeks. Damon and Jannie were almost free of their restraints but frozen on their bunks, watching me die. Ali hung off his bunk, screaming and reaching for me.

Spots were becoming blotches in front of my eyes, and all I could hear was my heart pounding like so many anvil strikes when I looked to my last hope on earth.

“
LET HIM GO, OR
I’ll shoot you!”

Sunday wasn’t sure who’d shouted the order at first. He’d been staring at the top of Cross’s head, waiting for the big collapse, the pissing and shitting in the pants that always seemed to mark a death by strangulation.

But then he glanced up and saw Nana Mama.

The old woman was lying on her bunk with her knees drawn up under the sheets. Her bony hands held his .357.

She was aiming at him from ten, maybe fifteen feet away, and the nickel-plated barrel of the gun rested in a cradle of sheet fabric stretched between her knees.

“Do it!” Nana Mama shouted.

Sunday grinned lazily at her and eased up slightly on the belt. Cross started coughing and hacking.

“Watch yourself there,” he said to the detective’s grandmother. “Bullet gets to ricocheting around here, who knows who it will kill.”

“Shoot him, Nana!” Ali said. “In the head. Like he’s a zombie!”

Sunday considered himself a brilliant interpreter of body language, and he saw in the old lady’s face and trembling upper body that she did not want to kill him and that she was afraid of even trying.

“You won’t kill me, now,” he drawled. “Catholic, southern lady and all. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not.”

Every inch of Nana Mama was shaking now.

“See there?” Sunday said, as soft and sincere as a funeral director. “You can’t even aim, you old bitch. You shoot, you’ll kill your grandson.”

“No,” she said. “I
will
shoot
you!
”

“No, you won’t,” Sunday said with a knowing grin as he leaned back and pulled on the belt with all his might. “Not in my universe. No—”

The flash, the explosion, and the impact seemed to happen all at once.

It felt like some invisible force had swatted Sunday, backhanded him as if he were no more than a fly. The bullet caught him square in the chest and flung him against the rear wall of the container car.

Looking down, Sunday saw the bright red color expand on his shirt like a rose unfolding, and he felt sick and began to slide down the wall, all too aware that he had lost his grip on the belt around Cross’s neck.

“No,” Sunday rasped, already tasting blood in his throat. “There’s no meaning … no point if he doesn’t …”

The hatch door at the far end of the container opened as the blood poured from him, and his breath got labored and raspy, and Sunday’s life began to ebb away. But not before one last image registered in his brain, a final vision that filled him with acute terror as he died.

A sunbeam had come in through the open hatch door, run across the container floor, and lit up Cross, who was not two feet away, fighting for air.

I CAN’T SAY THAT
I remember everything that happened in the moments after Sunday began to strangle me again, only that Nana Mama was yelling and then she shot. And for what seemed an eternity after that shot, there was nothing but the ringing in my ears, blood rushing to my head, and me wanting air.

Then someone was cutting the duct tape that bound my wrists and hands to my head. Flames shot through my shoulder, and I gagged against the dry, bruised sensation in my throat as someone turned me over. It was Tess Aaliyah. She was grinning through her tears.

“They’re all safe!” she said. “They’re all alive!”

I looked beyond and around her, seeing Damon sitting on the edge of his bunk, and Bree smiling sleepily, and Jannie and Ali being freed by Louisiana state troopers. A U.S. Coast Guard medic was already working on my grandmother.