Cross Fire - James Patterson [2]
“How long will the bruising last?” he asked. “And this swelling around my eyes?”
Cruz handed him a folder of aftercare information. “With proper rest, you should be looking completely normal in seven to ten days.”
The remaining changes, he could do for himself — shave and dye his hair down to a dark buzz cut and put in a simple pair of colored contacts. If there was any disappointment at all, it was that Kyle Craig had been so much better looking than Max Siegel.
But screw it. He needed to consider the larger picture here. Next time, he could be Brad Pitt if he wanted to.
He left the clinic in an excellent mood and took another cab straight to José Martí International Airport. From there, he caught a flight back to Miami, with a connection to Washington, DC, that same afternoon. For the main event.
Already, his thoughts had begun to coalesce around one idea: meeting up with his old friend and sometimes partner Alex Cross. Had Alex forgotten the promises Kyle had made to him over the years? That didn’t seem possible. But had Cross grown just a little complacent in the meantime? Maybe so. In any case, the “great” Alex Cross was going to die, and die badly. There would be pain, but even more than that — regret. It would be a finale worth waiting for, no question.
And in the interim, Kyle was going to have some fun. After all, as the new and improved Max Siegel, he knew better than anybody that there was more than one way to take another man’s life.
Book One
SHOOTER READY
Chapter 1
ANOTHER MANHOLE COVER had exploded in Georgetown, blowing nearly forty feet in the air. It was a strange little epidemic, as the city’s aging infrastructure reached some kind of critical mass.
Over time, underground wires had frayed and smoldered, filling the space beneath the streets with flammable gas. Ultimately — and more frequently these days — the exposed wires created an electrical arc, lighting a fireball in the sewer and sending another three-hundred-pound iron disk flying up into the air.
This was the weird, scary stuff Denny and Mitch lived for. Every afternoon, they would gather up their papers to sell and hoof it over to the library to check the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) website for wherever rush-hour traffic was at its worst. Logjams were their meat.
Even on an ordinary day, the Key Bridge lived up to its nickname, the Car Strangled Spanner, but today the M Street approach was somewhere between a parking lot and a circus. Denny worked his way up the middle of the traffic, and Mitch took the outside.
“True Press, only a dollar. Help the homeless.”
“Jesus loves you. Help the homeless?”
They were an odd pair, to look at them — Denny, a six-feet-something white guy with bad teeth and stubble that never quite hid his sunken chin, and then Mitch, a brother with a boyish, dark black face, a husky body that topped out at five six, and stubby little baby dreads on his head to match.
“This is a perfect metaphor right here, ain’t it?” Denny was saying. They talked to each other over the tops of the cars — or, rather, Denny talked and Mitch played a sort of straight man for the customers.
“You got pressure building, way down low where no one’s looking, ’cause it’s all just rats and shit down there, and who cares, right? But then one day —” Denny puffed out his cheeks and made a sound like a nuclear explosion. “Now you gotta pay attention, ’cause the rats and shit, they’re everywhere, and everyone wants to know why somebody else didn’t do something to stop it. I mean, if that ain’t Washington to a tee, I don’t know what the hell is.”
“To a tee, bro. To a P, Q, R, S, tee,” Mitch said, and laughed at his own dumb