Criss Cross

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.”