Kiss the Girls

by James Patterson

  I followed Sikes into a pine-wooded lot, and he began to move quicker. He was fast for a big man. He could lose me now. Somebody’s life would be at risk in the peaceful neighborhood. Another Scootchie Cross. Another Kate McTiernan. I remembered Kate’s words: Drive a stake through his heart, Alex.

  I slid the Glock nine millimeter out of my shoulder holster. Light. Efficient. Semiautomatic. Twelve deadly shots. My teeth were gritted so tight they hurt. I clicked off the safety. I was ready to take Davey Sikes out.

  I eyed the ominous shapes of overhanging pine branches as I moved along. An A-frame house was up ahead, set against the backdrop of a full, pale yellow moon. I moved quickly across the soft floor of pine needles. I made no sound. I had his tempo and rhythm down now.

  I saw Casanova rapidly approaching the A-frame house, gaining speed. He knew his way. He’d been here before, hadn’t he? He had been here to scope things out, to study the next victim, to get it just right.

  I sprinted up closer to the house. Then I couldn’t see him. I’d lost him for a second. He might have slipped inside.

  A single shimmering light had been left on in the house. My heart was going to explode if I didn’t blow him up first. My finger was on the semiautomatic’s trigger.

  Drive a stake through his heart, Alex.

  CHAPTER 118

  TAKE SIKES out.

  I fought to control my emotions, to find the calm pool inside me, as I ran toward a screened-in back porch that lay in shifting shadows and darkness. Suddenly, I could hear the sputtering hum of an air conditioner inside. I noticed a peeling sticker on the whitewashed porch door. It read: I live for Girl Scout cookies.

  He’d found another nice one out here, hadn’t he? He was going to take her tonight. The Beast couldn’t stop himself.

  “Hello, Cross. Now put down the gun. Very slowly, ace,” said the deep voice behind me in the dark.

  Both my eyes closed for a beat. I lowered the pistol, then dropped it on the lawn of grass and pine needles. My body felt like an elevator car in free-fall.

  “Turn around now, you son of a bitch. You meddling shithead.”

  I turned, and looked into the face of Casanova. He was finally right there, close enough for me to touch. He had a Browning semiautomatic aimed at my chest.

  There would be no more overthinking, just gut instincts, I told myself. I let my right leg buckle as if I’d lost my footing. Then I sucker-punched Sikes to the side of his head. It was a hard shot, a crushing, heavyweight-caliber punch.

  Sikes went down on one knee, but he came back up in a hurry. I grabbed the front of his jacket and bounced him off the wall of the house. His arm cracked against the shingles and the handgun fell loose. The ground was firm under my feet, and I moved in on him again. The moment had the feeling of a good old-fashioned streetfight. I wanted it. My body ached for physical contact and release.

  “C’mon, fucker,” he challenged me. He wanted me, too.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m coming.”

  Another light flashed on inside the house. “Who’s out there?” The sound of the woman’s voice caught me off guard. “Who is out there, please?”

  He threw an arcing roundhouse punch. Pretty good speed and aim. He was a decent fighter, not just a lover. I remembered that Kate said he was scarily strong. I didn’t plan to spend a lot of time in his killer’s grasp, though.

  I caught his punch on my upper arm, and it instantly went numb. He was powerful, all right. Stay away from his strength, I warned myself. Hurt him, though. Hurt him a lot.

  I fired a hard right uppercut into his lower stomach. I thought of Kate and the beatings she had taken for being disobedient. I vividly remembered the final beating she’d gotten.

  I crunched another right hand into his stomach. I felt the stomach soften. I think I hit him below the belt. Sikes groaned and slumped over like a badly beaten club fighter. It was a trick, a slick feint on his part.

  He fired a punch and caught the side of my head. He rang my bell pretty good. I snorted, bobbed a little, showed him he hadn’t hurt me. This was streetfighting, D.C. style. C’mon, white boy. Come to me, monster man. I needed this time with him so much.

  I slammed my fist hard into his lower stomach again. Kill the body, and the head dies. I wanted to mess up the head, too. I hit him for good measure in the nose. My best effort so far. Sampson would have been proud of the shot. I was.

  “That’s for Sampson,” I told him through gritted teeth. “He asked me to give you that. Hand-deliver it.”

  I hit him in the throat and he started to gag. I continued to bob. I didn’t just look a little like Ali, I could fight like him when I had to. I could defend what needed to be defended. I could be a street tough when it had to be that way.

  “This is for Kate.” I hit Sikes in the nose again, right on the button. Then square in the left eye with another right lead. His face was puffing up nicely. Drive a stake through his heart, Alex.

  He was strong and well conditioned, and still dangerous, I knew. He came at me again. Charged like a raging bull in the plaza de toros. I stepped aside, and he forearmed the wall of the house as if he were trying to level it. The small house rumbled and shook.

  I punched Sikes hard on the side of the head. His head snapped back so hard against the house’s aluminum siding that he left a dent in it. He was weaving now, his breath coming in gasps. Suddenly, there were wails of sirens in the distance. The woman inside must have called the police. I was the police, wasn’t I?

  Somebody hit me from behind, hit me real hard. “Oh, Jesus, no,” I moaned and tried to shake off the hurt.

  This wasn’t possible! This couldn’t be happening!

  Who had hit me? Why? I didn’t get it, couldn’t understand, couldn’t clear my head fast enough.

  I was dizzy and hurt but I turned, anyway.

  I saw a frizzy-haired blond woman wearing an oversized Farm Aid T-shirt. She was still holding the work shovel she’d just clobbered me with.

  “Get off my boyfriend!” she screamed at me. Her face and neck were beet red. “Get away from him or I’ll hit you again. You get away from my Davey.”

  My Davey?… Jesus! My head was spinning, but I got the message. I thought I did, anyway. Davey Sikes had come out here to see his girlfriend. He wasn’t hunting anyone. He wasn’t here to murder anyone. He was Farm Aid’s boyfriend.

  Maybe I’d lost it, I thought as I backed away from Sikes. Maybe I was finally burned beyond a crisp, beyond recognition or redemption. Or maybe I was like almost every other homicide detective I knew—overworked and fallible as hell. I’d made a mistake. I’d been wrong about Davey Sikes—I just didn’t understand how it had happened.

  Kyle Craig arrived at the house in McCullers within the hour. He was as calm as ever, completely unruffled. He spoke quietly to me. “Detective Sikes has been having an affair with the woman in the house for over a year. We knew about it. Detective Sikes isn’t a suspect. He isn’t Casanova. Go home, Alex. Just go home now. You’re through here.”

  CHAPTER 119

  I DIDN’T go home. I went to visit Kate at Duke University Medical Center. She didn’t look good; she was pale and haggard; she was rail-thin. She didn’t sound good, either. But Kate was much, much improved. She was out of the coma.

  “Look who’s finally awake,” I said from the doorway into her room.

  “You got one of the bad guys, Alex,” Kate whispered as she saw me. She smiled faintly, and she spoke in a slow, uncertain way. It was Kate, but not quite Kate.

  “Did you see that in your dreams?” I asked her.

  “Yep.” She smiled again, that sweet smile of hers. She was talking so very slowly. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  “I brought you a little present,” I told her. I held up a teddy bear dressed to look like a doctor. Kate took the bear and she continued to grin. The magical smile almost made her look like her old self.

  I put my head down close to Kate’s. I kissed her swollen head
as if it were the most delicate flower ever put on the earth. Sparks flew, strange ones, but maybe the strongest ones yet.

  “I missed you more than I can say,” I whispered against her hair.

  “Say it,” she whispered back. Then she smiled again. We both did. Her speech was a little slow maybe, but not her mind.

  Ten days later, Kate was up on a clumsy, four-legged metal walker. She was complaining that she hated the “mechanical contraption” and would be off it within a week. Actually, it took her almost four weeks, but even that was considered miraculous.

  She had a half-moon indentation on the left side of her forehead from the terrible beating. So far, she had refused plastic surgery to repair it. She thought her dent added character.

  In a way it did. It was pure, unadulterated Kate McTiernan. “It’s also part of my life story, so it stays,” she said. Her speech was closer to normal, getting a little clearer every week.

  Whenever I saw Kate’s half-moon dent, I was reminded of Reginald Denny, the truck driver who was so savagely beaten during the Los Angeles riots. I remembered how he looked after the Rodney King verdict. Denny’s head was severely dented, actually staved in, on one side. It still looked that way when I saw him on TV a year after the incident. I also thought of a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story called “The Birthmark.” The dent was Kate’s one imperfection. With it, in my eyes, anyway, she was even more beautiful and special than she’d been before.

  I spent most of July at home with my family in Washington. I took two short trips back to see Kate in Durham, but that was all. How many fathers get to spend a month with their kids, catching up with their wild-and-wooly run through childhood? Damon and Jannie were both playing organized baseball that summer. They were still music, movie, general noise, and hot chocolate-chip-cookie addicts. They both slept on the quilt with me for the first week or so—while I was recuperating, while I was trying to forget my recent time spent in hell.

  I worried that Casanova would come after me for killing his best friend, but so far there was no sign of him. No more beautiful women had been abducted in North Carolina. It was absolutely certain now that he wasn’t Davey Sikes. Several area policemen had been investigated; including his partner Nick Ruskin, and even Chief Hatfield. Every cop had alibis, and they all checked out. Who the hell was Casanova then? Was he going to just disappear, like his underground house? Had he gotten away with all those horrifying murders? Could he just stop killing now?

  My grandmother still had volumes of psychological and other kinds of useful advice for me to follow. Much of it was directed at the subject of my love life, and my leading a normal life for a change. She wanted me to go into private practice, anything but police work.

  “The children need a grandmother, and a mother,” Nana Mama told me from the pulpit of her stove where she was fixing her breakfast one morning.

  “So I should go out and look for a mother for Damon and Jannie? That what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes, you should, Alex, and maybe you should do it before you lose your boyish good looks and charm.”

  “I’ll get right on it,” I said. “Snare a wife and mother this summer.”

  Nana Mama swatted me with her spatula. Swatted me again for good measure. “Don’t get smart with me,” she said.

  She always had the last word.

  The phone call came around one o’clock one morning in late July. Nana and the kids had gone up for the night. I was playing some jazz piano, amusing myself, keeping a few junkies out on Fifth Street up with the music of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.

  Kyle Craig was on the phone line. I groaned when I heard Kyle’s calm subaltern voice.

  I expected bad news, of course, but not the particular news that I got late that night.

  “What the hell is it, Kyle?” I asked him right off, tying to make his unexpected call into a joke. “I told you not ever to call me again.”

  “I had to call on this, Alex. You had to know,” he hissed over the long-distance lines. “Now listen to me closely.”

  Kyle talked to me for almost half an hour, and it wasn’t what I had expected. It was much, much worse.

  After I got off the phone with Kyle, I went back to the sun porch. I sat there for a long time, thinking about what I should do now. There was nothing I could do, not a thing. “It doesn’t stop,” I whispered to the four walls, “does it?”

  I went and got my pistol. I hated carrying it inside the house. I checked all the doors and windows in our house. Finally, I went to bed.

  I heard Kyle’s fateful words again as I lay in my darkened bedroom. I heard Kyle tell me his shocker. I saw a face I never wanted to see again. I remembered everything.

  “Gary Soneji escaped from prison, Alex. He left a note. The note said he’d stop by and see you sometime soon.”

  It doesn’t stop.

  I lay in bed and thought about the fact that Gary Soneji still wanted to kill me. He’d told me so himself. He’d had time in prison to obsess about how, when, and where he was going to do it.

  I finally went off to sleep. It was almost morning. Another day was starting. It really doesn’t stop.

  CHAPTER 120

  THERE WERE still two mysteries that had to be solved, or at least dealt with in a better way. There was the mystery of Casanova, and who he was. And there was the one featuring Kate and myself.

  Kate and I visited the Outer Banks in North Carolina for six days at the end of August. We stayed near a picturesque resort town called Nags Head.

  Kate’s clumsy metal walker was gone, though she did carry around a knobby, old-fashioned hickory cane at times. Mostly she practiced karate exercises with the hardwood cane. She used it as a karate stick on the beach, twirling the cane around her body and head with great dexterity and skill.

  Watching Kate, I thought that she looked almost luminescent. She was back in good form. Her face was close to the way it had been, except for the dent. “It’s my stubborn streak,” she told me, “and it’s permanent until the day I die.”

  It was an idyllic time in many ways. Everything seemed just right for us. Kate and I felt that we both deserved a holiday, and much more.

  We ate breakfast together every morning on a porch made from long gray planks, which overlooked the shimmering Atlantic. (I made breakfast on my mornings to cook; Kate went to the Nags Head market and brought home sticky buns and Bavarian cream doughnuts on her days.) We went for long, long walks along the shoreline. We surf-cast for blues, and cooked the fresh fish right there on the beach. Sometimes, we just watched the shiny boats patrolling the water. We took a day trip to watch the crazy-ass hang gliders off the high dunes in Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

  We waited on Casanova. We were daring him to come after us. So far he wasn’t interested, at least he didn’t seem to be.

  I thought of the book and movie The Prince of Tides. Kate and I were a little bit like Tom Wingo and Susan Lowenstein, only mixed together in a different, though equally complex, way. Lowenstein had brought out Tom Wingo’s need to feel and give love, I remembered. Kate and I were learning everything about each other, the important things—and we were both quick learners.

  Early one August morning, we waded into the clear, deep blue water in front of the house. Most of the beach community wasn’t up yet. A lone brown pelican was skimming the water.

  We held hands above the low waves. Everything was picture-postcard perfect. So why was I feeling as if there was a gaping hole where my heart ought to be? Why was I still obsessed with Casanova?

  “You’re thinking bad thoughts, aren’t you?” Kate bumped me hard with her hip. “You’re on vacation. Think vacation thoughts.”

  “Actually, I was thinking very good thoughts, but they made me feel bad,” I told her.

  “I know that crazy-ass song,” she said. She gave me a hug, to reassure me that we were in this thing together, whatever it was that we were in.

  “Let’s take a run. I’ll race you to Coquina Beach,” she said
. “Ready, set, prepare yourself to lose.”

  We started to jog. Kate showed no signs of a limp. The pace picked up. She was so strong—in all ways. We both were. At the end, we were running nearly full-out and we collapsed in a wall of silver-blue surf. I didn’t want to lose Kate, I was thinking as I ran. I didn’t want this to end. I didn’t know what to do about it.

  On a warm, breezy Saturday night, Kate and I lay on an old Indian blanket on the beach. We were talking on half a hundred subjects at one sitting. We had already feasted on roast Carolina duckling with blackberry sauce that we’d made together. Kate had on a sweatshirt that read: Trust me, I’m a doctor.

  “I don’t want this to end, either,” Kate said with a heavy sigh. Then, “Alex, let’s talk about some of the reasons we both believe this has to end.”

  I shook my head and smiled at her characteristic directness. “Oh, this will never really end, Kate. We’ll always have this time. It’s one of those special treasures you get every once in a while in life.”

  Kate grabbed and held my arm with both her hands. Her deep brown eyes were intense. “Then why does it have to end here?”

  We both knew some, though not all, of the reasons.

  “We’re too much alike. We’re both obsessively analytical. We’re both so logical that we know the half-dozen reasons this won’t work out. We’re stubborn and we’re strong-willed. Eventually, we would go boom,” I said in a half-teasing tone.

  “Sounds like the old self-fulfilling prophecy to me,” Kate said.

  We both knew I was telling the truth, though. Sad truth? Is there such a thing? I guess that there is.

  “We just might go boom,” Kate said, and she smiled sweetly. “Then we couldn’t even be friends. I couldn’t stand the idea of losing you as my friend. That’s still part of it for me. I can’t risk a big loss yet.”

  “We’re both physically too strong. We’d kill each other eventually, Nidan,” I told her. I was tying to lighten things up.