Hope to Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

a walk and get my head straight.”
    “Want company?” he asked.
    “I’ll see you later at work.”
    “Sugar, you can’t work when something like—”
    “John, I
have to
work when something like this is going on,” I said firmly. “It’s the only way I’ll stay sane.”
    Sampson looked like he wanted to tell me something, but Detective Aaliyah came over, said, “Dr. Cross, I have—”
    “John, this is Tess Aaliyah,” I said. “She’s new, from Baltimore, and she caught this case and needs to be brought up to speed on what the secret task force has found out about Mulch.”
    “Secret task force?” Aaliyah said.
    “Exactly,” I said, and walked off, trying to convince myself that that wasn’t my wife’s body in the back of that coroner’s wagon.
    But grief and loss have a way of crippling the best intentions even in the strongest of minds.
    Within a block of leaving the crime scene I was lost in memories of my first days with Bree, how she’d rescued me from a long loneliness with an unshakable love, the kind I’d thought I’d lost forever. Then the likelihood that she was gone hit me like a freight train and I began to choke and sob right there on the sidewalk.
    Every woman I’d ever loved had ended up dead or so traumatized by the violence woven through my life that she couldn’t bear the sight of me. My first wife, Maria, died in a drive-by shooting when Damon was a toddler and Jannie was just a baby. A madman took Ali’s mother hostage, and even though we managed to rescue her, it permanently fractured our relationship. And now Bree, the absolute love of my life, might have been swallowed up by the darkness that had shadowed me without pause almost since the moment I became a police officer.
    What about my kids? What about my grandmother? Were they completely doomed to follow my loves into the shadows and the darkness? And what about me?
    Was I already there? I asked myself as I walked on, wiping tears from my eyes. Had I ever left? Could I ever leave?
    On autopilot, I took a route I’d taken a thousand times with my children. Every morning, or as often as was possible, I’d walked them to their school, Sojourner Truth. I did it for years, and as I retraced those steps, I was soon drowning in memories of Damon, Jannie, and Ali as each headed to the first day of first grade.
    Damon had gone willingly, eagerly. It was all he and his friends had talked about. But Jannie and Alex Jr. had been nervous.
    “What if I get a bad teacher?” Jannie asked.
    Ali had asked the same thing, and in my mind, suddenly Jannie and Ali were right there, together, both six, and both looking at me for a response. I squatted down to them and pulled them in close to me, rejoicing in their smell and their innocence.
    “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you,” I said. “And I love you. That’s all you need to know.”
    “Love you more,” Jannie said.
    “Love you more,” Ali said.
    “Love you more and more,” I whispered. “Love you—”
    A woman said, “Dr. Cross?”

CHAPTER
10
     
    STARTLED OUT OF THAT perfect vision of my life before Thierry Mulch, I was shocked to find myself at the fence around the Sojourner Truth playground. It was deserted. I thought I heard the school bell sound for recess. But where was the laughter of my children?
    “Dr. Cross?”
    Blinking, I turned my head to see a tall, pretty African American woman in a blue pantsuit standing beside me on the sidewalk, her face painted in concern.
    “Yes,” I said, almost recognizing her, feeling irritated and not quite knowing why.
    She looked at me closely, said, “You don’t look well.”
    “I’m just … where are the kids? The bell rang. It’s recess time.”
    “It’s Easter vacation,” she said.
    I looked at her like she was a stranger in a dream.
    “Dr. Cross,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”
    I did suddenly and felt myself grow irrationally angry. “You’re Dawson. The principal. You’re the one who