Cross

plan now and was traveling south to New York City. He was uptight and nervous but singing along with Springsteen, Dylan, the Band, Pink Floyd. Nothing but Oldies and Greaties for the four-hour ride south. He didn’t particularly want to leave Caitlin and the boys at the house in Massachusetts, but he figured they’d probably be safe there for now. If not, he had done the best he could for them. Better than his father ever did for him, or for his mother and brothers.
    He finally pulled off the West Side Highway at around midnight; then he went straightaway to the Morningside Apartments on West 107th. He’d stayed there before and knew it was just out of the way enough to suit his purposes. Convenient too, with four different subway lines going through the two nearby stations.
    No air-conditioning in the rooms, he remembered, but that didn’t matter in November. He slept like a baby safe in a mother’s womb. When Sullivan woke at seven, covered in a light sheen of his own sweat, his mind was focused on a single idea:
payback against Junior Maggione.
Or maybe an even better idea:
survival of the fittest and the toughest.
    Around nine that morning he took a subway ride to check out a couple of possible locations for murders he wanted to commit in the near future. He had a “wish list” with several different targets and wondered if any of these men, and two women, had an idea that they were as good as dead, that it was up to him who lived and died, and when, and where.
    In the evening, around nine, he drove over to Brooklyn, his old stomping grounds. Right into Junior Maggione’s neighborhood, his turf in Carroll Gardens.
    He was thinking about his old buddy Jimmy Hats and missing him some, figuring that Maggione’s father had probably popped Jimmy. Somebody had, and then made the body disappear, as if Jimmy had never been born. He’d always suspected it had been Maggione Sr., so that was another score for the Butcher to settle.
    It was building up inside him, this terrible rage. About something. Maybe about his father—the original Butcher of Sligo, that piece of Irish scum who had ruined his life before he was ten years old.
    He turned onto Maggione’s street, and he had to smile to himself. The powerful don still lived like a mildly successful plumber or maybe a local electrician, in a yellow-brick two-family house. More surprising—he didn’t spot any guards posted on the street.
    So either Junior was seriously underestimating him, or his people were damn good at hiding themselves in plain sight. Hell, maybe somebody had a sniper rifle sight pinned on his forehead right now.
Maybe he had a couple of seconds to live.
    The suspense was killing him. He had to see what was going on here. So he hit his car horn once, twice, three times, and not a goddamn thing happened.
    Nobody shot him through the skull. And for the first time, the Butcher let himself think,
I might win this fight after all.
    He’d figured out the first mystery: Junior Maggione had moved his family out of the house. Maggione was running too.
    Then he stopped that train of thought with just one word—
mistake.
    He couldn’t make any—not one misstep from now until this was all over. If he did, he was dead.
    Simple as that.
    End of story.

Chapter 91
    IT WAS LATE, AND I DECIDED to go for a drive in the R350. I was loving the car. The kids felt the same way. Even Nana did, praise the Lord. I found myself thinking about Maria again. The long investigation into her murder I had conducted and
failed
at. I was messing with my own mind, trying to picture her face, trying to hear the exact sound of her voice.
    Later that night, back at home, I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. It got so bad that I went downstairs and watched
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
again. Actually, I found myself cheering like a crazy person at the flickering TV screen. Tyler Perry’s movie matched up perfectly with my frame of mind.
    I called up Tony Woods at the director’s office around nine the next morning. Then I swallowed my pride and asked Tony for some help on the rape and murder case. I needed to find out if the Bureau had anything on the contract killer called the Butcher, anything that might be helpful to Sampson and me—maybe something classified.
    “We knew you’d call one of these days, Alex. Director Burns is eager to work with you again. You up for some consulting? Just light stuff. It’s your call what and where, especially now that you’re taking