Kiss the Girls

“You think you’re a laugh riot, Home?” he asked Sampson. He had a lead sap out and was holding it close to his hip, ready to strike.
    “Best I could come up,” Sampson said, keeping his smile turned on low. He wasn’t afraid of saps.
    My scalp was crawling and sweat dribbled slowly down my back. I couldn’t remember being rousted recently, and I didn’t like it one bit. Everything bad I had felt since I’d been here fell into place. Not that rousting black males is peculiar to North Carolina or the South anymore.
    I started to tell the cops who we were. “My name is—”
    “Shut the fuck up, asshole!” One of them popped me in the small of the back before I could finish. Not hard enough to leave a bruise, but it stung like a good rabbit punch. It hurt in a couple of ways, actually.
    “This one looks fucked up to me. Eyes are bloodshot,” the low-voiced patrolman said to his partner. “This one is high.” He was talking about me.
    “I’m Alex Cross. I’m a police detective, you
motherfucker!
” I suddenly yelled at him. “I’m part of the Casanova investigation. Call detectives Ruskin and Sikes right now! Call Kyle Craig from the FBI!”
    At the same time, I spun around fast and hit the closest one in the throat. He dropped to the ground like a stone. His partner jumped forward, but Sampson had him on the sidewalk before he could do anything too dumb. I took away the first stud’s revolver easier than I could disarm a fourteen-year-old hugger-mugger in D.C.
    “Assume the position?”
Sampson said to his “suspect.” There was no merriment in his deep voice. “How many brothers you pull that shit on? How many young men you call ‘homes’ and humiliate like that?—like you might fuckin’ understand what their life is about. Makes me
sick.
”
    “You know damn well the serial killer Casanova isn’t a black man,” I said to the two disarmed Chapel Hill cops. “You haven’t heard the last of this particular incident, gentlemen. Believe me on that one.”
    “There been a lot of robberies in this neighborhood,” the deep-voiced one said. He was contrite all of a sudden, doing the Corporate America step’n’fetchit, the old two-step backstep.
    “Save the sorry bullshit!” Sampson said, jabbing out with his own gun, letting the two detectives feel a little humiliation of their own.
    Sampson and I got back into our car. We kept the detectives’ guns. Souvenirs of our day. Let them explain it to their bosses back at police headquarters.
    “Son of a bitch!” Sampson said as we pulled away. I hit the steering wheel with the heel of my palm. I hit it a second time. The bad scene had shaken me more than I had realized, or maybe I was just too ragged and frayed right then.
    “On the other hand,” Sampson said, “we did take those boys down like
snap.
Little bullshit racism gets my adrenaline flowing, blood boiling. Gets the demons going. That’s good. I have the proper
edge
now.”
    “It’s nice to see your ugly face again,” I said to Sampson. I had to smile, finally. We both did. Then we were both laughing out loud in the car.
    “Nice to see you, too, Brown Sugar. You’ll be happy to know you’ve still got your looks. Strain’s not showing too bad. Let’s go to work. You know, I pity the poor psycho if we catch him today—which is likely, I might add.”
    Sampson and I were twinning, too. It felt as good as ever.

Chapter 88

    S AMPSON AND I found Dean Browning Lowell working out at the new faculty gym in Allen Hall on the Duke campus. The gym was filled with the latest and greatest muscle-building and toning equipment: shiny new rowing machines, StairMasters, treadmills, Gravitrons.
    Dean Lowell was working with free weights. We needed to talk to him about Wick Sachs, doctor of pornography.
    Sampson and I watched Browning Lowell do a tough set of lateral raises, then some leg curls and presses. It was an impressive workout, even by the standards of two dedicated gym rats like ourselves. Lowell was quite a physical specimen.
    “So this is what an Olympian god looks like up close,” I said as we finally strolled across the gym floor toward him. Whitney Houston was playing from speakers in the gym’s walls. Whitney was getting all the professor types pumped up to the max.
    “You’re walkin’ with an Olympian god,” Sampson reminded me.
    “It’s easy to forget in the presence of the great, yet humble, ones,” I said and grinned.
    Dean Lowell looked as he heard our