The Axeman's Jazz

space between houses. She turned toward the street as Sonny had done.
    She had help! Sonny was running down the street, was already halfway down the block, but someone was giving chase. Alex. Oh, great. Just what she needed.
    “Alex, get out of the way!” she yelled as she pounded after them.
    But Alex was gaining on him, was almost upon him. He wasn’t about to stop.
    Skip yelled, “Sonny, freeze!” but she was pissing in the wind and she knew it.
    And then to her amazement he did freeze. He simply stopped and turned around, seemingly calm as a cat. The problem was, Alex was still in the way.
    Suddenly, things looked different. Alex had been about to jump Sonny, but he stopped and sidestepped, like there was a wire stretched across the road at neck level. Sonny struck at him. Alex backed away. Sonny ran at him with his fist at chest level. Alex turned his back on him, obviously rethinking the whole thing, intending to run the other way, but Sonny grabbed him around the neck, jumped on his back.
    “Let me go!”
    What the hell was happening? Skip couldn’t tell.
    Sonny said, “Come one step closer and I kill him.”
    She stopped so fast she practically skidded, painfully aware of the comic aspect of it, but trying desperately to keep her balance; if she went down, she was out of control. If she wasn’t already.
    And she saw, as she focused on Alex, that she was. Sonny’s hand, tight around his neck, was holding a small blade at his jugular.
    “It’s a scalpel,” Sonny said. “Do you know how sharp these things are?”

THIRTY-ONE
    THE SIRENS OF the first District cars sounded in the distance, and when they had arrived, and the officers had come to take her place for a moment, she literally limped back to the car, feeling the weight of her now-drenched hair and clothes.
    She had stood for only a few minutes with her gun pointed at Sonny, while neighbors came out and went back in, but she could truthfully say they were the worst few minutes of her life. It was bad enough trying to focus on Sonny, putting everything into keeping him from making a move, trying to be damn sure she didn’t let him hurt Alex. But in addition there had been the neighbors, of whom she could get only glances out of the corners of her eyes. She’d had to hope none of them had a gun and none of them took it into their heads to shoot her. She’d had to keep shouting that she was a police officer, to “go back inside now!” knowing that her outfit—baggy khaki pants, sandals, and tank top—didn’t help her image.
    Her butt fell to the seat of the black-and-white, with no help from the rest of her body. She had to fight to keep from leaning over, resting her head on the dashboard. But she couldn’t; it would give away how close to collapse she was. She was reaching for the radio as Cappello pulled up.
    “Joe’s on the way,” she said. “I’ve already ordered the block closed off.”
    Skip rubbed her forehead. “Hostage negotiators?”
    “I didn’t know we needed them.”
    Skip gestured. “He’s got Alex; how’s that for irony?”
    Quickly, she ran down what had happened, then went to see about Missy and call Cindy Lou. Missy was staring out the window, pale, unmoving. Skip thought she was a good candidate for Cindy Lou’s ministrations, but she wasn’t ready yet to start picking up the pieces. There was still hard work to do.
    “He didn’t mean it,” Missy said. “He’s just overtired. He didn’t really mean it.”
    “Missy, listen to me. You’ve had a bad shock, but you can’t let yourself pretend it didn’t happen. You have to be strong for a little while longer.”
    Missy seemed to draw strength from the notion that someone wanted something from her. “Is there something I can do?” she said, and there was hope in her voice.
    “Maybe. But first I want you to drink something.”
    Skip went and got her some juice. When Missy had drunk it and some of her color had returned, Skip said, “I heard a lot of what he said.”
    “About killing his patients?”
    “Yes.”
    “You know, his family blames him for his grandfather’s death. He was…” Her face started to go, her voice caught in a sob, but she stopped till she could untwist her muscles, speak normally. “He was four years old at the time.”
    “Jesus.” Skip was all too familiar with the principle of blame. She’d seen families where the father was so wasted on crack he was barely recognizable as a human being and he’d say it was all