wore a cap from the Hoodoo Gurus tour.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. Crimson and blue emergency lights twirled behind him. “Wuz up? You don't look so good. You all right, man?” “Been stabbed twice with a hunting knife. Not as bad as the time we got shot over in Garfield.”
“Uh huh. Must look worse than it is. I want you to lie down here on the lawn. Lie down now, Alex.”
I nodded, and walked away from Sampson. I had to finish this. Somehow, it had to be over with.
The EMS people were trying to get me down on the lawn. Our tiny lawn. Or get me on their stretcher.
1 had another idea. The front door had been left wide open. He'd left the door to the house open. Why had he done that?
“Be right with you,” I said to the medics as I walked past them. 'Hold that stretcher, though. II
People were yelling at me, but I pushed forward, anyway.
I moved silently and purposefully through the living room and into the kitchen. I opened the door that's catty- cornered to our back door, and hurried downstairs.
I didn't see anything in the basement. No movement. Nothing out of order. The cellar was my last good idea.
I walked over to a bin near the furnace where Nana dumps all the dirty laundry for the next washload. It's the farthest corner of the basement from the stairs. No Soneji/Murphy in the dark basement.
S ampson came running down the cellar stairs. “He's not here! Someone saw him downtown. He's down around Dupont Circle.”
“He wants to make one more big play,” I muttered. “Son-of-a-bitch.” Son of Lindbergh.
Sampson didn't try to stop me from going with him. He could see in my eyes that he couldn't, anyway. The two of us hurried to his car. I figured I was all right. I'd drop if I wasn't.
A young punk from the neighborhood looked at the sticky blood down the front of my shirt. “You dying, Cross? That be good.” He gave me my eulogy.
It took us ten minutes or so to get down to Dupont Circle. Police squad cars were parked everywhereflashing eerie red and blue in the dawn's earliest light.
It was late in the night shift for most of these boys.
Nobody needed a madman on the loose in downtown Washington.
One more big play.
I Want to Be Somebody. During the next hour or so nothing happened-except that it got light out. Pedestrians began to appear around the circle. The traffic thickened as Washington opened up for business.
The early risers were curious and stopped to ask the police questions. None of us would tell them anything, except to “please keep moving along. Just keep walking, please. There's nothing to see. ” Thank God.
An EMS doctor treated my wounds. There was more blood than actual damage. He wanted me to go straight to the hospital, of course. That could wait. One more big play. Dupont Circle? Downtown Washington, D.C.? Gary SonejilMurphy loved to play in the capital.
I told the EMS doc to back off, and he did. I hit him up for a couple of Percodan. They did the trick for the moment.
Sampson stood by my side, sucking on a cigarette. “You're gonna just fall over,” he said to me. “You'll just collapse. Like some big African elephant had a sudden heart attack. I was savoring my Percodan buzz. ”Wasn't a sudden heart attack,“ I said to him. ”Big African elephant got knifed a couple of times. Wasn't an elephant, either. It was an African antelope. Graceful, beautiful, powerful beast.
I eventually started to walk back toward Sampson's car.
“You got an idea?” he called after me. “Alex?”
“Yeah. Let's ride, no good standing around here at Dupont Circle. He's not going to start shooting up rushhour traffic.”
“You sure about that, Alex?” “I'm sure about it.”
We rode around downtown Washington until just before eight. It was getting hopeless. I was starting to get real sleepy in the car.
This big African antelope was about ready to fall over. Beads of sweat slipped across my eyebrows, dripping down my nose. I was trying to think like Gary Soneji/Murphy. Was he downtown now? Or had he already escaped from Washington?
A call came over the car radio at 7:58.
“Suspect spotted on Pennsylvania Avenue, near Lafayette Park. Suspect has an automatic weapon in his possession. Suspect is approaching the White House. All cars move in!”
One more big play. At least I finally had him figured out a little. He was less than two blocks from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue when they'd found him. That was two blocks from the White House.
I Want to Be Somebody.
They had him pinned down between a shoe-repair shop and a brownstone building full of law offices. He was using a parked Jeep Cherokee for cover.
There was another complication. He had hostages. He'd taken two young kids who had been on their way to school early that morning. The children looked to be eleven or twelve, about the same age Gary had been w hen his stepmother started locking him up. There was a boy and a girl. Shades of Maggie Rose and Michael Goldberg, almost two years before.
