Free Cross by James Patterson

with Ali, but there would be plenty of time for that in the near future. So I fixed myself a leftover pork and coleslaw sandwich, and then for some strange reason I made popcorn for one.
    Why? Why not! I don’t even like popcorn that much, but suddenly I was in the mood for some hot, buttered junk food. Free to be me; free to be stupid if I wanted to.
    I ate the freshly popped popcorn and played the piano for a couple of hours that afternoon—Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Al Green. I read several chapters from a book called
The Shadow of the Wind.
And then I did the truly unthinkable—I took a nap in the middle of the day. Before I drifted off, I thought about Maria again, the best of times, our honeymoon at Sandy Lane in Barbados. What a blast that had been. How much I still missed her and wished she was here right now to hear my news.
    For the rest of the afternoon, the phone never rang once. I didn’t have a pager anymore, and in the words of Nana Mama—
I was loving it.
    Nana and Ali came home together, then came Jannie, and finally Damon. Their staggered arrivals gave me the chance to show off our new car three times, and to get their praise and applause
three times.
What a fine, fine day this was turning out to be.
    That night at dinner we chowed down on Nana’s delicious Frenchified chicken, and I kept the big news to myself until the end of the meal—pumpkin ice cream and café au lait.
    Jannie and Damon wanted to eat and run, but I kept everybody sitting at the table. Jannie wanted to get back to her book. She was tripping out on
Eragon
these days, which was okay, I guess, but I didn’t understand why it is that kids have to read the same book half a dozen times.
    “What now?” she rolled her eyes and asked, as though she already knew the answer.
    “I have some news,” I said to her, and to everybody else.
    The kids looked at one another, and Jannie and Damon shared a frown and a head shake. They all thought they knew what was coming next—that I was leaving town on a new murder investigation, probably a serial. Maybe even tonight, just like I always did.
    “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, and grinned broadly. “Quite the opposite actually. In fact, I’m going to attend Damon’s choir practice tonight. I want to listen to that
joyful noise.
I want to see how well he
supports his breath
these days.”
    “You’re going to choir practice?” Damon exclaimed. “What, is there some
killer
in our singing group?”
    I was purposely stretching it out some, my eyes methodically going from face to face. I could tell that none of them had a clue what was coming next. Not even our crafty, know-it-all Nana had figured it out yet.
    Jannie finally looked down at Ali. “Make him tell us what’s going on, Ali. Make him talk.”
    “C’mon, Daddy,” said the little man, who was already a skillful manipulator. “Tell us. Before Janelle goes crazy.”
    “All right, all right, all right. Here’s the deal. I’m afraid I have to tell you that I’m now unemployed, and that we’re practically destitute. Well, not really. Anyway, this morning I resigned from the FBI. For the rest of the day I did nothing. Tonight, it’s the rehearsal of ‘Cantante Domino’ for me.”
    Nana Mama and the kids went wild with applause. “Des-ti-tute! Des-ti-tute!” the kids began to chant.
    And you know what? It had a nice ring to it.
    So did
no more monsters.

Chapter 36
    THE NEXT BEAT in the story went like this. John Sampson was a star in the Washington PD these days. Ever since Alex left the department and moved over to the FBI, Sampson’s reputation had been rising, not that it hadn’t been on a high level before, not that Sampson didn’t get a lot of respect for all sorts of reasons. The curious thing, though, was that Sampson couldn’t have given a rat’s ass. Peer approval had never meant much of anything to the Big Man. Unless maybe it was Alex’s, and even that was a hit-and-miss thing.
    His latest case