I did the only thing I could think of.
I dropped the flashlight, wrenched Whitaker’s knife from my thigh, turned it skyward, and swung it in an upward arc, driving the blade into the back of his left leg, high under his buttocks, and burying it to the hilt.
I felt the tip strike bone and I twisted the knife.
Whitaker screamed and fired my pistol, missing my head by an inch. He flailed, attempting to pull the blade free.
I twisted the knife again. He dropped my gun and reached back, frantically trying to stop me.
I twisted the knife a third time, then wrenched it out of him and lay there on the flooded gravel, panting.
“Ha,” Whitaker said, stumbling back two feet, splashing to a stop. “See? I’m still standing, Cross. Artificial knee and I’m still standing.”
“You’re a dead man standing, Colonel,” I said with a grunt, dropping the knife and fishing for the waterproof flashlight still shining in the water. “I just put your knife through your femoral artery.”
By the time I got the flashlight beam back on him, Whitaker had gone from confident to confused. He was bent over slightly, his fingers probing the wound, no doubt feeling the blood that had to be gushing out of him. I thought the colonel would go for his belt to try to tourniquet his leg.
Instead, Whitaker went berserk. He charged, kicking me twice before diving on top of me and grabbing my neck with both hands.
As he throttled me, I tried to hit him with the flashlight again or trade it for the knife. But between my own loss of blood and the beating I’d taken, I couldn’t fight him. I just couldn’t.
My chest heaved for air and got none. Whitaker had this wild gleam in his eyes as my vision narrowed to blotchy darkness.
This is the end, I thought. The final …
The grip the colonel had on my throat started to weaken. I got sips of air, and my sight returned.
Whitaker was sitting on my chest, his head swaying to and fro right above mine.
“No, Cross,” he said. “John Brown, he … Mercury, he never …”
He panicked then, and tried to stand.
But halfway to his feet, Whitaker lurched off me, staggered, and then crashed into three inches of cold water, dead.
CHAPTER
104
TWO DAYS LATER, my face was still swollen and bruised. The knife wound had been sutured but it hurt like hell. Bree had won a commendation for solving the murder of the late Thomas McGrath. And Jannie’s orthopedist had called to say that her latest MRI showed the bone in her foot healing nicely.
“We have lots to be thankful for,” I said as we sat down to dinner.
“Says a man who looks like he went four rounds with Mike Tyson,” Nana Mama said, and Ali giggled.
“A man who went four rounds with Mike Tyson and survived,” I said, smiling and wincing at my split lip. “Anyway, we’re all here. We’re all healthy. We’re all safe. And for that, I for one am grateful.”
We held hands and said grace and then dove into a chicken Nana Mama had roasted with Dijon mustard, pearl onions, and lemongrass. It was delicious, another triumph, and we showered praise on her.
My grandmother was pleased and in peak form as dinner went on, cracking jokes and telling stories I’d heard and loved long ago. As she did, my mind drifted to the aftermath of Colonel Whitaker’s raid on Edgewater 9. Five Regulators had died in the firefight trying to escape. Two had been taken into custody by army MPs and had lawyered up.
Hobbes and Fender eluded the Coast Guard and escaped with a canister of VX, which had the country in a heightened state of alert. The men’s photographs were everywhere, and Ned Mahoney, who’d come through surgery with flying colors, was saying it was only a matter of time before they were located and captured.
George Potter, the DEA SAC, was now believed to be the source of the Regulators’ intelligence regarding the criminal supercartel targeted in the massacres.
The U.S. Naval Academy had taken two black eyes. Colonel Whitaker and U.S. Navy captain Cassandra “Cass” Pope were both graduates of Annapolis and on the faculty. Whitaker and Pope left vitriolic letters on their work computers declaring that slavers were destroying the country and that it was time for the slaves to arm themselves, rise up, and fight.
I shuddered to think what might have happened to Washington and to my family if they had managed to release a gallon of VX in the nation’s capital. But the important thing was that the Regulators or the vigilantes or whatever you wanted to call them were no longer operating. The road-rage killer was gone too. And no one had died from—
Someone started pounding on our front door.
Then she started to yell.
CHAPTER
105
“ALEX?” A WOMAN cried as she rang the doorbell. “Nana Mama? You in there?”