“You’re a hell of a motorcycle rider,” I said. “Saw you in action at Eden Center a while back.”
Le chuckled. “You never saw anyone pull that kind of shit before.”
“Never,” I said. “You are a rare talent. Now, how are we going to keep you, and your talent, from dying today?”
During a long pause I heard him snorting meth or coke or both. Then he said, “I dunno, Alex. You tell me.”
“How about you show me you can be trusted?” I said. “Let us retrieve our wounded officer.”
“What’s in that for me?” Le said.
I said, “We’re in this together.”
“Give me a fucking break,” he said. “We’re not together. We’re traveling different roads.”
“Different roads that are at an intersection. I’m trying to prevent a crash that you would not survive. Is that what you want too?”
He didn’t say anything for almost a minute.
“Mr. Le?” I said.
When Le spoke, his voice was softer, more thoughtful. “I figured things would turn out different for me.”
“What was your dream? Everyone’s got one.”
Le laughed. “X Games, man.”
“On the motorcycle?”
“That’s it,” Le said. “All I thought about. All I did.”
“When did you let the dream die?”
“I crashed too much and needed something strong enough to get through the pain,” he said. “Going into the business of killing pain just made sense.”
Le was smart, articulate, and self-aware. No wonder he’d been able to build a small empire.
“Can we come for Officer Parks? Things will go worse for you if he dies.”
Le thought about that and then said, “Do it. We won’t shoot.”
Chapter
44
“Thank you, Mr. Le,” I said. “We appreciate it.”
I muted my phone and said to Bree and Fuller, “Get me EMTs. I’m going across with them. I’ll keep him talking until Parks is clear.”
“I don’t like it,” Fuller said.
“Neither do I,” Bree said.
“Le needs to see me. It will change things.”
I didn’t wait for a reply. I cut the mute and said, “Mr. Le? You there?”
I heard him snort something again. “I’m here. You coming?”
“I am,” I said. “I’ll be the tall unarmed man with the ambulance workers.”
The EMTs came in pushing a gurney. I hit the mute button again.
“He says he won’t shoot,” I said. “But it’s your call. I’ll go alone if I have to.”
The male EMT, Bill Hawkins, said, “He mentally stable?”
“Surprisingly so, at the moment,” I said. “But an hour ago he evidently thought Officer Parks and the others were part of a vigilante gang and opened up on them. So there’s got to be some delusion there.”
“You trust him?” said Emma Jean Lord, the other EMT.
“Enough to lead the way,” I said.
They looked at each other and nodded.
“Be quick about this,” Bree told them. “Let Alex talk. You go straight to Parks, everything crisp and businesslike, no different than if he’d had a heart attack on his front lawn.”
“Okay,” Hawkins said. “Let’s go.”
Looking to Captain Fuller, Bree said, “You’ll cover them?”
“What are the rules of engagement?” he said with the hint of a sneer.
“Protect them.”
“Okay,” Fuller said. “I can live with that.”
“Good,” I said, thumbing the mute button off. “We’re coming out, Mr. Le. We will be moving fast to get to Officer Parks.”
“Come on, then,” Le said.
I holstered my gun, opened the door, and trotted off the front porch, saying, “You’re seeing me?”
“We’re not looking out windows and getting shot,” Le said. “Do what you have to do.”
Still, I couldn’t help feeling as if crosshairs were on my forehead as the three of us went to Officer Parks, who was gray and sweating with pain.
Hawkins swung the gurney next to him.
Lord said, kneeling beside Parks, “Can you feel your legs?”
“Yeah, too much,” Parks said through gritted teeth. “Like they’re on fire, and it hurts insanely bad around and above my hips. I think my pelvis is broken on both sides. And I’m thirsty.”
“Because you’re gut shot,” the EMT said, taking his vitals.
“Am I gonna live?”
“If we have anything to say about it,” Hawkins said.
Lord and Hawkins worked fast, getting an IV into Parks’s arm and then putting him on a backboard. They lifted him onto the gurney, strapped him down, and headed for the street.
I waited until they were out of range before saying, “You did a good thing, Mr. Le. Officer Parks will live. Why don’t you do another good thing and come out onto the porch to talk to me face-to-face?”
There was a moment of silence before Le said, “You must think I’m an idiot. I take one step out that door and I go boom-boom away.”
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” I said. “At least let some of the hostages go.”
“No.”
“No, you won’t come out and talk, or no, you won’t let the hostages go?”
“The hostages stay,” Le said, and I heard him set his cell down.
Then I heard him snorting yet again.
A female voice in the background said, “Go talk to him. Figure this the hell out, because I’m not dying for you and your meth paranoia!”
After several moments, the phone was picked up again. Le said in a slow, weird voice, “Uhhhh, sure, Cross. I’ll come out, and we’ll have us a chitchat.”
“When?”
“Why don’t we do it right the fuck now?”
Before I could reply, the line went dead, and inside the house a woman screamed.
Chapter
45
Bree’s voice barked in my earbud, “What’s going on in there?”
“I have no idea—” I started, and then the front door flew open.
A dazed Michele Bui shuffled out, her face a spiderweb of blood from a head wound. Thao Le stood behind her, one arm around her neck, the other hand pressing a .45-caliber 1911 pistol to her temple.
Le looked as wired as any snort-head I had ever seen. His eyes were sunk in their sockets, and the whites were the color of a freshly painted fire-alarm box. Blood seeped from his left nostril over skin and lips that had turned so waxy from the drugs they would have looked dead were it not for the odd twitches in his cheeks and cracked lips.
I turned my palms up to show I had no weapon, said, “Mr. Le?”
On the porch, two feet out from the open doorway, Le tracked me. “You…Cross?”
“That’s right,” I said. “What are you doing? We agreed to talk man-to-man.”
“What, did you think I was coming out alone? Without a shield? Let you all shoot me down? You cops been wanting to take me out for years.”
“Why don’t you let Michele go? She’s bleeding. She needs medical help.”
Le blinked and cocked his head but said nothing.
“C’mon, Mr. Le. She’s your girlfriend. Do you really want to—”
“You know her name, Cross?” he said. “And that she’s my girlfriend?”
He laughed and pressed the muzzle of the gun tighter against her head. Michele Bui winced and tried to cringe away, but he held her close.
“I am not stupid, Cross,” he said. “You know her name means you talked to her, and she’s been talking to you. And my girlfriend? Hell no. This skank’s a throwaway blow-up sex doll, means nothing to me.”
Something started to change in Michele Bui’s expression. She came up out of the daze and her eyes went hard.
“Michele seems interested only in keeping you alive,” I said. “In my book, that’s caring, Mr. Le. That’s love.”
&nbs
p; Le glanced at his girlfriend and laughed. “Nah. That’s survival. Without me, she’s on the street selling her ass.”
“So what do you want?”
“A way out of here,” Le said.
“That can be arranged.”
“Not in cuffs. Not in a cruiser. I mean gone.”
“Gone is not happening. But you can do yourself some good. Let her go.”
“No,” Le said. “I know stuff. There’s got to be a trade here. I tell you the stuff I know, and you let me walk.”
“You’d have to know something of great value for that to happen,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like who are the vigilantes? Are they mercenaries hired by rival drug gangs?”
“Hey, I don’t know, man,” Le said. “Seriously. I know a lot, but not that.”
I thought a moment. “Did you kill Tom McGrath?”
“No way,” Le said. “I wanted to, but that ain’t on me, and I can prove it. Can’t I, Michele?”
Bui looked at me and nodded. “We were in bed when that happened.”
“See?” Le said, relaxing his hold around her neck. “Sex dolls are important in other ways. What else do you want to know?”
I was just doing my best to keep him talking when something popped into my head.
“Did you frame Terry Howard?” I asked. “Did you plant the cocaine and the money? He’s dead, you know. It would help clear things up.”
“Nah,” Le said with a smirk. “I never did nothing like—”
Michele Bui opened her mouth and chomped down on Le’s forearm.
Le howled in pain and yanked his arm free. A ragged chunk of his flesh tore away, and his arm poured blood. In his drug-agitated state, Le looked at the wound in disbelief and trembled from adrenaline.
Bui smiled, spit, and said, “A throwaway sex doll that bites!”
She tried to kick Le in the balls, but he swatted the kick away, which threw her off balance, and she fell, half on the porch, half on the stairs to the front yard.
Le raised his gun, screaming, “I’m throwing you away now, bitch! You see it coming?”
“Le, don’t!” I shouted.
But it was too late.
From the second story of the house across the street, a sniper rifle barked.
Le lurched at the impact and fired his pistol, but the bullet went a foot wide of Bui’s legs and splintered one of the corner posts of the porch. The gangbanger staggered backward, hit the doorjamb, and slid down it.
I raced up, jumped over Bui, and got to Le. He gasped something in Vietnamese.
I knelt next to him, said, “There’s an ambulance coming.”
He laughed. “Won’t make it.”
“Did you frame Terry Howard?”
Le looked up at me, smiled, and seemed to try to wink before blood spilled from his lips and the light in his eyes turned a dull shade of gray.
Chapter
46
John Brown appreciated overcast nights like these, when it was so dark he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Blinded, Brown found his other senses heightened. He smelled manure and ripening tobacco, heard a barn owl hooting, and tasted the bitter espresso bean he was chewing to stay alert.
“Three miles out,” Cass said in his earpiece.
“Copy,” Brown said, shifting his weight on the corrugated steel. “Hobbes?”
“We’re ready.”
“Fender?”
“Affirmative.”
Brown bent to dig into a knapsack at his feet. A stabbing pain drilled through his knee, and he grunted through the spasm.
He managed to get out his iPad and stand, feeling the bones in his knee crack and settle. In a cold sweat, Brown turned on the tablet and signed into a secure website.
“Coming at you,” Cass said. “Lead car’s a blue Mustang, Florida plates. Behind the trucks, there’s a black Dodge Viper, Georgia plates.”
“Copy,” said a male voice.
Brown clicked on a link that opened a private video feed from a camera carried by one of Hobbes’s men. The scene was an interchange on Interstate 95 near the town of Ladysmith, Virginia, roughly one hundred and fifteen miles south of Washington, DC.
I-95 below the interchange was under repair. Crews were down there laboring under bright lights, and a detour forced all northbound traffic off the Ladysmith exit ramp. Another of Hobbes’s men stood at the top of the ramp.
He was dressed in a workman’s jumpsuit, a yellow reflective vest, and a hard hat, and he held a flashlight with an orange cover that he was using to direct the sparse traffic west, toward Ladysmith and the Jefferson Davis Highway.
The blue Mustang came into view, followed by the first of three eighteen-wheel refrigerated semis bearing the logo of the Littlefield Produce Company of Freehold Township, New Jersey. The black Dodge Viper brought up the rear as Hobbes’s flagman waved them east, to State Route 639.
When the flagman had done the same to Cass, who was driving a white Ford Taurus, Brown changed the feed to a camera held by one of Fender’s men, who was standing in the road directing traffic a mile west of the interstate. He waved the little convoy north on Virginia Route 633.
When Cass’s taillights disappeared, Brown said, “Stick to the plan. Execute the plan. Surgical precision in every move.”
Brown did not bother to watch the feed of the flagmen turning the convoy off Route 633 onto a little-used, unpaved county road that cut through woodlots and agricultural fields. He could already see the headlights of the Mustang turning off the county road, following the detour signs.
“Come to Papa,” Fender said.
Hearing guns being loaded all around him, Brown watched the semis make the turn onto the farm road and saw the Viper coming behind them. He knew he was going to suffer, but he knelt and gritted his teeth at the agony in his knee. The headlights came closer, revealing Brown on the corrugated steel roof of an old tobacco-drying shed.
There were six such long, low sheds in all, three set back on either side of the road that passed between them. The Mustang slowed at the blinking red light next to the sign they’d put up beyond the southernmost shed; it read TIGHT SPOT, 15 MPH.
Brown watched through the sheer black mask he wore as the Mustang kept coming. He could see the driver and the passenger now, both wearing T-shirts and looking around as if to say Where the hell is this detour taking us?
“Patience,” Brown said as the Mustang passed below him and beyond the northernmost shed.
He glanced at the semis but then focused on the Mustang as it followed a curve in the road and stopped at a high berm and dead end.
The trailer of the first semi was almost beyond the sheds when it stopped. The second one was completely between the sheds, and the third had its cab and half of the trailer between them.
Brown waited until he heard shouting from the men in the Mustang before he said, “Take them.”
He saw it all unfold in headlight glare and shadows.
Before the driver of the Viper behind the semis could even get out of his car, Cass came up fast behind him and head-shot him with a .223 AR rifle mounted with a suppressor. From the roof of the southern shed, one of Hobbes’s men armed with an identical weapon shot the passenger through the windshield.
Others positioned on the roofs of the sheds took out the drivers and passengers in all three semis. The six men died in their seats even as the Mustang’s driver and passenger realized what was happening. They came out of the Mustang fast and low, carrying automatic weapons.
Fender rose up from behind the berm in front of the Mustang and shot both men before they got twenty yards from their vehicle.
“Clear,” Fender said.
“Clear,” said Hobbes.
Brown said, “Leave the trucks and cars running. Police your brass, sweep your way out; we’ll meet on the road.”
Cass said, “Are you sure we shouldn’t check the produce?”
Brown grimaced as he fought his way up out of th
e crouch. They’d been over this before and she was still challenging him on it.
“Negative,” Brown said emphatically. “Nobody gets anywhere near that cargo.”
Chapter
47
Midmorning, an FBI helicopter picked up Sampson and me on the roof of DC Metro headquarters. Special Agent Ned Mahoney, grim and quiet, sat up front.
Ninety minutes earlier, a Caroline County sheriff’s deputy had been driving by a tobacco-drying facility northeast of Ladysmith, Virginia. A heavy chain usually blocked the entrance, but he noticed that today the chain lay in the mud next to the tracks of many large vehicles.
The deputy thought it odd because the harvest was still weeks off, and he drove in. He saw enough to call the state police and the FBI.
“Who’s been through the scene other than the deputy?” I asked.
“No one,” Mahoney said. “As soon as I heard, I was on the horn to Virginia State Police to seal off the area. We should be looking at it fairly clean.”
Forty-five minutes later we were dropping altitude over mixed farmland and woods, rolling terrain, mostly, with some creek beds and rivers. After the chopper soared over a last stand of towering oaks, the forest opened up and we flew in an oval pattern around the scene.
The grille of a blue Mustang was nosed up against an earthen barrier, the vehicle’s doors open. Two bodies, both male, were sprawled nearby in the grass. Between the long drying sheds, three gray, refrigerated semitrailers were lined nose to tail like elephants on parade. The truck windows and windshields were shot through and spiderwebbed. Behind the last semi was a black Dodge Viper with two dead men in the front seat.
The pilot landed out by the highway, where a perimeter had been established. After checking in with the Virginia State Police lieutenant and the county sheriff, we went to the crime scene on foot.
It was hot. Insects buzzed and drummed in the forest around the tobacco facility. Truck engines idling swallowed the sound of blowflies gathering around the Viper.
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