The Dark Root

by Mayor, Archer

  “I was told,” I explained, “that On Ha’s death was seen as a reflection of Van Loc’s bad karma. Could Truong have gone straight because someone told him he had bad karma? Maybe he felt On Ha was at risk, and he was doing what he could to save him.”

  Spinney looked doubtful. “I thought Lacoste told us that karma couldn’t be changed—if life is shitty, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  I thought back to a similar comment by Nicky Tai. “I’m just guessing, but if Van Loc was ambitious enough to make it to this country alive and become a kingpin as a snot-nosed teenager—supporting both his brother and the family that was raising him—he might be egotistical enough to think he could change his karma. People try to cheat their gods all the time.”

  “So he went bonkers because the Chinatown Gang massacre proved him wrong?” Spinney asked.

  Frazier killed the video and twisted open the narrow venetian blinds, letting in just enough light not to blind us. “All we know for sure is that he dropped out of sight after the funeral. The business was handed over to an associate, and he disappeared.”

  The pager on my belt began vibrating soundlessly. I glanced at its miniature display and recognized Dan Flynn’s number. Frazier nodded toward his phone, giving me permission to use it.

  Spinney was still asking questions. “No credit card trail? Phone calls?”

  Frazier shook his head. “None that we know of. Credit card use is not a big item with these folks, at least not legitimately. They tend to like cash. My bet is that Truong had a serious nest egg tucked away somewhere.”

  “And,” Spinney added, “if Joe’s right about Truong stealing business from Da Wang, he’s got a new money source in any case.”

  · · ·

  Flynn picked up on the first ring.

  “What’s up?” I asked him.

  “How fast can you get to Hartford? Heather Dahlin called. One of her people spotted Michael Vu in White River Junction. He disappeared before they were able to grab him, but he hasn’t been spooked. She’s put her entire department on the lookout for him, though, along with the Lebanon Police across the river.”

  I told him we’d be there in under an hour, and explained the situation to the others.

  Frazier looked slightly put out. “We haven’t really finished here.”

  “I sure would like the first shot at Vu if they nail him,” I countered.

  He conceded with a half smile. “All right. I’ll stay here and play with my paperwork."

  · · ·

  I let Spinney drive. All the ribbing from municipal cops aside, it was true that state troopers—even ones who had been in plainclothes for years—had more experience driving at warp speed on the interstates than any of the rest of us. As if to prove the point, he made the ninety-minute trip from Burlington in half that time.

  We found Heather Dahlin standing by her car in White River Junction, near the Route 4 bridge leading into New Hampshire.

  “We think he might’ve gone across,” she said, gesturing to the far side of the river with her thumb. “Could be he’s rounding up some money.”

  I introduced Spinney, and she stuck her arm in through the car window across my chest to shake hands. I could tell she was tense and frustrated. “We’ve had patrols out all over—haven’t seen a trace of him since that first sighting.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was on foot, entering a building. But by the time they figured out who he was, he’d disappeared.”

  “But you’re pretty sure he didn’t spook.”

  Her brow furrowed a bit more. “Pretty sure. But he’s got to know there’s a BOL out on him.”

  The radio in her hand muttered unintelligibly. She lifted it to her mouth and answered. Spinney and I clearly heard what came back. “We might have something on your subject.”

  I leaned back and opened the rear door for her. “Hop in.”

  She did so without hesitation, parking both her elbows on the seat back between us. “Cross the bridge, take a right at the light.”

  Spinney moved the car quickly into traffic and entered New Hampshire. I gestured to Dahlin’s radio. “Who’s on the other end?”

  “Lebanon Police.”

  Spinney took the right, drove through the village of West Lebanon, and bore right again to take Route 12A into the heart of the most heavily commercialized area along the entire Vermont-New Hampshire border. Almost a mile of plazas, malls, and megastores, this strip of 12A paralleled the Connecticut, crossed the Mascoma River—a small, fast-moving feeder—and went under the east-west bridge of Interstate 89. At the best of times, it was as jammed a spot as any good-sized urban downtown. At the worst, it virtually became gridlock. As we entered from the north, I could see things were about fifty-fifty.

  “What’s your location?” Dahlin inquired on her radio.

  The voice on the other end didn’t sound happy. “Below the interstate, east side. Chinese restaurant parking lot.”

  Spinney found his way there, having gone beyond the lot, turned left onto the airport road, and then doubled back along a back street. Road planning had not kept up with development.

  A Lebanon police cruiser was discreetly parked between two other cars, its clearly marked tail end facing a music-store window. One of the patrolmen had draped a jacket over the car’s roof light, further disguising it. All three of us got out and joined them.

  The driver, a tall blond with mild acne, looked disgusted. “We figured we’d wait for you here. Find out what you wanted to do. He went in there”—he gestured to the Chinese restaurant far across the big parking lot—“but we don’t know what happened to him then. When he didn’t come out after half an hour, we went inside. Nobody. We showed his picture around. They all said they’d never laid eyes on him.”

  Heather Dahlin kept her voice tightly under control. “You didn’t want to call for backup when you first saw him?”

  The blond looked uncomfortable. “We weren’t even sure it was him. We only caught a glimpse, from across the street.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “So maybe it wasn’t him?”

  I moved to defuse things a bit. “Considering he’s vanished, it probably was. It sure as hell was somebody who didn’t want to stick around and chat. Did you check for a back exit?”

  The patrolman nodded sadly and looked over at his partner. “Wayne here did a few minutes after the guy went in—that’s why we thought we had him bottled up tight—but I guess he’d already split. He must’ve cut through the place at a dead run.”

  Spinney stretched and yawned, seemingly unconcerned that he’d driven at supersonic speed to come to this conclusion. “Well, if he wasn’t spooked before, he sure sounds it now.”

  “Wrap it up?” Dahlin asked of me.

  I nodded. “Might as well. A half-hour head start, he could be anywhere.” I shook hands with the patrolman. “Thanks, anyway. It was worth a shot.”

  He merely shook his head, pulled the jacket from off the cruiser’s roof light, and got back behind the wheel.

  The three of us returned to our car.

  “What now?” Dahlin asked as we walked.

  I checked my watch. “It’s getting late. We might as well bunk down at a motel here, and then head back to Waterbury tomorrow.”

  Deflated by the anticlimax, no one spoke as Spinney nosed up to the line of traffic and waited for an opening. Heather sat back in her seat, staring out the side window, her radio ignored beside her. Although totally different in style, she reminded me then of Sammie Martens, which made me wonder how things were going back home in Brattleboro.

  Spinney was finally waved into line by a courteous driver and drove up to the red light just south of the interstate overpass.

  Reminiscing brought me to Gail, whom I hadn’t seen since the funeral. I had been hoping that tonight I could drive down from Waterbury to South Royalton—a short half-hour trip—and spend a little time with her, but that was obviously not to be. I’d call her anyway, even thou
gh the phone had become more of an irritant than a remedy to the isolation I was feeling.

  Spinney moved forward on the green light, passed under the interstate, and slowed again at another traffic light on the far side. We were just shy of the bridge over the narrow Mascoma River, and stuck between two huge mall complexes, one on either side of us.

  I glanced across Spinney, out his open side window, and onto the vast parking lot of the L-shaped Kmart Plaza. There was yet another Oriental restaurant about midway down the row of stores.

  Suddenly, I leaned forward in surprise. “There.” I pointed toward the distant restaurant, now half blocked by the opposite flow of traffic.

  Heather Dahlin sat up as if stung, her face glued to the window. Spinney kept trying to look to where I was pointing and watch for the light simultaneously. “What the hell is it?”

  “Go left—into the parking lot. I think I saw him.”

  “Damn.” Not daring to use his siren, in case Michael Vu thought the heat was off, Spinney switched on the blue lights mounted behind the car’s grille. Nobody seemed to notice. He inched into the line of traffic, now coming on quickly, jerking the car forward in stages.

  “Come on,” Dahlin urged from behind. “Where was he, exactly?”

  “Going into that restaurant.” Spinney swore and hit the gas, lurching in front of a small red Honda, which slammed on its brakes with a squeal. There was a howl of protest from a horn. Just feet away, I saw its driver contorting her face with a torrent of soundless invective. In a second she was gone, as Spinney sped forward, narrowly missing another collision in the next lane, and finally shot into the entrance of the shopping plaza.

  “Stop,” I yelled, and opened the door, which was wrenched out of my hand by the sudden arrest of momentum. I leaped out onto the pavement.

  “What’re you doing?” Spinney shouted at me.

  I was thinking of the two cops we’d just left. “Going around back in case you chase him through.”

  I ran across the end of the long line of shops and down a paved service road dotted with overflowing Dumpsters. To my right, noisy and tumultuous, the Mascoma River hurtled near, far, and near again as it passed through a long, sharp-angled S-curve between trash-strewn, muddy banks.

  A hulking eighteen-wheeler appeared at the far end of the road and began trundling toward me, gathering speed, despite the road’s narrowness and clutter. I ran faster, hoping to reach the restaurant’s back door before the truck cut me off, but I was too late. I was forced to skid to a stop behind one of the Dumpsters, and wait until the behemoth went by, my hopes of beating the others to the restaurant defeated.

  The outcome was predictable. Just as I began running again, Michael Vu exploded from one of the distant doors. He stopped for a moment in the middle of the road, saw me bearing down from his right, and bolted straight ahead.

  Facing him, the Mascoma veered back to within fifteen yards of the rear of the buildings, its current and depth mellowed by the hairpin curves just upstream. At the foot of the gentle bank that Vu was running down, there was an eddy of sorts—a gently swirling radius of calm water, where it looked like someone might take a dip in warmer weather. Beyond it, the water flowed its fastest, pushed away from the far bank by a tree that lay anchored in the sandy mud. Overall, the width of the river was about twenty feet.

  Vu didn’t hesitate. He reached the edge of the bank at full tilt and took off in a wild flat dive, landing with explosive force in mid-current. For a moment he floundered, his body twisting and rolling; then he grasped the far reaches of the small tree extending to the middle of the stream. He found his footing on the bottom, which was only some three to four feet deep, and dragged himself to the other bank.

  Abreast of him now on the opposite shore, I stopped, my feet in the mud, deafened by the river’s tumble. I cleared my revolver, pointed it straight at him, and motioned with my other hand for him to lie down. He hesitated momentarily, suddenly broke into a grin, and began working frantically to pull the tree’s embedded trunk free of the mud. He’d realized—as I knew all along—the futility of both my command and my weapon. Vu was wanted, as they say in the movies, “for questioning.” And while Hollywood routinely makes that an offense deserving gunplay, we both knew it was not.

  Swearing readily now, I started into the water.

  As desperate as it had seemed, Vu’s flat dive had been the right approach. As soon as I’d waded to the outer edge of the shallow swimming hole, the water’s full power grabbed both my feet and pulled them out from under me. I landed on the rock bed, almost losing my gun, and made a wild grab for the tree just as Vu succeeded in freeing it. As both the tree and I were swept away, I saw Vu take to his heels again, across the gravel bank toward a thick stand of saplings.

  My ride didn’t last long. At the next corner, I managed to catch a rock with the bottom of one foot, right myself, and pushing awkwardly on the bobbing trunk, stagger to dry land. From there, Vu was no longer visible, but I did see Spinney and Dahlin explode out the restaurant door on the other bank.

  I gestured to them to head back toward 12A, while I began running for the trees. It was not easy going—the saplings stood in tight ranks, amid an undergrowth of strangling brush, and halfway through them I had to scramble up a six-foot sheer embankment, reminiscent of some marine-corps training course. On the far side of this thick band of trees, I found myself in a broad, flat field leading up to the paved access road of the town’s water-treatment plant. In the distance, almost out of sight behind some storage sheds, was Michael Vu, still going at a dead run.

  I shoved the pistol back into my wet holster, and put all my efforts into catching a man who not only was obviously in great physical shape, but who was showing a pathological lack of interest in having a friendly chat.

  He was almost back to 12A’s ubiquitous line of traffic by the time I reached the access road, and as I watched, he seemed to vanish within it like a stone dropping into a dark well. I ran full tilt, half thinking I might find him spread-eagled and squashed flat by a flood of single- minded commuters. Instead, all I could see was a blur of cars and trucks, and way off on the other side—moving fast—the diminishing outline of my quarry, about to escape for a second time that day.

  Yielding to the same kind of passion I’d observed earlier in Heather Dahlin, and stimulated by a rush of adrenaline, I ran out into the traffic, hearing both her and Spinney’s shouted warnings in the distance behind me.

  The effect was bone-jarringly cataclysmic. Horns, squealing rubber, screaming voices, and the deadening crunch of fenders accompanied my broken-field dash across the street. Only once did I have to actually slide across the hood of a car that didn’t stop in time, much to the astonishment of its white-haired driver. On the far side, however, Michael Vu was still in sight.

  We were now coming abreast of what is called the Powerhouse Mall, a large, roughly C-shaped plaza expensively built in industrial-revolution style—heavy on red brick and large windows. Vu, steering away from the plaza’s trap-like embrace, skirted the parking lot’s open north face and ran alongside Glen Road, a narrow street into which it fed, aiming for the far end of the C, and the relative boondocks beyond it.

  Knowing I had no chance of catching him, I jogged on, my energy waning, paying no attention to the shouting of the angry motorists behind me.

  Partway across the front of the mall’s parking lot, however, Vu’s luck and mine suddenly changed.

  Ahead of us, from farther up Glen Road, came the distant howl of a siren. Vu slowed abruptly, quickly looked back at me, and then cut to his right, directly into the dead end formed by the Powerhouse’s three-sided box. Just at that moment, I saw the Lebanon police cruiser come into view, obviously summoned by Heather Dahlin, hurtling at full speed toward the intersection with Route 12A. Apparently she’d caught them as they were heading east on I-89, and had asked them to take the next exit and double back.

  Waving wildly to attract their attention, I began angling to cut Vu
off at the mall’s central, southern entrance. I briefly saw the blond driver’s pale face turn toward me, and then the sounds of his brakes as he fishtailed into the parking lot just a hair too late, sideswiping the high granite curb and blowing a tire. As Michael Vu veered again and vanished into the mall’s easternmost entrance, my attention was diverted by a second burst of squealing tires to my back. Expecting Dahlin and Spinney, I saw instead a black sports car with tinted windows swerve to a stop at the parking lot’s other entrance, and inexplicably spin around to return to Route 12A at high speed.

  Knowing the two patrolmen were now pursuing him on foot, I didn’t follow Michael Vu through the entrance he’d chosen, but instead continued toward the south door, in the middle of the mall’s C-shape, hoping to hell Dahlin had ordered all the support troops she could locate.

  The Powerhouse Mall is two stories tall, elegantly appointed with lots of dark wood and brass, and a long, narrow, lofting central hallway, running east to west, which reaches up to the roof high above. The second floor is restricted to two parallel balconies along this main corridor, meeting at staircases at both ends. Given Vu’s speed and the lead he’d gained, it was possible he’d had time to reach the upstairs—or, for that matter, to hide out in any of the mall’s dozens of stores.

  For the moment I stood motionless, watching, listening, and waiting for the others to catch up. What I wanted was a radio.

  Dahlin and Spinney didn’t take long to reach me, red-faced and out of breath. With the growing puddle around my feet, the three of us made for quite an attraction, just as I hoped Michael Vu had, bursting through the other entrance.

  “Ask the Lebanon boys if anyone saw him,” I told her. “Maybe then we can zero in on a general area.”

  She keyed her radio and passed along my suggestion. Spinney took off for the staircase behind us to block it off. A couple of minutes later, the radio announced, “Someone saw him heading south toward the staircase. Don’t know if he took it or stuck to the main hallway.”