Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24) Page 5

Damon said, “Wouldn’t miss out on watching the fastest woman on earth.”

  “Not yet,” Jannie said, grinning.

  “Dream it, own it, give it time,” Damon said, and then he picked up Ali, who was looking morose. “Why the face, little man?”

  Ali shrugged, said, “You’re going away. Again.”

  “I’ll be an hour away,” Damon said. “Not six hours, like when I was up at Kraft, so I’ll be home to see you a whole lot more.”

  Ali perked up. “Promise?”

  “You know I need my Ali Cross fix,” Damon said, and he tickled Ali until he howled with laughter.

  Then he hugged Bree, told her to take care of me.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “Whole new life waiting,” Damon said, and even though he was trying to remain cool, I could see he was vibrating with emotion as we drove away.

  CHAPTER

  12

  WE TOOK 295 heading north toward Baltimore and drove in a pleasant quiet. Part of me wanted to be a helicopter parent, remind him to do this or do that, tell him how to handle one academic crisis or another.

  But Damon had left home at sixteen to chase his dreams. He knew how to take care of himself already, and that made me both proud and sad. My job as a parent had shrunk to the role of adviser, but once upon a time, I had been all he had.

  Passing Hyattsville, Maryland, I flashed on the moment Damon was born, how my first wife, Maria, had sobbed with joy when the nurse laid him on her belly, a squirming, squealing miracle that I’d loved in an instant.

  I managed to keep my mind from going to the night Maria was killed in a drive-by. Instead, my memories were of those first few years after Maria died, how ripped apart I’d felt unless I was holding Damon or Jannie, who’d been an infant at the time. Without Nana Mama I would never have been able to go on. My grandmother had stepped in as she had when I was a boy. She was Damon’s mother as much as she’d been mine.

  Damon and I talked baseball near Laurel, Maryland, and both of us agreed that if Bryce Harper could stay healthy, he would put up Hall of Fame statistics. We’d gone to New York a few years ago for the All-Star Game and watched him hit in the Home Run Derby. Harper had freakish quickness and strength.

  “He’s like Jannie, you know?” Damon said. “An outlier. There’s something special about them. You just see it when they move.”

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.

  “I’m good enough to be a seventh or eighth man in Division One.”

  “Never sell yourself short,” I said.

  “Just being honest, and I’m good with coming off the bench, Dad,” he said. “Jannie, though? She’s in a world where very few people get to live.”

  That was true. Seeing my daughter run on a track was like watching a gazelle chased by a lion and—

  “Dad! Watch out!”

  Six or seven car lengths in front of us, a twenty-seven-foot Jayco camping trailer attached to the back of a Ford F-150 pickup had started to swerve wildly. I got my foot on the brake a split second before the camper and pickup went into a wide, arcing skid and then jackknifed, flipped, and careened left, inches off our front bumper.

  I hit the gas, shot forward, and went by it. The trailer smashed an oncoming car, the pickup slammed into something else, and then the whole mass of twisted metal went across the fast lane and down the embankment behind us.

  “Holy shit!” Damon yelled. “Holy shit, we just almost died!”

  My heart was slamming in my chest, and my hands were trembling on the wheel as I got over on the shoulder. We had almost died. The Grim Reaper had been right there but passed us by.

  “C’mon,” I said, yanking out my cell and dialing 911. “We’ve got to help.”

  Damon jumped out and ran back down the road to the embankment while I told the dispatcher what had happened.

  When I reached the pickup, Damon shook his head. The driver was dead and hanging out the back window. We heard a baby crying in the car that had been hit by the travel trailer and flipped onto its roof.

  “Help!” a woman yelled. “Someone please help us.”

  Damon got down on his knees by the car and I did too. The young mom’s head was bleeding hard. The baby was upside down but appeared uninjured, mostly just upset about being upside down.

  “We’ve got an ambulance coming,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Sally Jo,” she said. “Sally Jo Hepner. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Am I gonna die?”

  “I think you’ll need a lot of stitches, but you’re not going to die. What’s your baby’s name?”

  I could already hear sirens.

  “Bobby,” she said. “After my dad.”

  Damon had wriggled in through the window and gotten the car seat free. He squirmed back and pulled him out. Bobby Hepner was fussing, but just showing him his mother seemed to quiet him down.

  Firemen and EMTs were on the scene within five minutes of the crash. We stayed until we saw the mom safely extracted from the car and put on a backboard with a neck collar, just in case. One of the EMTs carried her baby into the ambulance.

  “Looks like our work here is done,” I said. “Let’s get you to school.”

  Damon smiled, but when we got back in the car, he was brooding. “Strange how life is. Here one minute and gone the next.”

  “Don’t worry about it too much.”

  “I guess. But seeing that, it’s like, what’s the point? You never know when your time is up.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So live every minute like it’s your last, and be grateful. The way I see it, that near miss was a message. We came close, but we weren’t meant to be in a car accident today. We were reminded of how fragile and precious life is, but we weren’t supposed to die. We were supposed to get you to college, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  Damon dipped his head, but then he grinned, said, “Okay.”

  Johns Hopkins had changed in some ways since I was a student, but the Homewood campus was still an oasis of green quads and red-brick halls in the city of Baltimore, and I still felt the electricity of the place when we arrived. We were met by student volunteers, who steered us through the various lines and gave us a thick orientation packet for incoming freshmen.

  We found Damon’s room and met his roommate—William Clancy, a lacrosse player from Massachusetts—and his parents. The boys seemed to click from the start. We helped them get squared away, and then there was an awkward moment when it was obvious they wanted the parents to leave.

  “Walk me to the car,” I said. “There’s something down there that I want you to have.”

  “Uh, sure,” Damon said, and he nodded to his roommate. “Be back, and then we’ll go to the welcome picnic?”

  “Sounds good,” William said.

  We got to the car, and I looked at him with fierce pride and love.

  “What did you want me to have?” Damon asked.

  I grabbed him and bear-hugged him, unable to stop the tears.

  “Your mom,” I choked out. “She would have been very, very happy to see who you’ve become.”

  Damon looked uncomfortable when I released him and stepped back. A few tears slipped from his eyes before he said, “Thank you, Dad. For everything.”

  I couldn’t take it, and I bear-hugged him again and then told him to get going before I became a total, blubbering mess. He laughed. We bumped fists. And he was gone, into the place that had cut and sharpened me into a man.

  Driving away was bittersweet; I was happy beyond words for his achievements but already mourning a part of my life that had begun in the loving care of Damon, my helpless infant boy, and ended just a few moments before, when my young man had walked confidently away.

  Part Two

  A VIGILANTE KILLING

  CHAPTER

  13

  I LEFT THE Johns Hopkins campus, drove around the corner, stopped, and put my head on the wheel. I’d known my son was leaving for months, but it had still flattened me
.

  My cell rang. John Sampson. I answered on the Bluetooth.

  “You like pho?” he asked.

  “If it’s made right,” I said, putting the car in gear. “Why?”

  “Because one of O’Donnell’s sources puts Thao Le at Pho Phred’s in Falls Church at one o’clock this afternoon. Can you make it back in time?”

  I looked at the clock, said, “With the bubble and siren, yes.”

  “I’d cut the siren when you get close,” Sampson said, and he hung up.

  I got back onto 295, put up the bubble, and took the car up to eighty-five, tapping on the siren to get folks out of the way and thinking about Thao Le.

  He’d been a gangbanger from the get-go. Son of a California mobster, he’d come east at eighteen and formed his own criminal enterprise that focused on the trade in heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, but he’d later branched out into human trafficking.

  He’d been arrested twice on racketeering charges, and twice he’d walked because of insufficient evidence or, depending on your source, because of the money Le paid in bribes. Soon enough, though, Le came on the radar of Detective Tommy McGrath and his partner at the time, Terry Howard.

  A year into the investigation of Le, Internal Affairs caught Howard with cocaine and money taken during a drug bust. Howard had always maintained his innocence, even tried to blame it on McGrath, but in the end, he’d been fired, and it had been ugly for him ever since.

  McGrath believed Le had framed his partner. But six years after the fact, Tommy had not turned up enough evidence to exonerate Terry Howard because, as he’d noted in the file O’Donnell found, the Vietnamese gangster was slippery and careful. The most time Le had ever served was three and a half years for assaulting two police officers attempting to take him into custody. Both cops had ended up in the hospital.

  Which is why I decided that if we were going to talk with Le, we would bring a small army with us. I started making calls.

  At ten minutes to one, I pulled into a lumberyard just down the street from Eden Center, a Vietnamese and Korean entertainment and shopping hub in Falls Church. I found Bree, Sampson, and Muller waiting for me as well as four SWAT operators, two patrol units, and a sergeant detective named Earl Rand whom I’d worked with successfully before. All were with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Department.

  “How’d it go?” Bree said. She’d already armored up in the sweltering heat.

  “Heartbreaking in some ways, the proudest moment of my life in others.”

  “Good for you. You should be proud of him. He’s an amazing kid.”

  “He is that,” I said, and I put on my own armor as Detective Rand placed a map on the hood of one of the cruisers. It showed the Eden Center, a mall laid out in a lazy U shape with a large parking lot in the middle.

  Pho Phred’s was near the Viet-Royale restaurant in the northeast corner of the U, part of a section called the Sidewalk Stores that was set up to resemble an outdoor market in old Saigon. Rand showed us the access to the area from the south off the main parking lot and from the north off a smaller parking lot that abutted Oakwood Cemetery.

  Rand said we’d want to cover both entrances as well as send in Fairfax officers familiar with the center through both ends of the bottom of the U.

  “You’ll have him cut off in four directions,” Rand said. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “Let’s do it,” I said, and I got in a car with Sampson.

  “It’d be nice if Le’s good for McGrath, Kravic, and Peters,” he said.

  “It would be,” I said. “I could take some time off, go watch Jannie run.”

  “No reason that can’t happen,” Sampson said, starting the car and heading for Eden Center.

  From there, everything went downhill fast.

  CHAPTER

  14

  WE WERE ALL in contact over the same radio frequency. Two Fairfax County officers entered Eden Center through Planet Fitness, on the far west side of the Sidewalk Stores. Two more came in from the east.

  Bree and Muller came in the north entrance. Sampson, Detective Rand, and I went in through the south door. This section of Eden Center was painted light blue, which Rand said was believed to promote prosperity.

  The area was certainly doing a thriving business. At one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, there were hundreds of Vietnamese Americans roaming around, shopping for fresh fish in one store, embroidered silk dresses in another, taffy candy in a third. And the air smelled savory and sweet.

  Sampson and I stood out like sore thumbs, but being tall among short people had its advantages. We later figured that one or all of us must have been seen entering the center, because we were inside for no more than ninety seconds before, not fifty yards away, Thao Le blew out of Pho Phred’s, looked around, and saw us.

  Le was wiry, fast, and agile. He turned and ran north.

  “He’s coming right at you, Bree,” I said, breaking into a run.

  “I see him.”

  Detective Rand said, “Take him clean if you—”

  Le must have spotted Bree and Muller, because he suddenly darted into a packed restaurant. Bree left Muller in the dust and dashed in after Le, her badge up. We heard screaming.

  “There’s got to be a back way out of there!” I yelled, dodging into a fish store forty yards shy of the restaurant.

  With my badge up, I yelled at the startled merchant and his customers, “Back door!”

  His eyes got big and round, but he gestured to rubber curtains behind the counter.

  I heard Rand calling for patrol cars as I went through the rubber curtains into a cold storage area off a small loading dock. The overhead door was raised. A wholesale-seafood truck was backing up.

  I jumped off the dock before the truck could block it, landed in a putrid-smelling puddle, and stumbled. Sampson was right behind me; he grabbed me under the arm and got me upright just as we heard a crotch-rocket motorcycle start up and then saw it squeal out from behind a dumpster fifty yards away.

  Helmetless, Le handled the bike like an expert, rear wheel drifting and smoking before he shot north and away from Bree, who had her gun up but wisely held her fire. Le accelerated toward the corner of the mall, then downshifted, braked, and disappeared to our right.

  “I’ve got cars coming right at him!” Rand gasped as he caught up to us.

  We were all running now. Bree got around the corner and held her ground. We reached her just in time to see the Fairfax patrol car turn Le.

  The gangster came right back at us with the patrol car in pursuit. Another patrol car was entering the hunt from behind us. I was thinking Le was as good as in cuffs.

  Le stopped about halfway down the parking lot, near another dumpster and a haphazard pile of wooden pallets stacked by the rear chain-link fence. The first cruiser was almost to Le when he looked our way and smiled.

  He flicked the accelerator on the motorcycle, covered fifteen yards in a second, shot up that pile of wooden pallets, and was in the air for maybe ten feet before he landed almost sideways on the dumpster.

  Le buried the throttle the instant he touched down, then he shot across the dumpster lids diagonally, jumped up on the pegs as the bike went airborne again, and sailed over the chain-link fence that separated the parking lot from Oakwood Cemetery.

  The motorcycle landed on a service road and almost tipped, but Le got his foot down, righted it, and sped off, leaving us angry at losing him and slack-jawed at his mad skills.

  Then a Fairfax patrolman still inside Eden Center came over the radio and said, “I’ve got Le’s girlfriend here at Pho Phred’s. You want to talk to her?”

  CHAPTER

  15

  WE FOUND THE officer and a zip-cuffed Michele Bui outside Pho Phred’s. Ms. Bui was, to put it mildly, unhappy.

  “I got my rights,” she said. “I’m U.S. born and raised, never put a toe in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. So I don’t have to say a thing because I have not done a thing other than order lunch. This is harass
ment, pure and simple.”

  Bui was tall for a Vietnamese female, almost five six, and slender. Her hair was shaved on one side and long on the other. She sported tattoos of yellow butterflies on her left arm, and red ones swarmed on the right. Two hoops in each nostril completed the look.

  Bui began to shout in Vietnamese, and many people in the halls and other stores came to the doorways and looked at us.

  “We just want to have a chat,” Bree said calmly.

  “You usually bring guns and zip cuffs to a chat?” Bui asked.

  “When Thao Le is who we want to chat with, yes,” I said.

  “When are you guys going to leave Thao alone?” she said. “You arrest him, he gets off. You arrest him, he gets off. When you going to figure out that he can’t be had?”

  She watched our faces and smiled knowingly. “You don’t have him, do you? You didn’t catch him!”

  Bui started laughing and then called out something in Vietnamese that got the other people there laughing.

  She looked at me. “You in charge?”

  I jerked my head toward Detective Rand.

  Bui rolled her eyes, said, “Can you take the cuffs off? They’re starting to hurt, and I smell a lawsuit coming on.”

  Bree said, “If we take them off, you’ll talk to us?”

  “Why would I do that?” Bui asked. “I am under zero obligation to talk to you because I have done nothing wrong.”

  “How about aiding and abetting a cop killer?” Sampson said.

  That seemed to come out of nowhere to Bui, and her chin retreated fast.

  “Thao’s no cop killer,” she said.

  “We think he is,” Bree said. “The cop was Tommy McGrath, a guy who had a jones to put Thao away for the rest of his life.”

  Bui said nothing, her eyes darting back and forth.

  “You’ve heard the name before? McGrath?” I asked.

  The way she shook her head said she had heard of the late COD.

  Bree picked up on it too. She said, “When someone kills a cop, the net gets big and wide. That net is forming around your boyfriend. Question is, which of his fish will get caught in the net with him?”