Джеймс Паттерсон - Cross the Line

“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.

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.”

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.

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?”