Cross the Line (Alex Cross #24)(38)

“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.