“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?