Cross the Line: (Alex Cross 24)

by James Patterson

  “Break me out a couple of grenades.”

  CHAPTER

  41

  BREE AND I looked at Captain Fuller like he’d lost his mind.

  “Grenades?” Bree said. “Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  “No,” Fuller said, and then he explained what he wanted to do.

  I considered it, decided once again that Captain Fuller was good at his job, and admitted, “That could work.”

  “It could,” Bree said. “Your move, Captain.”

  Three minutes later, on Fuller’s command, two flash-bang grenades went off behind the row house where Le and his fellow gangbangers were holed up.

  I had my binoculars trained on the windows across the street and saw movement inside, figures running to investigate the explosions. Then Bree threw up the window sash, and we stuck our service weapons out the window.

  “Go,” Fuller said, and he yanked open the front door to the old lady’s home.

  Kiniry and Remer bolted across the porch, leaped off the stairs, and landed beside Lincoln. O’Donnell let go of his partner.

  The SWAT guys got their hands under Lincoln and came up fast. O’Donnell jumped up, his gun, like ours, aimed at the row house as he backed up, covering Kiniry, Remer, and Lincoln.

  They got Lincoln inside, and O’Donnell was almost there when Le or one of his men opened up with an automatic weapon. Bullets blew out the windows of the Explorer and pinged and cracked off the cement stairs while Sampson, Bree, and I emptied our weapons at the house.

  O’Donnell sprinted and dove inside. Fuller slammed shut the heavy oak door as bullets strafed the side of the house and then stopped.

  “Fuck!” O’Donnell screamed, crawling and clutching at his shoe. “He shot me through the foot!”

  “Get this man medical attention!” Bree yelled back into the house.

  Two EMTs came running from the kitchen.

  While they started to work, I reloaded. Over our headsets, a voice said, “Cap, this is Maxwell.”

  “Go, Maxwell,” Fuller said.

  “I’ve got the shooter. Full chest exposed.”

  “Identity?”

  “Unclear, but subject is armed with an AK.”

  “Take him,” Fuller said without a moment’s hesitation.

  “What? Wait!” Bree said.

  There was a rifle crack overhead, followed by a death scream across the street.

  “Slow down, Captain!” I shouted.

  “You’re not giving them any options!” Bree said.

  “Options?” Fuller looked at us like we were addled. “That shooter, Le or not, just tried to kill four—count them, four— of my fellow officers. In my mind, that makes that person a potential cop killer with active intent, so I ordered him shot. End of story.”

  Bree started to argue but her phone buzzed. Angry, she looked at the screen, rocked her head back, and said, “Oh Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Michele Bui. She says we just shot and killed one of the female hostages.”

  CHAPTER

  42

  FULLER DIDN’T HEAR. He was barking orders into his radio while EMTs rolled a morphine-happy Detective O’Donnell through the kitchen toward the back door. The siren of the ambulance bearing Lincoln was already wailing away.

  “Captain!” I shouted at Fuller.

  The SWAT commander put his radio on his shoulder, peered at me angrily. “Detective Cross, stand down.”

  “I won’t stand down, Captain,” I said.

  “Nor will I,” Bree said. “One of your men upstairs, Officer Maxwell, just shot an innocent hostage on your orders.”

  Fuller lost color. “No.”

  “Le’s girlfriend, who is in there, says yes.”

  The captain pulled himself together and clicked his radio. “Maxwell?”

  “Right here, Cap.”

  “How did you identify the shooter?”

  “White T-shirt and weapon.”

  “No head?”

  “Negative.”

  “How long did you have the shooter in your scope?”

  “From right before he started shooting at O’Donnell,” Maxwell replied. “When he stopped, he ducked out of sight for maybe three seconds and then returned, like he’d reloaded.”

  “That was not a reload,” Bree said into her radio. “Officer Maxwell, you shot a hostage.”

  There was a long, terrible silence before Maxwell said, “Cap?”

  “Maxwell?”

  “Permission to stand down, sir.”

  Fuller glared at Bree, said, “Permission denied. I need you up there.”

  Bree said, “Captain, for the time being, you are going to stand down and let me try to save Officer Parks and avoid more bloodshed. Or do I call Chief Michaels to have you relieved of command?”

  Fuller blinked slowly at Bree, said, “I guess it’s your show, Chief.”

  “No, it’s Dr. Cross’s show,” she said, looking at me. “I’ve got Le’s phone number. Try to talk to him.”

  I took a moment to mentally adjust, to become less a police detective and more a criminal psychologist. Then I entered the phone number and hit Send.

  The phone rang three times before Le answered in a jittery, cocaine-fueled voice. “Who the hell’s this?”

  “The only chance you have of not dying today, Mr. Le,” I said. “My name is Alex Cross.”

  CHAPTER

  43

  LE’S BREATHING WAS rapid and shallow in my ear.

  “Do you understand, Mr. Le?” I asked. “There are SWAT officers preparing to storm in and kill you. I’m offering you a way out.”

  After a long, long pause, he said, “How’s that?”

  “Start by not making it worse for yourself,” I said. “Two police officers have been wounded and a hostage killed.”

  “That’s not on me,” Le said. “Some cop shot her.”

  I wasn’t going to quibble and point out that he’d shoved her into the line of fire with a weapon in her hand; I needed to keep him talking, establish rapport.

  “You’re a hell of a motorcycle rider,” I said. “Saw you in action at Eden Center a while back.”

  Le chuckled. “You never saw anyone pull that kind of shit before.”

  “Never,” I said. “You are a rare talent. Now, how are we going to keep you, and your talent, from dying today?”

  During a long pause I heard him snorting meth or coke or both. Then he said, “I dunno, Alex. You tell me.”

  “How about you show me you can be trusted?” I said. “Let us retrieve our wounded officer.”

  “What’s in that for me?” Le said.

  I said, “We’re in this together.”

  “Give me a fucking break,” he said. “We’re not together. We’re traveling different roads.”

  “Different roads that are at an intersection. I’m trying to prevent a crash that you would not survive. Is that what you want too?”

  He didn’t say anything for almost a minute.

  “Mr. Le?” I said.

  When Le spoke, his voice was softer, more thoughtful. “I figured things would turn out different for me.”

  “What was your dream? Everyone’s got one.”

  Le laughed. “X Games, man.”

  “On the motorcycle?”

  “That’s it,” Le said. “All I thought about. All I did.”

  “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 a
nd 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.

  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 thre
w 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 Lady-smith, Virginia, roughly one hundred and fifteen miles south of Washington, DC.