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.”
&nbs