Cross the Line (Alex Cross 24)

p; 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.”