With my badge up, I yelled at the startled merchant and his customers, “Back door!”

His eyes got big and round, but he gestured to rubber curtains behind the counter.

I heard Rand calling for patrol cars as I went through the rubber curtains into a cold storage area off a small loading dock. The overhead door was raised. A wholesale-seafood truck was backing up.

I jumped off the dock before the truck could block it, landed in a putrid-smelling puddle, and stumbled. Sampson was right behind me; he grabbed me under the arm and got me upright just as we heard a crotch-rocket motorcycle start up and then saw it squeal out from behind a dumpster fifty yards away.

Helmetless, Le handled the bike like an expert, rear wheel drifting and smoking before he shot north and away from Bree, who had her gun up but wisely held her fire. Le accelerated toward the corner of the mall, then downshifted, braked, and disappeared to our right.

“I’ve got cars coming right at him!” Rand gasped as he caught up to us.

We were all running now. Bree got around the corner and held her ground. We reached her just in time to see the Fairfax patrol car turn Le.

The gangster came right back at us with the patrol car in pursuit. Another patrol car was entering the hunt from behind us. I was thinking Le was as good as in cuffs.

Le stopped about halfway down the parking lot, near another dumpster and a haphazard pile of wooden pallets stacked by the rear chain-link fence. The first cruiser was almost to Le when he looked our way and smiled.

He flicked the accelerator on the motorcycle, covered fifteen yards in a second, shot up that pile of wooden pallets, and was in the air for maybe ten feet before he landed almost sideways on the dumpster.

Le buried the throttle the instant he touched down, then he shot across the dumpster lids diagonally, jumped up on the pegs as the bike went airborne again, and sailed over the chain-link fence that sepa

rated the parking lot from Oakwood Cemetery.

The motorcycle landed on a service road and almost tipped, but Le got his foot down, righted it, and sped off, leaving us angry at losing him and slack-jawed at his mad skills.

Then a Fairfax patrolman still inside Eden Center came over the radio and said, “I’ve got Le’s girlfriend here at Pho Phred’s. You want to talk to her?”

Chapter

15

We found the officer and a zip-cuffed Michele Bui outside Pho Phred’s. Ms. Bui was, to put it mildly, unhappy.

“I got my rights,” she said. “I’m U.S. born and raised, never put a toe in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. So I don’t have to say a thing because I have not done a thing other than order lunch. This is harassment, pure and simple.”

Bui was tall for a Vietnamese female, almost five six, and slender. Her hair was shaved on one side and long on the other. She sported tattoos of yellow butterflies on her left arm, and red ones swarmed on the right. Two hoops in each nostril completed the look.

Bui began to shout in Vietnamese, and many people in the halls and other stores came to the doorways and looked at us.

“We just want to have a chat,” Bree said calmly.

“You usually bring guns and zip cuffs to a chat?” Bui asked.

“When Thao Le is who we want to chat with, yes,” I said.

“When are you guys going to leave Thao alone?” she said. “You arrest him, he gets off. You arrest him, he gets off. When you going to figure out that he can’t be had?”

She watched our faces and smiled knowingly. “You don’t have him, do you? You didn’t catch him!”

Bui started laughing and then called out something in Vietnamese that got the other people there laughing.

She looked at me. “You in charge?”

I jerked my head toward Detective Rand.

Bui rolled her eyes, said, “Can you take the cuffs off? They’re starting to hurt, and I smell a lawsuit coming on.”

Bree said, “If we take them off, you’ll talk to us?”

Tags: James Patterson Alex Cross Mystery
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