“You can’t turn it off,” Lulu said. “At least, not from here. You have to cut it remotely.”
Decker rolled down his window and tossed the phone from the car.
“Great,” Lulu said. “First my laptop. Now, my iPhone.”
“Pull over,” said Decker.
“What? Are you crazy? They’ll arrest us. And besides, this is a ’64 GTO, with a 389 cubic inch 6.4 liter V8.”
Decker stared at Lulu in amazement. “What the hell kind of girl are you? And just because you know your engines doesn’t mean you can drive. Your grandmother probably drives faster. Pull over.”
Lulu rolled her eyes but slowed the car down nonetheless. Moments later, they crawled to a stop, followed immediately by the patrol car behind them.
CHAPTER 39
The blue and white cruiser with the flashing blue lights idled calmly behind them. Decker watched the state trooper as he looked down at something in his lap. He was taking his sweet fucking time.
“What’s he doing in there?” Decker said for the umpteenth time. Finally, in what seemed like slow motion, the state trooper got out of the cruiser. He was wearing black pants with a blue stripe down the side, a blue-gray tunic, and a wide-brimmed gray hat like something Smokey the Bear might wear.
Without warning, Lulu opened the driver-side door.
“Wait, what are you doing?” asked Decker but she simply ignored him.
Upon seeing her exit the Pontiac, the trooper stepped back behind his open car door and pulled out his gun. “Get back in the car,” he exclaimed. “Now!”
Lulu ignored him. She stood by the driver-side door, her hands raised over her head. “Wuj hau sulima?” she began.
“I said, get back in your car.”
Lulu launched into a sudden tirade of Chinese that not even Decker could follow. With a sigh, he opened the door on the passenger side and got out.
“You too. Get back in the car.”
Decker lifted his hands in the air. “She doesn’t speak English,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Put your hands on the car,” said the trooper, increasingly frustrated.
Decker did as he was told.
The trooper scurried out from behind his car door. He still held the gun in his hand, aimed at Decker, and slowly but surely made his way toward the Pontiac. Lulu kept babbling away in Chinese. “Tell her to put her hands on the car,” he said earnestly.
“I don’t speak Chinese,” Decker answered.
“You. You,” he screamed, aiming his gun now at Lulu. He gestured wildly toward the car. “I said, put your hands on the car.” It was as if he thought that by shouting he would somehow bridge the language divide.
“She doesn’t speak English,” Decker repeated.
“Show me your license. Tell her to show me her license.”
“I don’t speak Chinese.”
The trooper came closer to Lulu. He was a young man, in his mid to late twenties, with a strong jaw and washed-out blue eyes. He looked more like the caricature of a policeman than a real trooper, thought Decker. And he was obviously unnerved by Lulu’s brazen refusal to follow any of his strident instructions.
“On the ground,” he shouted at her. He gestured wildly at the road, trying to pantomime his directive. But Lulu simply ignored him. She kept screaming in Mandarin, growing more and more animated.
Finally, in abject frustration, the trooper reached out for her arm.
What happened next was difficult to follow, even for Decker’s trained eye.
Lulu’s right foot flew up in the air with such speed and directness that the trooper had no time to react. The foot caught him on the side of the face with an audible thwack. He staggered backward, slipping on a patch of dirty snow, and before he could start to recover, Lulu landed a palm thrust to his solar plexus. The trooper buckled and groaned. In a flash, Lulu dropped to the ground, scissored her legs, catching him behind the right knee with the heel of her foot. Then she kicked him with her other foot right on the chin.
The trooper flipped backward, striking his head on the tarmac. His Smokey the Bear hat went flying, his arms flopped, his hands slapped the wet pavement and the gun in his right hand skittered under the cruiser a good ten feet away. Without even hesitating, Lulu sprang to her feet, grabbed the unconscious state trooper by the ankles and began to drag him to the far side of the Pontiac, out of sight of the highway.
Decker was speechless. He had never seen anyone move quite so fast. And he recalled how brazenly he had manhandled her in her apartment in Cambridge, how he had thrown her up against the wall and pressed his elbow to her throat. She could have done any number of things to resist him, he realized now. And yet she’d done nothing. She’d let him think she was helpless. Indeed, ironically, her diminutive size had proven to be an advantage to her, for it had served to conceal her real power.
Decker pulled himself out of his stupor. He ran toward the cruiser, ducked down and fished for the state trooper’s gun. There it was, right beside the left tire, half-buried in a small pile of snow.
He plucked it out and stuffed the M&P 45 in his belt. Then he reached into the cruiser through the open driver-side door and unclipped the shotgun mounted between the front seats.
Lulu soon joined him. She began to examine a printout on the front seat of the cruiser.
“Nice job,” Decker said with an air of false nonchalance. “I had no idea you knew martial arts. That was Góuquán, wasn’t it? Iron palm?”
Lulu looked over at him through the cab of the car. “I’m Chinese, Agent Decker. We have a genetic advantage.” Then she laughed. “Yo, I’m kidding. You’re right, though. Góuquán. You know your Kung Fu.”
“I’ve studied a little. But you… you’re a regular Si Yue!”
One of the legends surrounding the origin of Góuquán, or Dog Boxing, was that it was developed by Buddhist nuns, some of whom — prior to joining their temples — were victims of the practice of foot binding and, therefore, found athletic disciplines that required a lot of standing quite onerous. The most famous of these nuns was Si Yue, who had developed her skills to protect herself from bandits and wild animals on the dangerous roads which she traveled.
Lulu’s eyes widened at his comment but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she reached for the printout and scanned it.
“…reportedly killed in Washington, DC, on December 11,” she began, “the suspect, John Decker, Jr., age 38, height 5’ 11”, approx. 185 pounds, black hair, medium build, was last seen in a black 1964 Pontiac GTO, VT license 40742, southbound on I-91 near Brattleboro, VT. He is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous.” She looked up at Decker. “What am I, chopped liver? Oh, wait. Here it is: Decker may be accompanied by Xin Liu, age… never mind. That’s not my height or weight, either.”
“This must be some kind of mistake. Wanted?” Decker stepped away from the cruiser as if he’d just been punched in the face. “On what charge? What law did I break? For taking out my would-be assassin?”
Lulu glanced back at the printout. “According to this, the PATRIOT Act.” She looked back up with a shrug. “Congratulations, John. You’re a terrorist.”
CHAPTER 40
The midnight black GTO tore up Route 2, heading eastbound toward Boston. Inside, Decker leaned forward to peer through the rain-spattered windshield. He kept an eye open for more cops as he swerved between cars.
“We’ve got to get off the highway,” he said. “Where the hell is that exit? I can’t see a damned thing in this rain.”