“He’s like Jannie, you know?” Damon said. “An outlier. There’s something special about them. You just see it when they move.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.
“I’m good enough to be a seventh or eighth man in Division One.”
“Never sell yourself short,” I said.
“Just being honest, and I’m good with coming off the bench, Dad,” he said. “Jannie, though? She’s in a world where very few people get to live.”
That was true. Seeing my daughter run on a track was like watching a gazelle chased by a lion and-
“Dad! Watch out!”
Six or seven car lengths in front of us, a twenty-seven-foot Jayco camping trailer attached to the back of a Ford F-150 pickup had started to swerve wildly. I got my foot on the brake a split second before the camper and pickup went into a wide, arcing skid and then jackknifed, flipped, and careened left, inches off our front bumper.
I hit the gas, shot forward, and went by it. The trailer smashed an oncoming car, the pickup slammed into something else, and then the whole mass of twisted metal went across the fast lane and down the embankment behind us.
“Holy shit!” Damon yelled. “Holy shit, we just almost died!”
My heart was slamming in my chest, and my hands were trembling on the wheel as I got over on the shoulder. We had almost died. The Grim Reaper had been right there but passed us by.
“C’mon,” I said, yanking out my cell and dialing 911. “We’ve got to help.”
Damon jumped out and ran back down the road to the embankment while I told the dispatcher what had happened.
When I reached the pickup, Damon shook his head. The driver was dead and hanging out the back window. We heard a baby crying in the car that had been hit by the travel trailer and flipped onto its roof.
“Help!” a woman yelled. “Someone please help us.”
Damon got down on his knees by the car and I did too. The young mom’s head was bleeding hard. The baby was upside down but appeared uninjured, mostly just upset about being upside down.
“We’ve got an ambulance coming,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Sally Jo,” she said. “Sally Jo Hepner. I’m bleeding like a stuck pig. Am I gonna die?”
“I think you’ll need a lot of stitches, but you’re not going to die. What’s your baby’s name?”
I could already hear sirens.
“Bobby,” she said. “After my dad.”
Damon had wriggled in through the window and gotten the car seat free. He squirmed back and pulled him out. Bobby Hepner was fussing, but just showing him his mother seemed to quiet him down.
Firemen and EMTs were on the scene within five minutes of the crash. We stayed until we saw the mom safely extracted from the car and put on a backboard with a neck collar, just in case. One of the EMTs carried her baby into the ambulance.
“Looks like our work here is done,” I said. “Let’s get you to school.”
Damon smiled, but when we got back in the car, he was brooding. “Strange how life is. Here one minute and gone the next.”
“Don’t worry about it too much.”
“I guess. But seeing that, it’s like, what’s the point? You never know when your time is up.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So live every minute like it’s your last, and be grateful. The way I see it, that near miss was a message. We came close, but we weren’t meant to be in a car accident today. We were reminded of how fragile and precious life is, but we weren’t supposed to die. We were supposed to get you to college, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Damon dipped his head, but then he grinned, said, “Okay.”
Johns Hopkins had changed in some ways since I was a student, but the Homewood campus was still an oasis of green quads and red-brick halls in the city of Baltimore, and I still felt the electricity of the place when we arrived. We were met by student volunteers, who steered us through the various lines and gave us a thick orientation packet for incoming freshmen.
We found Damon’s room and met his roommate-William Clancy, a lacrosse player from Massachusetts-and his parents. The boys seemed to click from the start. We helped them get squared away, and then there was an awkward moment when it was obvious they wanted the parents to leave.
“Walk me to the car,” I said. “There’s something down there that I want you to have.”
“Uh, sure,” Damon said, and he nodded to his roommate. “Be back, and then we’ll go to the welcome picnic?”
“Sounds good,” William said.
We got to the car, and I looked at him with fierce pride and love.
“What did you want me to have?” Damon asked.
I grabbed him and bear-hugged him, unable to stop the tears.
“Your mom,” I choked out. “She would have been very, very happy to see who you’ve become.”
Damon looked uncomfortable when I released him and stepped back. A few tears slipped from his eyes before he said, “Thank you, Dad. For everything.”
I couldn’t take it, and I bear-hugged him again and then told him to get going before I became a total, blubbering mess. He laughed. We bumped fists. And he was gone, into the place that had cut and sharpened me into a man.
Driving away was bittersweet; I was happy beyond words for his achievements but already mourning a part of my life that had begun in the loving care of Damon, my helpless infant boy, and ended just a few moments before, when my young man had walked confidently away.
Part Two: A VIGILANTE KILLING
13
I LEFT THE Johns Hopkins campus, drove around the corner, stopped, and put my head on the wheel. I’d known my son was leaving for months, but it had still flattened me.
My cell rang. John Sampson. I answered on the Bluetooth.
“You like pho?” he asked.
“If it’s made right,” I said, putting the car in gear. “Why?”
“Because one of O’Donnell’s sources puts Thao Le at Pho Phred’s in Falls Church at one o’clock this afternoon. Can you make it back in time?”
I looked at the clock, said, “With the bubble and siren, yes.”
“I’d cut the siren when you get close,” Sampson said, and he hung up.
I got back onto 295, put up the bubble, and took the car up to eighty-five, tapping on the siren to get folks out of the way and thinking about Thao Le.
He’d been a gangbanger from the get-go. Son of a California mobster, he’d come east at eighteen and formed his own criminal enterprise that focused on the trade in heroin, cocaine, and marijuana, but he’d later branched out into human trafficking.
He’d been arrested twice on racketeering charges, and twice he’d walked because of insufficient evidence or, depending on your source, because of the money Le paid in bribes. Soon enough, though, Le came on the radar of Detective Tommy McGrath and his partner at the time, Terry Howard.
A year into the investigation of Le, Internal Affairs caught Howard with cocaine and money taken during a drug bust. Howard had always maintained his innocence, even tried to blame it on McGrath, but in the end, he’d been fired, and it had been ugly for him ever since.
McGrath believed Le had framed his partner. But six years after the fact, Tommy had not turned up enough evidence to exonerate Terry Howard because, as he’d noted in the file O’Donnell found, the Vietnamese gangster was slippery and careful. The most time Le had ever served was three and a half years for assaulting two police officers attempting to take him into custody. Both cops had ended up in the hospital.
Which is why I decided that if we were going to talk with Le, we would bring a small army with us. I started making calls.
At ten minutes to one, I pulled into a lumberyard just down the street from Eden Center, a Vietnamese and Korean entertainment and shopping hub in Falls Church. I found Bree, Sampson, and Muller waiting for me as well as four SWAT operators, two patrol units, and a sergeant detective named Earl Rand whom I’d worked with successfully before. All were with the Fairfax County Sheriff’s Department.