I was standing opposite a clothing store filled with racks blocking my view of the interior. I stood quietly for a few moments, watching for movements, or reactions from the few shoppers inside. I couldn’t see a clerk at the register near the door.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw Spinney looking over at me. I gestured at the store, and then at my feet and the trail I’d left. He nodded and moved up so he was facing the store’s front door, albeit across the chasm.
He didn’t quite make it. There was a sudden flurry of movement near the counter, and Michael Vu-his long black hair plastered to his face-appeared from a small storage closet just behind the register, his arm wrapped around the neck of a terrified young woman, whose hands gripped his forearm in a struggle for more air. He wrestled her out onto the balcony, staring for a moment at both Spinney and me. In his free hand was a switchblade.
I held my breath. Hostage situations were unpredictable, dangerous, and volatile and only rarely ended up as happily as on TV.
I showed my gun, as did Spinney. “Let her go, Michael,” I said, loudly enough to attract Dahlin’s attention from below. In the corner of my eye, I could see her bringing the radio up to her mouth.
“Fuck you,” Vu shouted back. “You go away or she dies.”
“We’re staying put, Michael, and more cops are on the way. Killing her will do nothing for you.”
He looked around wildly, as if expecting a marine division to appear out of the blue. “I won’t be killing her.You will.”
“Look,” I said. “We don’t even have a warrant for your arrest. We want to have a talk with you-that’s all.”
He began shaking, swinging the woman before him like a rag doll. “Oh, sure. Right. A little conversation. That’s bullshit, man. You think I’m a dumb fuck?”
Suddenly, he arched his back, lifting the girl’s feet off the ground, and shouted, “Well, I’m not.” He pushed her over the railing and bolted down the length of the balcony.
The girl screamed and grappled at thin air as her body cantilevered over the top of the railing. Only as she was dropping into free-fall did one leg instinctively hook onto the rail and leave her momentarily hanging like a clumsy acrobat. I got to her just as her leg slid free, and snagged her ankle with my left hand. Despite her small size, the sudden weight pulled me to my knees, hammering the railing into my armpit. I gasped in pain, focusing all my strength on not letting her go. I rose slowly to my feet and began hauling the girl toward me, using her leg like a rope. Moments later, several startled shoppers began helping me pull her to safety.
At the far end of the mall’s long corridor, with Spinney close on his heels, Vu reached the bottom of the steps. Seeing Dahlin sprinting toward him, he whirled around to his left and disappeared under the distant staircase.
Confused about where he’d gone, I too now gave chase, pounding down the stairs, slipping in my wet shoes, and swung around the same corner to discover a glass-door exit, discreetly placed next to the bathrooms. It was just swinging shut after Dahlin’s passage.
Outside, to my right, I could see the three of them sprinting toward the Mascoma River, whose waters here ran faster, deeper, and more dangerously than where I’d entered them below the S-curves.
I started after them, my eye on Michael Vu, who was sliding down the bank to the water’s edge, just ahead of the others. As he was about to plunge into the rapids and risk a ride toward the Connecticut River, he stopped abruptly and sat down hard. Beyond him, high on the opposite shore, I saw the familiar black shape of the car that had screeched to a stop in the mall’s parking lot earlier, now pulling away fast, tires smoking, the sounds of its departure masked by the roar of the water.
By the time I got to the river’s edge, both Dahlin and Spinney were on either side of Michael Vu, looking perplexed. Spinney had turned to face the vast parking lot across from us, looking at where the black car had just been.
Dahlin was crouching near Vu, blocking my sight of him. “What the hell happened?” I shouted over the sound of the rapids.
She moved aside, barking orders into her radio, and I saw that Michael Vu wasn’t really sitting on the bank-he was lying on it, flat on his back. And decorating his chest-right over his heart-was a large bullet hole.
23
I did make it to Gail's off-campus apartment, long after she’d gone to bed. While my anticipation of our reunion had been altered by Michael Vu’s murder, the need for her company was as real as before. Only now, I wanted a place to think, and someone to hear me out.
She took it all in stride. She got back into bed, propped her head up against the pillows, and watched me pace the darkened room as I described the day’s events. It was a sign of our friendship that my unannounced arrival, the late hour, and the restless mood I was in were all dismissed without comment.
“Why do you think Vu was killed? And who did it?” she asked after I’d finished.
I paused by the window and looked out onto the silent street below. “The reasonable explanation is that somebody didn’t want him talking to us. But since we weren’t able to get a unit across the river fast enough to catch that black car, we may never know. Spinney was still running the mop-up when I left, trying to find witnesses. The New Hampshire State Police came in with a forensics team. But I don’t think they’ll find anything… We went back to the two restaurants Vu had visited. In both cases, he’d made a halfhearted attempt to extort some cash. He didn’t get much chance to put the screws to them at either place, of course, but I doubt he would’ve gotten much anyway. Once they heard he was dead, both owners seemed pretty unconcerned-as if they knew he was flying solo and that any threat had died with him.”
“So Truong put the word out?”
“Somebody did. Vu didn’t do anything for Truong’s-or ‘Sonny’s’-PR in Brattleboro. As far as we can tell, that whole operation’s collapsed. Sammie told me this afternoon that things seem pretty much back to normal. It’s possible Vu was targeted because of that failure. Our showing up probably just speeded things up a bit. If Vu knew a contract was out on him, cutting a deal with us might’ve sounded pretty appealing.”
“Isn’t it a pretty big coincidence that both you and a hit man appeared at the same place at the same time? And how did he know where Vu would run to so he could get off that perfect shot?”
I settled into an armchair opposite the window and propped my feet on the sill before me. “It wasn’t necessarily a coincidence. We heard about Vu through our own grapevine, and theirs is a hell of a lot more sophisticated. The miracle is we saw him alive at all. That’s what makes me think he was being doubly skittish, on the run from both sides. As for the shooter, after he saw us in pursuit, he had to back off; but he knew that Vu would either be caught by us in the mall, or would run for the river. Those were his only two options.”
Gail let out a small sigh. “So Truong had him killed.”
“Maybe.”
She looked up at me quietly for a moment. “You don’t think so?”
I gave a half-shrug. “He could’ve done it-he’s cold enough for it. But the FBI found out that when he was fresh off the boat, he had a little brother he doted on-paid for his upkeep, his education… Bent over backwards to make sure he flew straight. All financed with money he got working his way up through the gangs. The kicker is, after he’d built up a grubstake, he went straight, too-started running a legitimate business. A few years ago, the kid was killed as an innocent bystander in a gang shooting.”
A long silence filled the air.
“That means he couldn’t have killed Vu?” she asked quietly.
“No… It means he’s a lot more complicated than your run-of-the-mill wise guy. Killing a screwup like Vu is something Vu himself might’ve done. I’m not so sure about Truong anymore.”