The Dark Root (13 page)

Which gave me scant comfort. The old bloodhound in me was reluctant to give up the scent of a good case, and I had a habit of following things to the end.

IT WAS NEAR FIVE O'CLOCK
in the afternoon when Ron Klesczewski yelled through my office door, his face flushed with excitement: “Something hot’s going down.”

I caught up to him halfway across the parking lot. “What the hell’s happening?”

“A source at the bank called,” he said, unlocking his car. “She just paid out fifty thousand dollars cash to the owner of the Century Cinema, Peter Leung. He was nervous as a cat. She said she thought he might have a heart attack right on the spot. He even dropped some of the money he was stuffing into a briefcase. She knows she could get fired for giving us the tip, so I figured we better give it a look.”

“Where’s Leung now?” I asked, swinging into the passenger seat.

“Heading home, I think. A patrol unit picked him up on the qt about four minutes ago heading west on Route 9. He lives out on Green Meadows.” He suddenly gave me an apologetic look as we sped out of the parking lot. “I know this may be nothing—that he has the flu and a mortgage payment due at the same time or something—but I thought we better play it safe. Ever since you tumbled to this Asian thing, I’ve been reading up, and home invasions where one family member is sent out for the cash while the rest are held captive are supposed to be pretty common.”

“No problem,” I said, privately wondering if Ron would ever overcome the insecurity that would probably forever keep him halfway up the corporate ladder. His actions just now had been flawless—fast, decisive, and intelligent—but I sensed that had I raised one finger in opposition, however wrongheaded, he would have folded his tent. Still, I comforted myself, he had come a long way—he never would have stuck his neck out this far in the old days.

We pulled onto Route 9 and picked up speed heading west.

“What’ve you got lined up?” I asked him.

“In addition to the patrol unit and us, I had Harriet rally what she could get of the Special Reaction Team. They’re to stand ready at the West B fire station. I hope that’s okay.”

“Fine with me.” I didn’t know where Peter Leung lived specifically, but I was familiar with Green Meadows. A short horseshoe attached to the side of Greenleaf Street, it was an archetypal slice of suburban America, with ranch-style homes, lawns with swing sets, a swimming pool or two, and graceful young trees coming into bloom. It was as far from the town’s meaner streets as it could get, both physically and psychologically. If this did turn ugly, though, and Ron’s worst fears were realized, Green Meadows could well become a combat zone.

Not knowing which scenario might play out—or even if Leung was heading home—was going to severely cramp our style. The safest approach—sealing off his street, evacuating the neighbors, waiting for the transaction to go down, and then picking up the pieces—was almost ludicrously out of the question. Instead, we would have to be discreet, leaving the patrol unit and the SRT people nearby but out of sight, and making the approach to Leung’s house ourselves, without visible backup, without body armor, and with only our concealed sidearms for protection.

The radio crackled beneath the dash. “O-8 from O-20. Subject car has pulled into Green Meadows.”

Ron unhooked the microphone. “10-4, 20. Find a spot where you can see both ends of the street. O-3 and I are going to make a direct approach.” He looked over at me questioningly. I nodded without comment.

We pulled off Route 9 onto Greenleaf Street and drove up a short distance to Green Meadows’s first entrance. Ron paused a moment and looked around. Almost completely hidden by a large, leafy tree farther up and across the road, a fender and part of the windshield from O-20’s patrol unit looked like any other parked car.

“Where’s he live?” I asked as we entered the horseshoe.

“Right in the middle. East side.”

I glanced over at him. His eyes were straight ahead, scanning the street before us, his tension completely at odds with the smells of spring wafting in through the open windows, the sounds of a dog barking in the distance, of a mother somewhere calling for her child. I took a deep breath to relax.

“There,” he said, “gray house, red roof.”

It was all but indistinguishable from its neighbors in mood and tidiness, but it had a strange stillness about it, emphasized by shut windows and drawn curtains. One car was parked outside the closed garage, another—sportier, more pretentious, built for speed, and with Massachusetts plates—was by the curb. Both were empty.

Ron pulled over beyond the house, on the opposite side of the street. He cleared with Dispatch on the radio, killed the engine, and wrestled a portable radio from his pocket. “O-8 to all units and Dispatch. O-3 and I are approaching the front entrance. The SRT can stand by out of sight on Greenleaf beyond Green Meadows.”

A small chorus of muttered “10-4s” followed us as we left the car and walked slowly across the street, keeping several feet apart from each other. Ron held the radio in his hand, hidden behind his leg as he went.

I watched the windows for any movement, hearing the odd piece of gravel crunch under my shoe, feeling the weight of my gun in its holster. Those earlier sights and sounds of a neighborhood in early spring faded from my consciousness, until all I could focus on was that utterly still house, and the front door looming ever closer.

We crossed the sidewalk and came to the entrance from different angles, stepping on the grass rather than the paving stones leading up from the street. We reached the door, positioned ourselves to either side of it, our backs to the wall, and paused a moment. Ron’s face was glistening with sweat, as I suspected mine was. We exchanged glances, I nodded, and he knocked loudly.

At that moment, instead of the door opening, a snow-white BMW appeared around the bend in the street and pulled up behind the car already parked there. Loud music could be heard pulsing against the tinted, closed windows.

“Jesus Christ,” Ron muttered.

The music died with the engine. The driver’s door swung open, and Michael Vu, resplendent in a white suit and purple shirt, stepped out into the street. His back still to us, he shook his pants legs loose, slicked back his long hair, and turned to walk around the front of his car. He froze in mid-step as he saw us.

Before any of us could react, however, a second car rounded the bend, drawing all of our attention. Blotched with rust, trailing a pale-gray plume of smoke, it stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. Out of it half fell a wild-looking, disheveled Vince Sharkey. One hand reached out to the car hood for support. In the other was a gun.

It was at that moment that the front door opened between us, revealing through its narrow gap a frantic Peter Leung and, behind him, the familiar and malevolent face of Henry Lam.

What followed unfurled like a slow-motion silent movie, where I was so keen on survival that I heard no words of warning, and was only aware of the gunfire as I might have been of a hard rain hitting the roof at night—a distant sound in a dream-like state.

Still facing the street, Ron brought the radio up to his mouth with one hand and cleared his gun of its holster with the other. I threw my weight against the building’s front door, reached in to grab Peter Leung by his shirtfront, and pulled him past me with all my strength, throwing him into the bushes behind me. Now fully revealed, Lam stood openmouthed, rooted in place with an automatic machine pistol by his side.

Across the lawn, Vince Sharkey brought his gun unsteadily to bear on Michael Vu and fired a round that starred the white car’s windshield. Ron, now down in a crouch, shot once and hit Sharkey in the chest, sending him up onto the hood of his car before he rolled off and landed on his face in the street.

Meanwhile, Lam quickly recovered and brought his snub-nosed machine gun to bear on me as I leaped backward off the stoop and pulled my own gun free. The air between us suddenly burst into a smoky cloud, and I could feel Lam’s bullets tugging at my clothes and thudding into the ground around me. Stumbling backward, I fired twice into the middle of the cloud.

For a split second everything stopped. I was on my knees, my gun still bearing on the now-empty doorway. Ron was standing at the foot of the steps, gun in hand but unsure of what to do, and Vu stayed where he had been all along, still looking stunned.

Then the storm broke a second time.

Suddenly framed in the door were two more gunmen, young Asian boys, one with a shotgun, the other a semi-automatic pistol. Both looked utterly terrified.

As from a long, long way off, I heard myself yell, “Freeze—police.”

The one nearest me brought the shotgun to bear on my chest. I fired first, sending him flying backward out of sight. The second one aimed at Ron, who was just turning to face him, and unloaded four rounds before Ron responded in kind, hitting him three times in the stomach and bringing him to his knees. Clutching his middle, the young man looked at us with a confused expression and then toppled forward, landing spread-eagled across the steps.

We stood motionless for a moment, our guns trained on the doorway. I suddenly became aware of sirens, the squeal of tires on the street behind us. I heard Michael Vu being ordered to spread himself flat on the hood of his car.

I glanced at Ron; blood was dripping from his ear and darkening the shoulder of his jacket. “You all right?” I asked, my eyes back on the door.

He opened his mouth to speak, said nothing, and finally just nodded.

I glanced over quickly to where I’d thrown Peter Leung. He was still lying half across the bushes and half against the wall of his home, looking like a discarded rag doll. He was clutching his forearm, and I could see blood oozing from a thigh, where one of Lam’s wild shots had caught him.

“How ’bout you?” I asked him.

“My wife…”

“We’re going in to get her now.”

We approached the entrance again, and flattened ourselves to either side of it.

“You ready?” Ron finally croaked, and gestured to the house’s dark interior.

I nodded.

“Okay.”

We swung inside, low and away from the doorway, cutting to opposite directions. Apart from the motionless figures of the two young Asians, the entrance hall was empty.

On the radio, Ron let everyone know we were inside and gave orders to secure the area, surround the house, and enter from all possible avenues. As he spoke, I carefully went from one still body to the other, removing weapons and checking for pulses, all with one eye glued to the far doorway. There were no signs of life.

Soon joined by reinforcements, we located Peter Leung’s wife in an upstairs bathroom. Her hands were tied behind her back, and she was lying in a puddle of water and vomit in front of the toilet. The two young men had been holding her head under water, trying to find out where she kept her valuables.

After we cleaned her up a little and got a quick statement, we handed her over to the ambulance crew so she could go with her husband to the hospital.

What followed then was a long, legalistic procedure of precise and demanding form. The house and the street in front of it were cordoned off. Tony Brandt arrived, as did, in quick succession, Alfred Gould—the local assistant medical examiner—State’s Attorney Jack Derby, and his investigator, Todd Lefevre. Also, since this mayhem had involved local police officers, a “post-shoot” team from the Vermont State Police was called in to collate the details and run the interviews. Several hours later, the large green truck from Waterbury carrying the state crime-lab people arrived to photograph, measure, and remove for later analysis a small museum’s worth of forensic evidence.

Ron, the two patrolmen we’d left at the street’s entrance, and I were interviewed several times by different people, as were some of Peter Leung’s neighbors. Michael Vu was taken to the police department until his role in the shoot-out could be legally clarified.

At some point, much later, after our stories had been officially recorded and we’d been cleared to speak to one another once more, I searched out Ron Klesczewski. I found him in the living room, sitting on a small hard-back chair, staring out the window.

I pulled up another chair and sat next to him. He made no acknowledgment of my presence. Suddenly exhausted, I let out a sigh. “How’re you holding up?”

He turned toward me, but his eyes were unfocused, his mind obviously snagged on the recent past. “Fine.”

“Well, I’m not,” I said flatly, hoping to break through his blank expression.

My words hung in the air before him. He blinked once slowly and looked at me more attentively. “What?”

“We were almost killed, and we just shot four people to death.”

He nodded deliberately and went back to staring out the window. “Kids,” he murmured. “It didn’t really sink in till a while ago.”

“Dangerous kids,” I amended, “who were about to take our heads off.”

His face became more animated. “What the hell was that all about? They couldn’t’ve been more than sixteen, seventeen. They would’ve gotten a slap on the wrist for this—been out in no time. Why come out blazing?”

“They didn’t see it that way. You spend your whole life surrounded by corruption and violence and death, you don’t end up thinking much about the future. You take what you can when you can.”

He was quiet for a while. “So stupid.”

“You had no choice. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah—I guess.”

“How’s the ear?” I asked.

Unconsciously, his hand went up to his bandaged ear and touched it gently. “Throbs a bit. Amazing luck.”

I laughed and spread my arms to show off a borrowed uniform shirt, my own having been taken as evidence. “Six holes in the jacket, one in the shirt. I can’t believe he missed me.”

He shook his head and held up his hand, its thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart. “We came that close, and so fast. It could’ve been over before we knew what hit us. Get a tip, go on a drive, knock on a door, and—bam. You’re dead… Were you expecting anything like this?”