The Dark Root (46 page)

The inevitability of what was about to happen welled up inside me with the white heat of frustrated certainty. Truong himself was about to be put down like an overly trusting dog by Dennis DeFlorio’s killer, who would then escape into the night while I impotently stood by.

Without thought or plan, I shouted at the top of my voice, “Stop.”

The effect was instantaneous. Truong dove off the trail, back into the woods, and Diep vanished as if by magic, reabsorbed by the tower’s shadow. I took cover as fast as I could behind the nearest tree trunk, knowing clearly but too late that I was the only one without a gun, and that the other two still believed themselves to be allies.

“Truong,” I shouted again, seizing my only weapon, “this is Joe Gunther, from the Brattleboro Police Department. Give yourself up to the Canadian authorities. We know about your brother, about how you went after his killers. We know you kept Da Wang for last. I was in the truck that chased you through the woods a couple of hours ago. I followed you from Chinatown just now. You’ve been under surveillance for a long time. You’ve got nothing left. You’ll die tonight if you don’t give up.”

My words floated off into the air, replaced by the anonymous hum of the glimmering metropolis across the water.

“Did you ever wonder how Edward Diep found you, or where he came from?” I started again. “You took Henry Lam’s word for it that he was okay. And because Henry trusted him, you trusted him. But Diep was playing you all against each other. He was the one who planted the car bomb that killed that police officer. He was the one who undermined your whole operation in Brattleboro. You know why?”

Again, I could hear only silence, and I began to fear that while I was shouting to the trees, one or both of these men was busy moving around to my back. I paused to reposition myself about forty feet away.

“Whatever happened to Lo Yu Lung?” I yelled out. “Didn’t you wonder why you couldn’t find him?” A muzzle flash and an explosion lit up the night about halfway down from the tower. The bullet smacked into a tree nearby.

I shifted position again. “He’s getting nervous, Truong. Trying to shut me up.”

Two more shots were fired, still comfortably off target, “Lo and Diep are the same man. I’ve got proof. He killed Michael Vu so Vu couldn’t tell you. He told Da Wang where you kept your bank in Newport. Your pal Nguyen knows all this. He knew you were doomed—that you’d been stabbed in the back a long time ago. You just didn’t know it.”

I moved again, hoping I’d said enough, knowing that all this shouting might well be suicidal.

The next shot, when it came, was farther off, directed at someone else. For once, it was Diep who’d had the rug pulled out from under him, and who was scrambling for cover. That last shot, coming from near the tower, revealed his new priorities. Of the three options open to him now—escape, killing me, and killing Truong—only the last held out the hope that he might survive. Left alive, Truong would be a persistent threat, even if he spent a few years in prison.

Ignored for the moment, I circled around the peak of the hill and came up behind the tower, pausing briefly to put my shoes back on. The sky was paling steadily now, and the woods below beginning to gain definition. The cat and mouse were running out of time.

Nevertheless, I didn’t actually see what happened next. There were several flashes from opposing gunfire, and suddenly a yell. Only then did I catch some movement—the flickering of a shadow on a path leading downhill, in the direction of the glowing geodesic dome beyond the woods. The echoing of footsteps on the pavement told me of a chase. In the distance, hopelessly far off, I could finally hear sirens wailing.

Cautiously, I brought up the rear, jogging along the footpath I was pretty sure they’d taken. As I cleared the woods and came into the parking lot of the fancy restaurant near the dome, I saw both of them ahead of me, Truong leading, limping, running incongruously toward the erstwhile American Pavilion.

The dome had burned several years ago, the fire gutting its contents and removing its plastic skin. Gradually being rebuilt, it had been left open to the elements, its latticework of interlocking tetra- and octahedrons a visual wonder and a magnet for pigeons. An odd, space-age structure had been erected within its cocoon—an upended, ten-story-tall concrete, steel, and glass box, almost like a diving tower, with various appendages sticking out from its sides—observation booths, staircases, balconies—the most prominent of which was a long, wide platform, free floating on thin pillars, hovering some seventy feet above the ground like an enormous diving board.

As I watched, Truong leaped through the dome’s dizzying latticework and staggered up a metal staircase that led—switchback on switchback—up to that celestial platform. He paused at several points to fire in Diep’s direction to keep him sufficiently at bay. Only when he was near the top did he wait too long. Diep took advantage of that one extra split second to step clear of his barricade and squeeze off a lucky shot that caught Truong in the back.

Truong staggered on, finally gaining the protection of the winglike concrete projection.

As I watched from the shelter of an empty information booth at the edge of the parking lot, Diep moved out into the open, looking back at me, trying to gauge how best to get at Truong, as cognizant as I was of the approaching sirens. But his nemesis had chosen well. As odd at it had seemed at first, the platform was an ideal defensive position, especially for a man no longer seeking to escape. Utterly protected, approachable from one highly exposed avenue only, it forced Diep to either commit or abandon.

Perhaps responding at last to his own sense of fatalism, Diep committed. Turning his back on the reality around him, he began climbing the staircase.

I ran to the south side of the dome, where the platform jutted out without seeming function or purpose. Stepping through the veil of interlocking steel triangles, craning my neck to look up, I could see only the lip of the concrete slab and, in the distance, to its rear, the small figure of Diep, climbing.

Like a spectator at a movie in which I could not affect the outcome, I watched and waited for the inevitable.

There was a movement above me, at the railing on the platform’s edge, as far from the stairs as possible. A hand gripped one of the tubular cross pieces, and I saw Truong pull himself with grim deliberation to a sitting position and wedge himself against one of the uprights. Instinctively, I knew he must be mortally hurt.
Let Diep come on
, his long crawl along the platform’s length said.

But I was wrong, yet again. From high on his perch, with Diep cautiously advancing, Truong turned away and looked down at me, his gun in his hand.

Curiously, I felt no danger. I looked up at him, as if responding to some incomprehensible communication, and I spread my empty hands wide, indicating I had no weapon.

I thought I saw him smile then; he gestured with the gun, as if offering it. Although I made no response, he dropped it to me anyway. It landed in the gravel near my feet with a crunch. Reacting by reflex, I walked over and picked it up, popped out the clip, and saw it still had several rounds.

I looked back up at him, noticing that Diep was no longer visible on the staircase. He had obviously made it to the platform. Only now did I understand. Take out this man in my name, Truong had implied, in my brother’s name, perhaps in your fellow slain officer’s name. Kill the man who would kill me, for I no longer have the strength.

I stared up at him in wonder. He was right, of course. With his gun, now I had the advantage over Diep, who was cornered. But he was also wrong. While our roles might have appeared similar, our motivations couldn’t be. I didn’t share the passion, the beliefs, the cultural obligations that had brought him to this place. I wasn’t even sure I understood them—not as he did.

Looking up at him, our eyes locked, the air around us now vibrating with sirens coming from all angles, I shook my head, and dropped the gun.

There was a moment’s pause, before he turned away resignedly. Seconds later, several shots rang out, Truong’s body spasmed briefly, and one arm slipped out between the railing, dangling lifelessly in the air, its hand open.

I turned at the sound of cars squealing to a stop behind me, and saw both uniformed and plainclothes officers spreading out in tactical positions, making me doubly glad I’d dropped Truong’s weapon. I recognized Lacoste among them and then saw Frazier, Spinney, and Lucas all stepping out of their van.

Following their gaze, I looked back to the edge of the huge, floating platform. Standing next to Truong’s dead body, Lo placed both his hands on the railing’s top rung, still holding his gun. He looked down at the impressive display of vehicles and police officers fanned out below him.

I heard Lacoste’s distinctive voice, slightly blurred by a loudspeaker, demanding Lo’s surrender. But predictably, almost anticlimactically, Lo exploited his other option, bringing this cataclysm to an end. He raised his gun, took aim at the crowd beneath him, and died in a last angry outburst of bullets.

GAIL PULLED OVER TO THE CURB
and cut the engine. “He wanted to meet you here?”

I looked past her at the gentle curve of Morningside Cemetery, the ragged rows of individual and sometimes idiosyncratic monuments, the hulking, dormant mass of Mount Wantastiquet beyond. The air was tinted with the perfume of spring in full flower. “I called Megan Goss about him yesterday, after he asked me here. I wanted to run his symptoms by her to see what she thought. She said it sounded like he was in mourning—for a loss of innocence, maybe, compounded by what had happened to Dennis, and exacerbated by having a new baby on the way. Her guess was he wants to tell me he’s quitting the department. I guess a cemetery’s as good a place as any to do that.”

Gail studied my face for a moment and then reached across and squeezed my hand. “He’s not the only one in mourning, is he?”

I smiled slightly. “I suppose not. I hadn’t allowed any time for it till now.” I paused and then added, “I’d hate to lose Ron as well.”

Gail released my hand. “You better find out what he wants.”

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

I found Ron Klesczewski crouching at the foot of Dennis’s grave, staring distractedly at the broad river far below. I sat down next to him, using a neighboring stone as a backrest. “Hey, there.”

He didn’t turn his head. “Hi, Joe.”

"Guess you heard we closed the case, shut down the task force. We found Amy Lee, too—scared, but all in one piece.”

“I saw it in the paper,” he answered tonelessly.

I didn’t know what else to say, and despite my gloomy prognostication to Gail, I had no idea how this was going to end. The last thing I wanted was to precipitate a gesture he hadn’t been intending.

Groping for something benign in the silence, I finally said, “Willy put a donut in the coffin.”

Ron slowly turned away from the view and stared at me. “What did you say?”

“Willy said he put a donut into the casket when no one was looking at the funeral home, tucked just out of sight under the bottom lid panel. He thought Dennis would appreciate it.”

Ron shook his head, puzzled. “I thought Kunkle hated Dennis.”

“Dennis was a cop. Willy never dumped on him about that.”

Ron’s anguished face cracked a smile. “A donut? Jesus Christ.”

“Honey glazed—right on his chest, where he could reach it. And a napkin.”

Laughing now, Ron sat down against the stone next to me and stretched his legs out before him.

Seizing the moment, or maybe just wanting to get it over, I asked him, “You gonna’ quit the department?”

The laughter stopped, but the smile lingered encouragingly. He shook his head, his eyes fixed before him. “I was going to this morning. Even told Wendy.”

“What did she say?” I asked in the silence that followed.

He looked up at me. “Not to do it. She said she’d never seen me happier than the day I made detective. That it wasn’t something to give up just because I was in the dumps.” He rubbed his forehead. “That surprised me. She was one of the reasons I was thinking of quitting—Wendy and the baby.”

“Not bad reasons,” I murmured, thinking of Gail.

He sighed. There was still something unaddressed—some issue we’d stepped over that I hadn’t noticed.

“What is it?”

“I feel guilty.” His words were barely audible above the soft breeze from the river.

“Because you lived to worry that you almost got killed? You gotta see the irony in that.”

He smiled again, but I knew I hadn’t quite hit it. I had picked Ron as my Number Two a few years ago, over Brandt’s reservations, and I’d worked hard to make him feel comfortable in the role—perhaps too hard. I thought back to Truong Van Loc, and his relationship to his brother, on whom he’d pegged so much. I realized I too had been selfish, albeit a little less dramatically. Ron’s anxiety was as much my fault as a result of his own insecurities. I hadn’t paid attention to the price he’d been paying for a decision all my own.

“I’d be happy to switch things around a little, if you’d like—take you off as my second,” I told him.

He turned to me, surprised—and I thought a little relieved. “You sure that would be okay?”

“You’ve got a lot on your mind, especially with the baby due. Good time to step back a bit—not be so wrapped up in the job. Maybe Sammie’d be interested. You think she’d take it?”

He laughed. “In a heartbeat.”

I got up and walked to where the hillside fell off sharply to the railroad tracks and the near shore of the river, a hundred feet below. That was it, then. Life would resume for us all again, if in modified form.

At least almost—for there was loss lingering still, and a few things left I had to set right.

· · ·

The Lee residence looked much as it had the last time I’d seen it—abandoned, neglected, in mourning, sitting among its tidy neighbors like a scream in the night no one wanted to acknowledge.

Amy Lee sat next to me, tired and wan, her face reflecting the ethereal glow from the dashboard’s instrument lights. Unmolested and in good health, she’d been found in Da Wang’s stronghold in Montreal by Lacoste and his people. It had taken time for them to confirm her identity, and for me to get to her and vouch for her. The paperwork to bring her back had prolonged things further, forcing me to precede her back to Brattleboro. An INS agent had finally picked her up at the border and driven her here in his car, rather than having her ride a bus, as was standard.