Restless Soul - Alex Archer [94]
Nang screamed and Annja swiped down with the blade, aiming for the gun in the man’s hand and instead connecting with his arm. It had the same effect—the gun clattered away on the pavement, disappearing beneath a black BMW. The truck smashed into the Jeep’s side, and Annja had to compensate to keep from being pushed off the road.
“Bridge!” Nang warned.
Annja divided her attention between the road, the threatening pickup, oncoming traffic and now the bridge, which narrowed the road to a single lane. Below, the water sparkled like sapphire glass spun between the dirt-brown banks.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she coaxed the Jeep as she pressed the gas pedal as far down as it would go and inched past the truck. At least the passenger was inside the truck now, holding his injured arm. The driver was another matter; she spotted a gun in his hand. But he had to jump in behind her in the face of now-one-lane traffic.
“We will die!” Nang cried.
“Everyone dies,” Annja said. “But I won’t let us die today.”
The Jeep rode up on the sidewalk as she jockeyed for a better position to see the truck behind her. The passenger was on a cell phone; she couldn’t make out more than that because of the tinting to the windows. The driver had his arm out the window, gun against the door.
More sirens wailed, and she picked out three distinct sounds. At least three police cars were coming. Before they reached the end of the bridge a fourth was added to it. Car horns blared as she took an off-ramp at full speed, tilting the Jeep up on its right wheels and nearly tossing Nang from his seat, despite the seat belt. She raced past a motorcycle that spun out in her wake and watched in horror as the silver truck headed straight for the motorcycle.
“God, please don’t,” she prayed, her stomach rising into her throat. The biker’s death would be on her hands.
A maintenance worker on the side of the road pumped his fist and shouted at her as she continued to look in her rearview mirror.
The truck driver veered to the right to avoid the motorcyclist. His tires screamed in protest and the truck briefly rose up on its right tires like a stunt car before rolling on its side, sparks from the metal scraping against the pavement shooting up like fireworks.
Annja jabbed the gas pedal again and switched lanes, driving straight west again and leaving Chiang Mai and the increasing number of sirens behind.
28
“Nang, I want you to tell me all about Lanh Vuong. You were going to do that, remember, before we were rudely interrupted by your uncle’s thugs.”
Nang was still shaking from the wild ride in the city. She’d pulled onto a narrow road that cut through farmland. She wanted to avoid any major routes for a while, as plenty of witnesses would have described her and the Jeep to police.
“Lanh Vuong,” she repeated. “Tell me about him.”
“I called him Uncle Lanh when I was a boy, but he was not a true uncle.”
“Go on.” She stopped and let the engine idle, and she unhooked her seat belt and stood, pulling the maps out from under her. If she hadn’t sat on them, they would have blown out. Other papers had, and she’d nearly lost the jerricans and her backpack with the skull pieces, too. Stretching forward, she knocked the glass out of the window frame, making it easier to see. “I’d guess it was a 9 mm,” she mused as she began to drive again.
“Lanh Vuong is an important—” Nang picked through his brain for the appropriate word “—exporter of goods from Vietnam.”
“Smuggler,” Annja corrected under her breath. “How did he get in the business, Nang?” An odd question for her to ask, she thought, but something niggled at a corner of her mind.
“Because of the Vietnam War, I think. Before I was born, before my father and Uncle Kim were born, Uncle Lanh was a soldier in the North Vietnamese army. An important one, a colonel. He was in his forties then, and he led many men to battle.”
So he was in his eighties, or perhaps ninety now, definitely an old man, Annja thought. She waited, listening to the wind blow across the hood and welcoming