Jonathan Tieu, a pimply 20-year-old, and
Hossein Nayeri, an athletic Persian with
an air of insouciance.
Ma said nothing, just plotted a course
through the outlays of Orange County. He
had moved here, to greater Los Angeles’s
Little Saigon, four years ago, after a painful
divorce, taking a room at a boarding house
and starting a new life as a self-employed
cabbie. Ma never bothered to get his car—a
worn Honda Civic—registered for commer-
cial use. He didn’t see the point. Little Saigon
had always felt to him like a place that
enforced its own rules, and so he lived by an
old Vietnamese proverb: The king’s rule ends
at the village gate. He was 71, and in more
ways than one, he was on his own. The work
had a way of easing the loneliness he felt.
At Walmart, Ma dropped the men o≠ at the
door and was asked to wait. But soon Duong
and the others wandered back to the car. They
needed to go to a Target in Rosemead instead,
they told Ma. As Ma began to protest—the
store was 45 minutes away—Duong reassured
him: “Look, we’ll pay you $100 extra.”
Fine, Ma said.
Once at Target, the men were inside for-
ever. Ma had no way of knowing what they
were doing in there—that they were des-
perate for phones, for clothes, and for somesemblance of a plan. For all their casual
silence since getting picked up, the three
men had been growing impatient. The
night was ticking away. Outside, Ma was
trying hard not to be frustrated, too. He
paced to the far end of the deserted parking
lot, a slim Vietnamese cigarette between
his fingers. He had been asleep when Duong
had called and he hadn’t bothered chang-
ing out of his pajamas. This was supposed
to be just a quick ride, he thought. What
was going on in there?
It was after 11:30 when they emerged, and
as they found their seats in the car, Duong
seemed to sense the driver’s agitation. “My
mom’s place is right around here,” he lied.
“Take us there, please.”
The streets were dark and quiet, and after
a few minutes, Duong motioned to a co≠ee
shop that anchored a mangy strip mall. “Pull
in here,” he said. Ma realized this was no
home, but he reluctantly complied. As Ma
parked, Duong twisted around and locked
eyes with Tieu in the backseat. Duong spoke
in English: “Give me the gun.”
Ma flinched. His eyes darted to the mirror,
and he watched with panic as Tieu handed
Duong a pistol. A moment later, Duong had
it pointed at Ma and told the driver, calmly, in
Vietnamese: “We need your help.”Ma’s mind raced. “Please, just take what
you want,” Ma told Duong, his heart drum-
ming in his ribs. Duong flashed him an odd
look. “No, you need to come with us,” he said.
“Get out of the car.”They wore no coats. They just
shivered there, in the crisp night
air. And to the cabdriver who
slowed to study the three men
who’d called for a ride, this
seemed strange. It was January,
after all, and the temperature in
Santa Ana, California, had dipped
into the 50s. Yet these men had
on only collared shirts. As they
piled into Long Ma’s warm car,
the driver filed that detail away.
“Take us to Walmart,” said the man who
settled into the passenger seat —and this
was the second signal to Ma that something
was o≠. Ma recognized from the man’s voice
that he was the one who’d called for the
cab, telling Ma that he and his friends had
needed a ride home.
His name was Bac Duong, and he spoke
to Ma in Vietnamese—their shared native
language—and wore on his thin and weary
face a salt-and-pepper goatee. It was 9:30 at
night, and now they wanted to go shopping?
Ma thought. What happened to going home?
In the rearview mirror, Ma could see
Duong’s friends, quiet in the backseat:
If they killed the driver now, they could make a
cleaner escape. ma watched as Nayeri pointed in
his direction and shouted, “Boom boom, old man!”