There Will Be Killing

by John Hart

  Murder, serial killing, and mutilation were not his or Gregg’s areas of expertise and they had turned up virtually nothing but stuff on medical restraints, new psychotropics, brain injuries, and leftover blah-blah-blah from the Korean War.

  The way things were with Gregg and J.D. made Izzy reluctant to even bring up his name, and J.D.’s response when they suggested a phone call to a couple of the top researchers or even to the FBI for consulting help, had not exactly declared them The Three Musketeers.

  You two are the consultants, I told you that. I also told you that nobody is supposed to know about this and so far your best idea is to call the states and then the FBI? Why not just call in the media and see what they think about it? Come on, I read your CVs, you are supposed to both be brilliant. So. Be brilliant.

  Izzy didn’t feel brilliant. He felt like he would explode if he didn’t unload.

  “Gregg, can we talk?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “I’m worried. I feel like I’m barely hanging on here. My hands shake, have tremors. Without Sergeant Washington I could not have completed the procedure on Wilson. Sometimes I think I’m doing okay, but then I’ll start shaking again. Honestly, I’m afraid something’s really wrong with me. If not physically, then at least psychosomatically. It’s not something I want to tell Rachel about. I don’t want her to know what a mess I am. But you, I can talk to. Be straight with me. As a clinician, what are your professional thoughts?”

  Gregg turned down another street, a quieter street with trees moving in the moonlight breeze off the sea. “Actually, what I think is that there is nothing wrong with you, that you are just fine, normal, doing your best like the rest of us. I feel just the same inside as you, hanging on, counting the days, thinking about going home. Your hands are just talking for you, being honest about how crazy and scary and insane this all is. . . that shooting your first day, the thing we are in with J.D., those are just some nice big frosting on the usual cake here, which is crazy enough. So I say, the future will take care of itself once you get out of here. Meanwhile, you’re not nearly as much of a mess as you think. And don’t worry, your hands will settle down.”

  Izzy let out a big breath. Gregg thought he was okay. He wasn’t totally losing it after all, it just felt like that, and Gregg felt the same way and. . .that’s right, his hands were being honest while the rest of him was just clenched up, pretending everything was normal when it wasn’t.

  “Have you got any hobbies?” Gregg asked.

  “Guitar. Classical guitar.” Izzy’s fingers suddenly itched to let loose on the strings of the world-class, handmade concert-quality instrument he had received for his bar mitzvah. “Why?”

  “Because I can tell you that the guys who make it through mentally here have something good to do—like I surf, keep a journal. It would help those hands of yours to apply them to some kind of outlet, too.”

  “Makes sense. Unfortunately. . .” He didn’t want to get into the fit his mother had thrown when she found out he’d left his priceless guitar with his artsy, bra-burning choice in a life partner. “Rachel is keeping it for me since we decided to postpone our wedding.”

  “That must have been a tough decision.”

  “It was,” Izzy lied. There hadn’t been a lot of back and forth to the decision making process. Her suggestion and as usual he hadn’t argued. Arguments upset his congenitally nervous stomach. “We were planning to honeymoon in Spain. I was going to take some advanced lessons while she toured the museums. Rachel’s really great that way—willing to put things off to do it up right. She’s an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “Nice,” was all Gregg said before nodding toward a tasteful marquis down the block. “Look, there’s The Racquet Club. I’ve heard all kinds of crazy stuff about that place. Let’s go check it out and. . . no. Don’t tell me. . . ..”

  As a turquoise 57 Chevy with a white ragtop pleated down glided beneath the long black awning that fronted The Racquet Club’s entrance, Gregg staggered back several steps—

  Only to surge forward and pick up his pace when one valet opened Kate’s passenger door and another opened J.D.’s with a deep bow.

  “She didn’t return my call today.” Gregg’s uniquely beautiful voice sounded more like K.O. growling at a rodent. “Or yesterday. Or the day before. I am going to kill that son of a bitch J.D. He has got some nerve trying to move in on my territory—”

  Izzy grabbed Gregg by the back of his shirt while J.D. dropped a kiss on the back of Kate’s neck as they proceeded inside.

  Gregg spun around, nostrils flaring, eyes flaming blue.

  Izzy backed off, hands in the air. “Hey, pal, one good deed deserves another. I’m just trying to do a little damage intervention.”

  “What? So I can `marvel at my own magnanimous generosity’ or whatever the hell Robert David advised? No. No. Not this time. I don’t know what happened after the bastard took her home in that car that doesn’t belong here but I have waited more than half my life for that woman and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let him have her.”

  “I understand.” In truth, Izzy did not. He had never loved anyone so passionately as to be stupid with it. He cherished Rachel’s letters, their history, like the touchstones to reality they were and he loved all the things she was and he wasn’t. But ultimately, despite his parent’s belief to the contrary, even Rachel was a logical choice.

  She brought color and a sense of the avant-garde to his life. He brought other things to hers. Hell, who wanted to be married to themselves? Certainly not him.

  Logic was perhaps the one thing that could save him long term. And Gregg, short term, hopefully, though that seemed doubtful given the ragged edge to his voice, demanding, “Do you really? Understand?”

  “Perhaps not,” Izzy slowly admitted. “But Gregg, if you would allow me to return the favor of your counsel, I highly suggest we leave before you initiate a public scene that can only end badly and will not impress Kate. That’s not how you get what you’ve been waiting for.”

  Gregg’s breathing reminded Izzy of Wilson confronting the dead; but then Gregg closed his eyes, took a deep breath. When he opened them again he looked at his clenched fists with the kind of regard reserved for a visitor from Mars.

  “God, I’m sorry.” Gregg lightly self-slapped a tanned cheek, then the other. “I don’t know what got into me. Maybe this place just makes us all act crazy. I am so sorry, Izzy.”

  “I liked being called God better.”

  Gregg laughed with the jangled sound of nerves. “You MDs and those deity complexes.”

  “Just give us an inch and we’ll demand eternity.”

  Attention moving to the 57 Chevy being driven off by a valet, Gregg gave a middle finger salute and called “Hey, Cyclo!” to flag down one of the little motorized cabbies with seats attached to the scooter.

  “Now where?” asked Izzy, just glad to get away and fast, didn’t matter what direction.

  “Pawn shop,” said Gregg. “Find some guitars.”

  *

  Kate was fully aware she had more than crossed the fashion rebel line by wearing a traditional Vietnamese aoi dai, a flowing silk dress split to the hip over slinky silk pajama pants. She also knew the combination of her upswept blonde hair and golden skin was dazzling in the graceful, white ensemble reserved for women of another culture. She had wanted to be both breathtaking and scandalous, and judging from J.D.’s response, she had scored on both counts.

  They proceeded into the club where parted doors revealed a luxurious lobby with plush elegant rugs and rattan furnishings, slow moving fans and huge pink peonies with other fresh flowers that scented the air with sweet ginger. J.D. smelled even better. His cologne was subtle and understated, the smell of money well spent.

  “This is so nice,” sighed Kate with just the right come hither dusk in her voice, the perfect complement to their plush, intimate booth rounded in a corner. �
��I feel like we’re sitting in the middle of a Graham Greene novel. Do you read him?”

  “I read The Quiet American. That was enough for me. I prefer Kipling.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Let me guess. . .” She fingered the two mysterious silver bracelets J.D. wore on his right wrist. “The Jungle Book. That would be your favorite.”

  His hand came down, brought hers to his mouth. It was her wrist actually, the interior of it, that he discreetly skated with his teeth. Although she was a surgical nurse and understood the marvel of human anatomy, her immediate, hot, fluid response was more a mystery than the bracelets.

  Did Phillip have any idea what he was doing when he orchestrated their introduction? Surely not. Yet Phillip never, never did anything by accident.

  “Yes,” J.D. confirmed, having moved his mouth from wrist to just behind her ear. His breath tickled it, smelled like cinnamon, touched with the Gauloises they had shared en route to the club. “The Jungle Book is my favorite. And who would be my favorite Kipling character?”

  “Bagheera,” she breathed out, only to inhale enough lust fueled air to qualify for a hormone spiked mickey. “The black panther.”

  “No.” He paused, eased back, putting some distance between them. “Do you have anything for me?”

  His chameleon behavior was disorienting. Kate tried to get her bearings by feigning interest elsewhere, only to see. . .

  She squinted in the dimly lit and very large supper club, for lack of a better term.

  “I think I just saw Phillip.”

  J.D. followed her gaze, cast his about like a minesweeper, apparently turning up nothing before returning his attention to her.

  “Are you still sleeping with him?”

  Kate blinked. First her eyes were playing tricks on her, now her ears. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. I asked if you were still sleeping with Phillip. He would only send you here as payback for not, or a reward if you were, but his intentions would never be paternal.”

  “I. . .well, I. . .” Her throat was dry. She took a long sip of the Soixante Quinzes J.D. had ordered for her. Kate put it down, locked him in visual combat. “That is none of your business, J.D.”

  “Perhaps not.” His attention dipped, lingered on her chest. “Yet.”

  Kate wasn’t sure whether to throw the rest of her drink in his face or plant hers in his lap.

  She finished her cocktail in silence and ordered another instead.

  “We have a patient at the mission,” she finally said. “We turn no one away—especially not an old friend of Dr. Donnelly. He’s the mission director.”

  “Yes, I know. And what is the patient’s name?”

  Some spy she was. Kate didn’t want to cough up. “Professor Nguyen,” she muttered, quickly followed by an assertive, “I like him. He pioneered research in malaria here, at the Pasteur Institute.”

  “Yes. A credit to his profession.” J.D.’s smile was enigmatic, both approving and somehow not. “Anything or anyone else I should know about?”

  “Gregg left another message inviting me to the beach party they’re having in a couple of days. I’m not sure I should go.”

  “Of course you should go—with me.”

  “I don’t want to rub his nose in it. It’s unnecessary to be unkind. Especially to Gregg.”

  “We’ll be discreet.” J.D. leaned in, confidential. “Listen, Kate, I know what Gregg means to you. I like the guy, too—and I need him.”

  “Why?”

  “For consulting purposes on a case I’m not at liberty to discuss. And neither is he, so don’t put him in a compromised position by asking questions. Understood?”

  The look J.D. gave her made her stomach flutter, and not in a good way.

  Kate started to challenge the dictate, but hesitated. She had a feeling of being out of her depth and, besides, Phillip could arrange to have her sent home as quickly and easily as he had gotten her here. She wasn’t ready to leave. Smart girls knew when to push, when to back off.

  She nodded.

  “Now, about the party,” J.D. continued, “I need to explore a lead and could use your help, have you spend a little girl time with Margie and Nikki, see if they might divulge anything I haven’t been able to pick up about Peck.”

  “Why are you interested in him? It’s not illegal to be a jerk.”

  “He’s a person of interest. We’ll leave it at that. Just see what you can find out about his relationship with Nikki, if he has any strange private behaviors or violent tendencies behind closed doors. That’s the kind of information you can get on the Q.T. and I can’t.”

  When she hesitated he added, “By the way, it’s Hertz’s birthday and Sergeant Washington is in charge of the grill.”

  “Is there anything you don’t know?”

  J.D. raised an eloquent brow.

  The hell if she was telling him about her intimacies with Phillip. And the hell with Phillip if he thought she was sleeping with him anytime soon. It was the 60s and Kate got the whole liberation scene, but she had always felt liberated and wasn’t going to be confined now by some free love movement that she considered a little stupid for its lack of foresight. Smart girls were selective. They realized they declared their own value. Two back wheels that had burned enough rubber to go bald did not command a fetching price, and while she truly loved the smell, the taste, the sweat generated by a robust romp, Katherine Lynn Morningside did not come cheap.

  “Kaa,” J.D. suddenly said. “The python. That would be my favorite Kipling character.”

  “Why am I not surprised you would best relate to a snake?”

  The flash of J.D.’s smooth smile was followed by an unexpected burst of laughter. With his head tilted back, clearly exposing the scar that ran from just behind his ear to under his shirt collar it took an enormous amount of self-control not to investigate how far the scar ran.

  She should run. Kate knew it with the instinctive certainty of a dog’s ears quivering in response to a whistle too highly pitched for humans to hear. But she was even more certain of never forgiving herself for abandoning the human equivalent of a torqued and dangerous machine that she intended to ride like a bat out of hell with strobe lights flashing and sirens screaming full blast.

  There were no Orange Julius’s in Vietnam.

  Just one of the things she could fall in love with here.

  12

  Off the coast of Nha Trang are several islands. But while Nha Trang itself is a city of culture and sophistication and commerce, the islands might as well be a thousand miles and a thousand years away….

  Life passed in the same slow movement of seasons as it always had and always would, forever remaining exactly as it was before the Americans and before the French. The same fishing boats with their distinctive designs and colors, the same small village farms trading with the fishermen, they were all still here. As were the people, orienting their lives with the old calendar, the tides, the movement of fish, sun, and wind. They looked on the invading Americans as another odd and temporary form of bad weather. Something to endure until it passed.

  All kinds of gear had been offloaded onto the beaches for an American style beach party, complete with a Frisbee chasing dog. Sergeant Washington was clearly in charge of the operation and if he had been Commanding General of the Army in the way he was getting this party set up, the war would have been over and won last year. As the top level professional grilling got going and the scent of BBQ sauce and sizzling steaks and big kettles of beans drifted down the beach, Izzy and Gregg wandered along the palm-rimmed sand with Margie and Nikki, K.O. trotting close with the Frisbee between her teeth. Ahead of them was a postcard scene of what old Vietnam must have been like before the wars.

  “The war doesn’t seem real here.” Izzy’s gaze was dreamlike, taking in this small fishing village where time stood still with its thatched bamboo houses and prosperous, well fed looking families. Frien
dly smiles accompanied friendly waves to the four of them and they waved back.

  “A world away,” Gregg agreed. “I’d say it’s a perfect place for some music. Maybe play us a few tunes later, Izzy?”

  “We’ll see,” he hedged, despite having parked his guitar next to Gregg’s surfboard at the spot they had claimed down the beach.

  “Hey, I’ve heard you practicing. No need to hide that kind of talent around here. A few beers and one of Sarge’s best steaks, and you’ll be our entertainment for the night.”

  “Gregg already sold us tickets.” Margie, quick to back Gregg up.

  “That’s right,” Nikki, right behind her, “so you can’t get out of it now.”

  “More than a buck and he scalped you.” Izzy grinned despite his claim as they stopped in the shade of some tall, graceful Ironwood pines looking out over the water.

  They all stood quiet for a while in a companionable silence, until Margie dabbed at her eyes, any joking around having somehow segued to a somber moment.

  “What’s wrong, Margie?” Izzy asked.

  Margie shook her head, the sun bouncing off the red hair she had piled on top like a luscious strawberry snow cone. Gregg knew it wasn’t for him she was looking extra fine as she impatiently swiped at her eyes.

  Izzy hesitantly put an arm around her shoulder, and that’s all it took for her to let it all go.

  “Izzy. . .Gregg. What are we doing? We must be sending out more and more crazy kids every week. They are like broken toys and we put a band-aid on them and send them right back out. What’s going to happen to them when they get back, what about their families, what are they going to do with them? What have we done to them? Shit. . .sorry, sorry. . .I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to lose it like this. We’re here for a picnic. Who’s ready for a steak and another beer? K.O. you can have part of mine, girl.”

  “It’s okay, Margie,” Gregg assured her. “You’re just telling it like it is, saying everything we’re all thinking every countdown day.”