The Three-Nine Line

by David Freed

“Not just your language skills, Colonel.” I watched his hands. “You have a long history of violent behavior. Your actions precede you.”

  “You mean that little dust-up with my neighbors, the property line dispute? They were the ones who came after me. I was merely defending myself. The case never even went to trial.”

  “The knife you killed the guard with had paint on it. The paint was oil-based, waterproof, the same color as your hull— aquamarine. If I had to put money on it, I’d bet that further analysis will prove them to be an identical chemical match.”

  Cohen’s trousers were baggy enough to hide a full-frame handgun. Had he reached into his pockets, I would’ve drawn my revolver and might’ve been forced to shoot him, but he didn’t do that. He did something I never expected: he began to sob.

  I closed the distance between us and reached out to comfort my old professor, to tell him that, regardless of what he’d done, everything would be okay, one way or the other. That was my first mistake, letting down my guard. The second was in not realizing that there might’ve been someone else on the boat, in the cabin below.

  Carl Underwood Jr. was standing at the base of the ladder, arms extended in a two-handed combat crouch, aiming a 9-millimeter Glock up at me.

  “Try anything funny,” he said, “and I’ll blow your shit away.”

  I knew that Mercy and her team were watching us at that moment through their field glasses. Assuming standard tactical procedures were in effect, I also was aware that at least two high-powered sniper rifles were likely trained on Cohen from covering fields of fire. Unfortunately none of that surveillance or weaponry did me much good considering that Mercy’s team couldn’t see Underwood and were therefore unaware of his presence. I was tempted to alert them via some sort of subtle distress signal—mouthing the word “gun,” perhaps—but the rising panic in Underwood’s eyes told me he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot if spooked.

  I turned around and, facing the ladder, climbed down into the boat. Cohen followed me.

  The cabin was trimmed in varnished teak and smelled faintly of diesel fuel. Underwood backed up, careful to maintain a safe margin between us, giving him time to fire should I lunge at him, his eyes never leaving mine.

  “Check him for weapons.”

  “Please,” Cohen said, “this isn’t necessary. Mr. Logan’s a former student of mine. He’s not going to—”

  “Shut up and do what I tell you,” Underwood said, cutting him off.

  Cohen frisked me. The revolver wedged in my belt wasn’t hard to find.

  I repeated to Underwood what I’d told Cohen, that a heavily armed tactical team had the boat surrounded, and that there was no way out for either of them.

  “The absolute best thing you can do,” I said, “is to lay your piece down on that table, then we walk out of here together, the three of us, nice and easy. I’ll buy you both a cup of coffee and we can talk this all out. C’mon, Carl, what d’you say?”

  Underwood snatched my revolver from Cohen. He now had a gun in each hand trained on me. “I had it all worked out, every detail,” he said. “Then you came along and had to screw everything up.”

  “What did I screw up, Carl? Tell me?”

  “What did you screw up? Everything. Try my father’s honor, for starters.”

  “Your father? I don’t understand.”

  “Carl senior was one of the most courageous men I have ever known,” Cohen said, looking at Underwood. “You’ve done his name proud your entire life, son, but he never would’ve wanted all this. Now, please, Carl, put the gun down.”

  And then it dawned on me: Carl Underwood, Junior.

  “Your father, Carl Senior, died at the Hanoi Hilton,” I said. “He was tortured to death.”

  “He passed in my arms,” Cohen said. “Made me promise to look after his son if I ever got out alive. I’ve tried all these years. To the best of my ability, God knows, I’ve tried to be the father he never knew.”

  Underwood’s eyes were wet. “You have, Colonel. I’ll always be grateful.”

  “We wrote letters back and forth, talked on the phone almost every weekend,” Cohen said. “Christmas vacations with my wife and his mother. We tried to spend as much time together as we could, didn’t we, Carl? I owed your dad that much.”

  “Including helping Carl Jr. murder Mr. Wonderful?” I asked.

  “Colonel Cohen had nothing to do with it,” Underwood said angrily.

  “What about the knife, Carl?”

  “You won’t find my prints on it. I wore gloves.”

  “Why did you tell me about the paint? You knew I’d find out it matched the colonel’s boat.”

  “You said you were working for the White House. I threw you a bone, to get you off my back.”

  “You knew that the whole trade agreement, the big State Department dinner, would make good cover. It allowed you to ask questions about Mr. Wonderful—his schedule, his habits, where he’d be that night—without raising suspicions. Nobody’d ever suspect a thing. You wanted me to think the Vietnamese killed Mr. Wonderful. That’s why you told me Tan Sang collected knives. It’s why you told me his car was seen that night near the lake. You hoped Washington would blame him for the murder, create a stalemate, force the Vietnamese to release Stoneburner and Colonel Cohen.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?” Underwood said.

  “Not all. The paint on the knife. I still don’t get how it got there.”

  “I was at Langley for meetings about a month ago. I stopped on my way back to Vietnam, to see Colonel Cohen. We talked about his big upcoming trip to Hanoi, how nervous and excited he was about going back after all these years. He was working on his boat. I was happy to pitch in. A speck of paint got on the blade. I should’ve noticed it. I didn’t.”

  “You knew Colonel Cohen would be arrested along with Stoneburner. They’d be the likely suspects, and you killed the guard anyway.”

  “I thought they’d all be home by the time they found the son of a bitch. I thought they were all going back with Billy Hallady.” He turned to Cohen. “Isn’t that what you told me, Colonel. You were all going back at the same time?”

  “I never said that, Carl.”

  “Makes sense, though,” I said. “Once everybody was back stateside, Hanoi could scream bloody murder all it wanted, but there’s no extradition treaty with the US. Everybody would be safe, your father’s death would be avenged, and Mr. Wonderful would be sitting in an urn on his widow’s shelf. Is that how you saw it all going down, Carl?”

  “If you think I’m going to prison for doing what had to be done, you’re flat wrong,” Underwood said. “All you’re doing is opening up old wounds. I can’t let you do that.”

  He leveled my revolver at me.

  “Carl, please,” Cohen said, pleading, “don’t do this. I’m begging you.”

  “Don’t you see, Colonel? This is the only way. Doctor Barker here, or whatever the hell his real name is, shows up unannounced and says he has evidence implicating you in a murder. He wants money to keep quiet. Then, when he realizes you can’t be broken, just like my father, he’s overcome by guilt and shoots himself with his own weapon.”

  “For god’s sake, Carl, you’re delusional,” Cohen said. “Give me the weapon.”

  Underwood thumbed the hammer back. With a frightening calmness, he whispered, “No.”

  I went for his legs at the very instant Cohen lunged for the gun. Grunting and straining, the two men grappled for no more than a second or two before it went off.

  At first, I wasn’t sure who’d been shot. Then, slowly, Cohen slipped from Underwood’s grasp and collapsed. I could see a bullet hole in the center of his sweatshirt, the edges of it blackened by gunpowder. There wasn’t much blood, really.

  In that moment, Underwood, his face filled with the horrific realization of what he’d done, seemed to forget I was there and knelt beside Cohen, cradling him. The sorrowful cry that escaped his lips is something I’ll never forget. The
n before I could react, he raised the revolver to his right temple and squeezed the trigger for a second time. This time, there was plenty of blood.

  I hoped the gunshots would draw a response from Mercy’s tactical team, but hope never saved lives. I thumbed 9-1-1 into my phone and applied direct pressure to Cohen’s chest wound with my other hand. He was still breathing but barely.

  “The way is not in the sky,” he whispered. “The way is in the heart.”

  “The Buddha.”

  Cohen nodded, pleased that I recognized the quote. Then he closed his eyes.

  “Don’t do this, Colonel. C’mon, hang in there. Stay with me.”

  Outside, people were yelling my name.

  “Down here!”

  I could feel wetness on my cheeks. For a moment, I thought I’d been grazed by a bullet fragment. But it wasn’t blood that had dampened my skin.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Each morning, we are born again. What we do today matters most. The Buddha said those words more than 2,500 years ago. They are, however, as fresh to me as every new sunrise. It was in that context of essentially being reborn that I was better able to compartmentalize the death of Carl Underwood Jr. and my inability to have prevented him from taking his own life. A man can steep forever in guilt, dwell forever on the capricious nature of fate, its inexplicable cruelties. At some point, he has to let it all go and move on, to savor the new day, or slowly perish emotionally. I chose the former course.

  Journalists didn’t make the process easier. For two weeks, unconfirmed, often half-baked reports of what had occurred in Hanoi and in the Monterey marina dominated front pages and the nightly news. Thanks to the White House’s masterful job of spin control, though, much of what passed for factual reporting was reduced to little more than conjecture as administration officials maneuvered to bury the truth and salvage the big trade agreement with Vietnam.

  The glossed-over version fed to the public was that Carl Underwood Jr. was a troubled man with a history of mental illness that had gone mostly undetected during his tenure with the State Department. His rumored ties to the CIA were categorically denied. Cohen, meanwhile, was described as a “family friend” with whom Underwood had a “close but conflicted personal relationship.” Underwood died in what was officially described as an attempted “murder-suicide” after Cohen threatened to tell authorities what he knew of Underwood’s role in the death of Mr. Wonderful. The White House version made no mention of my presence in the case. It was as if I never existed, which was fine by me.

  Airlifted to the Level One Trauma Center at San Francisco General Hospital, Cohen would undergo emergency surgery and spend nearly a month in the intensive care unit, recovering from his wound. I stayed with him for the first couple of weeks until he insisted I go home.

  “Beautiful things happen when you distance yourself from the negative,” he told me.

  Turns out my former philosophy professor was right.

  About a week after I returned to Rancho Bonita, I got an e-mail from my interpreter, Nguyen Phu Dung. Colonel Tan Sang had made good on his word to release him unharmed. Phu Dung said he’d made his way to Laos, where he had relatives, and that he’d begun the long application process, seeking political asylum in the United States. I wrote back and offered to help any way I could. I told him we’d go flying when he made it to California. I also told him I would show an old MiG-21 driver how a real fighter pilot handles an airplane. As of this writing, I’ve yet to hear back from him. I hope he knows I was only yanking his chain.

  Mrs. Schmulowitz was thrilled to have me back—not only because she once again had someone to cook for, but because, she said, she was exhausted, having to play with Kiddiot all the time in my absence.

  “You can’t believe the tricks I’ve taught him,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, pouring me a cup of coffee in her kitchen. “This cat, he’s a genius!”

  With that, she opened a drawer near the sink and got out a wad of aluminum foil as Kiddiot sat looking up at her intently, swishing his tail side to side and making little chirping noises.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “watch this.”

  She tossed the foil ball across the kitchen floor.

  Kiddiot went skittering after it like he was being chased by coyotes. I never realized he was capable of that kind of speed. He batted the ball maniacally as he slid across the floor on his belly, before gently picking it up in his mouth and returning it like a well-trained Labrador retriever to Mrs. Schmulowitz’s outstretched hand.

  “Here. You try it.”

  She handed me the foil ball. I tossed it just as she had done. Kiddiot sat impassively and watched it roll across the floor until it stopped. He scratched his right ear with his right rear paw and yawned. Then he got up and walked out of the room.

  “Don’t feel bad, bubby. You know he loves you.”

  “Actually, Mrs. Schmulowitz, I don’t know that, but that’s okay.” I gulped the last of my coffee and set the cup in the sink. “Anyway, I’ll see you later. I’m late for a date.”

  “A date? A date with who? I have to be the last person on the planet to hear of these things? Who is she? What does she look like?”

  “I really do have to go.”

  “Go!” she said, pecking me on the cheek. “Have a ball. I hope you score. You know, if everybody in this world scored more often, there’d be no wars.”

  “From your lips, Mrs. Schmulowitz, to the Buddha’s ears.”

  V

  I drove up to the airport. Larry wasn’t there. Alicia Rosario was, though, waiting outside his hangar in a banana yellow VW bug convertible with the top down.

  “Hey, sorry,” I said, parking next to her and jumping out of my old Tacoma pickup. “I promise I’ll be on time for our next lesson—assuming you still want to go flying with me after this one.”

  She smiled, her eyes cloaked behind aviator sunglasses. “I suppose we’ll just have to see, won’t we?”

  Maybe it was the exquisite proportions of her face, her brown skin against the white tank top, or the way her ebony hair, which had grown longer since I’d last seen her, caught the breeze and the light. Maybe it was the low-riding jeans that highlighted the curve of her hips, or her open-toed sandals and burgundy toenails, or the fact that she’s a cop. Hell, there’s something inherently alluring in that alone—the whole beautiful-woman-with-a-gun-and-handcuffs fantasy. Whatever it was, all I knew was at that moment, as Alicia Rosario stepped out of her car, I found myself undeniably attracted to her. When she put her arms around my waist and hugged me, it only confirmed the sentiment.

  “How’re you doing, Logan? It’s been what, a couple years? You look great.”

  “You look more than great. How’ve you been, Alicia?”

  “Oh, you know. Same old, same old. I figured I needed a little change of pace, so here I am, right?”

  “I’m really glad you came. I didn’t think you would. San Diego to Rancho Bonita, that’s no easy drive.”

  “Hey, the sun’s up, got my top down. California dreamin’, you know? Besides, anybody who got in my way, I just waved my badge at ’em.”

  “Personally? I might’ve shot them.”

  She laughed. Neither of us mentioned the night in San Diego when we’d come exquisitely close to making love but hadn’t. Savannah and I were working hard back then to reconcile. Savannah was now gone. Times change. People change. And now, fast-forward, here we were.

  “My plane’s right over here.” I punched my computer code into the reader on the chain-link fence outside Larry’s hangar, then held the security gate open for her. We walked out onto the flight line. Winds were light and out of the southeast. The sky was cloudless. A perfect day to introduce anyone to the joys of flying.

  “You remember the Duck,” I said.

  “Do I remember?” Alicia laughed. “Pretty difficult to forget an airplane I once nearly got killed in.”

  “Yeah, I could see how the experience might reinforce certain memories.”

>   “I’m just glad you got it all fixed up. Looks good as new.”

  “The Duck says thanks.”

  Distracted as I was by memories of what she looked like naked, I was determined to maintain my certified flight instructor professionalism. She’d called to say she was interested in taking flying lessons, not to explore the possibility of rekindling a fledgling romantic relationship. I intended to keep it that way. Aboveboard. Honorable.

  “The first things we need to talk about,” I said, “are safety procedures. Safety is paramount in aviation. As my first instructor told me, ‘Unless you know what you’re doing, an airplane can kill you faster than just about anything.’ Now, before we actually get in the airplane, I’d like to demonstrate the—”

  Alicia held up her palm to silence me. “Before we get into all that there’s something I’ve been meaning to demonstrate, too. And I’ve been waiting nearly two years to do it.”

  She kissed me.

  In that instant, I was transported back to my days studying literature at the Air Force Academy, to that line from the English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.”

  Did I give Alicia a flying lesson that day, or did we retire instead to my apartment where we spent the afternoon teaching each other how to soar in different ways? I could tell you, but then I’d have to . . . well, you know . . .