Eddie’s stared. “You’re his wife?”
Short Time somehow scraped one more noodle off the plate and popped it into her mouth, and then she shifted her eyes up to Eddie.
“No more, I guess,” she said. “If Harry dead.”
Jesus wept. Eddie slumped back in his chair, shaking his head. Here we go again.
Thirty-One
AFTER Eddie gave him the slip, Chuck McBride went back to his office and made some calls.
He wanted to keep an eye on Eddie without getting too close, so he got four of his locals out quietly shaking the short-time hotels, not an inconsiderable task given the number of those things there were in Bangkok. He was pretty sure Bar was helping Eddie and his faithful Indian companion and, if he knew Bar and he was sure he did, he would have them holed up in one of those whorehouses he hung around. They sure as hell wouldn’t be in a suite at the Grand Hyatt. Just to be on the safe side, he also sent his best pair of Chinese bone-crushers to turn over some of the classier massage parlors, too. There were plenty of beds in those places—didn’t he know it? McBride thought with a grin—and maybe Bar was more imaginative than he thought.
Either way, Bangkok was a small town when you came right down to it, at least it was for farangs, and he was sure his people wouldn’t have any trouble finding Dare wherever he was hiding out. Yeah, when the big dog got off the porch, McBride chuckled contentedly to himself, there wasn’t much anybody could do about it but throw down a bone and haul ass.
Confident he would soon have everything back under control, McBride kicked off his loafers and sprawled on the couch. He had never liked Bangkok very much when he had been with DEA, although he had pretended to for the sake of the job, but as he lay on his couch with his hands clapsed behind his head he thought about all the fun he was having now.
The problem when he had been DEA was that no place was any fun when you were nothing but the town fool. Every major drug dealer in Asia operated openly in Bangkok and no one really wanted that to change. Even Khun Sa, probably the most famous heroin dealer on earth, would turn up every few months fresh from his labors in the Golden Triangle, get his teeth cleaned, and have lunch at the Hilton with his stockbroker. After he left town, McBride would inevitably discover that absolutely no one had seen him. Not the dentist, not the stockbroker, not even Mrs. Khun Sa who lived in a lovely home not far from Chitralada Palace that was complete with a goldfish pond, a white picket fence, and a bunch of other stuff McBride figured she must have seen in reruns of ‘Leave It To Beaver’ or some shit like that.
McBride’s job in Bangkok when he had been DEA was basically to show up every day and look mean. He operated as conspicuously as possible from a building on the grounds of the embassy and his function was officially described as intelligence gathering. The truth of it was that he didn’t do jack shit. He was just there to show that no one, by God, could run the United States of Fucking America out of a shitty little third world rat turd place like Bangkok. But of course someone could and, as a matter of fact, had. Nothing was keeping Uncle Sam’s tattered anti-drug banner flying anymore but a few fat, dickless losers driving around in dented Jeep Cherokees, wearing counterfeit Ray-Bans, and trying to keep their polo shirts pulled down over their paunches.
After a while, McBride hauled himself off the couch and, listening to his knees crack, stumbled into the bathroom. When he was done going to the toilet, he stood and examined himself in the mirror, something he noticed he had been inclined to do recently. He wondered briefly how much time he had left in life. He wasn’t being morbid about it; that was just a question of fact as far as he was concerned.
He had jumped at the chance of going over to CIA when they offered it to him. After six years as a DEA scarecrow, he wanted to do something real while he could still enjoy it. Then his desk officer at Langley had gotten a hard on over some rumors that a pile of money left over from the fall of Saigon was floating around Bangkok and he had laughed himself silly at first; but when he had found out that the rumors just might be true, that put a whole new spin on things.
What kind of middle-aged guy could resist a hunt for lost treasure in a place like Bangkok? It was all too goddamned romantic for words. Fuck those poor DEA bastards pretending to track down drug dealers. Chuck McBride was out there now looking around for ten tons of cash money.
When he stumbled onto Harry Austin, almost entirely by chance, and made the connection between Austin and the last days of Saigon, it started to mess with his mind. Harry Austin had been sitting on all that money for twenty years now. He couldn’t prove it in a court of law, of course; but now that he was CIA, he didn’t have to prove a goddamned thing. He just had to know it. And he knew it.
Still, there was something he just couldn’t figure. How could any man have a pile of cash like that, hundreds of millions of dollars in untraceable cash, and not do a fucking thing but bury it in the ground or something and then live in a crappy little apartment in a shithole like Bangkok for the rest of his life? McBride was sure he would have been in the south of France the day after grabbing the loot and that would have been that. Doing anything else was plainly nuts, so he guessed Austin must have been nuts. Occasionally he even wondered if it was just having all that money that had driven Austin mad, or if maybe it was something else.
Austin had probably been planning to let things cool off and then split, McBride had finally decided; but since twenty years of cooling off hardly seemed necessary, he guessed Austin had just never gotten around to doing it. It was, no doubt, one of those things he was always going to do real soon—and then there he was lying in the mud in some crummy street, his skull half crushed, bleeding to death. McBride would have bet his last dollar that Austin started wondering right then how it could have been that he had never taken off with the money, and that he had been wondering exactly that right at moment he just lay there and died.
Most people did that with their lives, McBride had realized a long time ago. They kept on putting off the good part until they were dead, and then there was no good part anymore. He had always done a lot of putting off himself, but his jump to CIA had flipped on a light; and then Harry Austin and his buried treasure had appeared to him like the Christmas star. Sure as shit, he vowed, he wasn’t going to put anything off anymore.
When Harry checked out of this world, McBride was absolutely certain he left something behind that pointed to where he had stashed all that loot. And he was going to find it, whatever it was.
At first, Austin’s hot little wife had seemed a good place to start looking, but then there had been that gnawing feeling he got that there was something about her that was off. It had taken a while, but he had finally worked out what it was: she didn’t know where the money was either and she was trying to work him to help find it. Fucking cunt. What nerve.
After that, everything went quiet for a while and McBride hadn’t been sure what he was going to do next. But then Bar Phillips turned up, sniffing around without a fucking clue like he always did, and this clown Eddie Dare and his Indian pal fell into his lap. Suddenly he was back in business.
McBride ran a comb through his hair and looked himself over again in the mirror. Better, he thought. Not so decrepit after all; at least still plenty good enough to get the babes in Bangkok where the male mating cycle lasted considerably longer than it did out in the real world. On the other hand, it suddenly occurred to him, maybe the south of France was a different deal altogether. Maybe the young guys got all the chicks there. He pushed that horror aside with a shudder and went back to thinking about Eddie Dare and Harry Austin’s secret stash.
He still didn’t have the vaguest idea how everything was going to come together, but he was sure that if he hung close to Dare something good would happen. The money was close now, he could smell it, and he was nearly certain Dare was going to find it, even if that dickhead didn’t know it yet himself.
Yep, that was just the ticket, he thought. Boogie on down the road right behind Eddie Dare,
keep his eyes open and his zipper closed, and eventually he would come to the magical city of Oz. He was still working on exactly what he would do when he got there, and he figured that was the really hard part.
He wondered what looking at ten tons of cash money did to a man. More to the point, he wondered what it was going to do to him.
Maybe it would do the same thing it had done to Austin, it had crossed his mind more than once. Maybe it would make him crazy and he would just grab all he could carry and disappear forever. On the other hand, what was so crazy about that? Maybe when you were looking at a pile of money that big, it was the only rational thing for any man to do.
Anyway, he decided, patting his cheeks with his open palms, he wasn’t going to worry about that yet. McBride’s daddy always said that the hen was the smartest animal in the world because she never clucked until after she had laid her egg. McBride held that thought for a minute; then he opened the bathroom door, went back to the couch, and laid himself out to take a nap while his guys shook down Bangkok looking for Eddie Dare.
***
WHEN Bar walked into the Little Princess, he was empty handed and Eddie decided Bar must have crapped out on getting the weapons he had asked for. But then a taxi driver staggered in just behind Bar. He was struggling under the weight of a dark blue duffel bag and Eddie smiled. The man dropped the bag next to Eddie’s stool where Bar pointed and, after he left, Eddie unzipped it and pulled it open until he could inventory the contents without taking anything out.
“Three army surplus .45s, three almost-new Berettas, and a hundred rounds for each.” Bar kept his face empty. “You owe me 29,000 baht plus a couple of hundred for the taxi. Make it $850 and we’ll call it even.”
“Grenades?” Eddie searched the bags with his eyes.
“They take two days. The samples he gave me looked pretty good, but I figured two days was too long so I passed.”
“What’s the shotgun for?”
“For looks. Mostly.”
Bar settled himself on a stool and called out for a Carlsberg while Eddie closed the bag and pushed it up against the bar with the toe of his shoe.
While Bar was drinking his beer, Eddie told him about the conversation with Short Time and they both swung around to look her over. She had pushed her empty plate aside and her head was on the table resting on her folded arms. She looked like she had gone to sleep.
“What do you think?” Eddie asked Bar.
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“You think she’s telling the truth about Captain Austin?”
“Yeah. And Richard Nixon was just misunderstood.”
They looked at Short Time some more, but there wasn’t very much to see, so they turned back to the bar and leaned on their elbows, resting their chins on their clasped hands.
There was a long, uneasy silence until Winnebago finally broke it.
“What the fuck are we doing here, Eddie?” he asked. “We’re stuck in some broken-ass, third-world crap hole 10,000 miles from home; we’re drinking shitty beer in a whorehouse with no whores; and we’re running away from a bunch of people who would kill us in a second for something we haven’t got and don’t know how to find. Does this make any sense to you?”
“Did you ever hear the old saying about having to be there when your ship comes in?”
“Yeah, but I’ve also heard the one about it not being over until the fat lady sings and the bitch is doing scales in my ear right now.”
“Well,” Eddie shrugged, “there you have it. That’s exactly what life generally comes down to: a choice between clichés.”
Bar shook his head and climbed off his stool. “This is getting us nowhere. I’m going to take a leak.”
“Me, too,” Winnebago said.
Winnebago followed Bar across the room and into what he gathered was the bathroom. When he got inside, he saw it was the kind of toilet that just begged people to piss on the floor. In fact that was the only option, since it was nothing but an empty room with three holes in the stained concrete, each hole surrounded by what looked like a broken toilet seat stuck to the floor.
“What the fuck is this?” Winnebago asked.
Bar unzipped and began relieving himself into one of the holes.
“They’re called squat toilets,” he said.
Winnebago followed Bar’s example and relieved himself in the nearest hole. It felt a little weird to piss into a hole in the floor, but then he supposed a piss was a piss. Something else bothered him though.
“You mean you have to sit on the floor to take a dump?” he asked.
Bar shook off and zipped up. “See those little footrests?”
Now that Bar mentioned it, Winnebago noticed that there were indeed tiny footprints imprinted on the seats, like the kind children made with their feet in drying concrete.
“You squat with one foot on each side and let go,” Bar said.
Winnebago watched his urine splashing into one of the little footrests and shook his head in disgust. Finishing up, he zipped his pants and he had just turned around to leave when he saw that Bar looking at him with an odd expression.
Holding one finger over his lips for silence, Bar cracked open the door and nodded toward it. Winnebago squinted out and, although his field of vision was limited, it was easy enough to see what had spooked Bar.
Two very large men were right up in Eddie’s face, their back toward the toilet door. Both were wearing leather jackets even though it must have been ninety degrees outside and, while Bar and Winnebago couldn’t see either man’s hands, their postures left little doubt that they were holding weapons in front of them.
Bar nudged Winnebago and gestured with his head to the opposite side of the room. Short Time had risen from the table where she had been slumped with her head down and was edging slowly toward the corner of the bar furthest away from Eddie and the two men. At first Winnebago thought she was just getting her little butt out of there, but then he saw the beer bottle she had down out of sight against her leg.
When she reached the other side of the bar, she leaned against it for a moment as if paying no attention to anyone. One of the leather jackets glanced toward her briefly, but quickly dismissed her and returned his full attention to Eddie who was talking and gesturing vigorously.
After the man had turned completely away from her, Short Time flipped the beer bottle very deliberately across the room. It crashed against a wall and both men pivoted immediately toward the sound. When they came around, Bar and Winnebago could see that they were both holding AK-47s with long banana clips curling gracefully away from the polished wood of their stocks.
“Oh fuck,” Winnebago breathed. “I thought that spook said the Vietnamese used knives.”
“They’re not Vietnamese,” Bar whispered. “They’re locals. Thai-Chinese.”
“Locals? Then exactly who the fuck is after our ass now?”
Bar just grunted, but he didn’t say anything. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Short Time’s hands dart under the counter while the two men were distracted. When they reappeared, to his surprise they cradled a pump-action 12-gauge sawed off just in front of the slide. In a single, fluid motion Short Time took a few quick strides down the bar, dropped out of sight beneath it, and racked the weapon’s action to chamber a round.
The ragged clack-clack of a shotgun’s pump is an unmistakable sound to anyone who has ever heard it. The leather jackets apparently had. They reacted instinctively, knowing now that the crash had been only a distraction. Spinning toward the sound, they split apart and crouched low, painting the room with their weapons looking for the real threat.
When the man closest to Eddie turned, his feet shifted automatically into a wide stance, both knees slightly bent and his body ready to roll in either direction. It wasn’t the best posture for defending himself and Eddie reacted quickly. He gripped the sides of his stool with his hands, cocked his right leg, and drove his heel into the back of the man’s exposed knee. As the man lost his ba
lance and toppled sideways, Eddie sprang from the stool, clasped his hands together, and clubbed him hard behind his left ear. The cracking of hands against bone and Eddie’s screech of pain came almost simultaneously, followed soon after by the thump of the man’s heavy body hitting the floor.
Winnebago and Bar were out the toilet door and hurtling across the room as soon as Eddie made his move. Scattering tables and chairs, Bar broke for the man Eddie had put on the ground, and Winnebago launched himself at the other one, but he need not have bothered. Short Time had already popped up from behind the bar and the muzzle of her sawed-off shotgun was poking him in the belly.
The man looked Short Time over, weighing his chances, but her eyes left no room for doubt. Slowly he lowered his gun, placed it on the floor, and clasped his hands on top of his head. Short Time came around the bar, kicked the AK across the room, and slammed the barrel of the shotgun across the side of the man’s face. He evidently knew the drill, because he quickly went flat on the floor, his hands behind his back.
The first man was beginning to push himself up off the floor and Bar hurled himself through the air directly at him. Eddie’s foot quickly lashed out and caught the man squarely in the head; and by the time Bar landed, there was nothing left to hit except the floor. Bar howled in pain as his kneecaps smashed into the hardwood.
Eddie bent over and grabbed the AK.
“Serves you right,” he said as he straightened up. “Was that the world’s longest piss you were taking out there or what? Even I was starting to run out of bullshit.”
Bar got off the floor and looked at the man lying crumpled next to where he had hit. He rubbed at his knees and then kicked the guy in the head just for the hell of it.
“You come with me.” Short Time tugged insistently at Eddie’s elbow. “All you. Come with me.”
Eddie shook his head. “We’re going to get some straight answers from these clowns first.”
“No! Now! With me.”
She whispered something in Thai to the girl in the shapeless dress who was tending bar and handed her the sawed-off shotgun. Motioning urgently for Eddie to follow, she trotted across the room and disappeared through a back door.
Big Mango (9786167611037) Page 26
