Eddie wanted to take one more try at persuading Austin to go with them before he called it quits, but when he looked around he noticed that the captain had disappeared. He had apparently slipped back inside while they were loading, so Eddie walked back through Poncho’s and up the hallway to the Green Latrine. When he discovered that Austin had locked the door to the storeroom behind him, he was a little surprised, but he assumed it must have happened by mistake so he went back outside. While the others hooked the security straps around the crates and then cinched them to the U-bolts welded into the frames of the vans, Eddie walked up soi 23 to get around to the Latrine’s front door.
He slipped past a food cart from which a smiling woman was doing a brisk business selling plastic bags filled with an unidentifiable yellow liquid, and then he turned right into Soi Cowboy. He took a few steps, slowing while his eyes searched out the front of the Green Latrine. Then he stopped abruptly, and blinked quickly a few times trying to absorb what he saw.
Lek was pushing gently with one hand against the Latrine’s front door while two Vietnamese men with the unmistakable look of pros took up positions on either side to seal off any escape from the building. Eddie was pretty sure he could pick out at least two more soldiers hovering not far away, their eyes also fixed on the Latrine.
Eddie slid back into the crowd and quickly retraced his steps.
***
IT hadn’t taken long for Lek’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. As soon as they did, she took stock of the room. The place was thick with dust. Tables, chairs and bar stools had been shoved haphazardly around and the floor was littered with debris. Splintered wood, nails, dirt and broken bottles were everywhere.
Her caution kept her motionless in the shadows, but when no threat materialized, her curiosity finally got the better of her. She rose slowly from her crouch and began to edge across the room, poking carefully at the wreckage with her foot. Her eyes scanned methodically for an explanation as to what might have happened, but she found none.
She was almost in the middle of the room when she heard a click that made her freeze. A male voice spoke from somewhere behind her.
“Hey, Lek. What took you so long?”
Instinctively, she dropped to the floor and roll away from the sound even as she registered that it was Harry Austin’s voice she was hearing. He had faked his death, the clever old bastard.
Lek crashed against a chair and felt her shoulder hit the wall furthest from where the sound had originated. She pushed herself up and edged along, her back pressed against it, looking for cover.
It was only a few seconds before she felt the cold metal against her neck. Knowing immediately that it was the muzzle of a gun, she stopped moving without a word.
“I’m right here, honey. These remote-control tape things are slicker than owl shit down a greased tube, ain’t they?”
Austin grabbed Lek by the hair with his free hand jerking her head roughly backward. She grunted, but did not cry out.
“Let it go, baby doll,” Austin said.
Lek opened her hand and the knife clattered to the floor.
“Now there’s one more thing I need for you to do, darlin’,” Austin said in a cheerful voice. “Scream real loud a few times, would you?”
Lek didn’t respond right away, trying to work out what Austin was up to.
He jerked hard on her hair again, slamming her head against the wall.
“Your goons are outside and I want them in here. That’s simple enough, ain’t it? So, a nice loud scream, please, or I’ll shoot you through a kneecap to get it.”
To underscore his seriousness, Austin snapped Lek’s head against the wall again, harder this time.
Lek couldn’t see what harm it could do her, so she gave Austin the long, wailing scream he wanted.
Almost immediately the two Vietnamese covering the front door burst into the room followed quickly by the two who had been hovering out in the street. Keeping low and clearing their weapons smoothly, they split apart until they had Austin and Lek covered from four widely separated angles.
“Okay, Harry, we’re all here. Now what?”
“Only four?” He sounded almost amused. “You’re traveling light these days, baby. I’m not worth anything heavier than that?”
“Fuck you, Harry.”
If Lek could have seen Austin’s face, she would have realized that he was smiling; but she couldn’t, so she tried the obvious tack.
“We can make a deal, Harry. You can still save yourself.”
Lek could feel Austin shaking his head.
“It’s the others I’m worried about now, Lek. I got no chance anymore. No chance at all.”
“You’re dead if you hurt me, Harry.”
Austin laughed. “No, honey, I’m dead anyway.”
Before Lek could work out what Austin meant by that, he told her in a matter-of-fact voice.
“It’s cancer, they say. If I shoot you now, I just get dead a little sooner, that’s all.”
Suddenly, unmistakably, Lek knew exactly why Austin had wanted her to scream and pull her men inside. And she saw in a flash of total clarity just what he was going to do.
She lunged desperately away from him, dropping toward the floor and groping at the place where her knife had fallen. It was a hopeless gesture.
Harry Austin’s old .45 was loaded with hollow points, rounds that tumbled and twisted on contact, chewing into bone and tissue alike, ripping away everything in their path. He had wedged the pistol’s muzzle solidly into the flesh under Lek’s chin and her weight falling toward the floor only jammed it tighter.
When he felt Lek begin to move, Austin squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession. The roar of the .45’s detonations were deafening in the small room and all four of the Vietnamese instinctively opened fire. In an angry counterpoint of silenced coughs, they emptied their clips into Austin, but the shots came far too late to do Lek any good.
Both she and Austin were dead before either of them found the floor.
Thirty-Seven
THE two Toyota vans were parked about fifty yards up soi 23 facing away from Soi Cowboy. By the time Eddie got back to them, Bar had finished strapping the crates down in the closest one and was just closing the back doors. Winnebago was still working inside the other.
Eddie took Bar by the elbow, towing him quickly through Poncho’s and up the hallway toward the Green Latrine describing to him as they walked what he had just seen. He had barely finished when they both heard a woman scream, followed shortly by an unmistakable explosion of gunfire.
“Oh, Christ,” Eddie shouted as he leaped toward the back door of the Latrine. “We’ve got to get the captain out of there!”
Bar grabbed Eddie’s arm and pulled him away from the door, his eyes flat. “Didn’t you see him send Short Time away?” Bar asked.
“What’s that got to do with—”
“He was protecting her, Eddie.”
Bar pointed to the locked door, still holding onto Eddie’s arm with his other hand. “When he went back in there and locked the door, he was doing the same thing for us. He knew Lek was coming. He was buying us time.”
Eddie shook off Bar’s hand and stared at the locked door.
“He’s dead, Eddie. That’s the way he planned it. Now we’ve got to get the fuck out of here before we’re next.”
Eddie took a deep breath and started to say something, but Bar was already pulling him away and Eddie allowed himself to be led back up the hallway in silence. He knew Bar was right.
As they stepped out of Poncho’s, there was a ching on the wall next to Eddie’s cheek and brick dust showered his face. Eddie and Bar dived behind the nearest Toyota, hugging the concrete as more shots ricocheted off the buildings along the sidewalk and pinged into the van.
Eddie glanced back over his shoulder. He saw Winnebago’s eyes go as big as saucers and he waved at him to take cover behind the crates in the second van. Whatever else a crate full of money was good for, it ou
ght to stop bullets, he thought.
The shots came from the direction of Soi Cowboy and, since he had heard no audible reports, Eddie gathered they were from silenced weapons, probably handguns. He guessed it could have been worse. They could have been staring down the wrong end of a rocket launcher.
When he risked a quick bob of his head toward Cowboy to reconnoiter, the movement drew a second volley of shots. They missed, and Eddie got a clear look at Lek’s soldiers.
Two of them were edging carefully into soi 23 and two more were providing cover from behind a parked motorcycle. Beyond them, Cowboy seemed to be partying on as usual. A few people glanced toward the Vietnamese, but they looked more amused than concerned at the antics of the four men.
“I don’t see Lek,” Eddie’s said and his face creased in a tight smile. “I’ll bet the captain got her.”
As the sound of the second volley died away, Winnebago’s old reflexes took over. He high-stepped his way smartly up from the second van, drawing more shots that went high and wide, and flattened himself between Eddie and Bar.
“We’re loaded,” he said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Eddie noticed Winnebago didn’t ask about Captain Austin. Maybe he had already guessed what had happened.
Glancing over his shoulder and measuring the soi behind them, Eddie shook his head. “We’ll never make it,” he said. “They’ll cut us up before we get out of range.”
“How could I have left those guns at the Princess?” Bar slapped his cheek with his open palm a couple of times. “Stupid. Fucking stupid.”
“They don’t know if we’re armed,” Eddie said. “They’ll hang back until they decide.”
Eddie glanced up and down the soi again, and then he scanned the walls of the buildings that lined both sides. He sighed deeply and made a hopeless gesture with his open palms. “We could always throw rocks at them, I guess.”
Bar thought about that for a second, and then shoved his hands down into the deep side-pockets of his fatigue trousers. “Or these might be better,” he said.
And like a magician dipping into a top hat, Bar produced two hand grenades, one from each pocket.
Eddie couldn’t believe it. “Where the hell did you get those?”
“The guy I bought the guns from gave them to me. They’re the samples I told you about. I forgot I had them until something just reminded me. Can’t imagine what.”
Eddie took the grenades from Bar and hefted one in each hand. “Oh man, oh man. Aren’t these the most beautiful things you ever saw?”
“Ah…” Bar broke in reluctantly. “Don’t get too carried away.” He pointed to a smear of red paint on one of the grenades. “That one’s not real.”
Eddie closed his eyes. “It’s a dummy?”
“Not quite. But it’s only a smoker.”
The Vietnamese had begun working their way cautiously up the soi in a two-by-two cover formation. The lack of any return fire was making them bolder.
“Well, hell,” Eddie shook his head. He bounced the grenades up and down in his hands. “I guess you work with what you got.”
He switched the live one to his left hand and rose into a half crouch. Pulling the pin on the smoke grenade in his right and clinching the spoon tightly, he duck-walked his way around the van, staying down out of sight as long as he could. When he reached a spot where he was sure he would be in the clear, he bobbed up with his arm cocked, and launched the smoke grenade in a perfect arc over Austin’s old Nissan right down the middle of soi 23. By the time it hit the concrete, the Vietnamese were already reacting as Eddie knew they would, falling back into Soi Cowboy and flattening themselves against a wall to ride out the explosion.
But there was no explosion.
The grenade hit the concrete with a solid cling and bounced a couple of times before it lay still. After a moment, it gave out with a long, slow hiss, and began emitting a thick cloud of yellow smoke that quickly filled the soi.
On the downwind side of the smoke, part of the Cowboy crowd had worked out that something nasty was happening and a few people started to scramble away without being entirely certain what they were running from or where they were running to. The Vietnamese ignored them as well as the hysterical screams of two girls who had seen the grenade hit. The four men peered cautiously around the corner into soi 23, trying to decide if the smoke was the only thing that was coming at them or if something much more unpleasant was just behind it.
On the upwind side of the smoke, Eddie was busy. As soon as he let the smoke grenade go, he sprinted back to where Bar and Winnebago were crouched.
“You take the first van, Bar.” Eddie pointed at the Toyota that was furthest away up the soi, “And lead us out of here to the main road.” He twisted his head toward Winnebago. “You get this one started and sit tight until I get back.”
Eddie shifted the live grenade to his right hand and looked back at Bar, who hadn’t moved. “Take off, man!” he snapped. “Do it now!”
Bar and Winnebago glanced uncomfortably at each other, neither wanting to leave Eddie alone to do whatever it was he had in mind.
“Do what I’m telling you!” Eddie screamed at them. “Move your goddamned fucking butts!”
And they moved their goddamned fucking butts.
Within a few seconds, Bar was powering the first van up soi 23 away from the Vietnamese while Winnebago fidgeted at the wheel of the second, its engine idling.
By then, Eddie had sprinted forward again and jerked open the back doors of Austin’s old Nissan van. He climbed through the cargo space and vaulted into the driver’s seat. The engine fired on the first try and Eddie let out a thankful sigh. He yanked the shift lever into drive and accelerated down the soi toward the yellow smoke.
When the Vietnamese heard engines turning over and the unmistakable sound of vehicles moving, they quickly abandoned their cover positions and plunged out of Cowboy, zigzagging through the swirling smoke and firing as they ran. They were now certain the smoke had been only a diversion; that nothing else was coming at them.
It was a miscalculation on which none of them would have long to dwell.
As the Nissan hit the edge of the smoke, Eddie made the steering wheel as steady as he could. In a single motion, he rolled over the seat and out through the flapping rear doors. When he hit the ground, he staggered slightly, but he kept his feet. He pulled the pin from the grenade, and lobbed it underhanded into the Nissan’s open cargo space.
The driverless van wobbled from one side of soi 23 to the other, but it kept going toward Cowboy. It crunched over a pile of empty cardboard boxes, grated against the front of a building, and then nosed into the thickest part of the smoke. Shots from the four charging Vietnamese thudded off its front and sides and Eddie heard the windshield go with a pop.
Scrambling back to the Toyota where Winnebago waited behind the wheel, Eddie was screaming, “Go! Go! Go!” even before he wrenched open the passenger door and dived inside. As Winnebago slammed the accelerator to the floor and popped the clutch, the sounds of two separate and distinct explosions punctuated their departure. The hand grenade went first and, a split second later, the gas tank of the Nissan.
As the two sounds rolled up together, they reverberated back and forth between the buildings lining soi 23, amplifying themselves into an awesome, guttural rumbling. In the background, Eddie was sure he could also pick out another sound, too: the higher-pitched staccato rhythm of the rounds carried by the four Vietnamese exploding. They were going off one by one, tapping out a minor key counterpoint to the bass roar of the explosion.
***
WHEN they closed up on the lead van, Eddie leaned out his window far enough to give Bar a thumb’s up sign and a big wave. Winnebago thumped the horn a couple of times for emphasis, scaring the hell out of two schoolgirls who had been puttering peacefully along the curb on a motorbike until the three farangs flew by in the Ambassador Hotel vans.
Eddie felt his surge of adrenaline fade as quickly
as it had come and he slid back inside thevan, rolled up the window, and settled heavily into his seat.
Winnebago glanced over. “You couldn’t have done anything for the captain. This was the way he planned for it to end.”
Eddie just nodded, his eyes straight ahead. He knew Winnebago was right, but he was still going to have to live with it for a while before he stopped thinking about it.
The two vans fell into convoy through the nighttime streets of Bangkok, winding their way toward the Pattaya highway. Winnebago focused his attention on following Bar and didn’t say anything else for a long time.
Eventually he glanced over at Eddie and wiggled his eyebrows up and down a couple of times. “Pretty good moves for an old guy,” he said.
Eddie smiled a little at that and then he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.
He wondered briefly if he should start trying to put everything that had happened to him over the last few weeks into some kind of perspective, to begin trying to understand exactly where he had ended up and how he had gotten there. But it was too soon, and it wouldn’t come, so he didn’t dwell on it. Anyway, he decided, he was thinking like a lawyer again. He really was going to have to stop doing that.
Inhale and exhale. Don’t try to hold your breath. Not in this air.
Suddenly Eddie smiled to himself. He knew at least one thing for certain, and he didn’t have to think about it at all.
His future was out there in front of him again. It was back where it belonged, back where, by rights, it should always have been.
And so it began.
THE END
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