“Bailey, Bighorn Mountains.”
“Yep.”
“Mai Kim!” Le Khang’s voice called from the other side of the room. She turned and looked at him and at the ready airman with the mustache who stood by the counter.
She looked at me, smiled, and got off her stool. “You go back there?”
I set my bottle back on the piano and stared at the keys. “I don’t know . . .”
She slipped her hand from my shoulder onto my wounded arm and carefully stroked the gauze and bandages that were wrapped there. “This girl, she there?”
I laughed a short exhale. “Yep.”
She gave me one last pat on the shoulder before walking away. “You go back.”
I drank steadily through the afternoon, the weight of my wounded arm sloping my shoulder farther and farther down until it was all I could do to continue raising my one hand to play.
I’d probably gone through an entire case of beer by the time I noticed it was full night; the crowd was pushing in against me. I’d also noticed that Le Khang hadn’t brought any more beer over for a while, a sure sign I had been cut off.
Rescue came in the form of a familiar powder-blue arm, which reached across and placed another beer next to all the empties on the flipped-up cover of the zebra-striped, grained piano.
“How you feelin’, Hollywood?”
He smiled and sat on the edge of the bench, and I noticed how little room he took up in comparison to Henry Standing Bear. Hoang had been released only two days after the incident at Khe Sanh, had already been reestablished to active flight duty, and had flown three more missions since the beginning of the week. “I buy you beer.”
“Thanks.”
He continued to smile at me. “You drunk.”
“Stinking.” He looked puzzled. “Stinking drunk.”
He brightened, always game for another piece of American slang. “Stinking drunk?”
“Stinking. Drunk.”
He held his beer up to mine as he chanted the phrase to himself. I picked up the bottle, wet with condensation, and tipped his. The English lesson made me think about Mai Kim, and thoughts of her battered away at the waves of alcohol that kept rolling onto the beaches of my mind. “Where’s Mai Kim?”
He looked at me blankly. “She not here.”
“Where is she?”
“She gone.”
I drank my beer. “Oh.”
I scratched my head and watched as my hat slipped off and fell on top of the foot pedals of the piano. Hoang reached down and snagged it and placed it back on my head backwards. “You stinking drunk!”
I pushed back and stood, none too steadily, and waited for the world to stop moving. It was getting late, and I decided to make the long trek back to the other side of the airfield where they’d lodged me in the visitors’ barracks. Hoang was next to me and put an arm on mine to help me steady a persistent list. “You go home?”
“Yep.” I stuck a hand out to grip the piano, which provided a little more support than the compact pilot. “If I can.”
“I help you.”
I half tripped over the piano bench and watched as everyone moved away. There was a brief upsurge of nausea, and I belched, which made me feel a little better. “I’m okay.”
As I turned and shambled toward the open doorway, Hoang raised one of my arms and slipped under to help me navigate what now appeared to be the pitching deck of the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge. I pulled away and fell down the two wooden steps that led out of the bar.
I rolled over and stared up into the hazy star-filled night. “Ouch.”
Hoang’s face was above mine. “You fall.”
“I guess I could use a little help.”
The Vietnamese pilot grabbed an arm and helped me get to my feet. He was surprisingly strong and half led, half supported me as I wavered down the deserted red-dirt road. He nodded his head. “You save my life.”
I looked at the ludicrous figure of the tiny man in the powder-blue jumpsuit and white silk scarf. “When?”
“You funny guy.”
I stopped and saluted the two air policemen who were stationed at Gate 055. The APs asked Hoang if I was going to make it or should they call a patrol with a jeep or maybe a forklift. Hoang shook his head and explained that we would walk the perimeter to the next gate to give me a chance to sober up. He also explained how I’d saved his life.
They said that was great.
He then explained how I’d saved other people’s lives, too.
They said that was great, too.
I puked.
I don’t think they thought that was so great.
Hoang supported me as we walked along the fenced boundary and looked at the moonlight casting down on the high whitewashed walls of the old French fort—Hotel California, as the locals referred to it. It didn’t look real, or it looked too real, and I felt like I was on some movie set where we would walk behind the structure and see the two-by-four bracings that held up the naked backs of the walls.
The nausea was creeping up in my throat again, and I stopped, leaning against something and sitting on a hard surface. “Hey, Hollywood, you ever see Beau Geste?”
“No, but need to talk to you.”
“One with Ronald Colman?”
He looked a little worried. “No...”
“Gary Cooper?”
“No.”
I looked at Hoang, who was blurred and wavering in the close strangeness of the Vietnamese night. “How about Gunga Din, did ya see that?”
"Lieutenant... need to tell you something.”
“What?”
He looked around. “Need to tell you something.”
I ignored him and started reciting Kipling.
You may talk o’ gin and beer
When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,
An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.
He edged away. “Lieutenant . . .”
I shook my head and immediately regretted it. “Doesn’t matter.”
I looked down and saw that my hand was resting on a cemetery headstone. I focused and saw more of them around me; they stretched into the late-night mist, thousands of them, and with the moonlight it was as if they were glowing like teeth. A dog barked in the distance, the sound rolling toward me like the cutting edge of harsh whispers.
When I looked up, Hoang was gone.
* * *
Quincy had gone back to work, and I’d made the march across the VA parade ground with my boots on.
It was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie that the fort was named after, and it was his residence to which the Doc had sent Cady. I thought about him and the history of the place as I crossed the foyer and climbed the steps to the upstairs ballroom. Mackenzie graduated West Point in 1862, number one in a class of twenty-eight. He fought in the Civil War and, before it was over, he’d been wounded four times, received seven brevets, and was a major general in charge of an entire division.
In our part of the country, however, his fame arose from the defeat of Dull Knife, the Cheyenne chief, and his village. On a cold November day in 1876, on the Red Forks of the Powder River, a spot just up the creek from where I’d been the day before, Mackenzie and four hundred men of the Fourth Cavalry, along with four hundred Indian scouts, took the Cheyenne chief and his 183 lodges by surprise. He destroyed the village and their supplies and effectively ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Northern Cheyenne nation.
Henry Standing Bear liked to remind anyone who would listen that Mackenzie died in his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York, in 1882, victim to the later stages of syphilis and, as Lucian would say, crazy as a waltzing pissant. It was, Henry also noted, not an unpleasant enough death.
Cady was standing in front of one of the large casement windows and was looking out at the last thin
remains of snow that clung to the shadowed crevasses of the rocky heights. She was still barefoot. She turned and the broomstick skirt swayed as the wide-planked oak floor popped and echoed under my approach.
She raised her arms. “Dance with me?”
I smiled and took her hand. “There isn’t any music.”
“Sure there is.” She placed my other arm behind her back and led me in a fanciful waltz, her face tucked against my shoulder. We wheeled around the empty and silent ballroom, and I thought about Virgil White Buffalo and watched my daughter as her head rose and she smiled. After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings.
9
“Forty-two charges of manslaughter?”
“At the least.” I could picture the California native, born in the high desert up near Edwards Air Force Base, and sheriff of a county that had eighteen times the populace of my entire state. “They brought ’em in through Long Beach, and we got an anonymous tip from down at the municipal pier; container vessel out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.”
“Why Yugoslavia?”
“The Vietnamese don’t need a visa to go there. About 40,000 Chinese go through the place every year, and they can blend. Not everybody can tell the difference, like you can.”
I took a breath and played at pulling Dog’s ear, his head resting on my knee. “What happened?”
“The traffickers had told the illegals on board the container ship to not make any noise and had packing crates of fruit pushed against the walls to help insulate any sound. The assholes closed the air vents, gave them four five-gallon buckets of water, and told them they’d be transferred in a matter of hours.”
I’d met Ned at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting in Phoenix, where we’d both avoided the social hour by hiding in the hotel bar and lamenting about our grown daughters.
* * *
He liked to fly-fish and had made the trek out to the Bighorns twice in the previous eight years. He was a good man, and I could hear the pain telling the story was causing him, but I needed it all. “Didn’t happen?”
“No. They loaded the container onto an eighteen-wheeler and headed up to Compton.” I waited. “This jaybird, Paquet, parks the truck in a lot behind his apartment and goes in to have lunch, watch a movie and, while he’s at it, shoot a little smack. He misjudges the product and ODs, leaving forty-two people in an airtight container on an asphalt parking lot in Southern California in July at 103 degrees.”
I slowly exhaled, and Dog looked at me.
“They stripped down to their underwear, tried drinking the juice from the tomatoes, and tried to pry open the vents.” After a moment, he continued. “We figure they started panicking after about six hours and began pulling the cases from the walls and pounding on the doors. I guess there was a lot of screaming and shouting, but nobody came. . . .” There was another pause. “Walt, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”
“All of them?”
“All but one. I had a freight supervisor from the DOT, Danny Padilla, with me late that afternoon and we were the first ones in after we got the doors open. He said it was strange that it was a produce truck and not refrigerated; then we got the smell. I shined my flashlight, the floor was covered with bodies, none of them moving; like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Then I saw this young girl in the back. She was tapping the side of the container and trying to get our attention. She had to crawl over the bodies to get to us.”
“What happened to her?”
“Took her to County General, ran her through INS. Then she got a sponsorship from some group who deals with that sort of thing.”
“What was her name?”
“Not Paquet.” I listened to him rustling the papers. “Ngo Loi Kim. The poor kid. . . . Hell, I thought about adopting her myself.”
“Did you say last name Kim?”
“Yeah, ring a bell?”
I stared at the blotter on my desk and watched my hand write the name. “An old one. There was a girl I knew in Vietnam with that last name.”
The phone was silent for a second. “Walt, you know what the English translation for Kim is, don’t you?”
“Smith?”
He chuckled. “That, or Jones.”
Ruby appeared in the doorway, but I held up my hand and she disappeared with Dog trotting after her. “What else did you get on this Paquet?”
“Quite a bit, actually. We seized his phone records, computer, and a bunch of other stuff. There was somebody moving a lot of Vietnamese illegals through L.A. County—child porn and some brothels that were in operation down here—and it turned out he was the kahuna on the deal, or so the California state attorney general’s office tells me.”
“Big investigation?”
“Whopper. They even wanted to know how you were involved in all this.”
“Ever heard of this guy, Tran Van Tuyen?”
“Can’t say that I have, but I can make some phone calls from this end.”
“That would be great if you could. Thanks, Ned.” I could hear someone talking to him in the background and waited.
* * *
I looked up at the clock on my office wall and figured Vic would be back from lunch any time now. “What about the prostitution charges on the granddaughter?”
“First-timer, and she had the unfortunate, or fortunate—I guess it all depends on your point of view—experience of having her premier customer turn out to be an Orange County plainclothes deputy.” It was silent on the line. “It’s hard for some of these people to assimilate into a new culture, and if she was from the wrong side of the tracks . . .”
I stared at the name I had just printed on my desk blotter. “Hey, Ned?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you check and see where this Ngo Loi Kim ended up?”
“I can do that.” It was silent again, the way it always was when men talked about things they’d rather not. “What makes you think this big Indian fella didn’t do it?”
“Just a hunch.”
I could hear him sniff out a laugh on the other end. “Sounds like he did a number on you.” I didn’t say anything. “You want that information faxed or do you guys have e-mail?”
“I am speaking to you now from a push-button phone and hope you are duly impressed.” I transferred him to Ruby, and he called me a dirty name just before I pushed a button, and the coast grew silent.
I sat there and watched the aspen leaves quiver in the slight breeze along Clear Creek; the sky was still cloudless, and we continued to need rain. I was getting that feeling, the one like an itch I couldn’t quite reach. There was something going on with all of this, something below the surface, and I had a notion that when I found it, it was going to be something pretty simple.
I got up and walked down the hallway to the holding cells where the big man lay with an arm over his eyes and where Frymire sat snoring in his chair. My dispatcher/receptionist appeared a moment later with Dog and a notepad. Dog leaned against my leg with all the grace of a pet Kodiak, and Ruby lowered her voice upon seeing that everyone else in the room was asleep. “Henry says that Brandon will be back from Rapid City tomorrow, and Lucian called.” I looked at her blankly. “It’s Tuesday.”
I stared at her for a while longer, then shook my head and gestured toward the holding cell and whispered in return. “Vic and Cady are going to Sheridan to pick up Michael at the airport, so it’s my night to sit Virgil.”
“He said he’d bring the chessboard over here.” She crossed something off of her list and then sighed, making a face at the notepad.
“What?”
“More of these garbled e-mails from the school WiFi system marked BPS.”
I pretended like I knew what that meant. “Call the school board.”
“I am.”
“Anything from Saizarbitoria?”
“No.”
"Vic?”
“Court du
ty, and that’s the second time you’ve asked.”
“DCI?”
“No.”
“Do me a favor?” She looked up at me, the Webster’s Dictionary illustration of irritated. “I don’t have a computer, or I’d do it myself.”
"What?”
“Look up this organization, Children of the Dust, and see what their connection is with Tuyen.” I stood there, looking into the holding cell, unable to tell if the big guy was really asleep. “And let me know when that report from LASD comes through?”
“He called.”
“Tuyen?”
She nodded. “It was next on my list. He was asking about his granddaughter’s body and her personal effects.”
“Did you tell him that’s a DCI deal?”
“I did.”
“How did he respond?”
She looked up. “Not well, but considering the circumstance . . .”
“Did he mention anything about any official documentation that connects him with Ho Thi Paquet?” I could feel the big blue eyes on me.
“No, but he said that he’d be at the Hole in the Wall Motel, room number five.”
I returned her gaze. “He changed rooms?”
“He said the television wasn’t working in the other one.” She continued to watch me. “Walter, the man lost his granddaughter, and he’s sitting in a motel room by himself in Powder Junction.” Except for the quiet hum of the minifridge and Frymire’s snoring, it was silent in the holding area—her voice carried the extra weight of being whispered. “You don’t think that Saizarbitoria should go over and check on him?”
“I’ll go down in the morning—Cady will be spending time with Michael.” My voice sounded a little harsh, like it always did when I was embarrassed. I stood there for a while longer thinking it was probably time to take a Ruby moral sounding. “Can I ask you a question?”
She folded her arms. “Sure.”
“Do you think I’m a racist?”
The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volume 1-4 Page 105
