Predator's Waltz

by Jay Brandon

  He didn’t know when he had lost that reserve, but he had. It had changed not only his feeling toward her but toward everything. He’d turned so sentimental: Beer commercials could leave him misty now.

  He padded down the hall and looked at her face on the pillow, surprised as always to see her still there. He turned off the lights, undressed in the dark, and slipped into bed beside her, touching her as if she might have faded away in those few moments.

  She hadn’t yet.

  Chapter 2

  MEANWHILE, BUSINESS AS USUAL

  Come on, don’t be such a weenie. Nobody’s going to do anything to you.”

  “I was thinking of you,” he said with dignity. She just laughed at that, but it was true. It wasn’t just that the bar she was trying to drag him into looked exclusively Asian. It also looked exclusively male. He didn’t see any other women inside, not even waitresses.

  “Come on, it’ll be fun. We go to the same places all the time.”

  Because he liked those places, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. After all, she was his fiance now, he supposed he had to indulge her sometimes. They had been out celebrating their engagement, so he was already a little tipsy. Maybe the alcohol emboldened him.

  “It’s cold out here,” she said, prompting him. They were standing on the sidewalk in this dim end of downtown, peering through the plate-glass window, half covered by curtains. The men didn’t look threatening. They looked dead, in fact. He couldn’t even see them move. The place looked like an opium den.

  “All right,” he said, “it’ll be fun.”

  As soon as they stepped inside, the Vietnamese men at the bar looked up at them. Their eyes didn’t change at all: They stayed flat, black, and hostile. The man in the doorway wanted to step back out into the cold. He realized immediately they’d made a bad mistake.

  When Daniel left with his wife, Thien realized it was the first time he’d ever been alone in the pawnshop. Daniel had given him a key and taught him how to turn the alarm system on and off, but it seemed to Thien he’d regretted that trust immediately. Thien never arrived early enough, even on Saturday, that Daniel wasn’t there, or Jeff, the part-time clerk, and Daniel never left early and let Thien lock up. Even today he had said he’d probably come by later. Thien knew what that meant. Checking up on him.

  But who could blame him? Trust didn’t come easily to anyone. Thien continued to sweep for a while. When he passed the front door he locked it. If a customer came he could open it, but he wanted some warning if the two who had kidnapped him after school returned. He went behind the counter and looked under it at the little shelf just at hand level for a man standing at the cash register. He laid a hand on the black handgun Daniel kept there. Its handle was smooth from handling. For a moment Thien felt again the envelope of safety he’d imagined he would find when he came to work for a white business­man. But the feeling was illusory. He looked out the window and stiffened.

  Dusk had fallen hard but the streetlights hadn’t yet come on. They, like the late-aftemoon shoppers, weren’t used to the early dark yet. Dusk had cleared out the streets. The man slipping along the side of the building across the street stood out. Thien knew him by sight. He wasn’t one of the two he had encountered earlier, but he owed the same loyalty they did. Thien laid his hand on the gun again. He wondered how many more were slipping around the side of this building. He thought of the pain his family would feel.

  The man across the street came to the comer of the building and peered around it to see that the sidewalk in front of the Vietnamese pawnshop was empty. Thien flinched slightly when the man reached into his pocket.

  But it wasn’t a gun the man brought out. If it was a weapon at all it was a very sophisticated one; it looked much too small to be a bomb. The man looked around the comer again, this time craning his head farther so that he could see into the pawnshop. A moment later he emerged from hiding, walking swiftly along the sidewalk. When he reached the front door of the Vietnamese pawnshop, he stooped and pushed his package through the mail slot. He hurried on.

  Thien kept his head down, waiting for the explosion. Nothing happened. After long moments the Vietnamese pawnbroker emerged from his shop. He was holding the package in his hands and glaring up and down the street. There was no one to be seen. The middle-aged Vietnam­ese shifted his glare to the shop across the street. Thien imagined he could see him inside. He tried to look innocent.

  After another long moment the man went back inside his shop. Nothing more happened that Thien could see. He shook his head in puzzlement. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was six-thirty, half an hour past closing time. His father would be waiting. Hastily he closed up the shop, turning the sign on the door from open to closed and hurrying down the dark street in the direction from which the young Vietnamese man had come before he had slipped the package into the other pawnshop. Thien wondered what that had been about.

  The streetlights came on suddenly. Their light seemed more threatening than the dimness had been. They spotlighted Thien as he hurried down the street but left patches of darkness in shop doorways and the mouths of alleys. He slowed as he approached comers, then hurried past them. The shops were closed or closing. In this neighborhood even the shops that weren’t Vietnamese- owned had Vietnamese employees. One or two spoke to Thien as he walked by, but no one joined him.

  He stopped outside the lighted square of a dry clean­er’s window. The store was already closed but he saw two people inside—a middle-age Vietnamese woman behind the counter and a young Vietnamese man who joined her behind the counter as Thien watched. The racks of clothes made a cozy nest for the two of them. The young man wore an easy, unpleasant smile. The merchant was nodding and nodding and pointing toward the back of the shop. The young man made no response at all, but when the woman turned the young man let her go. He glanced out toward the front. He might have seen Thien, or he might not. He turned away casually and sauntered after the merchant, his shoulders brushing the clothes on the racks.

  Neither of them reappeared in the two minutes Thien stood watching. He finally turned away and picked up speed, his heels clattering on the sidewalk. He didn’t meet the eyes of the few other pedestrians.

  Three blocks farther on was the drugstore Thien’s father managed. Thien rushed into it and slammed the door behind him. At once he began speaking in Vietnam­ese, calling in a loud voice as he loosened his jacket. No one answered. He started down the aisle toward the pharmacy counter at the back, calling to his father again, then stopped abruptly, silently cursing himself. He was so careful on the street but lost all sense as soon as he was home, as if he were safe there.

  A young Vietnamese man had stepped out of an adjoining aisle to stand beside him. He wore a red windbreaker and white tennis shoes. He was grinning at Thien. It was one of the men who had kidnapped him that afternoon. Thien felt hollow from his chest down into his legs.

  But they weren’t there for him. Windbreaker’s partner stood behind the pharmacy counter with Thien’s father. They both looked at Thien but then turned back to each other. They were by the cash register and both their hands were on it.

  Thien’s eyes sidled to the man beside him, hoping his attention was also on the two behind the counter, but it wasn’t. Windbreaker was still grinning at him. He put a hand on Thien’s shoulder. “Are you following us, little brother?”

  Thien stood rigidly, staring at his father. He looked up from his negotiations, saw Windbreaker’s hand on his son, and came around from behind the counter. The young man holding Thien just grinned at him, waiting. The cash register bell sang out and the older man stopped dead. Thien’s father had a high forehead and a promi­nent vein in each temple that throbbed when he was angry. The veins were all that moved in his face now as he stood there. Windbreaker’s other hand, the one not on Thien, had gone inside his jacket.

  Thien’s father turned away, head lowered. He returned to the other young man, who was rifling through the cash drawer, and spoke softly. The
young man ignored him. He was pulling bills out and stuffing them in his pockets.

  When he was through he came out from behind the counter, ignoring everyone, and sauntered down the aisle, brushing Thien. His partner gave a last painful squeeze of Thien’s shoulder and turned to join him. Thien stood there. His father was still behind the count­er. They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment.

  Thien turned and hurried down the aisle, so quietly that the two who had reached the front door didn’t hear him until he spoke. They whirled. When they realized who it was their grins returned, angrier because he’d seen that for an instant they had been afraid. One of them reached for him, holding him by the back of the neck and squeezing.

  “You like pain, little brother? You must like pain. We can help you.”

  Thien tried to ignore him, looking at the other one. “I want to join you,” he said.

  “Join us in what?” crooned the stupid one holding his neck. The other just shook his head angrily. “Wait till you grow balls,” he said.

  Thien said steadily, “I have.” They laughed at him. They were both six inches taller than he, and they were no giants.

  “Let me talk to Khai,” Thien insisted.

  They made wide eyes at him. “Tranh Van Khai will have you ground into paste just for speaking his name,” one of them said, grinning. The other squeezed his neck harder. Thien tried not to flinch.

  They were bored with him, ready to be out the door. “What can I do?” Thien asked.

  “Impress us,” Windbreaker’s partner said. “Teach us how brave and mean you are.”

  They stood there for another moment as if waiting for him to do so, then they laughed with each other and pushed out the door. Thien’s shoulders slumped. He stood there looking out into the black night. He could feel his father behind him and could already hear his reproaches.

  “Better to be one of them than to be afraid all the time,” Thien said.

  He managed to talk his fiancee into taking a table by the window, as far from the other customers in the bar as possible. He was sure it had been a mistake to come in, but he thought they could have one drink and clear out. They weren’t going to be held back by a crush of camaraderie. Theirs were the only voices in the place. The Asian men didn’t speak. He wondered if they’d been talking before the two of them had come in. Maybe it was their ritual just to gather at the end of the day and drink silently, thinking murderous thoughts. Maybe ritualistically killing the nearest white people when they finished getting drunk.

  The American gulped his scotch. He’d had to go to the bar to get it. No waiter had approached him. His idiot fianc6e had wanted a pifta colada but he’d managed to talk her out of that. She was drinking gin and tonic now, and smiling at him as if she were having the time of her life. She was a crazy girl. He’d known that, of course, but he’d found it charming. Now that her flightiness had turned life-threatening its charm had faded.

  He was overreacting, he knew. In the back of his mind he was already turning this into a funny story. “So she insisted we go into this little bar, and as soon as we walk in I see a sign saying Vietnamese Murder Inc. is meeting here tonight. ‘Honey,’ I say, ‘maybe if we just turn very quietly ...”’

  But as she said, this was their city, no place was off limits. He leaned on the table and started talking to her again.

  Because they were sitting by the window, they were the first to see the car. The view out the window was down a long deserted side street, a street of warehouses mostly. Not much of a view. When something moved out there, it caught his eye and he glanced out. A car had turned from somewhere and its headlights were aimed directly at them. It was still three blocks away; die headlights weren’t an intrusion, they were just something that drew his eye for a moment.

  “Maybe we could have our reception here,” she was saying.

  He laughed. “Right, and for entertainment we can have strolling bands of muggers. You want to have all your wedding presents stolen before we even get ’em home?”

  She rolled her eyes at him, drained her glass, and held it out, rattling the cubes. He groaned inwardly. He didn’t want to make another trip to that bar, where the men wouldn’t even move their shoulders to let him get close enough to give the bartender their order. Maybe he could convince her to move on now.

  She was looking out the window. He followed her gaze. The car was still coming straight toward them. It had picked up speed. He couldn’t see past the headlights to the driver. He couldn’t even see if it had a driver. His fiancee was shading her eyes with her hands.

  “Funny, it looks like it’s not even going to turn, doesn’t it?”

  He was glad she was the one who’d said that. After she’d already accused him of being a weenie, he didn’t want to act afraid of strange cars too. But it did seem to be speeding up rather than slowing for the turn.

  It wasn’t until he saw the driver’s door open and someone roll out onto the pavement that he allowed himself the luxury of panic. “Oh, shit,” he said, and stood up. He remembered to grab for his fiancee’s hand to help her out too but she was already up and scram­bling away from their table and the window. Men at the bar turned to look at the commotion. He started to shout but it was unnecessary. They were scattering too, after only one quick glance out the window. He was running, holding the girl’s hand. He turned to look back and could see almost nothing but headlights. The car had jumped the curb just outside the bar. That pushed its front end upward, angled straight toward the plate-glass window. It came like a wild animal after prey.

  The window shattered into a million pieces. The man dived over the bar for cover, dragging the girl. They landed on other groaning, cursing bodies. The sound of the car’s engine was amplified as it smashed inside the room. It sounded as if it were still coming for them.

  When the dust began to clear, they peeked fearfully over the bar. The car had knocked the table where they’d been sitting across the room. The car was wedged in the broken window now, half in and half out. Its engine had died but they could hear the ticking sound of its cooling.

  Everyone sighed. The American man even smiled at the Vietnamese next to him and the Vietnamese smiled shakily back. “Are you all right?” the man asked his fiancee.

  She said, “Of course I’m not all right,” but she was grinning with relief too.

  Just when they thought it was all over the car shud­dered and slid back out of the window, its balance giving way. More glass fell into the street. The patrons of the bar gathered outside, around the car, and were surprised to find that the crash wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the man who’d been dragged behind the car. At first they thought he was a run-over pedestrian, but when they looked closer they saw it had been deliberate. The man’s ankles were chained to the car’s back bumper.

  Horribly, he was still alive. He must have been dragged for blocks. There were no clothes left on him and almost no skin. But he was groaning in shock. He was alive. The Vietnamese leaned over him. It was almost impossible to recognize him, but they saw he was one of them. One of them finally saw something that made him guess who the victim was. It was the gang member who’d tried to plant a bomb in Khai’s car.

  “What are they jabbering about, honey?”

  “I don’t know, I think maybe they know him. Don’t look, it’s too horrible.”

  “Don’t worry about that, you couldn’t pay me to look. Let’s get—”

  They were all gathered around the car. They weren’t conscious of the tiny sound—it just sounded like the engine cooling—but when it stopped one or two of them glanced up.

  “Let’s—” said the man.

  The only survivor, who was standing seventy feet away when the car exploded, said later that it looked like the whole engine went straight up in a pillar of flame. In fact, it went outward in all directions. In an instant the car and engine were transformed into thousands of bits of metal, lethal shrapnel. In effect it was a giant grenade.

 
It took weeks to identify some of the bodies, but it was only a day before the news was out that two of them had been native-born Houstonians, the first innocent casual­ties of the war.

  The Vietnamese pawnbroker whose shop stood across the street from Daniel’s was a fifty-eight-year-old man named Linh. His shop was already closed for the day, but he was reluctant to leave it. He thought that if they were going to contact him it would be there at the shop, not at his home. He was still hoping for some word.

  Perhaps for that reason his ears were sharper than usual. He heard the tiny thump of the package dropping to the floor. At first he thought it was a footfall at the front of his shop. He reached instinctively for his shot­gun. But in the dim light he could see that the shop was empty. Outside in the street a young Vietnamese thug was hurrying away. Linh didn’t know him, but he knew his look. He was one of them.

  He hurried to the front of the shop, scooped up the package, and opened the door. He stepped out onto the street, into the twilight-laden wind. There was no one around. He glared in all directions. He glared at the pawnshop across the street for good measure, but it looked already closed, like his.

  Linh went back inside and locked the door behind him, still listening for the sound of a car approaching or running footsteps. He had been waiting for them for two days. But as he walked back to the counter, his attention focused for the first time on the package in his hands. It wasn’t the envelope he’d been hoping for, not a letter with a demand. It was too small for that. It was a rectangular box half the size of a box of kitchen matches, wrapped in brown paper. As he turned it over in his hands his heart began to speed up. He had heard stories as a child in Vietnam. But those were stories with which to frighten a child. Surely not here ...

  He pulled at the brown paper and it came off in one piece, falling to the counter. The box inside was made of bamboo, with a hinged lid. The pawnbroker waited a long moment before opening it. He could hardly stand to touch it. His heart was hammering.