Predator's Waltz

by Jay Brandon

  “By boat?”

  “First we had to get to the coast.” Thien was looking out the window as if seeing the story enacted there. His voice was almost entranced. “We lived miles inland. We left in the dead of night one night, seven of us, all the family members we had together. We had one old horse but most of us walked. We avoided the roads. But in Vietnam you could not avoid the soldiers. Everyone was a soldier. Two of them stopped us. You could see it was the delight of their night. They grinned at us like—”

  “Like wolves?” Daniel tried to help.

  Thien shook his head. “Like cruel boys who have caught something helpless. They asked so politely where we were going. My father told them we were helping a relative move. So we would be returning? the soldiers asked. Oh yes, my father said. The soldiers whispered together and said that we could go. It seemed I started breathing then for the first time since they had stopped us. But then they said something more. They said one of us must stay with them until the rest returned.

  “There was no argument. We had no deal to strike. We could only do what they said. They had rifles and pistols and we had nothing. I remember one of the soldiers touching my mother’s face. I wanted to throw myself on him but my father’s hand was on my shoulder, his fingers digging.

  “I have often wondered since—” Thien’s voice turned musing. It was much older than a sixteen-year-old’s voice. It didn’t rise with emotion as he told the story. In fact it seemed to grow deader. “I have often wondered if the story would have been exactly the same if they had chosen my mother. Would we have gone back for her or would we have gone on? Would my father have been more than a clerk after all? But they didn’t choose my mother. They chose my father’s sister-in-law. Her hus­band had been killed years earlier, in the war. She had a sour tongue, but all the soldiers saw was her pretty face. They said they would just detain her against our safe return. My aunt began speaking to us, saying something angry, but they shut her up. One soldier was already pulling her away into the darkness, and the other hurried to catch up, leaving us alone. We had paid our toll. We don’t talk about my father’s sister-in-law now. Maybe she is alive.”

  Questions rose to Daniel’s tongue but he stifled them. He was staring aghast at the Asian crowd in the street. His perception of them had changed abruptly. They all seemed touched with death. What kind of horrible loss did each one’s presence there represent?

  Thien’s voice changed again. Now it sounded like a child reading a moral from a story. “In America, I thought, we would not have to make such a sacrifice. When I came to school here and read your history, I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard of. Here people choose to make sacrifices of themselves, and willingly. And in times of crisis they band together, like the Founding Fathers. No one gets thrown to the wolves.”

  “That’s right,” Daniel said earnestly, but his voice sounded hollow even to himself. Perhaps because his throat was so dry.

  “In school that’s right,” said Thien. He was looking across the street at the Vietnamese pawnshop. It wasn’t open for business on this busy day. By now Thien knew what had been in the package Linh had received. Every­one in the neighborhood knew.

  Impress us, they had told Thien. How do you impress men who could do a thing like that?

  Daniel stood up. He felt stiff, as if Thien’s story had lasted for hours. Outside the shadows of the stores across the way stretched halfway across the street. Daniel felt suddenly anxious to see Carol again.

  A man came in and bought a gun: “Something small the missus can handle, but with stopping power. Too many crazies around.” A few more drifted in from the fair, and he actually did a good afternoon’s business, but he was glad to turn the store back over to Jeff when he returned. “Want to stretch my legs,” he said.

  Thien went out with him, but left immediately to rejoin his family. Everywhere Daniel looked it seemed to him he saw Vietnamese families, working together. No wonder they had such a reputation for solidity, if they had lived through such stories as Thien had told him. A little economic adversity and children growing into adolescence would be nothing compared to that.

  He was ready to take his own wife and go home. Maybe it was that thought that made him think he saw her. He stood on the curb looking over the heads of the crowd, the sea of faces. One of them stood out for a moment. Carol’s, he was sure. She was coming toward him, her face lifted, smiling at some triumph. He was raising his hand to wave to her and he thought she looked up, straight at him.

  But in the next moment she disappeared. Her head bobbed down and didn’t resurface, exactly as if she had drowned in the crowd. Hours later he remembered that moment—the way she had been there and then van­ished. The way his heart lifted and fell. At the time he thought only that he must have been mistaken.

  Daniel crossed the street. A couple of the shops were closed already, and a few of the food stands were empty and draped with canvas. It was five o’clock in the afternoon. The sky had lowered and turned threatening. There was a bite to the wind as well. The people still in the streets had buttoned their jackets. Daniel stood and watched a Vietnamese family close up their food stand, unrolling canvas and tying it down. The wind fought them for control. The woman, wearing a thin dress and a scarf on her hair, looked cold, and the three children paused in their work to hug their arms. One thing that had attracted so many Vietnamese to Houston was the climate, hot and humid most of the year, like home. As winter came on they looked more displaced.

  Daniel wandered the streets for a while before going back to his own shop. Jeff had already closed up and gone home. Daniel unlocked the door and went in to wait for Carol. The shop was so dim it made him nervous, and he turned on all the lights. Walking through the Vietnamese crowd had made him think about Khai again. If Khai wanted to find him, this is where he’d come looking. The thought made Daniel uneasy. He would have locked the door again but he wanted Carol to be able to walk right in when she arrived, not have to stand out there to be studied by anyone who might be watching.

  Instead he went inside the cage, one more layer of protection between him and the outside world. The cash drawer of the register was standing open, empty. It made the machine look broken, the aftermath of a robbery. The sight would have startled him if it hadn’t been a daily commonplace.

  His gun was in its place under the counter. It was a heavy black .45 revolver, with a long barrel. It was supposed to look menacing and did. Its main function was to intimidate would-be robbers. He checked to see that it was loaded, then looked thoughtfully at the hardware in the case behind him. Jeff had taken the guns down from their pegs on the wall and locked them in the long wooden case on the floor, so they weren’t visible from the street or even from the shop outside the cage. Daniel unlocked the heavy padlock and looked inside. One of the guns was a pump-action shotgun. He lifted it out of the case and inspected it. He had shells, but stopped short of loading it. Let’s not overreact here. What, after all, had happened? He had asked for help, found out the price was too steep, and turned it down. Khai wasn’t going to send an army in here with guns blazing over that. Daniel might have unintentionally insulted him, but it wasn’t a killing matter. Khai was a businessman—he had made that clear—and there was no profit to be made here. Daniel put the shotgun away and locked the case.

  He wished Carol would come back so they could get out of there. It was dusk, and the neighborhood seemed dank and ugly. He wanted to go someplace nice for dinner and forget about this.

  He wandered to the front window. There were still a few merchants open for business, unwilling to give up the last few dollars they could make, and maybe fifty tourists in the street, unwilling to give up on the festivities. He didn’t see Carol among them. The hour and a half they had agreed on had passed, and more. He couldn’t imagine what treasures could be keeping her this long. Maybe she was in the alley, putting something she didn’t want him to see in the trunk of the car.

  He thought again of Khai’
s offer. The high price had made it clear that it was an offer of murder. Khai hadn’t specified that and Daniel hadn’t wanted him to specify, but he was certain. It hadn’t been the thought of murder, though, it was the twenty thousand dollars that had accounted for the quickness of his refusal: No no no, that’s not what I had in mind at all. But what if the price had been only five thousand dollars, or five hundred? Would he have been so quick then to refuse, or to ask questions to clarify exactly what the offer was? The solution, after all, would be rather abstract from Daniel’s point of view, because he didn’t know his Vietnamese rival at all, probably couldn’t pick him out in a crowd. If he moved away or just disappeared, the effect on Daniel’s business would be the same. He’d never see the man again in either case.

  These were undoubtedly the speculations Khai had thought he had seen behind Daniel’s protests. He would probably return with a new offer. Daniel tried to shake off his thoughts. No, this wasn’t what he’d wanted, at any price. He wished he had never gone looking for someone to “intercede” on his behalf.

  Where the hell was Carol? He was irritated with her now. But of course she had no way of knowing how the darkening neighborhood was making him jittery. He found himself pacing the narrow aisles of the shop and decided to go out. Carol had her own keys. He scrawled her a note—“Carol, wait here, I’ll be right back”—and put the exact time on it: 5:45. He taped the note to the door and went out, locking it behind him.

  The crowd in the street had shrunk to a couple of dozen aimless people. A few other men were also looking around, ready to go home. He didn’t see Carol among them. As Daniel crossed the street the last food stand was closing. The shuttered stands had been pushed to the sides of the street or removed altogether.

  Only two stores were still open. Daniel went in the first, a small, cluttered place that he could see at a glance did not contain his wife. The second open store was larger, with a couple of side alcoves he had to check. He drew a quick glare from the Vietnamese woman behind the counter when he bent to glance under the louvered doors of the clothes-changing stall, but it seemed unoccu­pied.

  “My wife—” he began, but the Vietnamese woman shook her head immediately. He went out again.

  The only other places still open were the two restau­rants at opposite ends of the block. The first was called the Golden Door, which made it sound more like some kind of porno palace than a place to eat. Perhaps that contributed to the restaurant’s lack of success. At any rate, there were few diners. There were no women dining alone at any of the tables, and none of the couples included Carol. A couple of men turned to glare at Daniel as he looked around, and so did the owner, who first tried to hand Daniel a menu and then scowled as he turned and walked out again.

  The other restaurant, the Far East, was a slightly fancier place and more crowded, though it was equally empty of Carol. Daniel had to walk through the tables to make sure. The m&itre d’ followed and kept trying to seat him. In a far comer was the waiter who had told Daniel about Tranh Van Khai. He watched Daniel with an expression that looked deliberately inscrutable.

  Back out on the street, night had fallen. The wind had grown stronger. It blew a paper cup that seemed to pursue Daniel as he crossed the street. He returned to his own pawnshop, which was now the most brightly lit store on the street. He could see from the note still taped to the door that Carol wasn’t inside, but he opened the door and called her name anyway. There was no answer. The shop was silent except for the faint hum of the fluores­cent lights.

  The only other place he could think to look was their car. Accordingly, he walked down the block to the end and around the corner. The alley was dim. Two or three individual stores had lights over their back doors, but there were no streetlights back there. His footsteps echoed off the backs of the buildings and his heartbeat speeded up. He felt a strong desire to ran, either toward the car or better yet away from it, out of the alley, but he forced himself to walk deliberately, looking around. There were plenty of hiding places in the alley besides shadows. There were garbage dumpsters as tall as he was, a delivery van parked overnight, a few unlighted door­ways. Daniel quivered not only with the tension of not knowing who might be there, but also of what he might find. He peered hard into the shadows. The wind blew debris in the far reaches of the alley, coming toward him.

  His Toyota was halfway down the alley. It was brown and blended into the darkness, but he thought he could make out a shape where he had left it.

  If a random mugger was going to hide and wait for a customer, the best place would be the car, because it made sense that someone would return to it. On the other hand, the alley wasn’t a very lively place to wait for trade in the mugging business. That wasn’t what con­cerned him. Sure enough, no one was waiting near the car. He opened the door so the interior light came on, and saw that it was empty. As an afterthought he opened the trunk as well, but it held nothing unusual.

  He would have liked to move the car around to the street but decided to leave it where it was on the slim chance Carol would return there first. He didn’t want to leave her alone in the dark alley, searching for a car that wasn’t there.

  But another worry was growing in his mind, other than that she had run into trouble. He shook off this thought just as vigorously as he tried to ignore the images of her body lying in an alley such as this one, slowly losing blood.

  He allowed himself to hurry out of the alley. The echo of his footsteps sounded like pursuit. He ran faster, dreading a voice raised behind him.

  When he emerged from the alley the street seemed blessedly, almost painfully bright. He came to an abrupt halt, feeling foolish, but still looked back over his shoul­der. The alley looked no less sinister for his knowledge that he had traversed it safely.

  A man and woman passed him, hunched in their coats, glancing at him suspiciously and sidling away. He took some comfort in that. If he could inspire nervousness himself he must not look as much like a victim as he felt.

  Deciding to check the restaurants again, he stepped into the street. That was when he heard the car engine he had ignored in his abstraction. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed the car bearing down on him. He froze in its headlights.

  Daniel recovered just as the driver of the car seemed to become aware of him. The horn blared as Daniel jerked back out of the path. The car swerved out toward the middle of the street. He heard a man cursing. The car missed him by no more than a foot. When it was past he saw the brake lights flare and thought the car was going to stop completely, but then the red lights dimmed and the car sped on out of sight.

  Shaken, Daniel looked down the street in the direction from which the car had come. The barricades at the end of the block were gone. The street fair was officially over now, and the street had been reopened to traffic. The driver of that car probably hadn’t realized the block had ever been closed.

  Daniel walked back toward his own shop. The near-miss with the car had left his heart racing again, making him feel light-headed, hollow. Adrenaline with no pur­pose to serve made his hands shake. The doorknob rattled loudly when he opened the door of his pawnshop.

  “Carol?”

  There was no answer. The door swung closed behind him and he didn’t stop to lock it back. He crossed the shop and went through the doorway in the far wall, beside the door to the wire cage. The back of the shop held only a tiny office and an even smaller bathroom. Both were empty. He turned on their lights to make sure, and left them on when he came back out into the shop.

  “Well,” he said aloud, hands on his hips, looking slowly around. The shop felt different after dark. He always closed earlier than this and had been there this late only a few times. He remembered feeling like this on those occasions—alien, as if the shop had a different purpose after hours and he no longer belonged in it.

  Another half hour passed, minute by slow minute. Daniel kept passing from fear to anger. If she was doing this to him out of pure thoughtlessness, he was going to be furiou
s. Maybe she had run into friends, gone to have a drink, forgotten he was waiting. He called home on the crazy chance that she had gotten another ride there for some reason. The phone rang and rang. He pictured the empty house, dark and silent except for the shrill ringing of the telephone.

  He remembered seeing her face in the crowd. Had she looked at him? Had she seen him before she turned and disappeared? He pushed the thought away.

  The only places she could be now were the two restaurants. He went out again and crossed the street, this time looking carefully before he stepped into it. The street gave him another bad idea. Maybe Carol had stepped unthinkingly into it as he had earlier, into the path of a speeding car, driven by someone who didn’t see her in time. She could have been hit and dragged under the car for hundreds of feet. You read about that happen­ing all the time. If no one saw it happen and if the driver didn’t stop she could still be there, lying in the gutter a block or two away, bleeding to death or already dead. Daniel peered down the street in both directions. The only places open for business were the nearby restau­rants; the rest of the street was unpopulated for blocks and blocks. He started walking, then running, out of the circle of the streetlights into the echoing blocks of boarded-up storefronts and blank-faced warehouse buildings. There was nothing in the street. A shapeless mass in the gutter made his heart stop, but the wind scattered it as he approached: newspapers blowing away.

  He bent to peer under the one parked car, but there was nothing to be seen. He went for three blocks in that way, studying the street and the gutters, then ran back and searched for three or four blocks in the opposite direction. There were streetlights on every comer, cast­ing enough light for him to be sure there was no body in the street. Two or three cars passed him while he walked. Traffic was light but steady. Someone would have seen a hit-and-run, or seen the body afterward. He felt slightly reassured.