by Jay Brandon
The big one holding her shifted and then a rag covered her nose and mouth. She tried to twist away but he pressed her back too hard against his own chest. The fumes blinded her. She struggled for air but there were only the evil-smelling fumes. She could feel herself going limp. The man holding her legs dropped them and stepped forward, grabbing the waistband of her pants. His fingers were inside. She tried to pull away but there was nothing there. No body, no world. And finally no Carol.
“Anybody behind us?”
Ralphie was hunched over the wheel, driving as if being pursued. Carefully, though. The bitch was in the trunk, knocked out from the chloroform, and Ralphie knew Houston cops. They’d search the car just for the hell of it even if they only stopped him for speeding. Ralphie had never been stopped for something minor without getting hassled. For some reason cops didn’t like his looks.
The bearded one looked back at the crowded streets behind them for a minute, then turned back without saying anything. Ralphie hadn’t yet heard him say a complete sentence. The guy was nice to have at your side for something physical, but he sure as hell wasn’t company.
Ralphie got on Interstate 10 and headed west toward Katy. If you wanted to find some place truly isolated in the big city, you practically had to leave town. He tried to blend into the flow of the traffic but there was no such thing. The guy behind him wanted to do eighty, even if he had to go through Ralphie’s bumper to do it, while the guy in front of him insisted on going no more than forty-five. And one lane of the damn freeway was closed, as usual. Houston was arranged so that by the time they finished fixing a freeway it was time to start over again.
“Know any place along here we could stop?” Ralphie asked. “That’s some good-looking stuff we got in the trunk. Shame to waste it.”
“Shame to get wasted over it,” the big guy said, surprising him.
“Aw, those guys don’t give a shit. Look, there’s a little park right over here off of T. C. Jester. Nobody—”
“It’s Saturday, everybody’s in the park. Just drive.” The guy was turning articulate at the wrong time.
“What’re you, a pansy?” Ralphie said. “You one of those guys that went to prison and enjoyed the social life? ... All right, all right. What’re ya gonna do, punch me out while I’m driving?”
“You gotta stop some time,” the big guy said.
“Whoo, I’m terrified. I’m wetting my pants.”
The big guy went back to staring moodily out the windshield, and Ralphie just drove. At the North Belt exit he turned off and found the street he’d been told about but had never heard of before. After a few blocks it grew depopulated swiftly, almost turned into a country lane. They came to a field. He drove straight into it. It must not have been a park because, as the big guy had said, the parks were full today but this place was dead empty. It was sunset by now anyway. In another half hour it would be full dark.
Ralphie hoped the others would be late, give them time to damage the goods a little first, but there ahead of him was a gook standing all alone in the field. Their employer. “Shit,” Ralphie said, and pulled up next to him. They got out of the car. The guy was big for a gook, a little taller than Ralphie, though of course he looked like a dwarf next to the big guy. Ralphie wasn’t worried, but he kept his eyes open. This was always the tricky part, getting paid.
“You have her?” the gook asked.
“Of course we have her. Think we’d show up here without her? No problems, nobody followed us.”
“Oh, really?” said the gook, because just then here came another car. This one was backing across the field, until it was trunk to trunk with Ralphie’s. Another Vietnamese got out. This one was normal-size for one of them, a dink. And skinny as mesquite branches. The bigger gook said to this one ironically, “Did anyone else follow them?”
The dink shook his head. He opened the trunk of his car and waited.
“Show him,” Ralphie said, handing the keys to the big guy. He trudged away.
“She is unconscious?” the boss gook asked anxiously. “We don’t want—”
“She’s out, don’t worry about it. Let’s see the color of your money.”
“All right.” The gook pulled a thick wad of bills out of his pocket. Ralphie relaxed a little. He really had the money. “Now, you were already paid half—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ralphie looked back over his shoulder. Both trunks were open and they were moving the girl from one car to the other. Ralphie wondered how they’d take it if he offered to knock fifty bucks off the price if they’d just leave him alone with her for ten minutes first. Naw. No chance. He sighed. Well, he’d have money in his pockets after this. The streets wouldn’t be safe from him. He turned back to watch the one who’d hired them counting out bills. The big guy came and stood beside Ralphie, watching. The other gook was still back at the trunk of the car.
“Don’t trust me to give you your cut?” Ralphie said to the big guy.
“You are certain you were not followed?” the gook said. He turned his head sharply to look across the field. Ralphie followed his gaze.
“Relax. There’s nobody. Just give us the bread and let’s get the hell out of here.”
The big guy started making sounds like he was trying to clear his throat. The boss gook handed Ralphie the wad of bills. Ralphie took them in both hands, grinning. It looked like more money even than they’d been promised.
The big guy now was wheezing like a four-pack-a-day man. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Ralphie said. The guy was distracting him from his pleasure in the money. He was counting the bills from one hand to the other.
The big guy bent at the waist, his hands at his throat. He leaned against the car, still making noise.
“What’re you—”
“He is choking to death,” Chui said calmly. Now there was a gun in his hand. And Ralphie had nothing in his hands but goddamned money.
“And you are next,” Chui said. He fired. The first two into Ralphie’s stomach, just for pleasure. After he went down to his knees, Chui stepped closer and fired a more careful shot into the back of his head. He bent and held the wrist until the pulse stopped. He looked at the other one, who was on his back, eyes bugging out of his head. Nguyen’s thin wire was imbedded in the flesh of his neck. The man’s hands were at the wire but they were no longer moving. It was an exotic way to kill a man—Nguyen favored those—but couldn’t be traced to them.
Chui stooped to retrieve his money from Ralphie’s lifeless hands. He searched the man’s pockets and found the first payment. Fool. “Take them,” Chui said. He got into Nguyen’s car, now with the girl in the trunk, and left Nguyen to dispose of the bodies and the car.
Montrose is the most interesting neighborhood in Houston. Once fashionable, it had declined badly but now was fashionable again, though evidence of its years in decline still were visible. There would be an isolated block of fine old homes built soon after the turn of the century, two- and three-story minimansions with columns and wide verandahs. In other blocks tiny houses would predominate, with an occasional burned-out wreck no one had ever had the money to rebuild or tear down. And sometimes the mansion and the wreck would, be next-door neighbors. Montrose was also a center of gay life, nightlife, and a high-crime area, where most nights drunks were rolled and elegantly furnished town houses burglarized. Regularly one of these activities would end in murder. And deeper into the neighborhood there were narrower, darker blocks over which the rapid growth of Houston seemed to have washed and then receded like a tide, leaving an occasional block isolated. Families had moved out but gentrification hadn’t set in.
It was to such a block that Chui drove, slowly. For the last half block he turned off his lights. The street was dark. To his right was an empty lot and on his left, two small frame houses, also empty. Beside the vacant lot a large culvert emptied into a drainage ditch. The culvert was a concrete pipe big enough for a man to walk into. Chui backed the car up to its mouth and got out.
The woman in the trunk was still unconscious. The sight of her worried Chui anew. American. Americans were bad business. But it wasn’t his decision. He carried her into the culvert, set her down safely, then went out and moved the car away before returning to carry her farther. Inside the culvert was blackness and the sound of water dripping. Chui was careful to shuffle his feet, taking small steps. Rats lived there.
After a certain distance he stopped, though he could still see nothing. He put out his hand, brushing his fingertips against the slimy wall of the pipe, until the wall ended and he gripped instead an iron bar. Fumbling in the dark, he found a lock and inserted a key. The gate opened with a creak. Chui hurried through it, carrying the woman over his shoulder, into the side tunnel behind the gate. This one was a wider tunnel that entered the culvert at a right angle. Once inside it, Chui lit his cigarette lighter and held it high. The gate of iron bars closed behind him, locking automatically. Chui hurried along the corridor, the woman heavy and shifting on his shoulder. This corridor was drier. After a few yards it turned, so that he was out of sight of the gate and the culvert, and from that point on the tunnel floor sloped upward ahead of him. Chui eased the woman to the ground and went looking for the buzzer that would sound in the house.
“All safe?” asked Khai.
"We are safe,” said Chui. “Nguyen is disposing of the temporary help.” It had been necessary to hire the two American men. Chui understood that. If anyone saw the kidnapping, they must not identify the kidnappers as Vietnamese. Chui understood that sometimes they must work with Americans. It was the woman herself who made him uneasy. They could solve their problem without her. But Khai didn’t think so. And one did not argue with Khai.
“Must we keep her here?” Chui asked.
“I like it less than you,” Khai said. “But Tang’s men are everywhere. I want her near me.” As the gang war had escalated, Khai had developed the beginnings of a siege mentality. He seldom left the house nowadays, and he liked everyone close at hand.
They were still standing in the tunnel, near the entrance to the house, which was simply a large ragged hole cut in the rock wall. The hole led through a fake wall that could be slid aside into a closet on the first floor of the house, near the kitchen. When Khai had come into the tunnel he had closed the closet door but had left the fake wall open and out of sight. Now another man opened the closet door from the house side and came toward them, stopping in the tunnel entrance, filling it. The man was American, the only one in the house. Khai took no notice of his sudden appearance.
In the dim light of the tunnel, the body on the ground was barely visible. It may have taken the American’s eyes time to adjust, or he may have just been staring at the body, wondering at its implications. At any rate, he stared in the direction of the woman for a long two minutes before crossing past Khai and kneeling beside her supine body. Chui glanced at him a trifle uneasily.
His name was John Loftus. He was a tall man with sunburned arms but a pale face. Loftus was well muscled, but looking at him one could easily see the skeleton he would someday be. Bones were prominent in small knobs on the tops of his shoulders as well as at his collar and wrists. The skin of his face was white and taut, and he had that blond shade of hair and eyebrows that is almost invisible a few feet away, so that the shape of his skull was apparent. When he opened his mouth vertical creases appeared in his cheeks.
Khai was mulling over Chui’s protest. “Perhaps we could keep her here in the tunnel. If we-”
“No,” John Loftus said.
He was as much Khai’s man as any of them. Being an American here gave him no enhanced status; probably reduced it, in fact. But once in a great while he could still speak with the authority of the sergeant he had been; the voice of a noncom who follows dumb-ass officers’ orders without protest for months, until the day he thinks one of those orders will get him killed. Then it’s the officer who had better listen. Khai looked annoyed but didn’t immediately snap out a response.
John Loftus had knelt beside the woman’s body. Chui had pulled her blouse up over her face to serve as a makeshift blindfold. Underneath the woman wore a sheer bra paler than her white skin. Loftus had pulled the blouse back to look at her face. He let it fall back into place, covering her breasts and leaving her face exposed. Still kneeling, he had turned to look at the Vietnamese men.
“No?” Khai said softly. The calmness of his tone made Chui glance sideways at him. Clearly Khai was wondering at Loftus’s motive in interfering with the disposal of the white woman.
But Loftus’s tone was strictly business. “Leave her out here so if anyone finds the tunnel the first thing they’ll find will be her?” He stood. He was half a foot taller than the other two. In the dimness of the tunnel he seemed even bigger. “If she manages to scream anybody in that drainpipe could hear her. Kids probably play in that pipe. I did when I was a kid. You want her that close to the outside world?”
Khai looked at the woman thoughtfully. “My father is asleep upstairs,” he said slowly. “I do not want him disturbed with this business. More important, I do not want her to see any of us. If we release her I do not want her to say ‘Vietnamese held me in a large old house—’ ”
“Keep her in my room,” Loftus said. “No need for her to see anyone else. I’ll keep her blindfolded and gagged. The only voice she’ll hear will be mine.” Loftus had his feet planted and his fists on his hips. He was wearing a white undershirt that emphasized his skeletal nature, but the muscles of his arms were tight, highlighted by a thin sheen of sweat. “I’ll take all the risks.”
Chui started to protest that the risks would be all of theirs, if they entrusted the woman to Loftus, but Loftus’s voice rode over his. “What d’you think?” he said to Khai. He gestured at the woman’s body. “She’ll be waking up soon.”
Khai was stroking his chin. He nodded. He appeared to be lost in thought, but in fact he was carefully watching John Loftus’s face. When he nodded he saw a grateful expression quickly cross the American man’s countenance and as quickly disappear. “You make sense,” Khai said. “Take her then.”
Loftus nodded briskly. He crossed between Khai and Chui and stooped to lift the woman. She hardly seemed a burden in his arms. He passed the two Vietnamese men again without another word and disappeared into the house with her.
Chui began protesting in Vietnamese. Khai stopped him. “Let John Loftus run the risk of identification. He is right about that. When it is over it may be necessary for someone to take the blame. Who better than the man whose face she has seen?”
Chui nodded, of course. Khai put a hand on his shoulder and they followed Loftus into the house.
It was no accident that Khai lived in this mansion equipped with a secret tunnel to the block behind it. Khai and his father had lived in a mansion in Saigon every bit as large as this one, though lighter and airier. It too had had a bolt hole Khai’s father himself had ordered built, as an eventuality not against a Communist takeover, which he had not foreseen, but against changes in police administration, which happened regularly. Sometimes negotiations with the new administration were protracted and difficult, and the police chief would seek to accelerate them to a happy conclusion by sending minions to arrest the elder Khai in his home. The tunnel had kept him out of jail more than once, even saved his life when the police were acting under the orders of a rival. When they had come to America, where Khai’s father knew nothing about the police and trusted them accordingly, he had insisted on finding a headquarters similarly equipped. Khai had found it in the crumbling old mansion in Montrose, which had stood empty for years before Khai purchased it.
The mansion had been built in the ’20s, during Prohibition, by a bootlegger with gothic tastes, who had stood in the identical relation to Houston police as Khai’s father to Saigon police and had held their reliability in equally high regard. Just as important, the bootlegger’s personal stash had to be brought into the house, and not through the front door. Hence
the tunnel from the street behind, ending in the bootlegger’s closet, which served as his wine cellar.
When the two Vietnamese emerged from the closet, Chui asked, with an unattractive edge of eagerness in his voice, “What about the other one?”
“Ah, yes,” said Khai. He had forgotten the other. It seemed so trivial now. “We are becoming a house of women, are we not?”
“Is tomorrow the second Day?”
“Tomorrow? No. The next, I think. We don’t want it to pass too quickly.”
“No,” agreed Chui.
“There must be time for the information to pass.”
“I think it has,” Chui said.
“Really?” Khai found this flattering.
“Everyone knows. Everyone waits.”
“Let them wait another day, if you think best. I leave it to you.” Khai dismissed the whole operation. He had much larger schemes at hand now.
Chui, though, was looking forward to seeing the Days of the Hand played out. In the old days of Saigon, he had heard, it had been a time-honored practice, though one not performed for many years because it had been that long since a merchant refused to pay protection. But here in America an occasional one like the pawnbroker Linh was unfamiliar with the old ways and had developed an inconvenient independence of spirit. After other tactics had failed Khai had decided that the Hand would be the ideal device for bringing such a one into line. It would do the pawnbroker no good but would serve as an invaluable learning experience for others.
The operation of the Days of the Hand was simple: Leave the recalcitrant merchant in place but kidnap his wife. They would keep her for a while, sending easily detachable parts of her back to her husband’s shop: fingers primarily, sometimes ears or toes for variety. The pawnbroker would never go to the police, out of a wan hope that his wife would be returned to him, alive if not quite whole. Still, news would leak out within the community. His fellow merchants would see the effect on the stubborn fool as the packages arrived with their delicate cargoes bespeaking growing pain and disfigurement. The husband would grovel. Before the end he would beg to be allowed to pay protection. But it was too late for him already. On the last day of the lesson he would come to the shop in the morning to find a fingerless hand nailed to the door. The next day the pawnbroker himself would be gone as well, and no one would ever again think of not paying. The procedure was elegant in its simplicity, Chui thought. He was honored to be participating in its fulfillment.
