Predator's Waltz

by Jay Brandon

  The sudden appearance of the white woman in his world was jarring. Now there was one more person in the universe. He had entered into Khai’s service like a man entering a monastery, seeking to put off the burden of choices. But volition had tracked him down even here. He had to decide what to do about the woman.

  Bad enough that she was white, but she was a woman as well. When he first saw her, white breasts plain in the sheer white bra, then when he uncovered her pale face, he wanted her. Lust had struck him like a blow. The sensation seemed unfamiliar. It had been years since he’d had a woman without paying for her. He liked it that way. Payment was a fine thing: It made a woman your slave and distanced her at the same time. This white woman was helpless as a slave too. Khai wanted her freed after this was all over, and untouched in the meantime. The question was, what did John Loftus want? He didn’t know. Rape and romance were entangled in his mind.

  He would have remained loyal to Khai if Khai had stuck to their unspoken agreement, that they deal only with Vietnamese. Now all bets were off. Khai’s wishes were secondary to his own.

  He walked off down the hall and the stairs, oblivious of the Vietnamese he passed.

  Carol sat twisting her hand, trying to make it narrow enough to slip through the handcuff. She was doing this unconsciously while staring out the window. Wherever she was, the grounds were extensive. Just below her were porch lights that cast their glow a few feet out, but beyond that the yard was dark. Fifty yards farther out was a brick wall, stretching out of her sight in both directions. It was interrupted only by an iron-barred gate.

  The grounds were thick with trees. Through their tossing branches she had an occasional glimpse of down­town. She was relieved to know she was still in Houston. But the glimpses weren’t enough to tell her in what direction downtown was. She didn’t recognize the street beyond the gate. If she could get to it, though, she was sure she could find her way in minutes. Once she was free it wouldn’t matter. If she could get out this window and down there safely she could be over the gate in seconds. No one stood in her way.

  Her decision to escape if possible was automatic. She had been treated decently enough so far but there was something about the man in the mask that worried her; something in the way he so scrupulously didn’t come too close or touch her unnecessarily. He conveyed a sense of dangerous restraint.

  He was not one of the ones who had attacked her in the alley. He was too tall for one, too thin for the other. Those first two hadn’t been so cautious about letting her see their faces. She would recognize them again if she saw them. That worried her too. They must not be concerned about her identifying them later.

  Carol assumed she had been kidnapped for ransom and that her father would pay, but that didn’t mean everything would go off smoothly. Most of the kidnap­pings one read about seemed to end with the victim dead. If she could get away without relying on the tender mercies of her captors, she would do it.

  Her skin scraped against the metal of the handcuff. She almost had it. The cuff was built to hold bigger prey. She stretched the chain to its full length and yanked her hand as hard as she could.

  In the next instant she had to bite down on the back of the chair to keep from screaming. She had almost dislocated her thumb.

  But she was almost free. One more yank that hard, if she could stand it, should do it. She waited, breathing raggedly. Her eyes had clouded with tears.

  When she looked out the window again she started to her feet, forgetting the handcuff. A man had appeared. He was standing just outside the gate, looking in. He wore a long overcoat and a stocking cap.

  Carol pushed the chair out of the way so she could reach the window. Frantically she tugged it upward, but it wouldn’t budge. She reached above it, found the latch, and freed it, but the window still wouldn’t move. It was either stuck too tightly for her to open with one hand or nailed shut. Either way she couldn’t open it to call to the man.

  She looked around her but of course there was no object within reach with which she could break the window. She would have to use her fist.

  Not yet, though. The man was still too far away to hear her words if she broke the window and called to him. He would just think someone was yelling at him to go away. He would have no way of knowing the house held a captive. And the sound of breaking glass would bring the man in the mask running. “I’ll have to hurt you,” he had said.

  She didn’t care about that, but she didn’t want it to be in vain.

  The man at the gate was someone who lived in the streets, she saw now. Under his overcoat were layers of clothing, probably all he owned. His shopping cart stood at the cuib, filled with aluminum cans and unrecogniza­ble junk. He stood at the gate because he was eyeing the big trash dumpster that stood inside the fence.

  He would respond to a promise of money, Carol thought, if she could make him understand. Would he have the capacity to remember the address, if she sent him for the police? Come inside, she was thinking. Come a little closer.

  The man had the same thought. He was studying the house now instead of the dumpster, and apparently he saw no activity there. Carol had no idea how late it was. Maybe most of those inside the house were sleeping. Maybe the man in the mask was the only occupant.

  That dumpster must have looked like Ali Baba’s cave to a shopping-cart man like the one at the gate. He eyed it hungrily. Abruptly he decided it was worth the risk. He reached up for the top of the gate and hauled himself up and over, landing in a heap just inside. Crouched there, he peered at the house. Carol held her breath in perfect empathy with him. The dumpster stood beside the driveway, fifty feet closer to where Carol waited at the window. If he made it that far, he could hear her call. If only he wasn’t frightened into running away immediately by the sound of breaking glass. The window continued to resist her efforts. She leaned almost against it, in danger of breaking it with the weight of her body, in order to pull straight up. She tugged hard, as hard as she could. Her hand was pulled out of the slight indentation of the handgrip in the wood, breaking a fingernail in the process. The window didn’t budge. Carol leaned against it, her breath fogging the glass.

  She gasped. The man was gone. There was no one inside the gate. All at once she felt like crying again. She pulled back from the window so she could see better. The man’s shopping cart still stood in the street outside the gate. He couldn’t have gone far.

  She saw him then, still inside the fence after all. He had moved faster than she’d thought possible and had reached the dumpster. He was close now, as close as he would get to her. It was time to break the window and scream that she’d been kidnapped. The man was stand­ing right in front of the dumpster now, standing on tiptoes in order to peer inside. Carol looked around the shadowy grounds, hoping no one else had spotted the man yet, hoping he’d have time to get away once he heard her call.

  That’s why she was the only one to see the dogs.

  There were only two of them, but that was hard to tell at first, because they were black as the night. Blacker. They were almost invisible. They ran at full speed side by side, low to the ground. The dogs were Dobermans, but they didn’t remind her of her own. Ham weighed ninety pounds, he was one of the biggest Dobermans she had ever seen, but he was rather stately, well fed. These dogs were probably each ten pounds shy of his weight. There was something stripped-down about them: hot rods rather than touring cars. They were jet black but not glossy. Their fur didn’t shine. Only their teeth caught the light. Their teeth seemed to emerge from darkness, standing alone, unsurrounded by dog, like the Cheshire cat’s grin. It was only those teeth she saw clearly, moving through darkness, propelled by deeper darkness.

  The poor old street man never heard them. The dogs moved perfectly silently. They weren’t there to frighten, they were there to kill. They weren’t dogs to stand at the gate barking at passersby. They were dogs to prowl the far reaches of the estate and come running when they smelled warm blood.

  Carol did make a sound
. She screamed. It was as much a scream of fear as of warning. It carried through the closed window. The street man looked up, alarmed by that sound but not yet perceiving that the danger was his own.

  That’s when the dogs were on him. The first one leaped, slamming the man against the dumpster and bouncing off. The second dog already had the man’s arm gripped in his teeth. The dog didn’t go for a wrist or a sleeve. It clamped its jaws around the meaty part of the forearm, like a predator.

  The man was already stunned from having his head bounced off the metal dumpster. But the pain revived him. He screamed. He couldn’t even see what had him. It must have felt like demons. The street man tried to regain his balance, but he couldn’t stand upright because of the dog pulling on his arm. He jerked the arm but managed only to pull out of his overcoat sleeve. The dog regained its grip immediately, now on bare flesh. The man staggered. The first dog reared up on its hind legs and planted its front paws against the man’s chest, knocking him back again.

  Carol saw a spout of blood as the second dog’s teeth found the artery inside the man’s elbow. She stared helplessly. The man screamed again. Men inside the house must have heard him by now, but no one came running to call off the dogs. They could have been standing on the covered porch below her, watching. Carol had a feeling they were.

  The second dog never released its grip on the man’s arm. It just lunged upward for a better grip as the flesh began to shred and grow slick with blood. The other dog had the man by the leg now, jerking its head back and forth to tear with its teeth. They didn’t look like guard dogs subduing an intruder, they looked like jungle ani­mals feeding. Carol’s stomach was trying to come up her throat. She looked away.

  When the man went down it was as good as over, because the dogs could get to his throat then. He tried to hold one off with the one good arm he had left, but the dog bit his fingers and when the man instinctively jerked his hand away, the dog lunged straight for the throat. There was another spout of blood, darker and thicker than the first. The dog was immediately covered with it. The man got his hand around the dog’s own throat and tried to grip it, but by that point the dog was stronger than the man. Cords of muscle stood out on the dog’s neck. The man couldn’t get a grip on the slick fur. The second dog had finally released its grip on the arm and was tearing at the man’s unprotected stomach and crotch.

  In less than a minute after that the man lay perfectly still, his body jerking from the dogs’ pulling on it. Blood no longer pumped from his wounds.

  Only then did two men finally appear. They carried rifles loosely. One called a halfhearted command but the dogs ignored him, and the men let them continue to tear flesh from the body for another minute. That was their reward. One of the men was laughing.

  Carol drew back, free hand at her throat. The men were Vietnamese. With their rifles they looked like soldiers. She felt completely dislocated. Where was she? The men were part of the hellish scene. The laughing man was now pointing with amusement. Carol shud­dered.

  She fell into the chair, sliding down in it as far as she could, until the window displayed only night sky. Clouds had rolled in to smother the moon. Carol sat there shaking as if with fever and chills. Her hand had slipped back all the way into the handcuff as if for shelter. There was no rescue from this place. Even if she could escape the house, the grounds were lethal. And God help anyone who came in looking for her.

  When the man in the mask returned to transfer her to the bed, he found her apparently already sleeping. Carol slitted her eyes to look at him as he bent over her handcuffs. He gave off a strongly masculine smell of exercise and whiskey. Already contemplating her help­lessness, Carol felt positively childlike when he lifted her in his arms without apparent effort. She continued to feign sleep. He walked to the bed and held her for a long moment longer before lowering her. She could feel him still standing there. It was a relief when he lifted her arm and handcuffed it to the railing. She was afraid to open her eyes even slightly. Not until she heard the click of the light switch and the sound of the door closing was she sure he was gone. She wrapped her free arm around her and huddled into a ball. She was on the verge of crying herself to sleep. Some time later she was startled out of unconsciousness by the scream.

  It was high and loud and painful. And it was obviously a woman’s. It ended abruptly. The silence was worse. What on earth was this place? How many women had they stolen? Carol lay rigid in the darkness for a long time, eyes wide and staring and sightless. No one, of course, came to explain.

  It was a surprise to everyone when the woman screamed. If her captors had given a thought to her at all, they had assumed that when she awakened she would lie quietly, trying not to draw attention to herself. That would have been the wisest course. The pain that was her future could only be hastened by her creating a distur­bance. So she had been gagged, but loosely so. The scream that rose from deep inside her slipped through and around the gag barely impeded.

  The scream was a thing alive. The men in the room with her were bound in place by it. The woman’s scream carried such terror that the men forgot for a moment that they themselves were the cause of that terror. They thought there must be a monster in the room with them.

  There was the sound of running footsteps. The men realized whom they might be disturbing. One of them, Chui, finally freed himself from the spell of her scream and leaped toward the woman. His first instinct was to choke her. That cut off the scream, after which he pressed a pillow over her face, hard, trying to bury her in the bed.

  “Don’t kill her.”

  Chui looked up and saw Khai standing at his elbow. Chui cringed. He was the one who had acted, who had improved the situation, but now by his very involvement he looked somehow responsible for the scream. He eased the pressure on the pillow over the woman’s face and waited for a blow to descend. None came. When Chui looked up again Khai was no longer looking at him or at the woman. He was looking back over his shoulder at the doorway to the hall.

  In the doorway stood a white-haired man, as motion­less as if he’d grown there. The man stood straight, hands at his sides. His eyes were sharp. He was obviously an old man, but his face was relatively unlined. The years had sculpted rather than eroded his face. There was no excess in it His cheekbones were prominent, his cheeks tight The old man’s character was plainly visible in his features: craftiness, command, and an inescapable stern­ness. It was also obvious from his features that he was Khai’s father.

  His appearance turned those who saw him to stone. To annoy Khai was insanity, but it was best not even to be seen by the old man. He lived in the house among them but like a wraith, seldom leaving his room, his wants attended by invisible servants. The old man seemed placid enough these days in exile, but it was well known that in the old days in Saigon bad things happened to those who displeased Ngoc Van Khai, things that proved invariably, though seldom quickly, fatal. What might displease him could not always be predicted; the part of wisdom was to stay out of his sight altogether.

  The woman stirred and moaned. Chui applied more pressure and the moan ceased. Chui wished he too could become invisible, but he was the cork in the genie’s bottle; if he faded into the background, the scream would be set loose again.

  Khai’s jaw had set. He continued to stare at the old man. If the others in the room could have seen Khai free of the patina of fear he inspired, they would have seen that he looked like a boy caught at some mischief. He didn’t speak. He wouldn’t offer explanation in front of his own men.

  The old man didn’t speak either. After a long, long moment he turned away. Slowly he passed down the hall that had emptied before him.

  “Quiet her,” Khai said tersely. “Now.” And he hur­ried after his father. As he passed the door behind which the American woman was held he shot a glance at it There was silence. Loftus was nowhere in sight Khai caught up to his father at the top of the stairs. They started down together. At the first landing a man came pounding up into view. He skidded t
o a stop, his eyes growing wide at the sight of father and son together, and he turned and ran out of sight again.

  “What stupid games are you playing with the woman in my own house?” the old man asked abruptly. “Even a dog knows better than to shit where he eats.”

  “A mistake,” Khai said. “One of the men brought her here. He’ll regret it.”

  They spoke English, a habit acquired in Vietnam. Many of their men in the house spoke no English. Of those who did, none was as fluent as Khai and his father. When the two men spoke rapid English, tinged with the slang of the GIs from whom they’d learned it, they were incomprehensible to those around them.

  “He should’ve already cut his own throat in fear of your anger.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Khai said shortly.

  The old man made a sound like “Hmmph,” a sound of both disbelief and annoyance. Khai stopped walking, glaring at him. His father immediately added, “See you do,” and strolled on.

  The old man knew him so well. He knew when he made the annoyed sound Khai would stop walking with him, so he added the contemptuous sentence as a sign that he had dismissed his son rather than that Khai had stopped by his own choice. Ngoc’s step was almost spry as he walked on down the hall. Khai stared after him, one fist clenched tight.

  Khai sat alone in his study listening to Mozart, the Divertimentos, occasionally following a passage through the air with his hand. Palace music, composed for an emperor. A cup of tea had grown cold on his desk as he listened, trying to clear his mind.

  He knew what his father would say if he knew that things were much worse than what he had seen. If he knew that Khai was involved with Americans now. The lure, though, had been irresistible: to rule them as he had once served them. Khai thought himself intimately knowledgeable in the ways of Americans because he had grown up being a lackey and pimp for the GIs. His father had already been a wealthy man by then, but they couldn’t stop scrambling for more. Khai had harbored a secret contempt for the Americans because they never knew his true status. They treated him like just another street hustler. He’d never gotten to act the young master until he came to America. But such a pose was a mere puppet show for children unless he could wield power over Americans as well.