Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  “What about the girl?” I asked.

  “Can’t do nothing for her,” he said. “You know that.”

  “You can treat civilians when it’s an emergency.”

  “Only on the compound.” He closed the door and started up the engine. Ernie climbed into the back of the MP jeep. I told him to wait, and I trotted back down the alley to the hooch.

  The River Rat still lay on the ground, unmoving, and a few of the neighbors had wandered inside. I checked her pulse. Faint. She was becoming pale.

  I talked to one of the old women. She told me that the hooch’s owner had been notified and was on her way. In Korea, going to a hospital requires front money, in cash, and I didn’t have much. The MP jeep honked its horn. I ran back down the alley, got in the jeep, and we spun our tires all the way back to Camp Pelham.

  Bogard was all right. The bone had been broken, but not shattered, and the chopper came and took him to the army hospital in Seoul.

  Ernie and I spent some extra time on the paperwork. The shooting meant that if it wasn’t done right, it would be our ass.

  The MPs at Camp Pelham treated us like heroes, slapping us on the back and congratulating us. They were glad to have Bogard out of their village.

  It was well past curfew, but I managed to convince the desk sergeant to give me a jeep. At the main gate the guard came out in the snow and rolled back the fence for me, just wide enough for the vehicle to squeeze through.

  The village of Sonyu-ri was completely dark. Not even the glimmer of stray light from behind shuttered windows was visible to mar the beauty of the moon-cast glow on the white shrouded street. The road was slippery, and I drove slowly.

  I parked the jeep, locked the security chain around the steering wheel, and felt my way down the pitch black alley. The stench from the river seemed lessened now, and the murky waters lapped peacefully against the glistening mud of the shore.

  The gate was open. Inside, the moonlight shone down on the unsullied snow, and the River Rat lay on the ground where I had left her. I brushed the frozen lace from her hair and pressed my fingers into the base of her neck.

  I waited a long time. When I got up, I brushed the snow from my knees and walked away from the unblinking eyes that followed me.

  THE BLACK MARKET DETAIL

  A full-length dress clung to the soft, round parts of her short body like cellophane on a peach.

  “Looks like we’ve found our culprit,” Ernie said.

  We’d been sitting in the parking lot of the Yongsan Commissary for about thirty minutes, sipping acidic coffee, watching the housewives parade in and out, trying to decide which one to pinch for black-market activities. None of them had been good-looking enough. Until now. She pushed her overflowing shopping cart toward the taxi stand and smiled at the bright spring day. A voluptuous Oriental doll come to life.

  “Instant coffee, strawberry jam, a case of oranges, about twenty pounds of bananas. Is she black marketing or what?”

  “Either that or she owns a pet gorilla.”

  The bag boy helped load her booty into the trunk of the big PX taxi. The driver closed the door for her after she climbed in the back seat, ran around, and started the engine.

  Ernie tossed his Styrofoam cup onto the pavement and choked the old motor pool Jeep to life. He slammed the gear shift into low, we jerked forward, and I barely managed to keep what was left of my coffee from splashing all over the front of my coat and tie.

  Shadowing hardened criminals is never easy.

  Ernie slid expertly through the busy afternoon Seoul traffic and stayed within a few yards of the cab. In Itaewon the cabby turned left, ran the big Ford up a steep hill through a walled residential area, and took a quick right. Ernie waited at the base of the hill until he was out of sight and then, the sturdy old engine whining all the way, charged up after him. At the corner he turned off the Jeep and wedged us up against a stone wall.

  I got out and peered around the corner. The cab driver was helping her unload the groceries. I went back to the Jeep and waited.

  Most Korean wives of GIs will finish their black market activities in the afternoon before their husbands get home from work. They don’t want to jeopardize his military career by getting caught selling a few jars of mayonnaise and maraschino cherries for twice what they paid for them in the commissary. Sometimes the husbands are a little squeamish about the whole thing, but most of them like the extra income just as much as their wives do. An extra four or five hundred dollars a month. Easy. And if they get serious, go for the big ticket items—TVs, microwaves, stereo equipment—they can make as much as fifty thousand dollars during a one-year tour.

  Ernie and I usually get stuck with the black market detail. Our job is to bust housewives, embarrass their husbands, and cut back on the flow of duty-free goods from the US bases to the Korean economy.

  So far we’d managed to keep the deluge down to about a couple million dollars a week. Exactly what it has always been.

  The cab driver finished unloading the groceries, accepted his tip with both hands, bowed, and in a few seconds the walled street was empty and quiet.

  Ernie and I walked by her front gate. Stopped. Listened. Nothing I could make out.

  Down about fifteen yards on the other side of the road was a small neighborhood store, fronted by an ice cream freezer and a couple of rickety metal tables under an awning emblazoned with the Oriental Beer logo. We rummaged around, Ernie bought some gum, and the old woman smiled as she came up with two paper cups to go with the liter of beer we bought. We sat outside, under the awning, and waited.

  Spring was becoming summer in Korea and the afternoon was clear and bright but not hot. It reminded me of the endless days of sunshine I’d survived in foster homes throughout East LA. The sun had been as glaring and unrelenting as the gaze of the adults I’d been forced to live with. I’d cursed my mother for dying and my father for disappearing into the bottomless pit south of the border.

  It hadn’t all been grim. One of my foster parents, Mrs. Aaronson, made sure I brought my schoolbooks home and then took the time to correct my homework. She showed me that arithmetic and spelling and science are all puzzles. Games. The greatest games. And as I lost myself in these games for hours, I looked forward, for the first time in my life, to being praised by the teacher and respected by the other children for something besides my fists.

  The first payoff was when I joined the army and my high test scores earned me a brief stint in the military police. Later, I found myself graduating from the Criminal Investigation School—and on my way to Korea.

  Ernie and I had gravitated toward each other somehow. The two duds of the CID Detachment. The first sergeant kept us together mainly to keep an eye on us. We both had this bad habit of following an investigation even after the right slots had been filled in the provost marshal’s statistical charts. They wanted a body count of GIs caught selling coffee in the village—not a report on how it was a customs violation for a general’s wife to ship Korean antiques back to the States at government expense and then sell them at a three hundred percent profit.

  There was no briefing chart for that.

  By all rights Ernie should have been in Georgetown trying to pass the bar exam or working his way up through the ranks of young stockbrokers on Wall Street. His dad, a big honcho somewhere in the government, expected it of him. But for Ernie, Vietnam had interrupted everybody’s plans.

  Most people would blame his choices on the pure China White he was able to buy there from snot-nosed boys through the wire. But I knew him better than that. It was the loathing of routine, of predictability, that had caused him to reject a life of seeking riches in the States and caused him to reenlist in the army. And besides, he’d put down the heroin now—you couldn’t buy it in Korea anyway—and replaced it with the duty-free, shipped-at-taxpayer-expense, happy-hour-priced booze that gushed from the army warehouses like crude from a grounded tanker.

  A Korean man wearing sandals, a T-shirt, and l
oose-fitting gray work pants rode past us on a sturdy bicycle.

  Ernie elbowed me. “Must be the pickup, pal.”

  The produce displays kept the man from seeing us, and Ernie and I got up, taking our beer with us, and faded deeper into the darkness of the grocery store.

  The man parked his bicycle in front of the doll’s front gate and rang the bell. In less than a minute the door opened and the man went through, carrying some flattened cardboard boxes and some string.

  We sat back down and finished our beer. Ready for action.

  A rag dealer pushing a wooden cart on oversized bicycle tires rolled past us. He clanged his big rusty metal shears and wailed something incomprehensible to his prospective customers. A woman down the street, across from the doll’s house, came out from behind her big metal gate and bartered with the rag dealer for a while, finally selling him a brown paper bag filled with flattened aluminum cans.

  The Koreans have been recycling for centuries.

  The rag dealer tried to interest her in some bits of clothing but she shook her head and demanded money instead. A few coins changed hands, the woman went back behind her protective walls, and the rag dealer clanged down the road, turned left, and was out of sight.

  In the distance his clanging and wailing stopped for a while and I figured he must have found another customer.

  The man on the bicycle reappeared carrying two large cardboard boxes wrapped in string. He struggled beneath their weight but managed to hoist them up onto the heavy-duty stand on the back of his bicycle. He secured the boxes with rope, hopped on the bike, and rode off. The gate behind him had long since been closed.

  “Let’s go, pal.” Ernie and I trotted down the hill after him, and then jumped in our Jeep and followed at a safe distance as he crossed the Main Supply Route and went about a half mile farther into the heart of Itaewon.

  A steep alley turned up a hill, and the man jumped off his bicycle and pushed it slowly up the incline. Ernie pulled over, and I got out of the Jeep. I followed the man to the top of the hill and down a couple of alleys, and watched as he parked in front of a small house surrounded by a decrepit wooden fence. He unloaded his boxes and entered. Then he took his bicycle in and closed the gate.

  On the way back to the Jeep I stopped at a public phone and called the Korean National Police liaison officer.

  By the time I returned to where Ernie was waiting, a small blue and white Korean police car was just pulling up. Two uniformed KNPs got out, and the four of us walked up into the catacombs of the Korean working class neighborhood.

  They kicked the door in. In about ten seconds the man was face down on the floor of his home, his wrists handcuffed securely behind him. Some of the fruit was smashed and the US-made canned goods rolled slowly across the room. They took him to the Itaewon police station.

  Ernie and I popped back to the doll’s house and knocked on the door. There was no answer. We waited for a while and then a GI sauntered toward us carrying a briefcase. He was tall and thin, with a pencil-line mustache and the strut of a Southern aristocrat.

  The insignia on his neatly pressed khaki uniform identified him as Chief Warrant Officer Three Janson. Medical Corps.

  “What do you want?”

  I flashed my badge. “To question your wife concerning black market activities.”

  “No way.”

  Janson opened the door and told us to wait, but it didn’t take long because we barged in when we heard his scream.

  The voluptuous Oriental doll lay dead on the floor, blood seeping from a hole in her side where her ribs should have been.

  The big red brick building that was the headquarters of the CID detachment seemed to be waiting to swallow us as we approached.

  The first sergeant wasn’t in his office, but down in the admin section barking into telephones and ripping off teletype reports.

  “What the hell happened with you guys?” he said when he noticed us. “I send you on a simple black market detail, and you turn up with a corpse.”

  Ernie sat down on the edge of Miss Kim’s desk and offered her a stick of gum. She smiled and accepted a piece with her long manicured fingernails.

  “Bascom! Get down to my office! You too, Sueño!”

  The ass chewing was royal. You would’ve thought we’d killed the girl ourselves, and in a way that’s sort of what he said. At least we’d been in the vicinity and had the opportunity—if not the motive. He told us that if she’d been raped we’d probably have been charged and locked up by now.

  Shows you the high opinion our leadership has of us.

  He’d given the case to Burrows and Slabem, affectionately known around the office as the Boot Hill Brothers, his favorite investigators when it came to burying inconvenient facts. When the dependent of a US serviceman gets murdered, all hell breaks loose up at the Eighth Army Headquarters. Colonel Stoneheart, our provost marshal, was briefing the commanding general right now. The first sergeant felt that only a trustworthy pair of sleuths like Burrows and Slabem could properly handle the case.

  “You mean properly cover it up,” Ernie said.

  The first sergeant freaked, chasing us out of his office and warning us to stay off the case unless Burrows and Slabem had some questions for us that weren’t covered in our initial report.

  We wandered down the long hallway.

  “What would we do without the first sergeant’s hoarse voice echoing down the halls?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to act.”

  Ernie winked at Miss Kim on the way out, and we jumped in his Jeep and went directly to the Itaewon police station.

  Exactly what the first sergeant had told us not to do.

  Burrows and Slabem were there. Burrows, tall and skinny with a pockmarked face; Slabem, short and round with a pimply face. The Korean police wouldn’t talk to them. Neither would we. They harrumphed and tried to look officious. Chins met necks. Except in Slabem’s case.

  I greeted Captain Kim, commander of the Itaewon police station, and spoke to him in his own language.

  “Were you told anything by the offender?”

  “Yes. He told us everything.”

  “How did you get his confession so quickly?”

  Captain Kim slammed his fist into his cupped hand. “The lie detector.”

  He ushered us back to the cells and the guy on the bicycle lay on a moist cement floor. I recognized him because of his clothes. His face was a puffed hive of purple welts.

  Burrows and Slabem, the Boot Hill Brothers, glared at us as we walked out. Somehow I didn’t think they’d keep our little visit a secret from the first sergeant.

  We talked to a lot of the folks in the neighborhood, covering much of the same ground the Korean police had already covered. The only thing unusual anyone had noticed was me and Ernie hanging around. The man on the bicycle had been conducting black market business with the GI wife in the neighborhood for many months, without incident as far as anyone knew.

  The whole thing was a mystery to me. Why would a black marketeer kill one of his sources of income?

  Ernie thought it might have been Janson. Husbands are always a first suspect in a murder case. But we checked the back of the building. The walls were ten feet high, sheer, with shards of glass embedded in cement on the top. When we had seen Janson, his uniform was still neat, with no more wear than one would expect from a hard day’s work at the office.

  We couldn’t interrogate him. Burrows and Slabem would be handling that, on compound, in conjunction with the chaplain who was giving him counseling and trying to pull him through this crisis.

  “Might as well forget it,” Ernie said. “If it wasn’t the black market guy, Burrows and Slabem might figure out who it was. And anyway the first sergeant said to stay off the case. We’re potential suspects. Nothing we can do about it.”

  But we both knew what was at stake. The guys who played everything by the regulations considered us a couple of screw-offs anyway. And a young woman, a US army dependent, had bee
n murdered while we were actually staking out her home. We both planned a long career in the army, preferably in the CID, and I wasn’t going to walk into one assignment after another with the stigma of an unsolved murder, one that happened right under my nose, hanging around my neck.

  “We have to find out who killed her,” I said.

  Ernie shrugged.

  We went back to the compound and started making some phone calls. Calling in every favor we had out there. Tracking Janson.

  Somehow all our investigations seem to lead us directly to the Itaewon nightclub district.

  In this case we found out that Janson was the chief inspector for the Preventive Medicine division. They’re the guys who give the mess sergeants and the Officers’ club managers a hard time about the cleanliness of their kitchens, the temperatures of their food storage facilities, stuff like that.

  Janson’s NCO-in-charge, the guy who actually ran the operation, was Sergeant First Class Billings. Billings was sort of a soft guy. I’d seen him before at the NCO Club. A little out of shape. Never with a woman. Suspect. And he always puffed on his scroags through a cigarette holder.

  Word was that he was a real brown-noser. His boss, Chief Janson, or anybody else up the chain of command, could do no wrong as far as he was concerned. The privates who worked for him, though, could do nothing right, and he made their lives miserable. Much to the pleasure of Chief Janson, who felt that suffering subordinates meant a well-run ship.

  Captain Bligh in khaki.

  Sergeant Billings’s desire to please his superiors extended beyond the working day, and we had heard from one of his cronies that Billings and Chief Janson regularly ran the village of Itaewon together. The guy had heard Billings mention the Spider Lady Club, a little hole-in-the-wall amongst the bigger, gaudier nightclubs, as their favorite hangout.

  Ernie and I had changed into our running-the-ville outfits: sneakers, blue jeans, and a nylon jacket with a golden dragon embroidered on the back. It was nighttime and we were in the Spider Lady Club, having a welcome cold one and checking out the exceptionally attractive ladies. The music was mellow. The place was lit by red lamps and the flickering blue light from a row of tropical aquariums.