Trotting down the hill through the blaze of automatic fire and the thunderous artillery bursts came Bean's South Vietnamese language advisor. Seventeen at the time, a weakling not even half Bean's height, he risked his life racing down the hillside, scooped Bean into his arms and trudged back up the steep incline with the mountain erupting all around him.
Bean came to consciousness long enough to stare into the eyes of Tran van Hung. Then he shut his eyes again and resumed his flight, lofting through a black and empty sky until he woke days and days later in a suffocating room, as large as heaven, a warehouse of white, where flies clung to the sluggish fan blades and slow nurses floated through the labyrinthine rows of beds, and all around him were the cries of fatherless children lost in a maze without exit.
And that's when the ceaseless burn of his phantom pain began.
***
"I don't have a passport."
"It doesn't matter," Tran said. "We'll take the boat to Cuba, fly from there. You won't need a passport. This is how I came to Key West. How I'll go back."
"I don't know," Pepper said. "It sounds shaky."
Pepper was in his hotel room again. The smell of their sex clung to the curtains and the rug and the bedspread. The good people at the Marquesa Hotel would have to call the sex fumigators when Tran finally checked out, exterminate all the carnal cooties roosting in the crevices if they were ever going to make the room safe for the next lucky visitors.
Several of Tran's bags were packed, sitting by the door. It was one o'clock in the morning, quiet out in the patio and gardens except for a couple of drunk guests stumbling back to their rooms, shushing each other and laughing.
Pepper's jaw ached. Worst pain she'd ever had. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to swallow, it hurt to talk, and it hurt just to stand there in Tran's room watching the slender little man pack his toiletries in a leather shaving kit and slide it into one of his big gold bags. The worst hurt, though, was in her chest, where her heart had once been rooted.
"You want me to kill Bean Wilson before we go? Or I can send a man later and kill him then?"
"Whatever you think," Pepper said. "Now or later, I don't care."
"So why have you chosen me? You stopped loving your blond doctor? He hit you once and that's the end of your love affair for him?"
"You bet your ass."
"The man is a giant weenie. I think, yes, we shall kill him now. Let you see him die on the floor like an animal, so you will never think of him again in your future life with Tran."
"If it's easy to do, no risk, that's fine. I don't care. I don't need to see him die. He's dead now, far as I'm concerned."
"You want one more sexual activity in our love nest before we begin our travels?"
"No," she said. "My fucking jaw hurts. Hurts to blink my eyes."
"Sexual activity will take your mind off your pain. That's what it is for."
"Oh, that's what it's for, is it? Well, good, now I know. And there I was, thinking it had something to do with making babies."
"I will give you a baby, if you want a baby. I give you a hundred babies."
She went over to him and opened her arms and Tran van Hung stepped into her embrace. Short little guy, his ear only came to her breasts, the man pressing his head there, listening to where her heart used to be.
Short, yes, but that was okay. Short was fine. So what if he was a midget? So what if he was from the other side of the planet, and warbled and screeched like an inflated balloon squeezed in your fingertips, and his face was pinched and slitty? That didn't matter. He didn't strike her, he worshipped her body, and he was going to be a very rich man. Their sex was great, and Pepper was going to be a queen over there. A giant woman in a land of runts. Her head so high in the air she'd never have to use makeup again. That was fine. A huge change of plans, and happening awful fast, but it was fine. She was going with it. She was going to have a different life than she'd imagined, but what the hell, what the fucking hell?
"You want me to write down the formula for you, before we go?"
"What?"
Tran stepped out of the embrace. He cocked his head and looked into her eyes. The lights were low in the room and the incense of their sex was strong. She could feel the clenching in her stomach, wanting him inside her. Even with her jaw the way it was.
"Formula. Ingredients and numbers. You know what I'm saying. You want me to write down the formula so you can see it?"
"No," Tran said. "You don't need to write it down. You have it in your head. That's good enough."
"You're sure? I mean, I might decide to run off and sell the formula to someone else and make myself rich. Or some foreign agent could kidnap me, whisk me away somewhere, give me sodium pentothal to make me confess the formula."
"You should not worry about these things, Miss Pepper. I will keep you safe. You are secure with Tran. You have nothing to fear. I will give you all the blond babies you want. Diamonds and rubies too, what every girl wants, I give you. You are Tran's queen. You will wear beautiful dresses, a different one every day of the year. All the lipstick and eyeshadow a girl could ever want."
"You love me."
"Yes, sure. I love you. I love you completely and terrifically."
"Well, that's the right answer. Yes, sir. You couldn't come up with a righter answer than that."
Pepper walked over to his luggage and stared at the gold fabric. She didn't know much about luggage, but she could see this was expensive stuff. When it came rolling down the ramp at the baggage claim, everybody was going to watch it, see who picked it up. The problem was, except for the luggage and a few weeks of sex with Tran, she didn't have much proof of who he was and what he was all about. It was a scary step, going off with him. Scary as hell when you paused a second and considered it.
Tran came over to her, stood close.
"You think I am lying about love? Is that what you are saying? You think I only want the formula. You give me this test, dangle a bait in front of me like I am some kind of giant weenie person?"
"Weenie's a stupid word, Tran. I just told you that word to hear you say it all the time. I was goofing on you, that's all. Anybody who'd use that word has got to be a major weenie himself."
"You were trying to trick me?"
"Not a trick. More like a joke."
He looked hurt or maybe it was angry. She'd gotten a little better at reading his expressions than she'd been at the start, but she still had a long way to go.
"We shall go to the boat now," he said. "Take it to Cuba, then fly home. Miss Pepper, I don't know what I need to say to you to convince you of my love. All those hours we spent together in the sheets of that bed, I thought this would demonstrate with certainty how I felt. I would never try to cheat you, Pepper. You are the woman of my dreams. You are the woman I want always."
She stared at him for a long moment, then reached out and touched her fingertips to his cheek.
"Maybe I've been confused."
"Confused about what?" he said.
"Maybe I didn't know what the word means. I used it a thousand times, but I didn't understand what it was about."
"Which word is that?"
"You know which word, Tran. The word you shouldn't ever say until you paid your dues and you own the thing free and clear."
"I love you, Pepper."
"I know you do."
"Do you love me?"
"I'm working on it. I'm working on it real hard."
He stepped forward and they embraced again and she could've sworn she felt the molecules and atoms and a thousand other microscopic parts of her flowing out through her skin, through her clothes and into Tran and mingling with his microscopic parts, swirling up together, and his parts flowing back across into her. Some kind of magnetic thing or like the acid juices that oysters secrete to glue themselves to the pilings, mingling and joining. And even when she stepped back from the embrace, breathless and weak, she could feel that part of her was gone, passed across to Tran, and that missing par
t of her had been replaced by an equal part of him. It scared her. Made her dizzy.
She couldn't even look him in the eye.
Swinging toward the door, she said, "On the other hand, maybe we should kill Bean now. Kill him before we leave. That might be a good idea, now that I think about it. We blindside him before he knows what we're up to. Kill him and go."
"All right, then," Tran said. "Whatever my queen wants. We will kill the blond doctor, then go off to Vietnam. My beautiful country."
CHAPTER 27
When Thorn rolled off the lift into the first-floor hallway, Ginny was stationed in front of the elevator door wearing a goofy smile and nothing else. And even through the dim light and the boozy haze, Thorn could see that she had spent a great deal of time shaping her upper body into something taut and formidable. Her breasts were heavy but showed no sign of sag; muscles ridged her stomach. A lot of angry, obsessive dips on those parallel bars. Not trying to sculpt herself into something beautiful, but doing it because it was necessary—because it was all she had now, her upper body.
"I've been waiting for you," she said.
"I see that."
She was holding a bottle of red wine in her lap.
"I thought you'd like to come to my room, I could show you a few things you won't learn in rehab. So you could see it's not as hopeless as you think. There's a lot of pleasures still available."
She held out the wine to him but he shook his head. Then she touched the bottle to her lips and tipped it up. After she'd bubbled down a swallow, she set the bottle on the floor and rolled over next to Thorn.
"You can touch me, if you like. I know you want to."
Slowly, Thorn reached out with his right hand and ran a cautious finger along her sharp jawline. The muscles in her neck relaxed. Her flesh drank him in as if this were the first human touch she'd had in years.
"You're a beautiful woman, Ginny. Very beautiful."
"All right then, no more talk, let's hop to it."
"If I weren't already in love, I'd be there in a second."
She sighed, straightened her head, gave him a long, exhausted look.
"Well, it's a good answer anyway."
"It's the truth."
"You shouldn't kid yourself, you know. If you're in love with somebody, where is she when you need her?"
"I pushed her away. She's not here because I told her to leave me alone."
Ginny rolled back a foot, out of reach.
"But she's a normal woman, right? Legs, arms, completely intact."
"Fairly normal," Thorn said. "But she has her endearing peculiarities."
"How long you think something like that's going to last? Is she going to be able to deal with who you are now? Gorked. Half a man."
"I don't know. But I intend to find out."
She snorted, then reached down for her bottle and swiveled her chair around and headed down the hallway. At the door to her room, she halted.
"There's rumors about where the doc does his procedures." Thorn pivoted around and faced her.
"On a boat," she said. "He takes them on a cruise to nowhere. That's what I heard. So you'd best take along your life preserver. Dead legs don't float real well."
"Thanks, Ginny."
"Sure," she said, and turned to her door. "Down the road, if you discover you need some pointers on bedroom stuff, the offer stands. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here waiting till it's my turn to be the chimp."
The champagne haze evaporated as he rolled into his darkened room. He felt around for the switch, flipped it on, and his heart staggered.
Perched tensely on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, Monica stared into his eyes. Wearing a pair of old jeans and a black mock turtleneck and running shoes that matched his own. "I was just talking about you."
She put a finger to her lips and shushed him.
"What? What is it?"
In a whisper she said, "You're in danger, Thorn. We've got to get you out of here, right now. Right this second."
"I heard you were wounded. Are you all right, Monica?"
"I'm serious, we have to go now."
"The guy at the paper said you were shot."
"I'm all right. I'm fine." She twisted her head stiffly, pulled aside the turtleneck and displayed the bandage on her neck. "It's nothing."
She stood up and came over to him. Stood there for a few seconds peering into his eyes, then kneeled slowly and embraced him, pressing her cheek against his chest, and after a moment or two a quiet sob shook her, then another. He held her hard until she was still, and after another moment she raised her face, tilted toward him, found his lips, pressed her mouth flush to his, filling his lungs with feverish breath. It was an awkward embrace, a fumbling kiss, the salt of her tears on his lips, but the kiss lasted, neither of them getting enough, teeth clicked, their tongues working, and he felt the hard lump of anger in his chest liquefy and begin to drain away.
Finally Monica pulled away and stood up. She took a long breath, ruffled her short hair. Her eyes roamed the dreary room. Bare walls with dingy white paint, dirty wood floor covered by only a single tattered rag rug. A room where too many people had passed sleepless nights, too many had cried out in torment.
"The policewoman, Jennifer Bell, she came over at suppertime, told me you'd called her, that you needed to speak to me. I was just leaving anyway. I had to come tell you what I found out."
"I heard about Roy and his mother, some other woman."
"All murdered, yes."
"Those fuckers. Those goddamn motherfuckers."
"We need to get out of here. This has something to do with a drug Bean junior's been producing. Dolphin endorphins."
"Endorphins," Thorn said. "That's what he wanted from the dolphins? Some goddamn chemical."
"Yeah, Roy figured it out and he called Bean to help him fill in a few blanks with his research, then later that same night the killers came for him. It had to be Bean, his people."
"And they were coming for you too."
"I don't know that for sure."
"Maybe Roy talked before he died, gave them your name."
"Let's go," she said. "No more discussion."
"I can't, Monica. I've got to stay."
"Didn't you hear me? You're in danger. If they think I know about the dolphin thing, then they have to realize you know too. We have to go to the police, explain what's been going on. Let them handle it."
"It's not as simple as that."
"What?"
"There's a woman, Greta Masterson's her name. It's a very long, very involved story. But Greta's in danger and it looks like I'm the only one who can get her out of it."
Monica stepped away from him.
"Greta Masterson. A woman."
"That's right."
"Someone you knew before me?"
"I've never met her before."
"Never met her? But you've got to save her?"
"She's with the DEA. She was investigating Bean and he took her hostage. He's got her hidden somewhere, using her in his experiment, but he's going to take me to see her tomorrow morning."
"Why can't the goddamn DEA save her? Why do you have to do it?"
"I'm all she's got."
"Wait a minute," she said. "If Bean Wilson is holding this woman hostage, why the hell would he take you to see her?"
"I talked him into it. I preyed on his vanity."
Monica studied him, hands balled on her hips. Her eyes were talcum blue, probing his face for signs of sanity.
"From the first moment I saw that man in your hospital room, I didn't trust him. That bastard's going to try to kill you, Thorn, that's why he's taking you along with him—off to some remote place where he can shoot you in the back."
"He might try."
"Jesus Christ. Listen to you. You're in a wheelchair, for god-sakes. This isn't some guy in a bar fight, you with full use of your body. You're not on equal terms with Bean Wilson."
"I think I am."
&nb
sp; "Look," she said. "I'm taking you out of here, whether you want to go or not. You make a fuss and we'll both be dead."
She got behind him, took hold of the grips, and muscled him toward the door. She was reaching around him for the knob when someone tapped quietly on the wood frame.
Thorn wheeled away from her, snapped off the lights. He waved Monica into the corner, then rolled over to his gym bag and dug beneath the clothes and got his Colt. As he drew it out, Monica took a sharp breath.
He motioned for her to yank open the door, and after a moment's hesitation she stepped over, got a hand on the knob, and threw it wide. Thorn cocked the Colt and set his aim.
Old Doc Wilson stood stiffly in the doorway. His hair was a mess and his white shirt and khaki pants were badly rumpled. He held his hands up to his shoulders.
"Wait," he whispered hoarsely. "I come in peace."
He stepped inside the room and Monica shut the door behind him and switched on the lights.
Doc Wilson's face was drained of color. His shoulders were rounded, head sagging forward as if both his lungs had collapsed and he was coasting on what little oxygen he had left in his bloodstream.
"I made it as soon as I could."
Monica sat down on the edge of Thorn's cot. She shivered while her eyes wandered the dismal room.
"I may have good news."
"Great. We've been a little low on that lately. Come in, sit down."
He stepped into the room and shut the door.
"The first thing I need to know, Thorn, did you get an injection today?"
"What?"
"The steroids, did you get an injection today? In your catheter."
"Yes."
"How many?"
"One in the morning, one at night. The usual."
He frowned and took a quick look at Monica.
"And since you've been here at the clinic, they've given you the shots regularly? Never missed?"
Red Sky At Night (Thorn Series Book 6) Page 25
