Big Mango (9786167611037) (34 page)

Eddie checked the bills under his hand. There
were five, just as he thought. That was 2,500 baht, not 5,000. He
raised his eyebrows and looked at Short Time.

“Whatever,” she shrugged and pulled in
another mouthful of noodles with a sucking sound so resonant that
Eddie’s crotch gave an involuntary twitch.

“Who you, baby?” she asked.

“A friend of his.”

“Friend?”

“Yeah. An old friend.”

“How I know that true?”

This wasn’t going the way Eddie expected. He
was the man; he was talking to a bargirl; and he had the money on
the table. But Short Time was ignoring the money and asking him the
questions. How had that happened?

He had brought the two photographs that had
been sent to him in San Francisco. Hesitating only briefly, he
reached into his shirt pocket and pulled one out, laying it on the
table in front of Short Time.

“We were in the marines together. That’s
Harry Austin in the back.”

Short Time bent forward and studied the
picture. “Why you draw circle round head?” she asked.

“Look, are you going to tell me what you know
about Captain Austin or not?” Eddie’s patience had run out. “Or
maybe you’re just jerking me around and you didn’t know him at
all.”

Short Time grunted, spraying little pieces of
noodle all over the table.

“I know.”

“How well?”

She moved her head in a gesture that could
have meant almost anything, but Eddie knew that whether Thais just
moved their heads around or actually spoke words, anything could
mean almost anything.

“How long since you saw him?” Eddie
pressed.

Short Time chewed thoughtfully. “Two, maybe
three week.”

Eddie’s hopes popped like a soap bubble. He
stood up and wearily collected the photograph and the money from
the table.

“Hey!” Short Time’s eyes flashed. “What you
do? You say you give me money if I tell you about Khun Harry!”

“Look,” Eddie snapped. “I don’t need your
bargirl bullshit. You don’t know Harry Austin. You don’t even have
any idea who the hell I’m talking about.”

Short Time seemed genuinely confused. “Why
you say that?”

“Harry Austin has been dead a couple of
months. He was the man who was killed in that accident in the soi
you don’t know anything about.”

“He look okay when he come see me few week
ago.”

“You’re saying Harry isn’t dead?” Eddie shook
his head. “Even if he were alive, why would he come here to see
you?”

“Why not?”

Short Time peered at her plate. It was
empty.

“Man come see wife,” she went on without
looking up. “What wrong with that?”

Eddie’s stared. “You’re his wife?”

Short Time somehow scraped one more noodle
off the plate and popped it into her mouth, and then she shifted
her eyes up to Eddie.

“No more, I guess,” she said. “If Harry
dead.”

Jesus wept
. Eddie slumped back in his
chair, shaking his head. Here we go again.

AFTER
Eddie gave him the
slip, Chuck McBride went back to his office and made some
calls.

He wanted to keep an eye on Eddie without
getting too close, so he got four of his locals out quietly shaking
the short-time hotels, not an inconsiderable task given the number
of those things there were in Bangkok. He was pretty sure Bar was
helping Eddie and his faithful Indian companion and, if he knew Bar
and he was sure he did, he would have them holed up in one of those
whorehouses he hung around. They sure as hell wouldn’t be in a
suite at the Grand Hyatt. Just to be on the safe side, he also sent
his best pair of Chinese bone-crushers to turn over some of the
classier massage parlors, too. There were plenty of beds in those
places—didn’t he know it? McBride thought with a grin—and maybe Bar
was more imaginative than he thought.

Either way, Bangkok was a small town when you
came right down to it, at least it was for
farangs
, and he
was sure his people wouldn’t have any trouble finding Dare wherever
he was hiding out. Yeah, when the big dog got off the porch,
McBride chuckled contentedly to himself, there wasn’t much anybody
could do about it but throw down a bone and haul ass.

Confident he would soon have everything back
under control, McBride kicked off his loafers and sprawled on the
couch. He had never liked Bangkok very much when he had been with
DEA, although he had pretended to for the sake of the job, but as
he lay on his couch with his hands clapsed behind his head he
thought about all the fun he was having now.

The problem when he had been DEA was that no
place was any fun when you were nothing but the town fool. Every
major drug dealer in Asia operated openly in Bangkok and no one
really wanted that to change. Even Khun Sa, probably the most
famous heroin dealer on earth, would turn up every few months fresh
from his labors in the Golden Triangle, get his teeth cleaned, and
have lunch at the Hilton with his stockbroker. After he left town,
McBride would inevitably discover that absolutely no one had seen
him. Not the dentist, not the stockbroker, not even Mrs. Khun Sa
who lived in a lovely home not far from Chitralada Palace that was
complete with a goldfish pond, a white picket fence, and a bunch of
other stuff McBride figured she must have seen in reruns of ‘Leave
It To Beaver’ or some shit like that.

McBride’s job in Bangkok when he had been DEA
was basically to show up every day and look mean. He operated as
conspicuously as possible from a building on the grounds of the
embassy and his function was officially described as intelligence
gathering. The truth of it was that he didn’t do jack shit. He was
just there to show that no one, by God, could run the United States
of Fucking America out of a shitty little third world rat turd
place like Bangkok. But of course someone could and, as a matter of
fact, had. Nothing was keeping Uncle Sam’s tattered anti-drug
banner flying anymore but a few fat, dickless losers driving around
in dented Jeep Cherokees, wearing counterfeit Ray-Bans, and trying
to keep their polo shirts pulled down over their paunches.

After a while, McBride hauled himself off the
couch and, listening to his knees crack, stumbled into the
bathroom. When he was done going to the toilet, he stood and
examined himself in the mirror, something he noticed he had been
inclined to do recently. He wondered briefly how much time he had
left in life. He wasn’t being morbid about it; that was just a
question of fact as far as he was concerned.

He had jumped at the chance of going over to
CIA when they offered it to him. After six years as a DEA
scarecrow, he wanted to do something real while he could still
enjoy it. Then his desk officer at Langley had gotten a hard on
over some rumors that a pile of money left over from the fall of
Saigon was floating around Bangkok and he had laughed himself silly
at first; but when he had found out that the rumors just might be
true, that put a whole new spin on things.

What kind of middle-aged guy could resist a
hunt for lost treasure in a place like Bangkok? It was all too
goddamned romantic for words. Fuck those poor DEA bastards
pretending to track down drug dealers. Chuck McBride was out there
now looking around for ten tons of cash money.

When he stumbled onto Harry Austin, almost
entirely by chance, and made the connection between Austin and the
last days of Saigon, it started to mess with his mind. Harry Austin
had been sitting on all that money for twenty years now. He
couldn’t prove it in a court of law, of course; but now that he was
CIA, he didn’t have to prove a goddamned thing. He just had to know
it. And he knew it.

Still, there was something he just couldn’t
figure. How could any man have a pile of cash like that, hundreds
of millions of dollars in untraceable cash, and not do a fucking
thing but bury it in the ground or something and then live in a
crappy little apartment in a shithole like Bangkok for the rest of
his life? McBride was sure he would have been in the south of
France the day after grabbing the loot and that would have been
that. Doing anything else was plainly nuts, so he guessed Austin
must have been nuts. Occasionally he even wondered if it was just
having all that money that had driven Austin mad, or if maybe it
was something else.

Austin had probably been planning to let
things cool off and then split, McBride had finally decided; but
since twenty years of cooling off hardly seemed necessary, he
guessed Austin had just never gotten around to doing it. It was, no
doubt, one of those things he was always going to do real soon—and
then there he was lying in the mud in some crummy street, his skull
half crushed, bleeding to death. McBride would have bet his last
dollar that Austin started wondering right then how it could have
been that he had never taken off with the money, and that he had
been wondering exactly that right at moment he just lay there and
died.

Most people did that with their lives,
McBride had realized a long time ago. They kept on putting off the
good part until they were dead, and then there was no good part
anymore. He had always done a lot of putting off himself, but his
jump to CIA had flipped on a light; and then Harry Austin and his
buried treasure had appeared to him like the Christmas star. Sure
as shit, he vowed, he wasn’t going to put anything off anymore.

When Harry checked out of this world, McBride
was absolutely certain he left something behind that pointed to
where he had stashed all that loot. And he was going to find it,
whatever it was.

At first, Austin’s hot little wife had seemed
a good place to start looking, but then there had been that gnawing
feeling he got that there was something about her that was off. It
had taken a while, but he had finally worked out what it was: she
didn’t know where the money was either and she was trying to work
him
to help find it. Fucking cunt. What nerve.

After that, everything went quiet for a while
and McBride hadn’t been sure what he was going to do next. But then
Bar Phillips turned up, sniffing around without a fucking clue like
he always did, and this clown Eddie Dare and his Indian pal fell
into his lap. Suddenly he was back in business.

McBride ran a comb through his hair and
looked himself over again in the mirror. Better, he thought. Not so
decrepit after all; at least still plenty good enough to get the
babes in Bangkok where the male mating cycle lasted considerably
longer than it did out in the real world. On the other hand, it
suddenly occurred to him, maybe the south of France was a different
deal altogether. Maybe the young guys got all the chicks there. He
pushed that horror aside with a shudder and went back to thinking
about Eddie Dare and Harry Austin’s secret stash.

He still didn’t have the vaguest idea how
everything was going to come together, but he was sure that if he
hung close to Dare something good would happen. The money was close
now, he could smell it, and he was nearly certain Dare was going to
find it, even if that dickhead didn’t know it yet himself.

Yep, that was just the ticket, he thought.
Boogie on down the road right behind Eddie Dare, keep his eyes open
and his zipper closed, and eventually he would come to the magical
city of Oz. He was still working on exactly what he would do when
he got there, and he figured that was the really hard part.

He wondered what looking at ten tons of cash
money did to a man. More to the point, he wondered what it was
going to do to him.

Maybe it would do the same thing it had done
to Austin, it had crossed his mind more than once. Maybe it would
make him crazy and he would just grab all he could carry and
disappear forever. On the other hand, what was so crazy about that?
Maybe when you were looking at a pile of money that big, it was the
only rational thing for any man to do.

Anyway, he decided, patting his cheeks with
his open palms, he wasn’t going to worry about that yet. McBride’s
daddy always said that the hen was the smartest animal in the world
because she never clucked until after she had laid her egg. McBride
held that thought for a minute; then he opened the bathroom door,
went back to the couch, and laid himself out to take a nap while
his guys shook down Bangkok looking for Eddie Dare.

***

WHEN
Bar walked into the
Little Princess, he was empty handed and Eddie decided Bar must
have crapped out on getting the weapons he had asked for. But then
a taxi driver staggered in just behind Bar. He was struggling under
the weight of a dark blue duffel bag and Eddie smiled. The man
dropped the bag next to Eddie’s stool where Bar pointed and, after
he left, Eddie unzipped it and pulled it open until he could
inventory the contents without taking anything out.

“Three army surplus .45s, three almost-new
Berettas, and a hundred rounds for each.” Bar kept his face empty.
“You owe me 29,000 baht plus a couple of hundred for the taxi. Make
it $850 and we’ll call it even.”

“Grenades?” Eddie searched the bags with his
eyes.

“They take two days. The samples he gave me
looked pretty good, but I figured two days was too long so I
passed.”

“What’s the shotgun for?”

“For looks. Mostly.”

Bar settled himself on a stool and called out
for a Carlsberg while Eddie closed the bag and pushed it up against
the bar with the toe of his shoe.

While Bar was drinking his beer, Eddie told
him about the conversation with Short Time and they both swung
around to look her over. She had pushed her empty plate aside and
her head was on the table resting on her folded arms. She looked
like she had gone to sleep.

“What do you think?” Eddie asked Bar.

“Beats the hell out of me.”