“Where you live?” the blond Marine asked, kissing the girl, his breath racing and his face feeling on fire.
“Down hall next door,” Wild Thing lied, standing up and taking the young man by the arm. “I show you. I live just here.”
“I need to tell my buddies,” Mike Scott said, looking at the two of them still busy at the bar with the naked girls now perched on their knees.
“You stay all night?” the girl said, hoping for the twenty-dollar commission that he would pay up front.
“Naw, we got to get back pretty soon,” the lad said, looking at his watch.
With her clinging to his arm, he walked to the dark-haired Marine wearing the sunglasses and mustache and pointed to his watch.
“I’ll be back here in thirty minutes, tops,” he said.
The salty leader grinned at the blond and said, “No sweat, GI. You go boom-boom. No more Da Nang cherry boy. We’ll be right here, unless we go fuck these two hogs first.”
“I’m not leaving anyplace without you guys,” the blond Marine said, and then looked at Wild Thing wrapped on his arm.
Seeing doubt start to show on his face, the hooker then pressed her groin against his leg and pulled his arm hard.
“We go do short time,” Wild Thing said, and then pointed to the two girls, “they no let your friends leave without you. I promise. You be okay. Come, we go my room now.”
“Don’t sweat about it, Mike,” the dark-haired Marine said, reassuring his newbee pal. “We won’t leave here without you, man. I promise.”
James Harris sat, sipping his beer, watching the show, and shook his head at the trio of fools. Huong and Bao slipped away from the table and walked to the back of the saloon, past the red-lit stage and the bar’s one, stinking restroom used by both sexes, and pushed through a doorway that led them into a dark hall that emptied into another passage along which half a dozen single-room apartment doors opened.
Still wearing his uniform and sergeant chevrons, Mau Mau Harris ambled to the front of the bar and elbowed his way to the counter next to the Marine with the dark glasses and mustache.
“You guys with the wing?” Harris asked the man.
“Yeah, we’re with MAG-Eleven,” the dark-haired Marine answered. “You with the wing, too?”
“Naw,” Harris said, purposefully killing time, keeping the two buddies occupied. “I work over at the press center. You know, the PIO? I take pictures and shit.”
“You got stuff in the
Sea Tiger
?” the second Marine said, smiling while holding on to his naked playmate.
“Yeah, that and
Stars and Stripes
,” Harris said, making himself feel important.
“You going to do that for a living when you get out? Take pictures and shit?” the dark-glasses Marine asked, cupping his hands on his dancer’s breasts as she straddled his leg and ground herself on his increasingly damp thigh.
“Yeah,” Harris lied, enjoying the role, “I’ve got a job offer already with the
Chicago Tribune
, man. I rotate out of this hole, and I go back home and live a good life. Taking pictures of all the shit that goes on in Chicago.”
“Fuck, man, I wish I had a job like that,” the second Marine said, grabbing a pull off a fresh bottle of 33 Beer that Harris had the bartender set up with a snap and point of his fingers. “What’s your name? So I can say I knew the dude back when.”
“Rufus Potter,” Harris said, almost choking on the beer that he gulped after saying it. He saw both men fighting back laughs, and then narrowed his eyes at them. “You got a problem with what my mother gave me?”
“Sergeant Potter, oh, shit, no, man,” the dark-haired Marine said, and took off his sunglasses to show the sincerity in his eyes.
Harris laughed and drank more beer. Then he looked at the two men and scowled.
“That’s my father’s name, too,” Harris frowned. “So I go by Junior. My nick. Junior Potter.”
He had just thought of it, and Junior had a much better ring to him than Rufus, which he had typed on the green identification card in his wallet and stamped on the two metal dog tags hanging around his neck.
“When I go to taking pictures for the
Chicago Tribune
, you want to see my name in that paper, you need to look for Junior Potter,” Harris said, and then gulped down his beer when he saw Bao step into the daylight outside the saloon’s front door and give him a nod.
“Hey, check it out, I got to get back to the press center,” Mau Mau said in a hurry, making an exaggerated glance at his gold Rolex wristwatch and stepping away from the bar. Then, as an afterthought, he reached in his pocket and laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Let me catch another round for you guys, and for your buddy, too, when he gets back.”
As the deserter nervously walked to the saloon’s entrance, and then jogged to the street corner where the black Mercedes sat with its engine running, waiting for him, he cursed under his breath. His abrupt departure from the newfound friends, and his clumsy exit raised a host of red flags in his mind. He realized that the conversation with the two Marines had never mentioned their third friend. The blond had already left the saloon when Harris had joined the two playboys at the bar. Another thought, too: buying two complete strangers a second round of beers went overboard. Picking up the tab on the first serving seemed a little odd to him, now that he thought about it. When their buddy would eventually fail to return, and their search for him would turn up nothing, they might smell the rat and connect Mau Mau to his disappearance.
Speeding down a back street, Harris thought, “Why should I give a shit? I’m out of here anyway. Soon as I kill that rat bastard Elmore.” With a new life and fresh identity, and his share of three million dollars, why should he ever worry?
However, as the car whisked out of the heart of Da Nang, the bumping and kicking from the automobile’s trunk troubled him.
A COOL BREEZE stirred from the South China Sea brought the marine layer ashore and shrouded the low-lying lands and river bottoms with fog south of Da Nang. Huong switched on the yellow lamps mounted on the front bumper, near the center of the Mercedes-Benz’s grill, as he followed a narrow dirt road westward alongside the Cau Do River.
Hidden by the fog and the night, at a spot where the road branched north, a quarter of a mile east from its intersection with Highway One, Huong shut off the lights and stopped the car. He said nothing to James Harris, who sat in the backseat, smoking a cigarette, but simply looked at his brother, Bao, who got out of the car and opened the trunk.
Huong lifted the latch on the driver-side door and stepped out of the car when Bao dragged the first victim to the road’s edge, atop a steep bank, ten feet above the Song Cau Do’s low-tide water. James Harris looked at the foggy silhouette of the person the two cowboys had bound with communications wire and gagged with a knot tied in an old T-shirt. While Bao held the short man by the wrists, Huong put his .45 Colt to the back of the fellow’s head and sent a bullet out his face. Just as the gunshot popped, Bao let go of the dying cowboy’s hands and he splashed into the mud at the water’s edge.
The younger Nguyen brother returned to the trunk and pulled the young whore from it. Seeing her, James Harris jumped out of the car.
“Oh, now, wait, man,” Mau Mau pled with Huong. “That’s Wild Thing, man! She one of us!”
“She Benny Lam whore now,” Huong said, putting his .45-caliber pistol at the back of the girl’s head as Bao held her by the hands, and quickly pulled the trigger before the frantic black deserter could do anything. Then the cool older brother shrugged at the terrified American as he slipped his pistol back in its waistband scabbard. “She talk too much. She tell anybody, all this be no good then. No work. Not buy any time. CID keep looking. Benny Lam cowboy, he talk, too. We no need anybody talking. You understand?”
“Yeah, man, I understand,” James Harris said, looking at the muddy edge of the river where the girl and her watchdog lay dead, their hands and feet bound, and the rags tied around their mouths. “It’s just, I liked that chick, you know? She’s sweet.”
“Sweet like bamboo snake,” Huong said, taking a pearl-handled straight razor from the dead girl’s black velvet clutch purse with the long, thin gold chain shoulder strap. He flipped open the weapon under James Harris’s nose and made a quick swipe with it in front of his face. He snapped the blade shut and then dropped it in Mau Mau’s shirt pocket as a souvenir. Then he found the fifty dollars along with two more American twenty-dollar bills and a ten plus three fives, and folded the cash into the two hundred dollars he had recovered from Benny Lam’s watchdog. Turning the small handbag inside out, spilling the whore’s wallet, compact, and makeup onto the road, Huong dropped it over the side where it landed in the mud next to the two bodies.
Harris followed Huong to the back of the car, where Bao now pulled the bound feet of the unconscious blond Marine out of the trunk and waited for his two cohorts to take the young man by the shoulders.
“No, not here,” Huong told Bao in Vietnamese, and pushed Harris’s hand away from their barely breathing victim. “We no do here. Him dead someplace else much better.”
“You don’t want the cops to tie those two with this guy, right?” Harris said, realizing that authorities finding the three corpses together would naturally investigate the homicides as connected, and eventually tie the identity of the blond Marine with the missing man from the bar. As he climbed in the backseat and Huong slammed the trunk shut, with their captive safely inside it, Harris reminded himself that he had to think matters through better.
“GUNNY JACKSON,” THE sandy-haired CID lieutenant called as he walked through the doorway of the III MAF Criminal Investigation Division work quarters where the gunnery sergeant with the gold badge pinned on his green utility uniform sat behind one of three desks crowded into the small office space. “Somebody took out the Snowman.”
“Oh, really?” the seasoned veteran criminal investigator said, and leaned back in his chair, taking a sip of hot coffee from a white mug with a gold Marine Corps emblem and the name “Jack” painted on one side and gunnery sergeant chevrons painted on the other. “You sure, sir, or are you just supposing?”
“Supposing, I guess. We won’t be sure until they confirm the ID on the body at Hickam Air Force Base, in Hawaii,” the lieutenant said, pouring a cup of coffee and then walking to his desk. “Graves and registration are packing him out today. We may know something in a few weeks.
“Chief Toan claims it’s Brian Pitts for sure, though. And you know, he knew him better than we ever did. A pair of his patrolmen found the body this morning on the edge of Dogpatch, not two blocks from the Snowman’s villa. Staff Sergeant Lyons and Sergeant Knight got the call on it, about five o’clock this morning. We’re going out to investigate the scene in the daylight, as soon as they get in. Probably around noon. I let them catch forty winks this morning, since they got hauled out of the rack last night.
“Toan thinks that Benny Lam’s boys took out Pitts last night after somebody, most likely the Snowman’s crew, whacked one of Lam’s best whores and her watchdog. A patrol from Seventh Marines found the two bodies in the tidal wash of the Cau Do River this morning, near that big, green, iron bridge on Highway One.
“So the chief concluded that Lam’s boys must have caught Pitts trying to sneak back to his ranch, sometime after one or two this morning, some six to eight hours after the whore and the cowboy bought it, based on the time-of-death estimates, and shotgunned our man Pitts in reprisal. Blew his face off with a couple of blasts of twelve-gauge, ought-two man-stoppers.”
“You know, Lieutenant Biggs, Hickam will take a hell of a lot longer than a few weeks. We could be sitting here three or four months. Can’t we just run his fingerprints and make an ID? The FBI can turn it around in two weeks flat,” the gunny said, running his index finger down an incident report as he read through its data.
“Be nice, Jack,” the sandy-haired CID lieutenant named Melvin Biggs said, leaning back in his chair and sipping coffee. “Apparently Pitts saw it coming, and put his hands in front of his face. You know the typical defensive wound. Turned both his mitts into hamburger.”
“Convenient if you’re Brian Pitts and want the world to think you’re dead,” the gunny called Jack Jackson said, drinking more coffee and tossing the report he had just read across to the lieutenant’s desk. “Check out the description of this lost soul, a newbee from MAG Eleven, one Lance Corporal Michael Jerome Scott, age twenty-one, six-feet-nothing tall and 180 pounds. My last sighting of our infamous Snowman, Corporal Brian T. Pitts, matches this boy top to bottom.”
“That certainly casts a new light on the discovery of Pitts’s dead body, doesn’t it,” Biggs said, picking up the report passed to CID from the military police watch commander from the previous night.
“You know, sir,” Gunny Jackson added, “we were damned lucky to get that report you’ve got there in your hot little hands. We wouldn’t have had a clue about this kid, otherwise, had Scott’s two buddies not raised holy hell with the night watch, demanding that they call out the cavalry because their newbee lance corporal had gotten himself snatched.
“After these guys spent a couple of hours scouring the area around that bar, searching for Lance Corporal Scott, they beat feet to the MP shack and reported him kidnapped. That’s right, kidnapped, right off the bat. No missing-person bullshit. And they stuck to their guns about it being a snatch job, too, not just another Marine in love suddenly gone native, like we see more often than not.
“Given that this was the lance corporal’s first trip to the ville, and that he was nervous about being out of sight of his two buddies, the watch commander ordered a full sweep of that area. Of course he turned up zipzilch, but because the incident involves a possible kidnapping, it landed the report and Scott’s description right in our hands this morning.