“It okay, this Inspector Nguyen,” Huong said, motioning for his two cohorts to lower their weapons. “He work CID for Major Toan.”
Harris frowned at the cop, but slid his pistol back in its scabbard. Bao dutifully put his .45 back in the holster clipped to the inside waistband of his trousers, under his square-tailed shirt.
“I ask Inspector Nguyen to come say you what he say me,” Huong told Harris. “No good news on Elmo. He go Chu Lai. So forget about it. We go back Hue City tomorrow then.”
“What the fuck you mean, go Hue City tomorrow! What’s the story on that shitbird Elmore?” Harris snarled, and looked at the policeman for his answer.
“I work CID so I know about Elmore,” the police inspector said, taking off his tan cap and wiping sweat from his forehead with his bare arm. “I find out last night that Marine CID send Elmore to Chu Lai two, maybe three weeks ago. Keep him safe. Pretty soon they send him Stateside unless they first catch you and Snowman.”
“We go to fucking Chu Lai, then,” Harris snapped, and looked at Huong.
“No,” Huong said calmly. “Pitts say we must leave and come Hue City, where he stay if no can get Elmo. You hear him say it, too. We no can get Elmo. Three week all go by now. Too much bad place they keep him Chu Lai. So we go now.”
“I can fucking get in there and get him,” Harris said, now pacing back and forth by the window. “I know exactly where they be keeping him, too. That hangar down off the end of the flight line, down there where they got the fuel dump and all them barrels stacked way up high.”
“Too many guard Chu Lai,” Huong said, still keeping his voice relaxed, and sitting on a sofa chair, lighting a cigarette. “Jeep patrol, foot patrol, watchtower, all see you when you try go through fence. No good. I think about it. No way you do. You be caught.”
“I won’t fucking get caught, man,” Harris now pled. “They see a Marine in uniform out for a little PT, they don’t think nothing about it. Lots of guys be out jogging and shit. I be cool.”
“No, we need go now like boss tell us do. Time pass, no get Elmo. So we go Hue City, first thing,” Huong said, and took a long drag from the cigarette. Then as he sighed and let out the smoke he looked at Mau Mau and shook his head at him. “I tell you something more, but I have Inspector Nguyen say for you. That way you know it true.”
The policeman lit a cigarette and looked at James Harris eye to eye and did not blink as he spoke.
“Benny Lam put out contract kill you, Pitts, Huong, Bao, Chung, all Snowman cowboy crew,” Nguyen said, taking a pull off his cigarette, letting the smoke drift out of his mouth, then inhaling it back through his nose. “That boy you kill with that whore, he Benny Lam’s nephew. His sister boy. Benny very angry. He want blood for blood. Best you go long way from Vietnam. Even Hue City not safe from Benny Lam.”
James Harris said nothing, and wondered if the cop really bought the misdirection to Hue City. He concluded very quickly that Huong had brought the policeman to their apartment only to feed him the ruse, but still he could not get the idea of James Elmore so easily escaping their retribution from the forefront of his increasing anger. So he stewed silently while he watched Huong walk to a rolltop desk and open a green metal box, where he withdrew a handful of American bills. After he put them in the policeman’s hand, he went to the apartment door and opened it.
When the inspector walked into the hall and began stepping down the main stairwell, Huong hurried back to the box, emptied out the cash that remained, and stuffed it into his pants pockets. Then he looked around the room, giving it one last visual inspection, ensuring that he had missed nothing, and headed out the door, with Bao and Mau Mau walking fast behind him.
“We go
didi mao
,” Huong said, jogging to a closed door that led to a set of stairs housed in a concrete shaft on the outside of the building. “Take fire escape out before Inspector Nguyen have time to get to street and send people after us. I think he like get pay Benny Lam money for kill us.”
“Why ain’t we just kill that motherfucker when he in the room then?” Harris blurted as the three men rushed down the concrete steps.
“Because he policeman,” Huong said, running out of the alley onto a nearby back street that led to the place where they had parked the black Mercedes-Benz, well away from their Da Nang apartment that he anticipated would get surrounded as soon as he surfaced in the city asking questions.
“Just like in Chicago,” Harris said, breathing hard behind the two brothers. “Bushwhack a cop, and they knock down the buildings until they get your ass. Kill anybody else, and it’s just another homicide in the big city.”
“Now you think smart,” Huong said, pulling open the driver’s side door and slipping inside. James Harris jumped in the backseat, and Bao rode shotgun in front.
“I still got to kill Elmore, that rat-dog motherfucker,” Harris grumbled in the backseat. “He keep his mouth shut, we still be sitting pretty in Dogpatch, man. Wild Thing, she still be alive, too. That white boy you shot off his face, he be alive. So would Benny Lam’s nephew.”
“You keep smart, Mau Mau,” Huong warned, looking at the man in the rearview mirror. “No good try kill Elmo now. Best we wait. I know. I want kill him bad, too. First, we need go Saigon,
didi mao
. Major Toan, Marine CID, Benny Lam, they all come look for us big time when that shit Nguyen tell he see us. Already now, I bet. We go tomorrow morning. Early, early. Maybe we still get Elmo someday. Okay?”
“Yeah, man,” Harris grumbled, “someday.”
A FINE GLOW of perspiration beaded on Gwen Ebberhardt’s forehead as she stood in the galley, out of sight of the passengers, and lit a cigarette. Her nerves felt totally wrecked. She had nearly called the game for rain, having second thoughts about spiking Dicky Doo’s coffee and orange juice with the laxative, but then the way he had bullied everyone on the plane gave her the courage to do the job. She heaped a teaspoon full of the yellow granules and stirred it in his coffee, along with the cream and sugar, and then stirred in an ample amount in the two glasses of orange juice he ordered from her, too. She had stirred it in Stanley Tuft’s coffee and apple cider as well.
Now the flight attendant worried that she had put in so much that the two lawyers would taste it, and start asking questions when it began to work. The worry made her sweat, so she grabbed a quick smoke to relax.
As always, a few minutes after the crew finished serving drinks and snacks, one by one, passengers began to swarm by the doors of all three lavatories on the airplane, two in the rear and one up front, opposite the galley. Gwen kept her eye on row nineteen, waiting for the major and the captain to start feeling discomfort.
Both men had finished their coffee and juice, and now began to stir in their seats. She could tell that their bowels had already built up a head of methane gas.
“Damn, I think that breakfast we got may have had something gone bad in it,” Stanley Tufts said, wallowing in his chair and unlatching his safety belt.
“You, too?” Dudley Dickinson said, releasing himself from the seat and stepping into the aisle. Tufts scooted out after him, and both men then ambled toward the aft restrooms, which appeared to have fewer people waiting to use them.
Standing in line, the stomach bubbling descended into their lower abdomens and Dicky Doo suddenly farted without realizing he had done it until it was too late. Stanley jumped one step back and smiled while he sought air away from the major’s gas.
“Gee whiz, sir, cut us a little slack,” a gray-headed sergeant major growled, stepping away from the senior lawyer and waving his hand in front of his face to breeze away the rank odor.
“Sorry, Sergeant Major,” Dickinson said, blushing. “I think the captain and I ate something that went bad that they put in our breakfast from that greasy snack bar in the passenger terminal.”
“Fucking Viet Cong,” the sergeant major said. “They damned sure will sabotage your food, you go eating in a gook gedunk like that one.”
Stanley Tufts felt his gut rumble hard, and then he fought with all his will to keep the rapidly building gas and excrement from creeping out, standing stiffly with his legs pressed together and clenching his butt cheeks tight.
“Oh, please help me,” he sighed, his face growing ashen and sweat beading across his forehead. He felt rivulets of perspiration starting to run along the valley of flesh that followed his backbone and down the middle of his chest. Even with his arms held out from his sides, his pits became soaked, spreading large wet circles in his khaki shirt.
“Look, pal, I can wait, you need to get on inside the head,” a lieutenant colonel who stood next in line told Stanley, and pulled the captain ahead of the men waiting, and shoved him through the open lavatory door.
“Can I please go too, sir?” Major Dickinson begged with a timid voice. The colonel then pushed the other Marines aside to allow the visibly sick man to get into the opposite restroom.
“What do you want? Those two assholes shitting all over you guys?” the lieutenant colonel said to the crowd standing in line after the pair of lawyers had gone inside the two rear heads.
Gwen dashed out her second cigarette and made her way back toward row nineteen, when she saw the captain and the major walking back to their seats.
“You two don’t look so good,” she said to the lawyers as they sat down. “Can I get you anything? Some water, perhaps?”
“We got some bad chow at that gedunk in the passenger terminal,” Dickinson grumbled, already feeling more gas boiling in his gut. “My insides feel like a volcano churning and about to erupt.”
“Mine, too!” Stanley groaned. “We got food poisoning or something worse.”
“How about some Bromo-Seltzer in a big glass of cold water?” Gwen offered. “Does that sound like something that might help you to feel better?”
“Yeah, lady,” Dicky Doo growled, gritting his teeth. “Bring us a couple of glasses apiece.”
“Yes, ma’am, please,” Stanley Tufts whined, offering Gwen a meek smile.
“You don’t say ‘ma’am’ to the hired help, stupid,” Dickinson snapped at the captain as the flight attendant turned and left.
Walking back to the galley and filling four tumblers with water, Gwen had almost felt sorry for Dicky Doo. She did feel sorry for Stanley Tufts. The redhead had started to bring them both Bromo-Seltzer and water, to perhaps help settle their stomachs. Seeing them struggle to the restrooms had made her feel that the prank had fulfilled its objective. However, the remark she overheard Dickinson say as she had left them, after she had genuinely wanted to help the two men, left her pissed off all over again.
As she stirred the seltzer into the glasses of water, she divided what remained of the granulated laxative among the four containers.
“There, that ought to do it,” she said as she set the glasses on a serving tray and walked back to the pair of lawyers.
At first the bubbling water felt soothing, neutralizing the acid in the two men’s stomachs. Major Dickinson sighed, let his seat back, and closed his eyes to relax.
“Viet Cong in the snack bar,” he said to Stanley, who also let his seat back. “It damned sure was something in the food there. I’m going to have a visit with the health inspector or somebody, and have that place shut down.”
“Did you see any of the other lawyers going to the conference on this flight?” Stanley said, feeling momentary relief.
“Nobody I know,” Dickinson said, still keeping his eyes closed. “If they’re on the flight, I don’t recognize them.”
“My brother wanted to go on this trip, too, but he had a case. I’m not sure who his office sent, if anyone. They’re shorthanded still, you know,” Stanley said, and then sat up, his eyes peeled wide open. “Oh, no!”
“What?” Dickinson said, sitting up, too.
“I’ve got to go shit, sir, bad!” Tufts said, panic filling his voice and raising his words into a rapid, high-pitched staccato. “Right now!”
The captain unbuckled his seat belt, leaped to his feet, and began trying to climb across the major’s legs.
“Now that you mention it,” Dickinson said, feeling his bowels coming alive with new thunder. The gas had left his stomach, which momentarily made him feel better, but the additional dose of phosphoric soda, polyethylene glycol, and electrolytic salts now went to work with a vengeance as it surged through his intestines.
He stood between Stanley Tufts’ legs and knocked the captain backward. The junior lawyer fell across the now dozing recon Marine’s lap and slammed his head against the airplane’s window. The sleepy-eyed captain angrily pitched the lawyer off his legs and onto the floor.
“Oh, God!” Stanley cried as he struggled to his feet, the strain causing him to release a wet fart that he immediately pinched off for fear of filling his shorts.
“I’m heading up front,” the major yammered, stepping into the aisle and fast-walking toward the nose of the plane with his butt cheeks clenched. “You can have the back, Stanley,” he called over his shoulder.
MICHAEL CARTER COULD not get to his cubicle fast enough. At the foot of his bed he dropped to his knees and began praying while tears gushed from his eyes.
“There you are,” Terry O’Connor called as he walked through the barracks door and saw the captain he called Stickman crouched over his footlocker.
“What?” Carter said, sobbing.
“We’re getting ready to head to the courtroom, and I thought you wanted to come, too,” O’Connor said, walking to where Michael Carter knelt. “Wayne’s already there with our client. I’ve still got a couple of things to go over with our three defense witnesses. Only one of them worth a shit, though, this fellow, Private First Class Wendell Carter, apparently PFC Celestine Anderson’s hometown buddy and only real friend.
“Meanwhile, Charlie Heyster has this sideshow of good ol’ down-home peckerheads he’s going to parade through, led off by this darling of rebel pride and eternal prejudice Private Leonard Cross, who Charlie the shyster has come to lovingly call Laddie-my-boy. This clown seriously believes that wearing a white sheet and a peaked hat is something noble. He thinks the Ku Klux Klan is a benevolent service club like Lions and Kiwanis.”