Slicky Boys (41 page)

“They arrested him.”

“Arrested him? They’ve got him in custody? And no one was hurt?”

“Hurt? Of course not.” Miss Chong looked indignant.

I would’ve bet that taking Shipton down would’ve caused a slaughter.

“Where is he now?”

“At the MP Station.” She pointed. “One block down. On your left.”

I ran out the door.

The MP Desk Sergeant was surprised to see a guy toting a canvas bag and all out of breath burst into his office. I showed him my badge. “Where’s the guy you arrested at the commissary?”

“With the phony ration control stuff?”

“Right.”

“Back here.”

He led me down the hallway to a holding cell and I peered through the one-way glass.

A chubby buck sergeant in wrinkled fatigues slumped on a wooden bench, his elbows on his knees. His brown hair was cut short and a narrow mustache drooped from his round nose.

“This is the guy?” I asked.

“That’s him,” the Desk Sergeant said proudly. “Caught him red-handed.”

A wave of nausea rumbled through my gut. For a minute I thought I was going to throw up but I fought back the feeling. The head of the buck sergeant lolled listlessly from his shoulders.

He wasn’t Bo Shipton. He wasn’t even close.

36

T
HE GUY REMINDED ME OF AN OVERWEIGHT CHIPMUNK
. He kept rubbing his hands and wouldn’t make eye contact with anybody; really ashamed of what he had done.

“I thought it would be easy money,” he whined. “I’d seen the guy around compound once or twice, couple of months ago. He asked me where I worked and we shot the breeze, but this morning he sits down with me at the snack bar and shows me this ration control card and asks me if it looks like the real thing. It did. So he tells me I can have it. Cheap. I tell him it won’t do me any good without a phony ID card. So he pulls one out and shows me how the plastic is already slit and I can slip my photo right in there. So I ask him how much and he says a hundred bucks, but I can tell he’s in a real hurry so I get him down to forty and I figure I have a pretty good buy.”

“You did,” I said. “But you should’ve had the ID card relaminated.”

“Yeah. Now you tell me.”

“Did this guy give you his name?”

“No. Just a passing acquaintance, you know? Said, ‘hey,’ya know?”

“You saw him in the snack bar a few times? Anywhere else?”

“On the shuttle bus going to Camp Walker. In the PX.” He shrugged.

“What’d he tell you? Was he retired? Active duty? Civilian? What?”

“He didn’t say. I just figured he was on leave.”

I pulled out the photograph. “Is this him?”

The buck sergeant took it with the tips of his fingers. “That’s him,” he said sadly.

I snatched the photo back. “Did he say where he was going?”

“No.”

“Did he hang out with anybody around here?”

“Not that I know of.”

I slipped the photo in my wallet and stood up to leave. The guy looked at me, his big brown eyes starting to water. “Say, how much trouble am I in?”

I said, “Enough to fuck up your whole career.”

His mustache drooped all the way to his knees.

“I was afraid you were going to say that.”

For some reason Shipton had tried to draw me to Taegu. Was it to pull me away from Pusan, or to keep me away from Seoul? Or was it for some other reason altogether?

Or was it so he could lure me into a secluded spot and slice me up like he’d done Whitcomb and Miss Ku and the Nurse? And the two lovers before them.

One thing was for sure: there was no sense chasing ration control numbers all over the country anymore. Shipton had probably sold them all off, scattering them to the wind like a flock of pheasants exploding from a bush.

He knew I was following. Maybe he’d had a scare on Texas Street. After all, we’d been right on his heels, hadn’t missed him by much on the
Kitty Hawk.
But he’d be more cautious now. He’d be a lot harder to catch.

The First Sergeant was probably right. I needed the resources we could pull together in Seoul. Now that Shipton was onto us, I could no longer do this alone.

Bo Shipton was trying to manipulate me. The best way to avoid that was to go back to what he was after. Secrets. Classified information. All the black-marketing stuff was just to make money to support his operations.

Had the
Kitty Hawk
been his last big score? Would he disappear for good now, his mission accomplished?

I didn’t think so. If it was, I didn’t think he would’ve murdered Miss Ku. Instead, he would’ve run to Pusan, stolen what he wanted, and vanished. If Miss Ku had given us information, he would’ve been gone before it did us any good.

Of course, I was assuming he was still rational. Which maybe he wasn’t. After all, he’d had no good reason to kill the Nurse. He killed her just to warn me off. Or was there maybe another reason she had to die? One I hadn’t thought of yet?

It took two hours for me to interrogate the buck sergeant the Camp Henry MP’s had arrested and write up my report. The sun was just going down and I was half starved when I stopped in the NCO Club and had half a chicken and a mess of greasy french fries. Afterward, I wandered toward the front gate.

It was nice here. The rain and snow had stopped. The wind had died down. The sky was clearer than in Seoul. The moon and stars blinked at me between banks of drifting clouds.

At the pedestrian exit an MP stopped me and checked my ID card. After he glanced at it, I showed him Shipton’s photo.

“Do you recognize this guy?”

He shook his head and stepped past me to check the trunk of a PX taxi that was leaving compound.

Black market. Eighth Army was so preoccupied with it that we let all the big stuff slide.

Outside the compound, four cabs sat in front of the cement block walls. I told the driver of the first one to take me to
Mikun piheing chang.
The American army airfield.

Thirty minutes later I had bummed a ride in a helicopter heading north. We floated through billowing gray clouds and gathering dusk. After forty-five minutes, I lifted the visor on my helmet. Lights sparkled in the distance.

The Emerald City of Seoul.

We landed on the helipad on the south post of Yongsan Compound. I thanked the pilots, hiked the long mile back to the main compound, and wound through the brick buildings of the headquarters complex. The lights of the CID building were off, but the front door was open. So much for security. The Admin Office was locked, however, so I pulled out my key and opened it.

I switched on the light, tossed my bag into a chair, and started puttering around with the coffee maker. I wasn’t really sure why I was here. Maybe just to check the blotter reports, see if anything unusual had happened, anything that might lead me to Shipton.

The coffee started to perk and I sat down in one of the vinyl-cushioned lounge chairs.

I’d lost my best chance on Texas Street. Shipton would be hard to find now.. Maybe impossible.

The only thing I could do was to anticipate his next move. But how the hell would I do that?

I was mulling this over when all the faces I’d been dealing with in this case started to swim before my eyes: Cecil Whitcomb, Eun-hi, Miss Ku, the Nurse, Herbalist So, Shipton. When I got to the Chinese woman, I imagined her offering me a steaming bowl of tea. I sipped on it and suddenly felt totally relaxed. She studied me with her almond eyes. Then I was gone.

I jerked awake, twisting around, struggling to remember where I was.

Moonlight filtered down, illuminating the coffinlike shape of Riley’s desk. The pot of coffee was full now. Untouched. I could smell its gentle aroma.

What had awakened me had been a loud noise. A door slamming, as if someone were leaving the building. Or entering?

All was silent now. No noise, not even the clanging of the rusty pipes of the radiator. The heat was turned off. I was cold.

I strained to pick up any sound. Nothing. Still, I felt as if there was a presence out there. I reached inside my jacket, pulled out the .38, and clicked off the safety.

The gun felt heavy and reassuring in my palm. Cold. Loaded with death.

Footsteps. Slow at first but then faster, with more authority. Heading this way.

I slid out of the chair and stepped behind a filing cabinet next to the door. If someone entered the room I’d have a straight line of fire. Into the back of his head.

The footsteps stopped in front of the Admin Office. Hesitated. As if the intruder were peering into the room. Then the footsteps came closer and I pointed the business end of the pistol at the back of a skull. It was fuzzed with close-cropped gray. As I was about to squeeze the trigger, he turned and I saw the wrinkled face. The bleak eyes.

“Sueño!”

“Top! What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”

“Put that goddamn pistol away, will ya?”

Slowly, I lowered it and stuck it in the shoulder holster. “Sure.”

He switched on the light. Our eyes blinked.

“That’s the second time you almost goddamn shot me,” he said.

I grinned.

“I thought someone had broken in here.” The First Sergeant looked at me more carefully. “About time you showed up, Corporal.”

“Look, I can explain that. One of the ration control numbers turned up in Taegu. I had to check it out.”

“Did it come to anything?”

“No. Turned out Shipton sold the card and phony ID to some gullible buck sergeant down there.”

The First Sergeant’s eyes drilled into me. For a minute I thought he was going to start cursing. “I told you to get your ass back here.”

“Yeah, well, I was on a case.”

“I don’t give a shit about your damn case. When I tell you to get back here, you get back here! You understand?”

I could’ve argued with him. I could’ve told him that he’d just put his finger on the trouble with the entire army. The army didn’t care about the cases. Bureaucratic shuffling, the next promotion, how it looks in the newspapers. All those things are more important than the case. More important than catching a murderer. I could’ve told Top all that; I wanted to. Instead, I shut up.

In the army, taking an ass-chewing is a lot easier than accepting a court-martial.

“Yes, I understand,” I said.

Top glared at me, trying to gauge my sincerity. In the end he decided to accept what he got.

“Don’t let it happen again,” he said.

I nodded.

He noticed the perked coffee and walked over and poured himself a cup. As he stirred in the creamer he kept staring at me.

“You guys must’ve spent a lot of time carousing in Pusan.”

I walked back over to the chair and flopped down. “Yeah. Carousers. That’s Ernie and me.”

He kept studying me, not coming to any conclusions but getting more and more suspicious.

“What the hell did you do down there?”

“Came close to catching Shipton,” I said. “But he got away.”

The First Sergeant perched on the edge of Riley’s desk, spreading his fingers, studying his stubby knuckles.

“I got some bad news for you,” I said. “Ernie’s in the hospital.”

Top scowled. “I know. The One-two-one notified me. I just came from there.”

“How’s he doing?”

“In intensive care.” The First Sergeant shook his head. “The asshole should’ve listened to the doctors in the first place.”

“You’re not taking me off the case again, are you?”

“No. Stick with it. But the next time I tell you to get back to Seoul right away, you get back to Seoul, you understand me, Sueño?”

“I understand, Top.”

“Good.”

I shrugged on my jacket and left the First Sergeant. I trudged through the thick snow toward the 121 Evac.

The big double doors of the Intensive Care Unit blared in stenciled red: Authorized Personnel Only.

When you want to do something in the army, don’t ask for permission. I didn’t.

The room was dark, with only little red lamps on the nightstands next to the beds. I scanned the charts rather than trying to make out the bandaged faces. Ernie was third bed on the left.

When I leaned over him, he seemed to be asleep.

I stood there for a moment, silently. He was hooked up to tubes. One eye cranked open.

He croaked. I didn’t understand but I knew he was trying to say something. He shook his head from side to side, then lifted his arm, grabbing the tube in his mouth.

As he pulled, an endless plastic serpent emerged from his throat. Finally, it popped free and he rotated his jaw as if to get the muscles working again.

“Son … of a bitch . . . busted … my spleen.”

His voice sounded as if he’d been wandering through the desert for three days.

“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that you’ve been running all over Texas Street, chasing after a half-crazed killer, with your insides rattling around?”

Ernie grinned. “I guess I have. Give me some . . . water,”

It didn’t sound like a good idea. If they were feeding him intravenously it was because they didn’t want anything in his stomach. He saw my hesitation.

“Just enough to . . . rinse . . . my throat.”

There wasn’t any water on his bedstand. I tiptoed across the aisle, found some next to another guy’s bed, poured a little into a small paper cup, then sipped it to make sure it was water. I held the cup to Ernie’s lips. He sucked greedily until it was all gone. Then he leaned back and convulsed his throat as if enjoying the full magnificence of the life-giving fluid.