The report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicated that in the last few years as many as fifty thousand female illegal immigrants had been brought to the United States exclusively for use in the sex industry. Ho Thi Paquet and Ngo Loi Kim’s story was horrific, but it wasn’t exclusive.
“Children of the Dust was the front for the importation of the young women, and Trung Sisters Distributing distributed them into the brothels worldwide, as far as London. It’s all in the report.” I took a deep breath. “Ngo had a facility with computers and a tenuous connection to Wyoming, and Ho Thi had learned to drive, so...”
Vic looked up from her part of the report. “Ngo doesn’t speak English?”
“No, so the e-mails she was sending were phonetic Vietnamese, which looked to us like a garbled mess.”
Saizarbitoria raised his head and looked at me as he passed the last of the file to Lucian. “So, Phillip Maynard was drugged before he was hung after all?”
“Drugged like Paquet, according to the Yellowstone County coroner.” I plucked at a loose straw in my hat. “Maynard was the advance man Tuyen sent from their Chicago branch. Henry translated, and Ngo filled in the rest of the story. The girls had gotten separated—Ho Thi ended up in Powder Junction and Ngo ran to Bailey. Tuyen came to finish the job, found Ho Thi, but couldn’t find either the computer or Ngo. He killed Ho Thi when she wouldn’t tell him where Ngo had gone. He needed a fall guy, and he needed some time. He had seen Virgil and knew that he lived in the culvert near Murphy Creek, so he planted her body there and threw her purse in the tunnel, but when it didn’t look like I was going to bite, he sacrificed Maynard with the fake suicide.” The Basquo folded his hands on the bed covers, and I played with my hat in an attempt to soften the unease between us. “Tuyen’s wounds looked self-inflicted, and the bottle-cap thing just seemed too obvious—so I started thinking about who would gain from implicating the Dunnigans.”
Saizarbitoria continued to study me as Marie pushed the door open with a tray that I assumed was lunch. “What about the quarters?”
We’d been warned against tiring him, so I plucked my hat from my bent knee, put it back on my head, and stood. “I asked Ned about that. He said that they would bring the girls in, some of them as young as ten, and lock them in a manufacturing building that had been cordoned off into little twelve-by-twelve rooms. Then they were...” I glanced at Marie. “
Trained
—and told they owed Trung Sisters twenty thousand dollars apiece for their transportation to the U.S. and that they would work off the debt and be released. They were given twenty dollars a week in quarters, so that they could eat and drink from the vending machines in the building.”
The Basquo let out a long slow breath.
Vic handed the rest of the report to me as she and Lucian stood. “What happens to Ngo now?”
“The people from INS picked her up about an hour ago and flew her back to Los Angeles under a Temporary Protected Status. Under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, it looks like she’s going to be granted a T-Visa and citizenship through adoption.”
Saizarbitoria watched as his pregnant wife rolled a stand and tray table over to his bed and removed the stainless covering from his lunch—it looked ghastly. No wonder he was trying to bribe all of us into bringing him food from the Busy Bee. “Adopted by who?”
I stuffed the thick file under my arm. “If I were a betting man, I’d say the sheriff of Los Angeles County has two daughters and is about to acquire a third.” I smiled at Marie as she seated herself as comfortably as she could in the corner chair and gestured for the staff to follow me as I crossed and opened the door. “We’ll leave you to your lunch and your wife.” I smiled at her again. “When, exactly, are you due?”
She rested her hands on the sides of her stomach. “November. ”
I ushered Vic and Lucian out—the old sheriff was having lunch with Isaac Bloomfield, but the rest of us were on our own. I began closing the door behind me.
"Hey, boss?”
I stopped and leaned back in. "Yep?”
Santiago looked down at the boiled meat, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what he was contemplating. "I...” He stopped, looked up, and then started to say something again.
“Don’t worry about it, Sancho.”
* * *
Vic rolled down the window of her eight-year-old unit in the parking lot of Durant Memorial. “I guess that leaves only one more mystery.”
I opened the door of my truck and watched as Henry moved the bags of groceries to the center and climbed in on the other side; Dog was asleep in the back. “Not really. Mai Kim had given birth to Ngo Loi’s grandmother three years before I ever got to Tan Son Nhut.”
“I guess you’re off the hook.” She flared the canine tooth at me and started her truck. “You’re fast, but not that fast.” She slipped the vehicle into gear. “You do remember that you have a debate tonight.”
I pulled out my pocket watch and checked the time. “Yep, but that should be over by eight.”
"So?”
I tucked my watch back in my pocket and considered the fact that I was about to ask my deputy out on a date in front of Henry. It was enough to curdle my fortitude, but I figured it was time to get the thing out in the open. “I was wondering...?”
She didn’t say anything.
I glanced back at the Cheyenne Nation, who continued to watch us. “Henry has to tend bar and Cady and Michael have plans, since he’s leaving tomorrow, so I was thinking...”
She studied me. I thought I should say something else, but then she started to speak and I stopped. “I’m washing my hair.”
I stood there looking at her drive away, her vehicle barking the rear tires as she turned out of the parking lot. I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong. I knew I was out of practice, but the response seemed a little abrupt. I started the Bullet and put my seat belt on. Henry sat there without saying a word; Dog didn’t speak either. “What?”
He turned his head to look out the windshield. “Nothing.”
"What?”
I watched as he tried not to smile. “Just a small piece of advice.” He turned and looked at me again. “Next time, try not to make it sound like you have nothing better to do.”
Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968
I didn’t have anything better to do, so I figured I might as well get drunk.
My right shoulder still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but I found that after a little practice, I could drink with my left hand. I’d been practicing steadily since being released from the base hospital two hours ago. I wasn’t wheels-up till 1820 hours; the flight itself would be only twenty minutes back to BHQ, and then the provost marshal wanted a personal debriefing on my investigation. He wouldn’t be happy that I was drunk, but he wasn’t going to be happy with me anyway, so I figured what the hell. I stared at the empty piece of paper on the piano bench next to me and knocked back another whiskey. It was not my usual weapon of choice, but I was in a hurry. Things were just starting to pick up at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, and the place was getting crowded, but nobody came near me.
If you’re unlucky enough in life, there’s a time when people will start associating you with death.
I had written three letters already, and I was getting depressed writing about dead people. Le Khang promised to deliver this one to a girl who knew someone near the village where Mai Kim’s family supposedly lived. Would the letter actually get there? Would the family care? Did any of it really matter?
I picked up the bottle, refilled my glass, and struggled with the wave of regret, depression, anger, and disgust that continued to churn under the flood of alcohol. I thought that there should be somebody in the place that I should say good-bye to, but there wasn’t anybody left.
Letter number one would go to San Antonio, Texas. Baranski had indeed shot Mendoza in the back of the head along Highway 1.
Letter number two would go to West Hamlin, West Virginia. The one-eyed sergeant’s name had been George Seton, and he’d survived another four days after his two rounds of AK fire had taken most of Baranski’s chest. Before he succumbed to the wounds he’d sustained during what they were now calling the Tet Offensive, he’d made a statement to the 377th Security Investigators that had exonerated me in the death of Baranski. I was probably going to end up getting a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for my efforts in driving back the offensive; I figured that, and a dime, would get me a phone call.
Letter number three would go to the Airwing of ARVN to be delivered to Hoang’s parents in Saigon. I attempted to put a brave and honorable face on why their son had bled to death in the back of a jeep on the way to Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base.
Letter number four was the one I hadn’t written yet. I set the shot glass down and stared at the chipped keys of the piano. There was no other music in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, because I had ripped the electric cord from the bar’s jukebox and thrown it into the bamboo outside. I extended an index finger and hit an F, listening to the tone of it resonating through my life.
In Mai Kim’s memory, I launched into a one-handed version of Fats Waller’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” I’d made the bridge and was into the chorus in a dirgelike manner when I noticed that a short soldier was standing by the piano and was singing along.
“A good man is hard to find, you always get the other kind. Just when you think he’s your pal, you find him foolin’ ’round some other gal. Then you rave, you even crave to see him laying in his grave...”
I looked up at the squat but flashy-looking woman with the oversized lips; she couldn’t sing very well, but she was loud. “Marine, you don’t look like 285 pounds of jam, jive, and everything.” She had an enormous smile. “I haven’t heard Fats Waller in quite a while.”
I looked down at my hand and noticed that I’d stopped playing. I swiped my utility hat off and saluted the two Special Forces men who accompanied her. She wore the beret and the uniform but no insignia for rank. She didn’t salute me, so I figured she was the brass and started to stand, but she put out a hand and seated me back on the piano bench. We were just about eye to eye. “Are you Lieutenant Walt Longmire?”
“Ma’am?”
She shook her head and smiled again as she read my nametag. “You are Marine Inspector Walter Longmire from Durant, Wyoming?”
“Ma’am.”
“I’m from Butte, Montana, myself.” I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. She pulled a piece of paper from her substantial breast pocket and tried to hand it to me. I sat there looking at her and it, so she picked up the untouched shot glass and rested the note on the piano. “It’s from a friend of yours up north. He knew I was coming through Tan Son Nhut and I promised that I’d hand deliver it.” She studied me for a moment more. “You are Walt Longmire?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She smiled, slugged my shot down, and daintily placed the now empty glass on top of the note. “You take care of yourself, Lieutenant. ” She placed a kiss on the top of my head, and I watched as she made for the open doorway.
An airman came up and looked at me as I picked up the shot glass and plucked the paper that was stuck to its bottom. It was typed in black letters and was obviously written by a two-fingered typist since the pressure was even on all the letters. It was from a mountainous site ten miles inside Laos; a station that wasn’t supposed to even exist. Recon Team Wyoming was assuring me that he was fine and was inquiring as to how I’d made out in the war’s most recent developments in his own special way. I read “Seen your ghost lately?”
The shot glass stayed steady in my hand as I remembered a professor of Shakespeare at USC who read to an uninterested class, “I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’ the dead men walk again.”
The airman leaned forward and looked in my face. “How do you know her?”
I poured myself another shot. “Who?”
“Colonel Maggie.”
“Who?”
“Martha Raye, Lieutenant. She was on the Steve Allen Show, she was a movie star...”
I slugged the shot down and set it back on the Bear’s note, picked up the pen, and started on the letter to Mai Kim’s family with a renewed vigor. I had to get out of Vietnam, it was getting as strange as Wyoming.
* * *
I dropped Henry at his T-Bird and Dog with Ruby and was late getting to the gym but changed my clothes and quickly climbed the steps to the second floor and the Universal machines. I made the corner at the landing and started the last leg when I heard a smattering of laughter that caused me to slow.
I stopped on the stairs. I could see Cady, who was seated at the leg press, and Vic’s brother, who was standing in front of her with his back to me. Michael’s T-shirt stretched across his broad young shoulders and read PHILADELPHIA HOMICIDE UNIT, OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS. They laughed again, and I listened as he attempted to motivate my daughter into finishing her workout. “Two more...”
I waited to see how the conflict would resolve itself and then fought against the wave of exhaustion that cemented my feet to the concrete steps and forced me to think about the scene that had unfolded only an hour ago. I caught my breath, more than a couple of emotions tearing at me like the mockingbirds had torn into Virgil’s untouched groceries.
* * *
The bag I’d left at the beginning of the week had still been hanging off the Lone Bear Road guardrail.
I had sat with Dog at my side, placed the new grocery bags at my feet, and watched as the sporadic traffic dutifully slowed and swept into the opposite lane. Wyoming was an emergency-lane-change state, after all. I thought about this morning. I thought about Ngo Loi Kim, and how she wouldn’t get out of my truck.
A three-way conversation had lasted for almost an hour with Henry as the translator, but it still seemed that there had been so much more to say and not enough time to say it. I tried to tell her about Mai Kim and about the war.