The Walt Longmire Mystery Series Boxed Set Volumes 1-4 (133 page)

When I looked up, Hoang was gone.

* * *

Quincy had gone back to work, and I’d made the march across the VA parade ground with my boots on.

It was Ranald Slidell Mackenzie that the fort was named after, and it was his residence to which the Doc had sent Cady. I thought about him and the history of the place as I crossed the foyer and climbed the steps to the upstairs ballroom. Mackenzie graduated West Point in 1862, number one in a class of twenty-eight. He fought in the Civil War and, before it was over, he’d been wounded four times, received seven brevets, and was a major general in charge of an entire division.

In our part of the country, however, his fame arose from the defeat of Dull Knife, the Cheyenne chief, and his village. On a cold November day in 1876, on the Red Forks of the Powder River, a spot just up the creek from where I’d been the day before, Mackenzie and four hundred men of the Fourth Cavalry, along with four hundred Indian scouts, took the Cheyenne chief and his 183 lodges by surprise. He destroyed the village and their supplies and effectively ended the nomadic lifestyle of the Northern Cheyenne nation.

Henry Standing Bear liked to remind anyone who would listen that Mackenzie died in his sister’s home on Staten Island, New York, in 1882, victim to the later stages of syphilis and, as Lucian would say, crazy as a waltzing pissant. It was, Henry also noted, not an unpleasant enough death.

Cady was standing in front of one of the large casement windows and was looking out at the last thin remains of snow that clung to the shadowed crevasses of the rocky heights. She was still barefoot. She turned and the broomstick skirt swayed as the wide-planked oak floor popped and echoed under my approach.

She raised her arms. “Dance with me?”

I smiled and took her hand. “There isn’t any music.”

“Sure there is.” She placed my other arm behind her back and led me in a fanciful waltz, her face tucked against my shoulder. We wheeled around the empty and silent ballroom, and I thought about Virgil White Buffalo and watched my daughter as her head rose and she smiled. After a full sweep of the dance floor, I bent down to kiss the U-shaped scar at her hairline and attempted to keep time to the counting of my blessings.

9

“Forty-two charges of manslaughter?”

“At the least.” I could picture the California native, born in the high desert up near Edwards Air Force Base, and sheriff of a county that had eighteen times the populace of my entire state. “They brought ’em in through Long Beach, and we got an anonymous tip from down at the municipal pier; container vessel out of Belgrade, Yugoslavia.”

“Why Yugoslavia?”

“The Vietnamese don’t need a visa to go there. About 40,000 Chinese go through the place every year, and they can blend. Not everybody can tell the difference, like you can.”

I took a breath and played at pulling Dog’s ear, his head resting on my knee. “What happened?”

“The traffickers had told the illegals on board the container ship to not make any noise and had packing crates of fruit pushed against the walls to help insulate any sound. The assholes closed the air vents, gave them four five-gallon buckets of water, and told them they’d be transferred in a matter of hours.”

I’d met Ned at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting in Phoenix, where we’d both avoided the social hour by hiding in the hotel bar and lamenting about our grown daughters.

* * *

He liked to fly-fish and had made the trek out to the Bighorns twice in the previous eight years. He was a good man, and I could hear the pain telling the story was causing him, but I needed it all. “Didn’t happen?”

“No. They loaded the container onto an eighteen-wheeler and headed up to Compton.” I waited. “This jaybird, Paquet, parks the truck in a lot behind his apartment and goes in to have lunch, watch a movie and, while he’s at it, shoot a little smack. He misjudges the product and ODs, leaving forty-two people in an airtight container on an asphalt parking lot in Southern California in July at 103 degrees.”

I slowly exhaled, and Dog looked at me.

“They stripped down to their underwear, tried drinking the juice from the tomatoes, and tried to pry open the vents.” After a moment, he continued. “We figure they started panicking after about six hours and began pulling the cases from the walls and pounding on the doors. I guess there was a lot of screaming and shouting, but nobody came. . . .” There was another pause. “Walt, I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

“All of them?”

“All but one. I had a freight supervisor from the DOT, Danny Padilla, with me late that afternoon and we were the first ones in after we got the doors open. He said it was strange that it was a produce truck and not refrigerated; then we got the smell. I shined my flashlight, the floor was covered with bodies, none of them moving; like something out of
Night of the Living Dead
. Then I saw this young girl in the back. She was tapping the side of the container and trying to get our attention. She had to crawl over the bodies to get to us.”

“What happened to her?”

“Took her to County General, ran her through INS. Then she got a sponsorship from some group who deals with that sort of thing.”

“What was her name?”

“Not Paquet.” I listened to him rustling the papers. “Ngo Loi Kim. The poor kid. . . . Hell, I thought about adopting her myself.”

“Did you say last name Kim?”

“Yeah, ring a bell?”

I stared at the blotter on my desk and watched my hand write the name. “An old one. There was a girl I knew in Vietnam with that last name.”

The phone was silent for a second. “Walt, you know what the English translation for Kim is, don’t you?”

“Smith?”

He chuckled. “That, or Jones.”

Ruby appeared in the doorway, but I held up my hand and she disappeared with Dog trotting after her. “What else did you get on this Paquet?”

“Quite a bit, actually. We seized his phone records, computer, and a bunch of other stuff. There was somebody moving a lot of Vietnamese illegals through L.A. County—child porn and some brothels that were in operation down here—and it turned out he was the kahuna on the deal, or so the California state attorney general’s office tells me.”

“Big investigation?”

“Whopper. They even wanted to know how you were involved in all this.”

“Ever heard of this guy, Tran Van Tuyen?”

“Can’t say that I have, but I can make some phone calls from this end.”

“That would be great if you could. Thanks, Ned.” I could hear someone talking to him in the background and waited.

* * *

I looked up at the clock on my office wall and figured Vic would be back from lunch any time now. “What about the prostitution charges on the granddaughter?”

“First-timer, and she had the unfortunate, or fortunate—I guess it all depends on your point of view—experience of having her premier customer turn out to be an Orange County plainclothes deputy.” It was silent on the line. “It’s hard for some of these people to assimilate into a new culture, and if she was from the wrong side of the tracks . . .”

I stared at the name I had just printed on my desk blotter. “Hey, Ned?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you check and see where this Ngo Loi Kim ended up?”

“I can do that.” It was silent again, the way it always was when men talked about things they’d rather not. “What makes you think this big Indian fella didn’t do it?”

“Just a hunch.”

I could hear him sniff out a laugh on the other end. “Sounds like he did a number on you.” I didn’t say anything. “You want that information faxed or do you guys have e-mail?”

“I am speaking to you now from a push-button phone and hope you are duly impressed.” I transferred him to Ruby, and he called me a dirty name just before I pushed a button, and the coast grew silent.

I sat there and watched the aspen leaves quiver in the slight breeze along Clear Creek; the sky was still cloudless, and we continued to need rain. I was getting that feeling, the one like an itch I couldn’t quite reach. There was something going on with all of this, something below the surface, and I had a notion that when I found it, it was going to be something pretty simple.

I got up and walked down the hallway to the holding cells where the big man lay with an arm over his eyes and where Frymire sat snoring in his chair. My dispatcher/receptionist appeared a moment later with Dog and a notepad. Dog leaned against my leg with all the grace of a pet Kodiak, and Ruby lowered her voice upon seeing that everyone else in the room was asleep. “Henry says that Brandon will be back from Rapid City tomorrow, and Lucian called.” I looked at her blankly. “It’s Tuesday.”

I stared at her for a while longer, then shook my head and gestured toward the holding cell and whispered in return. “Vic and Cady are going to Sheridan to pick up Michael at the airport, so it’s my night to sit Virgil.”

“He said he’d bring the chessboard over here.” She crossed something off of her list and then sighed, making a face at the notepad.

“What?”

“More of these garbled e-mails from the school WiFi system marked BPS.”

I pretended like I knew what that meant. “Call the school board.”

“I am.”

“Anything from Saizarbitoria?”

“No.”

"Vic?”

“Court duty, and that’s the second time you’ve asked.”

“DCI?”

“No.”

“Do me a favor?” She looked up at me, the
Webster’s Dictionary
illustration of irritated. “I don’t have a computer, or I’d do it myself.”

"What?”

“Look up this organization, Children of the Dust, and see what their connection is with Tuyen.” I stood there, looking into the holding cell, unable to tell if the big guy was really asleep. “And let me know when that report from LASD comes through?”

“He called.”

“Tuyen?”

She nodded. “It was next on my list. He was asking about his granddaughter’s body and her personal effects.”

“Did you tell him that’s a DCI deal?”

“I did.”

“How did he respond?”

She looked up. “Not well, but considering the circumstance . . .”

“Did he mention anything about any official documentation that connects him with Ho Thi Paquet?” I could feel the big blue eyes on me.

“No, but he said that he’d be at the Hole in the Wall Motel, room number five.”

I returned her gaze. “He changed rooms?”

“He said the television wasn’t working in the other one.” She continued to watch me. “Walter, the man lost his granddaughter, and he’s sitting in a motel room by himself in Powder Junction.” Except for the quiet hum of the minifridge and Frymire’s snoring, it was silent in the holding area—her voice carried the extra weight of being whispered. “You don’t think that Saizarbitoria should go over and check on him?”

“I’ll go down in the morning—Cady will be spending time with Michael.” My voice sounded a little harsh, like it always did when I was embarrassed. I stood there for a while longer thinking it was probably time to take a Ruby moral sounding. “Can I ask you a question?”

She folded her arms. “Sure.”

“Do you think I’m a racist?”

She smiled and then covered it with a hand. “You?”

“Me.” I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

She tipped her head up and considered me, and I felt like I should be wearing a lead vest. “You mean because of your experiences in the war?”

“Yep.”

“No.”

It was a strong response, and one that didn’t leave a lot of room for further discussion. I glanced at her unyielding eyes and shrugged, turning to look back as Virgil’s arm moved and he looked at the two of us. “Just wondering.”

“You do have one prejudice though.” I looked back at her again from under the brim of my hat. “You don’t care about the living as much as you do the dead.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

I leaned there on the headstone, but before long gravity and alcohol forced me to slip, and my head jarred with the impact of my ass hitting the ground. I sat there looking at my lap for what seemed like a long time before a streak of red light ricocheted off the thousands of white markers that surrounded me.

There was a movement to my right, and I rolled my head in that direction and rested it against the cool surface of the stone. There was somebody there. She was looking into the distance, standing in the graveyard. It took a while for me to find my voice. "Hey...”

The young woman turned. She was Vietnamese and familiar. She raised a hand and reached out to me, the fingers loose but imploring.

I started to move, but all I could do was swipe a gesture toward her. “Can’t, sorry....” I took a few breaths to get my stomach settled. I remembered her from somewhere but couldn’t see clearly through the red shooting stars.

Her fingers were still extended; they looked cool somehow, but they were just out of my grasp. I pushed my weight against the stone and raised myself on one arm, catching the edge of the next grave marker with my fingertips, and stood. I felt like a poleaxed Lazarus and wasn’t sure if I was going to make it.

I looked around, but she wasn’t there. When I saw her again, she was moving lithely through the stones, her fingers trailing on their surfaces, and I’m sure it was because I was drunk, but each time she touched a grave, I heard music.

I moved forward in her wake. She paused and looked back at me. The red lights flickered again, and there was a slight movement at the corner of her mouth like a smile.

“Wait, miss, please. . . .”

She turned slowly as though dancing, with two fingers whispering back toward me as I stomped forward like a sleepwalker, my head floating on my shoulders.

"Ma...” Her fingers traced the tops of the markers, and she played the headstones like a piano. She played like me, making the same mistakes, using the same dissonant chords.

I could see the waves of sound ringing from the markers like pebbles striking smooth water. The song was melancholy and sad, and I recognized it and started to sing—“A good man is hard to find / you always get the other kind”—I surged forward, but each time I touched a stone, the note it held was silenced until there was no more melody.