Little Mountain (13 page)

         Perhaps Sith could tell from Sambath’s eyes that something was wrong, and his face filled with doubt. “You can fuck her first,” he said.

         This woman had gotten so close to the safety of the camp. Then Sambath did what he had sworn to himself he would never do: he balled up both fists and hit a communist soldier squarely in the mouth, then pounded until Sith fell backwards into a puddle and started choking on blood and teeth. Sambath pinned him to the ground, then pulled his .45 from under his shirt. He pointed the barrel at
Sith’s
forehead.

         “No! Stop! Don’t be like him!” the woman cried. As he squeezed the trigger, he felt the woman’s urgent tug. The slug landed beside
Sith’s
ear and splattered water on the side of his bloody face.

         Sambath stripped
Sith
of everything but his trousers: shirt, sandals, watch and cigarettes, and an American M-16. Then he escorted the woman and her boy to a small border camp, shaken that his rage had gotten out of control, grateful that the woman had saved him from becoming a murderer.

         Later that day, Sambath met Keo, the local communist commander. “I heard you beat Comrade Sith,” he said. “Lucky for you,
Sith
has soggy rice for brains, and he told me a whore had spread her legs for him. He knows comrades aren’t supposed to have sex. I promise you, by tomorrow he’ll be just a lump inside a python. When you see him again,
Sith
will be snake shit.”

         He never saw Comrade Sith again, but a week later the woman was raped in the camp; she and her son were found dead in the morning light. Sambath never knew their names.

         Now the more he wanted to hit Viseth, the more he had to lose. When he began taking ESL classes with Julie and wanted to pop her fiancé in his upper-crust jaw, he stood to lose her respect and perhaps a chance at citizenship. And then, when Viseth’s name hovered on the tip of every frightened tongue on Mersey Street and now cropped up in other neighborhoods, Sam wanted to shatter his jaw like crystal. Of course, wanting and doing weren’t the same thing at all. Decking a punk wasn’t worth losing his badge or his self-respect.

         Viseth might have planted the buckshot in Chea’s face, but so far there wasn’t much evidence. Would he hang out on 11th Street the day after committing a murder there? Sam could never tell what Viseth would do. Plant a 9-millimeter slug in Sam’s spinal cord, maybe.

         Barbra Streisand’s voice wafted from the radio while Sam scribbled notes on junk mail envelopes with a pencil. Sarapon’s voice had been higher and more delicate when she sang to him on the swing, and then years later when she sang love songs on the radio. Big sister would be thirty-seven now, would probably have married and made Sambath an uncle if she hadn’t been taken to see
Angka
. He drew a stick figure with a baseball bat and an outline of Cambodia,
then
crossed it out. Cambodia looked like an old, battered pan. Every pleasant memory of his native land brought a batch of painful ones, as though he’d reached for a rose and come up with a fistful of thorns. On the back of one envelope were four names, addresses, and phone numbers, the ones he couldn’t get anyone at the station to check out for him.

        
Only three names.
The search had taken over an hour, about a half minute for each of about two hundred pages. With luck, he hadn’t missed any Khems. His eyes burned after the close attention to thousands of lines of black print. How far could Khem What’s-His-Name have gotten in the last twenty-two hours, if he’d decided to run?
As far as he wanted.

         The telephone rang. “Am I calling too late?” Fitchie’s voice sounded like gravel.

         “No problem, Julie’s out for a while. What’s up?”

         “Man, I think my brain’s been fried,” Fitchie said.
“Called the Assessor’s office before knocking off work.
You remember the trust I mentioned?”

         “Paradise Trust, yeah. You find any real names?”

         “I’ve got one here. First name S-I-S-A-P-O-N, last name T-H-O-M. That a man or a woman?”

         Sam wrote down the name. Where had he seen it before? Offhand, he couldn’t remember. “Could be either,” he said. “A lot of Cambodian names are like that.”

         “Well, he or she has owned Bin Chea’s building since April.
Looks like we want to talk to this person.”

         “What about Chea’s life insurance?”

         “Think two hundred K is enough to kill for?”

         “We can let Mrs. Chea tell us that.”

         Before they hung up, Sam asked Fitchie to see what he could find out about Samson Cleaners.

Julie arrived home at quarter past ten and closed the door softly behind her. She smiled and hung her purse on the chair, and he put his hand behind her head and drew her to him. He ran his fingers through her hair and smelled a trace of the Ciara that he’d given her last Christmas. Her scent mixed with the air that the fan pulled in through the window. He kissed her softly at the source of the fragrance, a spot just beneath her ear, and listened as she sighed. “Come on to bed, Sam,” she said. Maybe he could forget about the murder long enough to enjoy Julie’s love.

         Soon they lay side by side on the sheets in the darkened room, their arms around each other, her fingers gentle on the small of his back. Sam’s troubles disappeared into the city’s night as though he and Julie were the only two people in the world. He tasted the moist skin between her breasts, felt her pounding heart,
heard
her inarticulate whispers and the hum of the summer fan. Then she tugged at his waist and urged him on top of her, and there was Julie, only Julie, and gentle movement and spasms of joy.

         Later, Julie slept with her head on his shoulder, her hair soft against his chest. Sam lay half awake as the hazy image of a cement stoop drifted into his brain.
A cement stoop with a footprint.
A door opened, and Bin Chea smiled back at Sam with rotted teeth. He carried a handful of palm fronds--or
were
they knives? Sam tried to wipe away his thoughts and let the tension seep from his muscles. “
You don’t know me,
” Father said. “
They will kill you.
” Father’s face pressed close, magnified and twisted, and his body jerked in time with Julie’s rhythmic breathing.

The flames--the flames again.
A flashlight in the face, a straw torch, a knowing smile, a man on a cross who looks like Jesus.
“Here, take this. Warm this criminal’s feet and I know you’re not his son.”
Blisters crawling up Father’s legs.
Worms from the oven.

         “You don’t know me,” Father said. “You don’t know me!”

        
The flames again.
Run like hell, somebody’s in there! The front of the cruiser is underneath a truck from the gas company. What if it burns? It’s Callahan, he’s bleeding,
it’s
burning. Pull him out, is he awake? Oh-h! I’m dead. Father, I’ll save you. I won’t let them burn you. It should be me. I deserve to burn--Callahan is screaming Holy Jesus, dear holy Jesus. It’s going to blow.

Sam sat up with a start, his face covered with sweat. In the darkness, red digits glowed one oh one. He sighed, walked to the kitchen where he ran the tap and splashed cold water on his face. The water ran down his arms and off the crooks of his elbows. He folded his arms on the kitchen table and put his head down to let the breeze course over his neck and shoulders. If he couldn’t clear his mind, he’d try to fill it with more pleasant thoughts--of Julie, for example,
who
lay on her side and breathed softly.

CHAPTER TEN

Sam’s first order of business the next morning was to check
both cars
, his and Julie’s. Look at the tires, under the hood, on the seats, just as he’d done last night with other officers present. There was no sign of tampering except for a small spot of blood where Mouse Cop had been. Was it feline or human blood? The lab would let him know today. Last night, Comrade Bin’s bloody rib had ripped into Sam’s memories again--or was he simply crazy?

         Memory and nightmare had swirled together like tea leaves and ditch water. Bone became steel that sliced out of Comrade Bin’s body. Sambath tumbled into the foundation of an old building where a tangle of bodies cushioned his fall, and a volley of screams tore at his eardrums. Comrade Bin stood at the edge of the pit, splashing gasoline on his victims below and lighting a match. Sambath frantically shielded his father from the flames.

         “Save yourself! You’re not my son!” Father screamed.

         Sam sipped on his coffee as he arrived at the station, ten thousand miles from his dreams.

         Damn dreams. If only Sam could sleep without them, the way that Shakespeare character had wanted. Was that Hamlet or Lear? Julie would know. Only a fragment of a dream survived from his straw-mat nights at Little Mountain, when he’d imagined a huge plate of
prahoc,
fish sauce, and rice. He’d once awakened thinking that he had gorged himself on a marvelous meal, so how could he still be so hungry?

         Why did dreams reflect either desperate wants or deep, unsettling fears? When Sambath lay on the grass after fourteen hours of carting away the dead, his bones aching to the marrow, his family often came back to him wrapped inside a dream. They laughed again as they swung in the hammock. They drove past women wearing
sampots
who sold dried fish on racks on the outskirts of Siem Riep. They drove in his father’s dusty Peugeot to the ancient temple of Angkor Wat where five magnificent spires pierced the sky. Now that he was free, those pleasant dreams evaporated like the mists that hid the stilt-houses off the shores of Tonle Sap.

         Vacheran had swung viciously at Comrade Bin. Would a trace of broken ribs show up in an x-ray after so much time had passed? Were there any x-rays in Bin Chea’s file? There were none mentioned in the autopsy report. But Sam was kidding himself. How would he have known if Comrade Bin had a broken rib?

         In any case, it didn’t matter.

         Comrade Bin was dead.

Sam found Wilkins and Fitchie in the midst of a conversation next to Sam’s desk.

         “You said that Justo knew Viseth and beat the bejeesus out of him,” Wilkins said. “If the Diaz girl can place Viseth in front of Chea’s house, then what’s your scenario?”

         “Who’s Diaz?” Sam asked.

         “Carmela Diaz, she went through a windshield the same time as the shooting,” Fitchie said. “Justo was the DOA in the same car.”

         Sam drained his coffee cup. “Viseth shows up to shoot Bin Chea, and the kids see him.”

         “While they’re making out,” Fitchie said.

         “A few days earlier Justo beats up Viseth, and now there’s Viseth with a shotgun. Justo panics, but Viseth isn’t after him.” Wilkins popped a piece of gum into his mouth and looked at Fitchie.

         “Doesn’t notice him, maybe?”

         “Or has other priorities,” Sam said. “Right now he wants Bin Chea.”

         “But why skip Justo for Chea? You need a motive.”

         “I’ve seen hundreds of killings with no motive, Lieutenant. No point at all. But there’s
something
here. Chea was his landlord. I’d start with money.”

         “Just deal with it,” Wilkins said as he walked away.

         “Keep walking,” Fitchie mumbled,
then
said, “Whose money, Sam? Who wanted Chea dead?”

         Sam would have wanted Bin Chea dead if he had known of the bastard’s existence, but some wishes were best left unspoken.
“Somebody who believed the rumors about him.”

         “Viseth flashing any dough on the street?”