More Deaths Than One (25 page)

“Haven’t seen him for a while. He took
Harrison’s death hard. Blames himself, but I don’t know why. It’s
not like he had anything to do with Harrison getting cancer.
Strange. I didn’t think they were that close.”

“Does he still use that old air strip west of
town?”

“As far as I know. You planning on seeing
him?”

“I might.”

“Well, go see Harrison’s lawyer, too. And
call Dunbar. Get them off my back.” Hamburger Dan’s quick grin took
any sting out of the words. “Are you here to stay?”

“Not this trip.”

“Be sure to stop by before you leave. Take
care, you hear? You too, Julie.”

Bob and Kerry finished their beers, then
threaded their way around the tables to the door. A few notes of
“Imagine” followed them outside.

It was still raining.

Despite umbrellas and raincoats, by the time
they found a taxi, their pant legs and sandal-clad feet were
soaked.

Kerry sneezed. “Are you going to see McCray
now?”

“It’s too late.”

“Would it make you sad to take me by The
Lotus Room?”

“No.” Bob gave the cabdriver the address,
then settled back into the damp seat, which smelled of mildew and
sweat.

When they pulled up in front of the familiar
building, Bob paid the driver to wait for them. He and Kerry
climbed out and stood staring at the place where he’d spent most of
his waking hours for sixteen years. Seen through sheets of rain, it
seemed shuttered and remote, though its lines were still
pleasing.

Kerry looked from the pagoda-like building to
Bob and then back again.

She shook her head. “I can’t picture you in
there.”

“Neither can I.”

They climbed back into the cab.

“Where should we go?” she asked.

“To the hotel. I need to get some sleep. I’m
still tired from the trip and not as alert as I need to be.”

He shuddered, remembering how slow his
reactions had been to the knock on the door earlier in the day. It
had only been the room service waiter, but what if it had been the
operatives from ISI?

***

Panting and shaking, Bob jerked himself
awake.

He lay quietly, trying to remember the dream,
but the images hovered out of reach, like chill emanations from a
ghostly presence.

His breathing slowed. Calm settled over
him.

He fell back asleep, back into the same
nightmare. This time when he awoke, he remained edgy.

Realizing he wouldn’t be able to sleep again,
he got out of bed and did his exercises. When he finished, he went
out for a run in the predawn dark. He ran long and far, but could
not outdistance his edginess.

He paused in front of the Siam International
Hotel to enjoy its unique roof of overlapping eaves representing an
ancient Thai warrior helmet, and found a moment’s respite, but as
soon as he raced on, his disquiet settled over him again.

When he returned to the Fountain Hotel, the
first fingers of light were stealing across the sky. He sat in the
courtyard, watching the night-blooming flowers bow their heads,
watching the sun lovers open to welcome the new day. He breathed
deeply of the fragrant air and let his thoughts and feelings waft
away.

When he finally went back inside, he found
Kerry sitting cross-legged on the bed, talking on the phone.

She placed a hand over the mouthpiece. “I’m
ordering the breakfast special for us. Something called a Thai
Omelet. Is that okay?

“Fine, but be sure to order a glass of whole
milk.”

Hanging up, she said, “I didn’t know you
drank milk.”

“I don’t. It’s for you.”

She drew back. “Don’t you know by now I never
touch the stuff?”

He smiled. “You will.”

The omelets came, sitting innocently in the
middle of thick white china plates.

Kerry poked at hers. “Looks like a plain old
western omelet to me.” She put a forkful in her mouth. All at once
her eyes widened, and tears streamed down her face. She dropped the
fork and frantically fanned her mouth with both hands.

Bob passed her the glass of milk.

She grabbed it and gulped a mouthful. Eyes
still watering, she said, “How can you sit there so calmly eating
that stuff? I think I burned a hole in my esophagus.”

“I’m used to it. You can order something else
if you want.”

“No, no. It’s good. Just . . . not what I
expected.” After a few more bites of food and gulps of milk, she
lifted her chin. “I’m not going with you to the airfield.”

He raised an eyebrow. “We decided we needed
to stay together.”

“No. You decided.” She held out her hands and
juggled them like a scale. “Sitting in a boring old office waiting
for you or going on a tour of Bangkok. That’s a toughie.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but she
hurried on. “You want to talk to Donald McCray alone so we’d be
separated anyway, and it’s a guided tour. There’s safety in
numbers, right?”

He found himself momentarily at a loss for
words.

A smile spread across her face. “Good. That’s
settled.”

***

McCray seemed older and paler than Bob
remembered, but his thatch of red hair burned as brightly as the
tip of his cigarette.

He squinted at Bob through the smoke.
“Haven’t seen you around for a while. Thought you took off.” His
voice sounded rough from decades of smoking.

“I came back to talk to you.”

McCray coughed. “Yeah? What about?”

“A private trauma hospital operating in the
Philippines during Vietnam.”

McCray’s eyes shifted to the left as he took
a deep drag. Blowing out the smoke, he said, “Don’t know what the
hell you’re talking about.”

“Before Harrison died, he told me you’d
talked to him.”

“So what if I did?”

“He said you told him about the
hospital.”

McCray set his half-smoked cigarette on a
cracked ceramic ashtray, fumbled in his shirt pocket, and brought
out a pack of cigarettes and a cheap disposable lighter. He shook
out a cigarette, then dropped the pack on the dusty invoices
littering his gray metal desk.

He narrowed his eyes at Bob. “You fixing to
get yourself killed, too?”

“No.”

McCray lit the cigarette, cupping his hands
around the flame. “Wish I’d never told him. Those bastards killed
him.”

The smoke stung Bob’s eyes and scratched his
nostrils. “Do you know for sure, or are you guessing?”

McCray flicked a shred of tobacco from his
tongue. “Don’t know for sure, but it’s more than a guess. Those
people can do anything.”

“I know how dangerous they are,” Bob said. “I
promise they’ll never know you helped me.”

“Why do you care what happened?”

“Harrison was my friend.”

McCray puffed a couple of times. The smoke
swirled toward the ceiling fan.

“Kept my mouth shut for nineteen years,” he
said. “Now look what I started.” He set his cigarette on the
ashtray next to the first one, which had burned down to a long
ash.

“We flew transport planes out of Bien Hoa, me
and my co-pilot Hap. Barry Hapworth. We loved flying, being above
it all. We talked a lot about staying in Southeast Asia when our
time was up and opening our own air cargo business. Everyone always
complained about the shitty weather in Vietnam, but not me and Hap.
I came from Chicago, and he came from Detroit, and we had no
intention of going back home to face the frigid winters.

“When we had about six months left of our
tour, they ordered me to fly with another pilot, and they sent Hap
on a special assignment.

“Hap was a quiet guy who seldom talked, which
is probably why the brass chose him for those missions, but nobody
seemed to realize his curiosity made him stick his nose where it
didn’t belong.

“Hap knew from the beginning there was
something very odd about his assignment. For one thing, he flew
solo with a plane full of injured men, which seemed risky to him.
For another, he took them to a privately owned trauma hospital on
the outskirts of Quezon City, not to a military hospital. And to
top it all off, too much secrecy surrounded what should have been a
routine flight.

“He kept his eyes open and discovered that
most of the patients were injured badly, but some seemed to be
relatively healthy men in drug induced stupors. One day he returned
from his special mission really upset. At first he refused to tell
me the trouble, but finally the truth burst out of him.”

McCray lit another cigarette and dragged
hungrily on it. When it burned down half an inch, he stared at the
ash as if he couldn’t bear to get rid of it. Finally, he tapped it
into the ashtray.

The smoke made Bob want to cough, but he held
it back, afraid to disrupt the flow of the story.

“Hap told me they did human experiments at
that hospital,” McCray continued. “He said they did something to
his passenger’s brains. Then he clamped his mouth shut and refused
to say another word.

“Two weeks later he had another solo flight
to Quezon City. Right after he took off to return to base, his
plane crashed. He ended up in that trauma hospital.

“When he got back, I asked him if he found
out anything more about the human experiments, and he acted like I
was crazy. I didn’t see Hap much after that, but when it came time
for us to be rotated out, I went searching for him and asked him if
he still wanted to go into business with me. He gave me a blank
stare and asked what business. I reminded him we were going to open
an air cargo business here in Southeast Asia, and he said—I’ll
always remember this—‘I hate flying. I hate the tropics. I can
hardly wait to get back to Detroit.’”

McCray finished his cigarette. “If they can
scramble a person’s brain like that, they can do anything, anything
they want.”

“Do you know who they are?” Bob asked.

“Not really. By chance, several years ago I
got a charter to take this guy to Singapore, and we got to talking.
You know how it is. Well, maybe you don’t know, seeing’s how you’re
not much for shooting the bull. We found out we were in the service
at the same time. He’d been some kind of orderly stationed at a
hospital outside Quezon City. He mentioned that the military didn’t
run the place. Some corporation owned it. ISS, I think.”

Bob gave him a sharp look. “ISI?”

McCray nodded. “Could be.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“Fowler? Crowley? Something like that.”

“Is there any way to find out? Maybe from an
invoice?”

“No. It happened too long ago.” McCray lit
another cigarette. “I kept asking the guy about the hospital, but
he didn’t remember much.” He inhaled, held the smoke for several
seconds, then exhaled it with a cough.

“But he did remember something,” Bob
said.

“Nothing important. When you were in Nam did
you ever hear that story about the freak they called The Sweeper?
No, I guess you wouldn’t have since you were just a REMF.”

“I heard Harrison tell the story many
times.”

“Well, this guy said that when he was
stationed at the hospital, he heard rumors the freak died there.
That’s about all he remembered, except that after the war when the
hospital closed, one of the doctors stayed behind and opened a
clinic in the slums of Manila. Four, five years ago when I was in
the Philippines I checked it out. What a shithole.”

“Do you know the doctor’s name?”

“Brewer. I remember because me and my charter
joked about it being a better name for a bartender than a
doctor.”

Bob leaned forward. “What’s the address of
the clinic?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I can draw you a
map like I did for Harrison.” He scribbled a few lines on a piece
of paper then pushed it across the desk. “Don’t blame me if you
wind up dead.”

Chapter 22

The skies were deep gunmetal gray, but it did
not rain.

Bob perched on a stone bench in the
courtyard, a tablet of 12x18 ready-to-paint canvases steadied in
one hand, a brush tipped with forest green acrylic paint in the
other. He dabbed paint on the canvas, then cocked his head,
listening for Kerry’s return.

Telling himself she was safe—she had to be—he
dabbed another bit of green onto the canvas.

Knowing Kerry’s tour would last most of the
day, he’d bought the painting supplies as a way of passing the
time, but he couldn’t seem to get into it. His depiction of the
courtyard seemed lifeless and dis-jointed.

With a forearm, he wiped away the sweat
trickling into his eyes and continued to dab color onto the canvas.
He had almost finished with his painting when he heard the door
bang open, Kerry’s voice call out his name, and the sound of her
quick footsteps.

“There you are,” she said, entering the
court-yard. “I wish you could have come with me. It was so much
fun. I got to see the gold Buddha! It’s nine meters tall—I didn’t
realize it would be so big. We also saw the marble temple,
Chinatown, and all sorts of fascinating places. We even had lunch
at the terrace restaurant at the Oriental Hotel where Somerset
Maugham used to stay.” She wrinkled her nose. “You were right about
the smog. I’m surprised you don’t have emphysema or something after
so many years of living here. All the times I dreamt of having
adventures, I never considered that the places might smell
terrible. What are you working on?”

She leaned on Bob’s shoulder. “Oh.” She spoke
the word in a flat tone. “What happened? It looks like one of those
paint-by-number things my grandmother used to do.”

“I tried to stay focused in the present.”

She moved in front of him and put an index
finger to her chin as she studied him. “You’re afraid,” she said
softly. “You’re afraid if you let go you might get lost in your own
picture and not be able to find your way out.”

A denial formed in his mind, but before he
could voice it, he realized she was right.