Thai Horse (21 page)

Gallagher sat next, the man who walked with this funny hitch like limping with both legs, as if his feet hurt all the time. That was because they did. A land mine had driven the floor of his jeep up to his armpits. And beside him was Johnny Prophett, who had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but he stayed in Nam
too
long. Burned out at twenty-five, he had turned to heroin to ease the pain of losing his golden touch.

Prophett was sitting beside the road, scratching out some notes on a legal pad he kept stuffed in his canvas shoulder bag. His back hurt and his throat was ch
o
ked with dust. It hadn’t rained for days, and the roads were brick-hard and beginning to crack into jagged seams. He had lost the war two days before, twenty or so miles away, a
w
akening in the morning after a night of white-powder
hallucinations
to find the outfit he had tied up with gone. Nothing left behind but the usual:

empty cans and shell casings; asked remnants of fires; tattered socks and tank tops too worn out to bother with. It was always the same when they moved out, like a gypsy carnival that had packed up in the night and moved to another town.

He had run out of horse and was already beginning to feel the agonies of withdrawal. The stomach pains, the itching, the headache, the dry mouth. His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly write. Besides, it all sounded the same. He hardly heard the jeep until it was almost on top of him, and he jumped, startled, and then scrambled to his feel and stuck out his thumb. It reminded him of the day he had hitchhiked to Woodstock, or tried to. By the time he got there the music was a memory.

The dust-coated jeep whizzed by, then skidded to a stop, throwing out pounds of dirt and dust.

‘You oughta be careful,’ Gallagher said, a Cincinnati-flat accent, ‘I almost creamed
ya.’

Prophet limped over to the shotgun seat. ‘How about a ride?’

‘Sure, hop in,’ said Gallagher, grindi
n
g the gears into low. ‘Where you headed?’

‘I lost track of the war,’ said Prophett, rubbing his arms.

‘Shit, you’re goin’ in the wrong direction. Action’s back there,’ Gallagher said, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.

‘Where you headed?’

‘Thought I’d jog cross-country to Camranh,’ Gallagher said.

‘What’s your gig?’ asked Prophett.

‘Run a coupla service clubs down in S—town.’

‘Sounds real tough.’

‘It’s a living. You a reporter?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I know a few TV guys down count
r
y. Keep them happy, know what I mean?’

‘Right,’ said Prophett, huddling
down
in the seat, hoping the shakes wouldn’t get too bad. At least he could score there, maybe catch a Huey ride back up to the line. He draped a foot over the side of the jeep. ‘Camranh sounds fine t’me.’

‘I’d watch that,’ said Gallagher. ‘This road’s fulla cracks.

Hate to lose control with you hanging that leg over the side like
—,

The words were hardly out of his mouth when they hit the land mine. Gallagher didn’t even hear the explosion; all he felt was the ungodly pain in the bottom of his feet, as if he had been hit with a baseball bat by Hank Aaron, and he was tossing head over heels in the
ai
r, trying to grab on to something, anything, only there was nothing to grab on to. He landed in a soggy ditch twenty feet away with a
thunk
that sounded like someone smacking a p
u
mpkin with a board. The air hissed out of him. He rolled over on his back, out of the gooey mess, and stared up at the sky and thought, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, be kind to me. Don’t let me die here.

On the other side of the road the shattered jeep lay upside down, its wheels still spinning
a
round, its undercarriage blown away. Prophett lay on his side, staring dumbly at his leg, which was trapped under the
w
reckage. He had forgotten withdrawal, the pain in his leg was so great. He slid up to a sitting position and pushed hal
f
h
ea
rtedly on the side of the vehicle, as if he thought it might just topple back upright. Then he passed out.

Then there was Wonderboy, rock star turned marine. He had left most of his face in the Mekong Delta.

Harswain was a short, lean stick of a man with a bushy mustache and hair like a porcupine’s and he still carried his swagger stick from the days when he was a DI at Parris Island. He sat on a log and drew little nothing doodles in the dirt with it.

‘You’ll know when it’s coming, pretty boy,’ he said to Wonderboy. ‘That round with your name etched into it. You’ll know it. It’ll come sighin’ ‘cross the field and it’ll spit in yer eye a second afore it eats up yer brain.’

He laughed.

Wonderboy felt a cold chill on the back of his neck. Fear nested in his chest and squeezed h
is
lungs and he was out of breath. It was time for some relief. On the line for seventy-seven days. No break. Out of the first sixty that had gone up, there were fourteen left. He
listened
to Harswain and he thought about that bullet.

That was when Charlie hit. There was chaos
—
everybody running around, scrambling to get behind something, grabbing for weapons. Mail coming in. Harswain yelling at them as usual.

‘Get below his horizon,’ he was yelling and Wonderboy was snaking across the ground on his belly, crowding a downed tree and suddenly it was being chewed up a foot away and he cowered down behind it and got his piece ready and then he did a John Wayne, twisting, rising, throwing his rifle across the log, popping half a dozen caps at the jungle.

That was when he saw the bullet, or thought he saw it, that lead slug
auguring
through the air toward him as if in slow motion, spinning white-hot like an angry
wasp
, an ugly stub of lead whistling through the air.

He fell on his back with his eyes squeezed tight shut and waited, listening to more lead ripping the tree over his head, and then he dropped his gun and scrambled on his hands and knees away, toward the jungle, sobbing with fear, listening to Harswain’s scream, ‘Come back here, you lily-livered little freak, you.
Damn you,’ heard him fire a burst toward his back and saw it chew the ground up around his feet but he didn’t stop. He stood up and kept running until he couldn’t run anymore. He fell on his hands and knees and threw up.

He heard the flamethrower nearby, felt the backlash of heat from it and peered through the jungle grass. The kid was twenty feet away, burning everything in front of him.

Perfect cover, thought Wonderboy, scrambling in behind him. Then somebody yelled, ‘Incoming!’ and he heard the sigh of the mortar falling down from the sky, and he pulled into a tight little curl like a slug in a garden. It was a direct hit on the tank, and the flamethrower and the kid erupted in a giant splash of fire that swept over him and a moment before he passed out he felt the skin on his face begin to melt.
.

Finally there was Corkscrew and Potter. Now, there was a pair. Corkscrew and his br
o
ther, Hammer, had once run most of the class hookers in
M
oTown from the backseat of a gold-tinted stretch Lincoln, .while Potter had scratched out a living on an Arkansas farm where the earth was so poor ‘the ants climbed trees to fuck,’ as he delicately put it. They had come out of the war closer than twins.

They had been holding the hill in Dang Pang for two days against a bunch of VC that seemed w be everywhere.

On the morning of the third day Potter crawled around the top of the hill and checked pulses. The rest of his men were dead. Mortars had taken down most of the trees and rain had filled the shell holes with stagnant water. B
a
by mosquitoes popped from their eggs and skimmed along the s
u
rface of the smelly ditches. Now there were three of them. Potter, the poor Arkansas dirt farmer, and Corkscrew and his
brother
, Hammer, a couple of fast-living Detroit pimps who got
caught
in the draft. Dogface infantry soldiers all, with about as
m
uch in common as a banana and a glass of gin.

Potter crawled back to the small bunker he had fashioned from fallen trees and dirt.

‘We’re outa everything,’ Corkscrew told Potter and Hammer. ‘Outa ammo, outa food, outa
w
ater,’ he said.

‘Outa luck,’ Potter groaned, clutching his stomach. ‘I gotta have a drink, Corkscrew.’

Corkscrew said, ‘You got a
stomach
full of shrapnel, man, if you drink, you’ll die.’

‘I’m dead anyway,’ Potter answered.

‘Bullshit,’ snapped Corkscrew.
H
ammer had said nothing. Corkscrew reached over and shook his brother to wake him up, and Hammer rolled over and toppled face
down in the muck at the bottom of a ditch.

‘Ham!’ Potter yelled. He
jumpe
d
down and lifted Hammer up and dragged him back to the top of the ditch. But Hammer’s body was cold and his eyes were sightless.

‘Oh God damn, God damn yo
u
all,’ Corkscrew screamed angrily. ‘You motherfuckers, co
m
e on up here. You want something,
you
fuckin’ apes, come a
n
d get it.
.

When the relief column came up the hill, Corkscrew was standing over the wounded Potter and his dead brother holding his empty M-16 by the barrel, waiting for the VC.

Yeah, thought Earp, they’d all do in a pinch, but tonight Riker will do. He nodded to the man in the safari hat.

‘Checking out,’ Riker said. He took off his hat with ‘Home Sweet Home’ embroidered across the crown in gold and swept his chips into it. He was wearing khaki cotton tennis shorts and a red tank top, his chest hair curling over its neckline, and while his thick black hair was turning gray and he sometimes wore gold-rimmed reading glasses, his deeply tanned arms and shoulders had the smooth muscles of a man who kept himself in top physical shape. He walked across the room and cashed in his chips to the portly man they all called the Honorable.

A thin, hollow-eyed Johnny Prophett got up from the poker table and urged Earp into a dark corner of the alcove. ‘Let me go on this one, Wyatt, please?’

‘C’mon, look at you. Your hands are shaking so bad you could mix a martini without moving your arm.’

‘A
cup
of
coffee,
a
quickie
. .

‘Johnny, some other time, okay? I’
m
being straight up with you. If I take you on this, you could get us all killed. Maybe next time, okay.
.

‘I pull my own,’ Prophett mumbled, looking down at his feet.

‘Sure, you do,’ Earp said and slapped him on the shoulder.

Earp, Riker and Early left the alcove, passing behind the bar and entering Wilkie’s private office. He ignored them. The office looked like an indoor junkyard. Old newspapers, bills, file folders, and magazines were piled on the desk, chairs, on the floor, and were stuffed in an old-fashioned file cabinet shoved in one corner.

‘Sweets has every piece of paper he ever got in his life,’ said Early, shaking his head sadly as he surveyed the oppressively cluttered office.

‘That he has,’ Earp answered.
He
opened a drawer in the desk, put his
.357
in it and took out a 9 mm. pistol with a silencer attached. He popped the clip and checked it. Full.

The phone rang, a muffled announcement from under a stack somewhere. Riker found it and handed the receiver to Earp.

‘Earp. Yeah
. . .
excellent, excellent! Okay, we’re on. Be real careful. Good luck.’

He hung up the phone and rubbed his hands together very slowly.

‘We’re in luck. She got there ahead of him. He checked in ten minutes ago and she managed to get the connecting room.’

‘So it’s a go, then,’ said Early.

‘Yep,’ said Earp.

‘Sounds like a stroll down the la
n
e to me,’ said Riker.

‘Could be,’ Earp said with raised eyebrows. ‘Let’s go, we got ten minutes.’

Prophett, too, left the alcove and walked across the bar to the men’s room. He sat down i
n
a stall and took a small plastic box from his pocket. It contained a hypodermic needle, a candle, a spoon and a packet of heroin. With shaking hands he lit the candle and set it on the toilet-paper holder, then tapped some of the powder in the spoon and cooked it over the flame until it was a clear bubbling fluid, dipped the tip of the spike in the fluid, his fingers squeezing the bulb on the end of it, forcing out the air, sucking in the fluid. He flexed his fist. The needle flirted with a vein, nicked it, then slipped deeply into it. Prophett flinched slightly, took a deep breath and shuddered. A look of contentment crossed his face,
he
closed his eyes and smiled.

The Dusit Thani was a short walk away, but they took Riker’s pickup truck and parked t the rear. Riker got out but stayed close by. Early and Earp went to room 429. She was waiting.

‘We’ll give you about five minutes so you can find out the size of the load,’ Earp said. ‘Nervous?’

She shook her head.

‘Good girl. Let’s do it, then.’

She left the room, took the stairs to the third floor and took the elevator back up, just in case he was watching or listening for it. She knocked on the door of 427 and it was opened almost immediately by a large Chinese with a livid scar down one side of his face.

‘Mrs Giu?’

She nodded, and he stepped back as she entered the room, then quickly checked the hail before closing the door. He was surprised. The woman was beautiful
—
tiny, erect, almost regal in her bearing. She was wearing an emerald-green silk evening dress and white gloves. Her pearl earrings looked expensive. She certainly did not fit the profile of a drug courier.

‘I am Mr. Sen,’ he said. ‘Passport?’

She took the small leather-bound booklet from her purse and gave it to him. He checked it closely, looking for signs of a forgery, but couldn’t detect any. If it got past him, it would get past customs.

The passport identified her as
M
rs. Victor Giu, a widow, twenty-nine years old, born in. Bangkok. She had done her share of traveling, mostly to Malaya, India, Hong Kong and the Philippines.

‘I see by your passport you are a dancer,’ he said.

‘Yes. The steamer trunk is for my costumes.’

Sen smiled thinly. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘A clever stroke, the trunk. It holds three times what a normal suitcase carries. You understand ‘what you are to do?’

‘Yes. I check the four cases through to Seattle. After I pass through customs, a limousine will be waiting to pick me up. Once the bags are loaded in the car, I will be paid the rest of my money and be free to go.’

‘Yes. Really quite simple.’

He took an envelope from a dresser drawer and gave it to her.

‘Here is your round-trip ticket and two thousand seven hundred ninety-five dollars. That’s five hundred dollars for expenses and half the fee.’

Mrs. Giu quickly calculated the weight.

‘Not bad for a few hours’ work,’ Sen said.

‘You forget the risk,’ she said, moving toward the door that connected the two rooms.

‘There are no problems,’ Sen said. He was attracted to the elegant widow and began bragging. He picked up one of the suitcases, put it on the bed and opened it, explaining that the walls were lined with cakes of pressed heroin wrapped in thin sheets of aluminium foil soaked in coffee. The coffee shielded the odor from dope-sniffing dogs. The pockets in the suitcases and several of the drawers in the steamer trunk contained small bags of sachet, which concealed the smell of the coffee from inspectors. As he described the carriers, Mrs. Giu leaned back against the connecting door and unlocked it, then moved across the room to the foot of the bed, keeping Sen’s attention away from the door.

‘We have not lost a shipment in six months,’ Sen said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

His back was to the door connecting the room next door. As he spoke, the door swung open and Earp stepped quickly into the room. Sen heard the sound and then, in the dresser mirror, saw Earp behind him. He reached for the gun in his belt and twisted around at the same time, dropping to his knees.

Earp, ten feet away, was standing with his feet slightly apart and his gun at arm’s length He fired his first shot. The pistol made a flat sound like someone slamming a door. As Sen pulled his own gun Earp’s bullet hit Sen just above the left eye, snapping his head back. He fell against the bed.

A blinding pain seared through Sen’s head. His hands and feet went numb, and the salty taste of blood flooded his mouth. The room swirled crazily. He saw his gun tumble from his hand and, looking up into the end of the silencer and behind it, saw the tall man with the white mustache standing over him. The gun thunked again and he saw the room explode into hundreds of blinding colors and then it turned black.

As Sen’s body seemed to collapse into itself and sagged forward, Riker rushed into the bathroom, grabbed several washcloths and some towels and, dashing back, slammed the washcloths against Sen’s bleeding wounds. It was all over in twenty seconds.

Earp turned the steamer trunk on its back and opened

‘It’s gonna be a tight fit,’ Earp said.

‘This guy’s got to weigh two hundred pounds,’ Riker said as with great effort he and Earp lifted the dead man’s body and forced it into the trunk. Sen lay on his side with his knees jammed against his chest and his head down on his chest. They forced the door shut, locked it and lifted the trunk by one end and set it upright.

‘We’ll send over four messengers for it,’ Earp answered. Mrs. Giu took the elevator to the lobby, walked out of the hotel empty-handed and got in a
tuk-tuk
that was waiting nearby.

Two minutes later Earp and Riker
left
the hotel by the rear door after having checked both rooms. They walked down the fire stairs and threw the suitcases in the truck.

‘How much?’ Early asked.

As they drove off into the night, Earp settled down, smiling, and said, ‘Thirty-seven keys.’