Hooligans (63 page)

The security guard flagged mc down as we drove toward the island.

“You got somebody waiting for you?‟ he asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“There‟s this black sedan down to the right. Pulled up just after you went in. He‟s been down there

ever since.”

I squinted through the dark and could see the car, halfa block away, sitting on our side of the street. It

could have been one of Dutch‟s hooligans, but I didn‟t recognize the car.

“Can you tell how many there are?”

“Just the one,” he said.

“Maybe he‟s sleeping one off” I said.

“Yeah, well, just thought I‟d mention it,” the guard said.

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

I pulled out of the security drive and turned left, away from the parked car. It pulled away from the

curb without showing any lights and fell in behind us. I drifted, letting it pull closer. As usual, my gun

was in the trunk.

“Hook up,” I told Doe.

“What?” she said.

“Your safety belt. Hook it up, and hang on.”

She groped for the belt and snapped it across her lap.

“What‟s the matter?” she asked, urgency creeping into her voice.

“We‟ve got company,” I said, hooking up my own belt. “Just hang on. It‟ll be like the old days in the

dune buggy.”

I waited until the car was ten feet behind me, then slammed down the gas pedal and twisted the

steering wheel. The car leaped forward, its tires tortured by the asphalt, and then spun around. I hit the

brakes, straightened it out, and left rubber all over Palm Drive as I headed in the other direction.

The other driver was faster than I figured. He swerved and hit my left rear fender. I lost control for a

moment, spun wheels, hit gas and brakes trying to get it back, leaped over the banquette, missed an

alcove of garbage cans and Dempster Dumpsters, and wasted about thirty feet of the fence

surrounding the compound. My car came to a halt, its ruined radiator hissing crazily.

I fumbled with the keys, got them out of the ignition, jumped out, and ran back toward the trunk. The

other car did a wheelie and headed back toward me, stopping ten feet away. I was still struggling with

the trunk latch when I heard Turk Nance say from behind me:

“You need driving lessons.”

While we were looking for him, Nance had followed me. Doe was out of the car beside me.

“Get back in the car,” I said as quietly as I could.

“What‟s going on?” she squealed.

Too late. Nance was standing in front of me, his Luger at arm‟s length, pointed at my face, his reptile

eyes dancing gleefully, his tongue searching his lips.

I reacted. Without thinking. Without figuring the odds. Without thinking about Doe.

It was like an orgasm, a great flood of relief. All my frustrations and anger boiled up out of me into a

blind, uncontrollable rage. Nance was more than lust a psychotic who had killed people I knew and

who‟d tried to kill me. He vas every broken promise, every shattered dream, every pissed-away value

in the last twenty years of my life.

I didn‟t think. I grabbed the gun by the barrel and twisted hard, heard the shot and felt the heat surge

through the barrel, burn my hand, and howl off down the street. I hit him, knocked him into the alcove

of garbage cans, hit him again, kneed him, thrashed him back and forth, from one wall to the other,

and then hit him again and kneed him again. He started to fall and I held him up and kept hitting him.

I could hear Doe screaming my name hysterically but I couldn‟t stop. Every punch felt good, every

kick. He started screaming, trying to get away from me. His shirt tore and he fell to his knees and

scrambled toward the street like a crab. I slammed my foot down on his ankle to stop him, twisted it,

and hit him in the hack of the head several times with my fist until my hand was burning with pain. I

dragged him up and kicked him in the small of his back and he vaulted in a clean diver‟s arc into the

garbage cans.

it wasn‟t enough. I snatched up a garbage pail lid and slammed it down on his head, three, four, five

times, until it was a mangled wreck, then threw it away, dragged him to his feet, and jammed my knee

into his groin again. I grabbed a fistful of his shirt, held him, and hit him halfa dozen more times,

short, hard shots, straight to the face. I hit him until he was a bloody, limp rag.

Doe was leaning against the wail, her hands stifling her screams, her eyes crazy with fear and shock.

“Stop it, Jake, for God‟s sake, please stop it!” she cried.

I dragged him up and threw him across the hood of the car, picked up his Luger, and jammed it into

his throat.

„The entire exhibition had taken about thirty seconds.

“You fucking Mongoloid!” I screamed in his ear. “That‟s three strikes. You‟re out.”

“No, no, no!” Doe screamed.

The security guard was in the street, blowing his whistle, not sure whether to pull his gun or not.

“Call this number,” I yelled to him, and barked out the number of the Warehouse. I repeated it.

“You got that?” I demanded.

“Yes, sir!”

“You call it now, tell whoever answers that Jake Kilmer wants company and not to waste time getting

here.”

“Yes, sir” He dashed back inside the security house.

Nance wasn‟t alone. Nance was never alone. Nance was a company mail; he liked people around.

“Run back inside the compound,” I told Doe.

“But—”

“Do it now. This creep isn‟t alone. Just get inside and stay there until——”

Headlights ended that sentence. The car moved toward us from a block away. I gripped the Luger in

two hands and blew out a headlight. The car picked up speed and stopped an inch in front of mine. I

aimed at the other light and a voice behind me said:

“Drop it, or the girl goes down.”

Nance tried to gargle something through swollen, bloody lips. I dragged him off the hood and threw

him on the ground, dropped the clip out of his gun, and threw it at him with everything I had. It hit

him in the side and clattered harmlessly across the sidewalk.

A moment later something just as hard hit me in the back of the head. The street turned on end. Doe

Spun around me like a doll on a merry-go-round. The lights went out.

72

FLASHBACK: NAM DARY, END OF TOUR

The 556th day
:
We been on the
ass
of this crazy schoolteacher named
Nim
who‟s been raising hell u

and down the river and has maybe a hundred slopes tagging after him now. HQ says he‟s getting to

be some kind of God to these people and to terminate the cock-sucker
posthaste.
I mean, there‟s five

of us on this CRIP team, right, and we‟re gonna bust this crazy bastard and a hundred or so nuts that

are hanging out with him?

So I tell HQ I need about fifty, sixty first-class hunters, Kit Carsons‟ll do fine, but I ain‟t running u

against this fuckin‟ army of Nim‟s with a five-man team, I don‟t care how good we are, and I‟ll tell

you this, we‟re the best they got down here, goddamn it. Between the five of us, I‟d say we got

probably three hundred fuckin‟ scalps. Not bad for six months on the line, five guys. Corrigan, French

Dip, Squeak, Joe Fineman, and me. Five guys, one head. We‟re charmed. We got this daily bet, -we

start off with a bill apiece and each add a twenty every day we‟re dry. First one gets his kill, takes the

pot. It ain‟t ever gone over eight hundred, that‟s four days.

So anyway, we go down to meet the riverboat today and pick up this bunch of sharpshooters HQ sent

down, and the boat crew says the war‟s gonna be over any day now and I say, “Sure, I‟ve heard that

before,” but the team, they all buy it and they get a couple of jugs of Black Jack from the black market

guy on board and while I don‟t put up with drinking out here I figure, what the hell, we got all these

wild-eyed slopes from HQ, why not, they deserve it. So the rest of the team, they get juiced up to the

eyeballs and I have to sit guard all night to make sure this asshole Nim don‟t come crawling u on us,

blitz us all. The slopes are okay in the daylight, face to face, that kind of fighting. I don‟t trust them at

night when I can‟t see them, so I sit up.

All night I keep thinking about the cease-fire and about what that lieutenant, what was his name,

Harris? said, that night in Dau Tieng, about going back to the World and bowling every night and all.

Shit.

Turns out it was a false alarm, about the cease-fire, 1 mean. Another day of grace.

The 558th day:
It was beautiful Last night we catch up to Nim just before sunset and we blitz the shit

out of his whole fuckin‟ bunch. We have them boxed in and we have a fuckin‟ field day. The Carsons

are crazy motherfuckers. They cut heads, drink blood, I mean really rubber-room crazy. We get in

close enough, the team is having some real sport. We all managed to acquire these Remington pumps

from the juice man upriver, and so the deal is, this time we have to use shotguns to win the pot. So

anyway we load up with rifle slugs; it‟s about an inch around and weighs about three ounces and it‟s

rifled so you get a little spin on it and when it hits anything solid it fuckin‟ blows up.
You
hit one of

those motherfuckers dead center, the body being mostly water, it‟s like shooting a fuckin‟ watermelon.

We call them splashers.

Anyway, it was like shooting skeet. So I take the pot. We just put it up this morning, six hundred bucks.

Nine scalps. A good day‟s work. The only problem is, this Nim and about twenty of his gooks got

away from us.

So this morning we track them into this little valley with a hump in the middle, looks like a tit in a

cake pan. Lots of trees, I call in some air and we do a little Macing. It‟s hotter than a whore‟s

mattress and we spread out around the perimeter and we give the fuckers a little while and that gas

starts mixing with their sweat, next thing you know one of these Kit Carsons, he stands up, starts

sniffing the air like a
hyena, points down in the bush, here comes about fifteen of them, beating the

shit out of themselves because of the Mace, crying. The Kit Carson, he up and blows the first one

away, just like that if you please, and then he tells the rest of them to get their hands behind their

heads like good little gooks. Man, they took a beating, all covered with Mace burns, their eyes all

bugged out. Whipped dogs, man, they got as much fight left in them as a guppy. So we figure we‟re

lookin‟ at, what, five, six of them that are left maybe. Fuckin‟ Nim ain‟t in the group.

I got this American
180,
a neat little submachine I won in a poker game with some civilian types in

Saigon, shoots
.22‟s
but, like, thirty rounds a second. You could drill a hole in a brick wall with this

motherfucker. That‟s what it sounds like, a dentist‟s drill:

Brrrttt, brrttttt.

Like that. Jesus, what a nice piece of work. Two of these, the Alamo would have never fallen. So what

it is, you learn to do things quick over here, know what I mean? You move fast, shake „em up, they‟ll

tell you anything you want to know. The thing is, you don‟t spend a lot of time thinking, you just do it,

see. I call one of these little bastards over, he gets about four feet away, I give him a burst.

Brrttttt.

He hits the dirt, jerks once, it‟s all over. I call out the second one, ask him where this fucker Nim is, he

starts thinking about

Brrttffl.

Another one down. The third one I point at tells us all of it. The slopes don‟t call me Monsieur Morte

for nothing. What it is, there‟s this pool at the foot of the hill and Nim‟s holed up there in a cave. I

call the air back and this time he comes in and lands and the pilot, who is this fuckin‟ rosy-cheeked

bastard about twelve years old, he jumps out, says, “Where‟s the lieutenant?” and I tell him there

ain‟t any lieutenant, I‟m a sergeant and I‟m in charge and what‟s his problem, and he says the cease-

fire is tonight and it‟s official, all that shit, and he wants to call the whole thing off. “What the hell,”

he says, “it‟s only a few more hours,” and I say, “Listen, you fuckin‟ wimp, we been following this

little bastard for days and we‟re goin‟ in there and get the motherfucker, so let‟s get on with it.” He

gets the color of a goddamn beet and he says, “I‟m putting you on report. What‟s your name,

mister?” and I say, “Just tell them Monsieur Morte insulted you, that a Pall Mall‟ll get you a kick in

the ass and that‟s all it‟ll get you,” and he says, “Don‟t give me any of that Wild West shit, what‟s

your name?” and I say, “Parver, P-a-r-v-e-r,” and I spell it for him and then I say, “And either

you‟re gonna fly that fuckin‟ bird or one of us will. We‟re goin‟ over that hump and my people ain‟t

wadin‟ through a lot of fuckin‟ Mace to get there.”

Anyway, before it was over, we were in the chopper and we go over the hump and the pool‟s down

there, like the gook says, and there‟s little gray wisps of Mace, still hanging in there, like stringy