Little Mountain (37 page)

         “Sit down, detective.” The EMT’s large hand gently pushed Sam’s shoulder down. “Fire about put your lights out for good.”

         “What?” Sam’s head was about to burst. “Where’s my father?”

         “Breathe deep,” the EMT said as he held the oxygen to Sam’s face again. The EMT’s name tag said “C-O-T-T-”--Sam couldn’t even see straight. His father was here somewhere, he’d heard his voice. You’ve been gone so long, Father! Where are you?

         After a minute, Sam began to get his bearings again. Knots of curious onlookers gathered at a safe distance. Smoke and flames billowed from the roof. Firefighters attacked with arcs of water, and then the roof collapsed.
Great spectator sport, house fires.
Down the street, an ambulance whooped its siren, making its way past rows of parked cars.

         Fitchie walked over to Sam, his face covered with dirt and sweat.

         Sam pulled away his oxygen mask. “You okay, Fitchie?”

         Fitchie shrugged. “You look like you saw a ghost. We should’ve just tossed in a match and said
sayonara
.”

         “Death--death is too easy. I want Bin Chea--to live a very long life--”

         “Oh, sure you do.
In prison, with a blowtorch up his ass.”

         Sam managed a weak smile; Fitchie had read him perfectly.

         They sat on the grass together, not talking as ambulances carried away
Angka’s
prisoners. Sam had second-degree burns that hurt like hell. He walked over to a waiting ambulance, but nothing would stop him from seeing Julie and Trish tonight.

         In the flames, there had been a flicker of joy when Sam thought he had seen his father, when he thought that his memories had played him a cruel trick, that his parents and his sister Sarapon must be alive and well. That his father would take him by the hand--

         But his father was in a different world, Sam realized that now. To meet again, they would have to wait.

EPILOGUE

Countless people had died at Little Mountain. If only the bones could speak, if only the spirits could return from the mists above the pond, they would point at Comrade Bin--
You! You!
they
would say.

         But Sam would speak for them. And now a few of those missing men had crawled back from the dead, oozed out of
Angka’s
grip. Even if they never spoke, their mere existence was testimony enough to put Bin Chea away forever.

Early that evening, Julie and Trish met Sam at the hospital as he was discharged. “Let’s go back to the cabin,” Sam suggested, and they all agreed. As they drove out of the lot, an Asian boy and girl walked hand in hand along the sidewalk, laughing together. If their parents saw them, they were as good as engaged. Sam could never forget his
past,
forget what his people had wrought on themselves. If you forget about evil, it will sneak back in the night and club you on the head. But if you forget about the good, it will vanish in the mists until you search for it. Sometimes you will search forever.

         Trish must learn about her heritage. Cambodians weren’t them and Americans us. She was an inextricable blend of both.

         They stopped by the apartment. The bedroom was cleaned up, and Julie’s books had been replaced on the bookshelf near the window. Buckshot had damaged some of the Shakespeare volumes and pocked the wall behind them. Sitting on top of the books, undisturbed, was the cassette of Sarapon’s songs. The cassette he hadn’t dared listen to. He picked it up and ran his thumb lightly over the plastic case that covered Sarapon’s picture, then put it in his shirt pocket.

         Sam drove past the park and stopped at a traffic light. Tonight at story time, he would tell Trish about the
apsaras
and the
romvong
they danced, about the strands of red silk that joined newlyweds by the wrist. If she was still awake, maybe he would tell her about the Monkey General, or about fish that walked on their fins. And he would certainly teach her to count:
Muy, pe, bei
...

         Cottony wisps hung in the evening sky, their edges turned to gold by the setting sun. On the basketball court,
a half
-dozen teenagers played three-on-three as though the day would last forever. A Frisbee coasted over the outstretched hands of a boy, and glinted briefly in the fading light.

         Oh, and there was one more thing Trish should hear.

         He slipped Sarapon’s tape into the cassette player and headed for the interstate.

The End

GETTING LUCKY

By Bob Sanchez

Chapter 1

Take one Lowell cop, slightly ripe. Shred a 28-year career and a 30-year marriage. Toss in a P.I. license and a dump of an office. Add a sense of humor, a dash of decency, and a taste for Beethoven. Sear with the loss of a son. Drain off the self-pity, and set it aside. Add salt to taste, and garnish with small paychecks.

        
One Clay Webster
, comin’ up.

         The phone kept ringing as I ran up the stairs. Those Yellow Pages were great. My ad wasn’t even in print yet, and one of Lowell’s troubled souls had found me anyway. I dropped an armload and fumbled to find the key my son Jerry had given me. My first caller certainly showed patience.

         I pushed open the door to my new office and froze at the sight of a rat the size of a linebacker. I chucked the Boston White Pages at him, and he took off in a brown blur toward his own private exit in the corner.

         In the middle of the desk, the phone stopped ringing.

         Rats.

         This office was in no shape for clients to see anyway. “I got this place for you, Dad,” Jerry had told me. “First
month’s
free--hey, after all you’ve done for me, it’s the least--”

         The least, he had that right. In the late ’90s, my son the slumlord owned a dozen properties here in Lowell, Massachusetts, and I certainly wished his paying customers better than this. But who was I to complain? My first six months in business had been slow, and five thousand in savings wasn’t going to take me far. A guy could spend a buck to eat macaroni out of a can, or he could spend it on a Megabucks ticket for a $2 million jackpot. But I’ll win Megabucks when the next ice age comes to Lowell. Macaroni is now.

         At least the office came furnished. The vintage 1960 desk had
a gray plastic top and steel sides
. Behind the desk sat the only chair, a swivel type upholstered in green plastic with duct tape running diagonally across the seat. The walls had dark stains from a leaky roof, and three of the ceiling tiles lay on the floor. Underneath my feet, the commercial carpet showed years of ground-in dirt. Overall, the place smelled like stale droppings and dead cigars, as though the rats hung out here for late-night poker games.

         I left the door and window open for a little air and made a mental note for my next trip to the store: broom, dustpan, rat poison. Better get a bottle of Mister Clean too, the biggest they have. Custodial help wasn’t a line item in my budget, and whipping this dump into respectable shape for Monday would take me well into the night. Given my immediate business outlook, I’d have time to patch every last crack in the plaster walls. I walked down the hallway looking for an extra chair or two, picked the lock to the store room, and found a dozen chairs like the one I already had. I took the best two and attached Dymo labels to the back that said:

        
Property of Clay Webster, P.I.

        
Out front in the parking lot, the autumn wind slapped fast-food cartons against trees and sand against my face. My office sat above Robby’s Auto, which sold parts stripped from the automotive graveyard that lay behind the building. Just as Robby’s is built on the ruins of cars, Webster Investigations is built on the ruins of lives. “Former Lowell police officer benefits from personal tragedy--details at eleven.” When Channel 7 runs a promo like that, it’s been a slow news day.

         I carried more furnishings in a cardboard box stored in the trunk of my old Dodge: a typewriter, every stationery item I could think of from paper clips to a date book Molly had given me, a bottle of generic aspirin, a half package of Tums I’d opened after Thanksgiving dinner, a cassette player, and a coffee pot, all tools of the trade for my new career. There were also a half dozen classical music tapes. For the moment, my Smith & Wesson .38 Special stayed in the sock drawer in my apartment--lately, I didn’t trust myself with it. I tossed my brown bomber jacket on the desk. To me it was my Joe Louis jacket, named for the Brown Bomber himself.

         It was Sunday morning on the long Thanksgiving weekend. On Thursday I’d watched the annual high school football rivalry between Lowell and
Lawrence,
then went to Jerry’s place for turkey pot pie and a nasty case of heartburn. As a joke, he also gave me a cap pistol. It wasn’t the height of tact, given the way my police career ended. But when your family falls apart, you forgive the little slights so you don’t lose the one person you think still loves you.

         Jerry had said, “Why not go in and spruce up the office some? You know, Dad, customize it to your liking?” No one would stop in on the holiday weekend, so I could tack my P.I. license on the wall, set up the coffee pot, and plan out my work for the next week, assuming any work needed planning. I plugged the cassette player into the wall, and Beethoven and I went to work.

         The phone rang again. They say a good businessman picks up on the first ring, and I did. “Webster Investigations,” I said with practiced smoothness.

         It was a kid, and I won’t repeat what he said. He was the same nitwit who’d jangled my bells at home every night for two weeks. I hung up; as first calls went, it was hardly auspicious.

         “Slimeball,” I said.

         “Excuse me, sir?” A woman stood at the doorway: she seemed about forty years old, with a black leather coat that reached past the tops of her black leather boots. She had high cheekbones, jet-black hair, and a skin tone that suggested a recent getaway to a secluded Caribbean cay. The curve of her coat implied that she wasn’t built like a sheet of plywood. This weekend marked the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season, and the woman probably wanted directions to the local branch of Saks Fifth Avenue--as if Lowell had one. Still, my pulse quickened.

         “I need a bomb,” I said. How else would I fix what ailed this dump?

         “Insurance and a match, that’s all you need.” She turned and walked down the hall, leaving me embarrassed about the sight of the place. Thank God she wasn’t a potential client.

         But she returned in a minute, meeting my grin with a flicker of a smile. “Everything’s closed,” I said. “I’m just here to sandblast the office.”

         She looked down at a slip of paper and said, “Do you know when Mister Clayton will be in?” From her accent, I guessed that she was Puerto Rican.

         “The name’s Clayton Webster, but I go by Clay.”

         “Bonita Esquivez,” she said. We shook hands. Her grip was soft and warm, and I let go reluctantly. Her dark brown eyes scanned the room, full of pity for the dump she surveyed.

         “Handyman’s dream,” I said. “I’m getting it ready for opening on Monday.”

         “Can’t you help me now? My husband is missing.”

         I grabbed my jacket. “Then let’s get a cup of coffee,” I said. “There’s a donut shop two blocks down.”

         A man never gets to make a first impression a second time, and somehow I’d survived her first impression of me. But my first impression of Bonita Esquivez was that she possessed a nervous elegance and a baby-blue Cadillac Eldorado with Dade County, Florida, plates.