Another Man's Moccasins

“You must be worthy. Short-pants told me the Old Ones speak with you.” I looked up, and his eyes stayed on mine as we listened to the old Seth Thomas on the wall tick. He gestured through the bars and toward the game. I brought the pawn out to G4 and he countered with another to B5. There was a pause, and I listened to him breathe along with the ticking of the clock. “The Old Ones have never spoken to me.”

Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

“He’s dead.” I looked at Hoang’s eyes and watched as they stared indifferently, his mouth slack in silence and the bubbles no longer struggling through the blood that saturated his chest. I held his head up and supported it against me.

Baranski laid an arm over Mendoza’s seat and threw a look back. “What?”

The sunrise oranged the sky, and I desperately tried to contain my anger. “You can slow down now, he’s dead.”

The CID man peered back at the road and returned his eyes to me through the rearview. “What’d you just say?”

“I said that he’s dead, and you can slow down. You accomplished what it was you set out to do.”

He looked at Mendoza, who was in the passenger seat and was still staring ahead. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have sworn that there were two dead men in the jeep. “Are you accusing me...?”

“He told me about the satchel, the one you gave him to take in the helicopter when we were on our way to Khe Sanh.” Even in the gloom of early morning, I could see his eyes as they flicked to the side. “He told me, and I saw you do it. Pretty slick, getting rid of all your bad eggs in one basket.”

“Hey, fucking new guy, do you have any idea the shit that you’re getting yourself into?”

I ignored him and continued. “It didn’t make any sense when the chopper blew to the northeast with Charlie attacking from the same direction. Anything they would have shot at us would’ve blown the other way.” I gestured with the body in my arms. “I guess Hoang didn’t know you intended to kill him, too. And then, since that didn’t work, you tried to get him to kill me. If I’ve got it right, Hoang was supposed to get me good and drunk and then take me out to the bunker where you’d already killed Mai Kim and finish me off.” I swallowed, my spit catching in my throat. “But I saved Hoang’s life in Khe Sanh, and he couldn’t shoot me himself or pick me up and drag me over to the murder site where you could finish the job. He didn’t even tell you where I was.” I looked down at Hoang’s dead face. “Turns out, he was a pretty good guy, huh?”

He kept the jeep at close to sixty. “Fuck you, you fucking asshole.”

My hand slipped below Hoang’s legs, where the safety strap from my .45 was still unsnapped and the safety was not on. “The acceleration in drug trafficking roughly coincided with your arrival here at Tan Son Nhut, and the only thing I’m wondering is whether you knew about the investigation beforehand and were trying to protect your interests, or if you just stumbled onto this mess and made it your own little cottage industry.”

He looked at the road through the windshield as if there were something up there. “You don’t know shit.”

Mendoza suddenly spoke. "Hey...”

I looked over at Baranski. “I think I’ve got it all pretty much figured out, except for one thing.” I studied the back of Mendoza’s head. “Is he in on it, too?”

The Texan raised a hand, pointing toward the road. “Hey!”

Baranski looked at the side of his partner’s face, and I cleared the big Colt from under Hoang’s legs as the Texan grabbed at the steering wheel. Baranski swung back around as we struck something in the road, which sent the jeep in a two-wheeled spiral off to the left. “What the ... !”

The vehicle didn’t quite flip, but the jolt tore Hoang’s body from my grip, and I tumbled out the back with the .45 still thankfully in my hands. I hit a dirt pile and carried a lot of it with me into the barrow ditch beside the road. I lay there for a moment, trying to get my breath back, and looked around for Mendoza and Baranski, but the only body visible was Hoang’s, lying askew about twenty yards in front of me.

I shook my head and felt some blood dripping down my cheek. I must have picked up road rash from the pavement. I rose up on my skinned elbows and shook my head again in an attempt to clear my vision; it seemed as though the surrounding bushes were approaching Hoang’s body and the jeep, which was still lying on its side on the elevated highway. Birnam Wood marching on Dunsinane.

I listened to the pounding that sounded like tanks firing in the back of my brain and wiped some of the dirt and blood from my face with my free hand. I took a deep breath and stood, thinking that I’d better find the CID man and his chum before they found me.

Then the bushes turned and looked at me.