Cambodia Noir (26 page)

I shoved the dirt back over the bones before I left, but it's easy enough to see where. Bun goes right in, clearing with tiny, careful fingers. Vy and I watch—I'm wishing again we had Phann with us.

“Wait here,” I say.

“Where are you going?”

“I want to see where this path leads.” Better not to be surprised. Vy glares, and I turn away before she can say anything.

The strange, nervous energy that filled the place on my last visit is gone, but the narrow track through the woods still makes my heart pump faster. I don't see any marks that look recent—but I'm not much of an outdoorsman. Mostly, I'm worried about who I might find on the other end.

I've pushed through a few hundred meters of brush when the ground starts to rise. The path twists up a muddy little cliff, and then I'm standing on the edge of a wide dirt track. Large enough for a truck, and used often: green grass sprouts between brown wheel ruts. A logging trail?

Wherever this leads, I don't think I'll get there on foot. But someone has been moving something through these woods. Someone who leaves bodies behind?

“It's not her,” says Vy, voice like rock candy.

“Are you sure?” I'm looking at Bun, who looks back at Vy and says something in French.

“The bones are male, probably forty or—late forties, early fifties,” Vy translates. “About five foot six, likely Asian, though she can't be certain. He has several old wounds, stabs and one gunshot. The bones are all cut up, marks all over, so no clear cause of death. Not much else she can tell without a lab, but it's definitely not June.”

For some reason, the news doesn't surprise me. I'm relieved—then not. How convenient would it be to have it all end here? A simple story, another Cambo casualty. I push the thought away.

“Fine,” I say. “Finish putting them back, and let's get out of here. I'll think of something to tell the police.”

Vy looks down at Bun, who chatters something else in French. She's looking back and forth from Vy to me, excited.

“What?”

They're both looking at me now, Vy's eyes wide and bright. “There's something else,” Vy says. “You said the ground looked turned up when you got here.”

I nod. “There was nothing growing there. Soil was soft.”

“Even in this climate, it would take months for a body to go completely to bone. Maybe a year. Long enough for ground cover to grow back, certainly.”

Of course it would. Idiot. Well, what do I know about this stuff? I've seen people go into the ground; not usually around when they come out. “So it's a reburial,” I say hopefully. “Body was moved from somewhere else.”

But there are other explanations, ones I like less, and I see them all flicking over Vy's face: that these bones have been here much longer, and I found them because I knew where to look. Better still, I put them here.

“Are you sure they're all from the same person? Only one body in there, right?”

Vy turns to look at Bun, who nods. Back to me: “How did you find this, Will?”

“I told you.” Vy is staring, hard, but Bun is talking again, trying to get her attention, gesturing with her hand like with a knife.

“What's she saying?”

“What do you think she's saying?”

“Fuck's sake, Vy, just tell me!” I'm screaming.

She takes a step back, wary. “She can't say much without a microscope, but she thinks some of the marks on the bones are . . .” Bun nods, Vy sucks air. “Are marks like you would have from someone cleaning the flesh off. With a knife, maybe, or—” She shudders.

Bun looks at her expectantly.
“Ou des dents,”
she repeats, spreading her lips wide and biting down.

Vy's eyes: open wounds.

“Cover them,” I croak. “We're getting out of here.”

In Vy's room at the Dane's. I'm well into a fresh bottle of vodka; she's chain-smoking on the bed.

The sun was still high as we made our way back, but it felt like midnight all the way. No one said a word. I kept trying to figure it: Maybe a whole corpse would have been too easy to identify? Or the murder could have happened a long time ago, and the killer moved the bones? Better: someone uninvolved found the bones and reburied them rather than deal with them. There were plenty of stories of cannibalism from the KR years: someone found an old grave and didn't want the hassle of police and reporters and historians, so they dumped the bones in the swamp. There: that's simple, believable.

But then how did June know? That photo exists for a reason.

At the docks I paid Lon—a little too much, but nothing remarkable. Trying to buy silence usually just gets you noticed. Hopefully he thinks I went to show my friends the beautiful lagoon I found the other day.

Alone now, it takes us some time to get our voices back. When we do, I tell Vy almost everything—glossing over the details of why I was staking out the Aussie and Charlie. She's not impressed.

“And Bun doesn't know how old the bones are?” I ask, for the eighth or ninth time.

Vy shakes her head.

“If we had them in a proper lab, she could tell you how long they've been in the ground, whether they spent all that time in one place, whether they were buried with a body or separate. All sorts of things.” She drops her lashes and looks at me. “But we don't.”

“Shit. We'll go back and take a couple. Just the little ones, enough for her to look at. They won't even be missed—” I'm cut off by a shoe flying past my head.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Her face looks like someone grabbed it in the middle and twisted. “Do you understand nothing?”

“What do you mean?” I'm drawing a blank. I can handle people, but around Vy it breaks down fast.

“That body was a person, and he's dead. Something horrible happened to him. You can't just leave him lying out there because it might inconvenience you.” She's crying now; it makes her ugly. “That man, whoever he is, deserves an investigation, deserves some justice!”

Is she serious? It must show in my face, because she screams again (“This is not a joke!”), grabs another of her shoes, and tosses it at me. This time her aim is pretty good, but I see it coming and knock it out of the air. She reaches down for something else and I pitch the vodka bottle over her head. It smashes against the wall, showering her with glass, and she freezes. Then I'm around the bed, reaching for her. Block a kick to the groin and catch her fist halfway to my face. She plants the other one in my solar plexus, and I grab that, too. Let her struggle: she's not moving me anywhere. I think she expects me to scream or hit her, and when I don't, she finally goes limp, looking at the floor.

“Listen to yourself,” I say, soft as I can manage. “You think we're in Paris? Where do you think we are?”

Vy looks me in the eye and spits. “In hell.”

I don't move. “You want to go to the police? It's as likely as anything the police did this. Or if not them, then the army, or someone else connected to the government. They'll move in and cover it up and say nothing ever happened, just some silly tourists having a scare over . . . dog bones. The best chance that skeleton has of getting a name would be if it turns out to be three thousand years old. But it's not, is it?” I drop her arms. Wipe my face. Light a cigarette.

Vy's still looking at the broken glass at her feet. “No one ever says no to you, do they?”

“Everyone I've asked for an insurance policy.”

“What would you be worth?” She's not laughing. “You're a parasite. You use everybody—just to get to the next score. Even when it's not the drugs, or the money, you play with people, so I guess you must enjoy it.”

“And you just like rolling in the mud.” She slaps me, hard enough I drop my cigarette. It smolders on the bedclothes, and I pick it up before we have to call the fire department, too.

Her look says everything about where she's running, and what from.

“Gimme three days before you go anywhere with this,” I say.

“Fuck you.”

“Please.”

“Oh, who am I going to tell?” She laughs now, long and low. Tosses herself back on the bed. For a second I see the Vy I knew. This is hell—and she can't stand to be too far away.

“Now the pleasantries are past”—I lean over her—“there's one more thing I need from you.”

By the time we're done making faces at each other, the exhaustion has come back, and I can barely stand up. Vy and Bun are on their way up to Phnom Penh, and I'm staggering back to my room, thinking wistfully of all the pretty bottles of vodka pining away in the Dane's closet. Sorry, ladies, another night.

I find Phann sitting in his car outside the hotel, listening to the radio. Give him the rest of his cash, and some extra, and tell him I'm done. He should go back east. He pockets the money, then he reaches under the dash and pulls out a gun. Some kind of automatic: silver, greasy looking. Big. I have a half second of fear, but he holds it out to me, butt first.

“Never touch the stuff.” He just sits there, looking at me like he knows better. “I'm a journalist,” I say, in Khmer. “If I take that, I won't be one anymore.”

Phann doesn't move. “You not journalist now,” he says, in English. “You detective. Need protection.”

“No thanks.”

Phann shrugs and puts the gun back in the car. “There's nothing so important it's worth dying for,” he says, just kind of conversationally. “I learned that a long time ago.”

“I learned the opposite.”

“May all the devas protect you from harm.”

Back in the room. Phann talked the hotel guys into not kicking me out, and they've reconstructed the bed while I was gone. I sit on it and smoke my way through the last of my gear. Look at the floor for a while, then change it up and look at the ceiling. The tiles make a nice pattern. The ones in the walls, too. Everything adds up.

About a thousand years ago, in another life, I had an uncle who tried to teach me chess. I could never get it. Trying to think five moves ahead—I lost and lost. Eventually I stopped playing. All I remember of the game is the feeling I have now: I'm in the dark and I can't see what's coming.

If I'm even halfway right about what Luke's up to, sticking my nose in his business is going to be instantly fatal. Taking my suspicions to Kara could be just as bad. Time is running out before the Feds show up—and I've got no moves left to make. A pawn against an army.

That's when I hear the click.

I roll off the bed, feeling in the dark for the metal poles that hold up the mosquito netting. Pull one out of its socket and grab the net in the other hand. The door bangs open and men rush in. I get the first one right in the eye with the end of the pole and toss the net in the face of the second, but there's a third in the doorway with a gun pointed right at me, and I freeze.

A moment of relief as I realize there are no machetes.

The first guy grabs the pole out of my hands. The world goes red as he brings it down on the bridge of my nose. The room spins, hands grab me—

Then nothing, for a long while.

I feel awake, for what must be the first time in days. I'm still a bit groggy, which I guess is from the medications. . . . I don't know what all they've done to me. But it's good to write again (in my right mind, that is, haha).

The hospital is some kind of colonial gothic—a big gloomy ward, divided by curtains on rails, which they mostly keep closed, but up above I can see the arches in the ceiling, and the edges of high fan lights. It's all super clean and smells vaguely of bleach. The nurses have been in and out since I woke, asking me things in Cambodian that I can't possibly understand, so I just do my best to smile. I'm not really sure that helps much. They wanted to give me a drip, and I could see from the bottle it was just saline, but I remembered my training: no needles. So I mimed drinking, and they brought me some kind of Tang-product. It's amazing we have any astronauts left alive, if this is what we give them.

There was a doctor who came to see me sometime in the afternoon. He was absolutely tiny, in a perfect white coat and spectacles, and spoke a little English. He told me my leg had got infected. It must have been that cut, the one from the car on my first week. It never did heal, and I guess wading around in the swamps aggravated it. The doctor seemed very concerned.

“Bad cut,” he kept saying. “Why?”

I told him a dozen times that a car had hit me, but he just kept shaking his head, looking worried and vaguely accusatory. “Very bad,” he said. Gus called to shout at me, too. He said he had half a mind to send me home (which I managed not to laugh at) and if I wasn't more careful, and this is a dangerous place, and etc. Apparently I gave him a scare. I think he was ready to drive all the way down to Sihanoukville just to yell at me in person, but I managed to convince him I was sorry, and would take better care of myself, and would have his story ready soon . . . eventually he seemed to calm down. Sok came by, and says that tomorrow we can finish the drive home—ideally without me having a seizure in the passenger seat this time.