Monkey on a Chain (9 page)

Suppose he had a wife who wouldn’t like a Eurasian daughter crawling out of the woodwork? No, that kind of wife was impossible to imagine, for Roy. Any kind of wife was impossible to imagine for Roy. A wife would imply a commitment to someone besides himself. More, it would imply a human need. Roy had no need for anything that couldn’t be bought.

So just the fact that April was looking for her father was no threat to Roy. Suppose his paternity were connected with something else, something that made Toker, and possibly April, dangerous to him? Even that didn’t fly. The situation simply didn’t have Roy’s signature on it. He always used the minimum force necessary to achieve his ends. If there had been a threat, he would have disappeared, left it behind, or found a solution that required something less than a Claymore or a grenade.

But I wondered how much of my thinking was accurate and how much was just a reluctance to believe that Roy could have suddenly begun killing his old friends.

I don’t know why I parked in front of the motel instead of around the side, by the door to our room. I think it was because Walker and I both parked in the long-term lot at the airport. My decision to be unpredictable. Whatever the reason, I did park in front, and I led April through the lobby and out into the courtyard by the pool. There, I froze.

The drapes covering our patio door were closed. I distinctly remembered leaving them open, with the radio and all the lights on in the room. The lights were still on, but I couldn’t see into the room.

I pulled April to me, squeezing her arm hard to get her attention, and whispered to her to go back to the car and wait for me. She looked frightened, nodded, and took off. I walked around the perimeter of the buildings at a normal pace, listening intently. As I passed our room, I heard nothing. I should have heard the radio. It had been turned off. If someone was waiting for us inside, the radio would have been turned off so our key could be heard in the lock. I walked to the end of the building, then cut back across the pool area, out through the lobby, and to the car. April looked up when I slid in beside her.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s been someone in the room.”

“Roy?”

“I don’t know who, or how many. Or if they’re still there. Or if they left anything behind.”

“Are we going to find out?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t let an enemy pick the time and place.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

“Leave town.” I put the car in gear and drove as quickly as I could to the airport. I parked in the short-term lot and left the keys under the front seat, along with the automatic. I didn’t like leaving the weapon.

We could still make the flight to Las Vegas I’d bought tickets for earlier. I called the number I’d memorized at Johnny Walker’s house. He didn’t sound sleepy when he picked up. “Yes?”

“Me.”

“What do you want?”

“Two things. We had visitors while we were at your place. They may have been waiting when we got back to the room. We didn’t go in to find out.”

He thought about that and then asked, “What else?”

“I’m leaving the car in the short-term lot.” I gave him the license plate number. “It has to be returned to Los Angeles. The gun needs to be dumped. And someone has to watch the room, see who comes out.”

“I told you I can’t get involved.”

“You can have this done. There’s no danger. Just watch. See what happens. I’ll take care of the rest of it.”

After a moment, I heard a sigh. “Okay. Call the office number. I’ll leave a message.”

He hung up. Ten minutes later, we were in the air, climbing toward thirty thousand feet.

Chapter 4

ALBUQUERQUE

I was getting sick of the Las Vegas airport. Fortunately, we didn’t have to stay long. There was a flight to Albuquerque in twenty minutes. We made it easily and flew out under two new names. I was Andrew Hofstat. She was my niece, Angela Romero.

April said nothing on the flight to Las Vegas. On the flight to Albuquerque, I told her that we were going to be okay. She said she wasn’t worried.

I knew that had to be a lie. I was worried. “Then why the long silence?” I asked.

“All my things. The things you bought me,” she said.

“We’ll get more,” I told her. “They were only clothes.”

She said nothing for the rest of the trip. It was still hours before dawn when we arrived in Albuquerque. We made a cautious approach to my car. I checked the undercarriage and opened the hood before I let her approach it. There was no sign it had been disturbed. We drove straight out to Placitas and made the same cautious approach to the house. Again, we found no sign of visitors.

I opened the door to the deck to air out the house, then threw together a breakfast of sorts and put April in bed. After cleaning the kitchen, I locked the place carefully and got myself to bed just as the sky was beginning to lighten. I fell asleep immediately and only woke once, when April crawled in beside me. She put her back against me, sighed, and drifted off. After half an hour, so did I.

The morning was half gone when I pulled myself from one of my stranger dreams. I was sharing a life raft on the open sea with a faceless child. The raft kept shrinking, or maybe it had a leak. I was afraid of drowning, and more afraid of drowning the child. I slipped into the water and woke in a sweat. April was still asleep. She slept like a kitten, limp and sprawled over the bed. A lot limper than I was, anyway.

I put on a pot of coffee and showered, then stepped outdoors for a tour of the land. There was nothing obvious to see in the parking area. I walked around the house, keeping my eyes on the ground. Someone else had taken the same tour within the past day or two. There were footprints leading from the parking area to the stairs that came down off the deck behind the house.

I ran quickly back to the front and into the bedroom. April smiled up at me and stretched. “Good morning,” she said. I told her to get up and get dressed, and to do it quickly. Then I checked the door from the deck more closely than I had been able to in the dark the night before. It was scratched around the lock, but there was no indication that anyone had entered. The house was all right.

April padded into the kitchen while I was pouring coffee. I handed her a cup and surprised myself by telling her what I’d found. Normally I don’t like to tell people a thing until I know what to tell them to do about it. But she was different. Or I was. I wasn’t sure which.

She put her feet on a free stool and asked, “No one’s here now?”

“No, but we can’t count on that for long.”

“Maybe it was a prowler.”

“We don’t get prowlers out here. I may be the only person on the road who bothers to lock a door.”

She nodded. “You think it was Roy,” she said flatly.

“I don’t know who it was. But it wasn’t a friend.”

“Are you scared?”

“Aren’t you?” Her attitude didn’t make sense.

“Not as long as you’re here. You’ll take care of me.”

“If I can,” I said grimly. “But we have to leave. The trouble followed us. Somehow.”

She stared at me over her cup. “Doesn’t Roy know where you live? He wouldn’t have had to follow us.”

I liked that. She was thinking, maybe for the first time since she had walked back to her house and found the place torn apart. “He could have found out easily enough,” I admitted. “Besides, it doesn’t look like this trouble followed us. It preceded us.”

“So where do we go now?”

“We find Roy. But first, we’ve got some errands to run.”

“You’re the errand boy,” she said.

I grimaced. “Watch your tongue. And hit the shower before you make me mad.”

“Are you going to watch again?”

That surprised me. She must have seen me in her room when I searched her luggage the day she arrived. “No,” I told her. “I’ve got better things to do.”

There was no way I could trust the phone, so my calls would have to wait. While April showered, I burned some of my records, packed up others, and erased a few computer files. I pulled a package from the safe under the house. I threw everything that might spoil in the refrigerator into a box and carried it to the car. I packed another suitcase, this time for an extended trip. By the time April was dressed, I was ready to go.

We locked the house and took off. I pulled into the driveway next to mine, the one with MURPHY on the mailbox. Jenny came to the door looking surprised to see me, but she took the groceries with a smile when I told her I would be going out of town for a couple of weeks and didn’t want them to spoil. I didn’t have to ask the question I’d really stopped to ask. She asked me if my friends had gotten in touch with me.

“What friends?”

“They didn’t leave names,” she said. “They came by yesterday. Two of them. Short and dark.”

“Mexican?” I asked. She wasn’t sure. They could have been, but the accents weren’t right. She thought they might have been Filipino. They had asked how to find the house and had thanked her when she told them, then driven off down the road.

She looked at April a couple of times, but I didn’t introduce them and she politely ignored her after that. I looked as puzzled as I could manage. “Well, they didn’t leave a note,” I said. “They’ll probably get in touch with me later.”

“They might come back,” she said. “Can I tell them where you’re going?”

I told her Los Angeles, for a short vacation. I drove off feeling sick. Filipinos.

Thirty minutes later, my records were in a safe-deposit box and we were checked into the Albuquerque Howard Johnson’s. Camouflage. Blend in with the family types. We were Roy and Dale Evans. I shouldn’t have done that, but I was getting sick of being run around the country. And anyway, I didn’t plan on using the room for more than one night.

I made a couple of calls to Phoenix from a pay phone about a mile away. There was no answer at either Johnny Walker’s number or at his Peacemaker Investments office.

I took April to the Coronado Mall, bought her two suitcases, then turned her loose in a department store with my credit card. She managed to fill the cases without much trouble, once she quit trying to duplicate the things we’d abandoned in Phoenix. She made a point of consulting me on her choice of brassieres and panties. It made me uncomfortable until I realized she was having some fun with me. Then I started voting for the skimpiest things on the rack, and she soon left me alone.

On the trip back to the motel, I pulled into a gas station and made another call to the same number that had gotten me the pistol in L.A. This time, my problem was more difficult. I had a couple of passports I could use if necessary. One of them, Harold Stephenson’s, was rock solid. But April had no ID she could use in case the LAPD had a warrant out on her. It wasn’t even clear that she was in the country legally. She needed a birth certificate, passport, driver’s license, everything. Fortunately, my man regarded such difficulties as opportunities for negotiation. The price went up. The paper would be forthcoming. All I had to do was get him some recent photographs.

That was more of a problem than the negotiations had been. Taking a picture was serious business for April. We went back to the motel and spent an hour deciding which of her new clothes would look best. Then it was back to the mall for shoes that matched. I pointed out that her feet wouldn’t be in the picture. It didn’t matter.

I might have enjoyed the afternoon if Jenny hadn’t said my two friends looked kind of like Filipinos. Well, I might have enjoyed it more. It wasn’t so bad. By the time we found a restaurant, I was feeling almost boyish. Full of vim, vigor, youthful enthusiasm. Not myself, in other words.

Dinner was pleasant. We had a couple of steaks and a bottle of wine in Old Town. Parts of the restaurant were almost three hundred years old, according to the advertising on the menu. That impressed April. The food was good. The chile was hot. The wine was smooth. We talked about April’s school. She wanted to go back as soon as possible, and I pretended that she might be able to. We didn’t talk about Roy, or Toker’s death, or the fact that I couldn’t go home. The evening was—well, we stretched it out. We didn’t want it to end.

After dinner, we drove to the airport to use a pay phone, just in case. I called Johnny Walker. There was no answer. Just in case, I dialed Peacemaker Investments. There was no answer there either.

My mood was not so good when we returned to the motel. I was worried about Johnny. April tried unsuccessfully to bring me out of it. Eventually she gave up. She sat on the bed and asked where we were going next. I told her El Paso. She said she didn’t realize you needed a passport to go to Texas. I told her you didn’t. She lay back against the pillows and stared at me until I gave in.

“Okay. The papers are insurance. In case we can’t find Roy. Or in case something happens to me. You will be legitimate, as long as you don’t attract too much attention.”

“Nothing will happen.”

“Maybe Toker thought the same thing.”

“He didn’t have any warning!” She looked angry. “You know something is wrong. And you’re…more careful.”

“If I’d been careful, I’d never have gotten into this thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“How I got involved. I was at China Beach, taking an in-country R&R, when I met Roy. I was there because I caught a piece of shrapnel in a firefight out of Chu Lai. I was stupid, rash. They gave me a medal for it and two weeks of R&R when I got out of the hospital.”

“You got a medal?”

She had the same look on her face a lot of them got. There were only two looks, unless they’d been there. The one on April’s face now and the older one, back when the faddish slogan was BABY KILLER. Both of them make me sick. You can’t talk to either face. And even if you could, it wouldn’t make any difference. You wouldn’t feel any better, and they’d never understand. Ask Buddha what nirvana’s like and he smiles. Ask a vet what ’Nam was like and he shrugs. You can’t describe the important part of either thing. If you try, you’ll just lie to people. And to yourself.

“Yeah, I got a medal. Last time I saw it was in a drawer in the kitchen, I think.”

There I go, lying again. I know exactly where the damned thing is. I’ll never forget where it is. But it’s not like I’m proud, exactly. Half proud and half ashamed. Like a hick who buys a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge. Sure, he knows he got ripped off, but by God, he got a piece of the Golden Gate! Biggest damned bridge in the world. He’s a fool, but he’s not a little two-bit fool. He bought a piece of the best, and if it was a rip-off, maybe that says more about the con man than it does about the poor schmuck who was dumb enough to believe in something.

April was waiting. I tried to remember where I was in the story. China Beach. One of the most beautiful beaches in the world.

“I was drinking bau-mi-baums. Beer 33. Vietnamese beer. Pretty good. And watching the surf. A lieutenant came along with a cooler, and we just sat there for a couple hours. After a while, we got to talking. He asked what I was doing, and I told him I was getting ready to go back to my unit. Just saying goodbye, sort of.

“He asked a lot of questions about what sort of unit I was with, what kind of action I had seen, that sort of thing. Anyway, the upshot of it was that he offered me a deal. He’d get me a transfer to the Military Police in Saigon, under his command. I knew there would be a payback, but I thought about it for a while, and then I said sure, why not.”

“You were afraid to go back to your unit?”

“No.”

“Then, why?”

I shrugged and lied. “I was in a hospital in the Saigon area. I got out on passes a bit, and I saw what was going on there, what the REMFs were up to. And I felt embarrassed, I guess. Like I was being played for a sucker.”

She asked the obvious question first. “What are REMFs?”

“Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers.”

“Oh.” She was frowning. “A sucker,” she said. “You mean you thought you were fighting for the oil companies?”

That made me impatient. “The only people I ever met who believed Vietnam was sitting on a pool of oil,” I told her, “were the peace freaks. The guys who went over there believed they were doing the right thing, helping people, saving the world, defending America, whatever. Even the officers I knew believed that.”

“Then why did you feel like a sucker?”

“When I got there, everything was simple,” I said. “Charlie was the bad guy. He wore black pajamas and hid in the jungle and cut off the heads of old men and little babies just to make a point. We were the heroes. We wore jungle fatigues and had clearly defined free kill zones and protected the old men and babies, no matter what we had to do to them. But in Saigon, I met people who didn’t believe anymore, who had quit saving the world and were trying to make a living in it. People who asked what difference the old men saw between us and Charlie.”

“You’re saying there was no difference between us and them.”

“No. There was a big difference. Charlie never asked if he was doing the people any good. He knew the answer. And he was going to fight the evils of capitalism with the last drop of blood in the last kid’s veins.” I looked at April sitting on the bed, and I felt very tired. “Look,” I said, “all this is ancient history. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to what’s happening now, and it isn’t going to help us find Roy. I wanted to tell you about how I got involved, but if you don’t mind, I want to stop telling you now. I want to get some sleep.”

“So get in bed.”

“Are you going to stay in your own bed?”

“Of course,” she said.

I showered quickly and turned the bathroom over to April. I called the desk for a seven-thirty wake up and crawled between my sheets. She came out wearing a towel.

I asked her why she hadn’t bought any nightgowns. She said she didn’t wear them. She always wore Toker’s old T-shirts. They were softer. I told her I’d buy some T-shirts tomorrow. She said it wouldn’t work, they had to be real old. She dropped the towel and slipped into her bed. I made a note to buy her some nightgowns and turned off the bedside lamp. I lay in the dark, trying not to think about Saigon. She was doing some thinking of her own.