Once a Warrior (25 page)

“You buy?”  The child peddler plucked a bright red balloon from the bouquet of balloons in his hand and held it out to her.

Before she could ask him how much the balloon cost, Loc stepped between them, angrily waving his arms and shouting at him in a rapid-fire barrage of Vietnamese.

His lower lip trembling, the boy turned and ran.

Cat scowled at Loc. “Why did you chase him off?”

His expression hardened as he opened the passenger door for her. “The Viet Cong use their women and children to kill Americans in Saigon.”

“But it was only a balloon,” she argued, still standing in the street. “And he was just a little boy.”

“Last month another balloon seller—a girl, this time—asked an American soldier to hold her wares while she made change for him. The balloons, which had
plastique
explosives in them, blew up.”

“Wha . . .” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “What happened to them?”

The sadness in Loc’s black eyes made her sorry she’d asked. “Both she and the soldier died.”

Her stomach churning at the thought of Americans being so hated and innocent children being used for such evil purposes, Cat got into the car. “I’m sorry,” she whispered when he swung in behind the wheel. “I had no idea that kind of thing was going on.”

“There are atrocities on both sides in this war.”

She wondered if that explained his T-shirt, which protested against the chemicals being used to defoliate the jungles where the Viet Cong usually hid, but didn’t pursue it.  

He turned on the ignition. Then he turned into a maniac. He threw the Pontiac into gear, floored the accelerator and rocketed away from the curb with a force that plastered her back against the front seat.

The drive from downtown Saigon to Cholon took less than ten minutes, but it was the longest ten minutes of Cat’s life, with Loc flying through busy intersections, rounding corners on two wheels and careening across lanes like some berserk bumper-car driver at an amusement park.

“What’s the hurry?”  She gripped the armrest with one hand and the dashboard with the other, trying to brace herself as he hit another one of the potholes that cratered all the streets. In her peripheral vision, she could see huts fabricated of sheet metal, wood scraps and cardboard whizzing by. Through the open car windows she could smell the malodorous Ben Nghe Canal mingling with the aroma of a cabbage dinner cooking on a charcoal stove for some luckless family that lived along its banks.

“I need to be sure we’re not being followed.”  He glanced into his rearview mirror, then did a one-eighty in the middle of the road, barely missing a truck carrying a load of chickens. Apparently satisfied that he’d done enough zigging and zagging and backtracking to lose anyone who was trying to tail them, he slowed to a crawl and turned onto a dim back street.

Cat’s head was spinning crazily as Loc braked to a stop. Still glued to her seat, she breathed a sigh of relief and smiled over at him. Only to find herself facing the back of his head.

“Foreigners are not welcome in Cholon after dark.”  He continued staring out his window as he spoke.

Hearing herself called a foreigner, even though it was true in this instance, made her feel strange. She sat up with the intention of asking him if there was an alley they could use so no one would notice their coming and going. But peering across him and seeing the dump Cain lived in struck her dumb.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“It’s six-thirty now,” Loc said. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

Cat blinked in dismay. “You’re not coming in with me?”

“I have business of my own here in Cholon.”  He turned his dark eyes back to her. “And the less I know about your dealings with Cain, the better for me.”

“Oh, of course . . .” Embarrassed to realize that she hadn’t even considered the potential consequences of the risk he’d already taken on her behalf, she grabbed hold of the door handle and said as she alighted, “I’ll see you at seven.”

As the Tempest pulled away, Cat set her jaw firmly and started toward Cain’s house. It was even more dilapidated than it had appeared from the curb—like something out of “The Munsters.”  Which made her wonder what he did with all the money he was earning from his criminal activities.

The white stucco exterior was stained with black mildew caused by the moisture from the nearby rice paddies, while the red barrel-tiled roof was broken and jagged in places. Some of the shutters were closed, others partially open, giving the house the air of an old unshaven drunk staring at her through half-closed eyes. A mangy yellow cat digging through the pile of smelly garbage that littered the courtyard hissed at her as she passed through a wrought-iron gate hanging rusty and broken on its hinges. And a beady-eyed rat crossed her path when she approached the front door.

No one answered her knock, but the door creaked open of its own accord.

“Cain?”  She called his name into the dim interior, but got no response. Clearing her throat nervously, she tried again. “Mr. Cain?” 

The chippering of a sapphire swift as it swooped across the sky was her only reply.

Maybe Loc had gotten the address wrong, Cat stewed. Or maybe Cain had left Saigon again. There was one way to find out, of course, but the idea of entering someone else’s house without their permission—especially when she’d already been warned that she wasn’t welcome in this part of town—scared her silly.

She dashed a trickle of sweat from her cheek with the back of her hand. Reached up and tucked in a tendril of damp hair that had escaped from her ponytail. Waved away an annoying fly. Then another one. Finally, she checked her watch and saw that she’d already wasted five of her allotted thirty minutes waiting for someone to answer her.

Forcing down her trepidation, she entered the house and stopped just inside the door. The sudden shift from daylight to gloom nearly blinded her. Long shadows cut a swath through the small front room and the shuttered windows admitted only enough light to limn the cracks in the bare walls and gild the dust motes drifting through the stale air. When her eyes finally acclimatized, she looked around.

And was horrified to see a man lying face-up on a cot in the middle of the otherwise empty room.

Cat’s first thought was that he was dead. Despite the drugging heat, which the snaggle-bladed ceiling fan did nothing to dispel, she felt a sudden chill. She covered her mouth to keep herself from screaming and wondered if she should call the police. But there was no telephone in the room. And even if there had been, she couldn’t have relayed her concerns to anyone because she didn’t speak Vietnamese.

The man drew a deep breath and let it out on a loud snore.

Her shoulders wilted with relief at the realization that he was asleep, not dead. She laid her palm over her still racing heart. Then she took a tentative step forward. And froze when he fisted his right hand. Irritated at this new delay, she wasted yet another precious minute or two waiting for him to relax his hand before taking her last cautious steps toward the cot.

Up close, he looked more like a charity case than he did a soldier of fortune.

His muddy jungle boots hung over the end of the small bed, his fatigue pants were ripped up one long leg and a black patch covered his left eye. She wondered how he’d lost his eye, then remembered Kim telling her that he’d been wounded in Hanoi and was in the process of recuperating. Which probably explained that blood-soaked piece of white cloth tied around his right bicep. As well as the seeping cuts that crisscrossed his bare chest and flat abdomen.

There were other scars—a thin silver one that circled the corded column of his neck, a puckered pink starburst in his lean side—that read like a map of too many rivers run, too many jungle trails followed and too many brushes with the law.

But it was another, more deadly reminder that she had entered the netherworld that drew her eyes.

Her knees nearly gave way when she saw the pistol that had been shoved into the waistband of his fatigue pants. Given the nature of his profession, she assumed that he probably needed to keep it handy. Then again, he might just be trigger-happy.

How long she stared at the gun, Cat didn’t know. But it suddenly occurred to her that if he woke up and found a complete stranger standing over him, he might shoot first and ask questions later. Her body jerked as if from the recoil and her heart pounded with fear. Still, determined to talk to him, she held her ground.

“Cain?”  She whispered his name so as not to startle him into doing something rash—like pulling that gun. “Mr. Cain?”
       He snorted and he snuffled, but he didn’t wake up.

Refusing to think about the gun, she concentrated on his dirt- and sweat-streaked face. And felt a strange shiver pass over her from head to toes. His shaggy black hair fell across his forehead, his nose was bold yet finely chiseled, and his strong jaw was shaded with several days’ growth of beard. But it was his bowstring mouth that made her tingle. In a face that was all lean planes, hard angles and five o’clock shadow, that tautly drawn upper lip and sulky lower one were almost blatantly sexual.

He startled her into taking a step backwards when he began moaning and mumbling and twitching restlessly as if he was either in the throes of a nightmare or terribly ill. Reminding herself that he’d recently been injured, she stepped forward again to see if he needed help. She bent down, causing her ponytail to fall over her shoulder, and reached out a hand to check his forehead for fever. Then she got a whiff of his breath.

And realized that he was drunk.

* * * *

Oh, Christ, he’d died and gone to Donut Dolly Hell.

That was all he could think when his eye grated open and he saw the shadowy face of the woman who smelled like Dove soap and sweet dreams but who was staring down at him with the sort of repugnant expression he’d had his fill of in an earlier life.

“Cain?”

He winced as her voice went through his head like a spear. Then he winced again because it had hurt so damn much the first time. At great expense to his pain threshold, he shifted a little on the cot and let his eye droop to half-mast, trying to get a bead on her through the screening veil of his lashes.

Not bad, he admitted. But not his type, either. With that bonfire of hair and velvety-looking vanilla skin, she was too All-American girl for a jaded half-breed like him. Still, she was quite a picture. Her eyes were brown with a little green mixed in for good measure, her cheekbones were sharp enough to cut glass, and her perfect nose belonged on a prom queen. Her mouth . . . despite the disdain that puckered them now, he would’ve bet his last piaster that her lips were full and—

“Mr. Cain!”

But her voice!  God, it rapped his muddled consciousness like a judge advocate’s gavel. He touched guarded fingers to the goose egg on his temple and groaned, “Go away.”

She straightened, giving him his first good look at her slender figure and just a hint of her long legs, and snapped, “Not until you sit up and talk to me.”

Cain thought about whipping out his .45, just to see her jump, but the knife-wound that those two bully boys had put in his arm last night was throbbing as badly as his head. It was small comfort to remember that he’d managed to do a little slicing and dicing of his own before it was over. Because right now he had another problem on his hands.

He fixed that problem with a ferocious glare. “If I weren’t so sick—”

“Sick, my foot,” she fired back. “You’re drunk!”

No, he was hungover. Wrung out and strung out to beat the band. He’d spent the better part of last night swilling beer with his contact in Madam Wu’s before ol’ mama-san had sicced her boys on him. Now his mouth tasted like the cat had crept in, crapped and crept out, his teeth felt like they’d grown fur and his stomach was in imminent danger of emptying itself.

Hair of the dog, Cain decided groggily. That was what he needed. His taste buds perked up as he reached down under the cot and closed his fingers around the half-empty bottle of Ba Muoi Ba beer that he’d stuck there the night before, after he’d torn up what was left of his T-shirt to bandage his arm.

But no sooner had he raised the bottle to his lips with a shaky hand than Dolly snatched it away from him, held it out to her side and poured the rest of the warm bom-de-bom on the filthy tile floor.

“Hey!” he croaked, making a feeble but ultimately futile attempt to grab the bottle back. “What the hell are you doing?”

She dropped the empty bottle on the cot and smiled down at him as though he were a dolt. “I’m trying to get your attention, Mr. Cain.”

Oh, she had his attention, all right!  And if he hadn’t been in such bad shape, she’d have had his hands around her throat, too. He scowled up at her, wishing he had the wherewithal to wipe that supercilious smile off her face.

Cat was no more enamored of Cain at this point than he was of her. From his undisciplined mane of hair to his mud-caked jungle boots, he looked every bit as dangerous and disreputable as Colonel Howard had declared him to be. She was sorely tempted to go find a pay phone and call the MPs. Tell them where this debauched specimen of humanity was hiding out so they could haul him off to the hoosegow.

But that would be tantamount to betraying her two new friends’ trust. The police would want to know who had led her to him, and would likely detain her until she told them. Which could put Kim and Loc’s jobs, if not their lives, in severe jeopardy.

And as galling as it was to admit, Cat needed Cain. He could glower and growl at her all he wanted. She really didn’t care if he liked her or not. He was her only link to Johnny, and she’d gone to too much trouble and too much personal expense to retreat now.

She looked down at her watch and was disheartened to see that she had a little less than fifteen minutes left to get some answers out of him.

At the same time, he levered up on his good elbow and asked in a raspy voice, “In a hurry, Miss . . .?”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Mr. Cain.”  She held out her left hand so he could see the simple gold band that adorned her tapered ring finger. “And it’s Mrs.,” she corrected. “Mrs. Johnny Brown.”