Once a Warrior (26 page)

In the past two years, Cain had perfected a near mastery over his reflexes. He’d learned to control his reactions in situations he’d never experienced before, and in others he hoped he’d never experience again. Which was a damn good thing. Because when his still-sluggish mind finally put a face to the name, red flags went up and alarm bells went off.

“Air Force, right?’  With some half-million American soldiers in Vietnam, he wanted to be sure they were talking about the same Steve Canyon look-alike who had rubbed him the wrong way on more than one occasion.

“Right.”  Cat started to add that Johnny had graduated first in his pilot’s class, then decided that was beside the point and let the single word stand.  

Cain swallowed thickly against a wave of nausea, trying not to disgrace himself by puking all over her strappy little sandals. “Second tour, as I recall.”

Now she gave him a bob of the head that he took for a nod.

He swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up woozily. His head was hurting like a son of a bitch, which didn’t improve his mood. But since neither his memory nor his vision was impaired, he didn’t think he’d suffered a concussion.   

“So,” he said, smiling thinly, “how is ol’ Johnny, anyway?”

Bridling at his sardonic tone, she replied more sharply than she’d intended, “He’s been classified as Missing in Action.”   

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Brown.”  He was surprised to realize that it was the truth. Even though he’d never liked the guy, he always hated to hear that another American had gone down.

She tilted her head. “You didn’t know?”

“I’ve been on the move.”  The dim light cast her face in shadows, but he could see the sadness in her eyes. With everything else that was coming down right now, though, he couldn’t afford to feel for her. “When did it happen?”

“March 28.”

“Have they found the plane?”  He thought that was kinder than asking if they’d found the body. And he was sure that somewhere out there in that green hell of a jungle there was a body. Otherwise, he’d have been notified by now.   

“Not yet.”  But she needed to call her parents when she got back to the hotel to see if they’d had news to the contrary.

“Did they say where he went down?”  He’d heard through the grapevine that, despite their denials, the Americans had stepped up their bombing of the Viet Cong’s infiltration routes from Laos.

She shook her head. “Over North Vietnam, I suppose.”

“That covers a lot of territory.”

“They also said he could be a prisoner of war.”

Cain realized that she was asking him for a measure of hope, no matter how scant, that her husband was still alive. He couldn’t bring himself to deny it to her. “There is that possibility.”

“It’s the not knowing . . .” Cat looked up at the water-stained ceiling, fighting to keep her emotions in check, then down at him. And uttered a small gasp. “You’re bleeding.”

He touched his arm, and his fingers came away smeared with red. “The bandage is coming loose.”

She resisted a ridiculous urge to reach out and help him as he made an awkward, left-handed grab for one end of the makeshift binding. Weaving the way he was, it took him two tries to catch it. But then, when he bent his head and seized the other end in his mouth, it was more than she could stand.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”  As she plopped down beside him on the cot, he peered up at her with that piece of cloth trapped between his straight white teeth. “Let go.”  She chucked him under the chin, ignoring the sandpapery rasp of his beard against her skin. “I’ll do it.”

“Be careful.”  He squirmed in apprehension when she set her shoulder bag aside and reached for the bandage.

“Sit still.”  Gingerly, she slid her index finger into the top loop of the knot and gave it a tug.

To his relief, he felt only a mild discomfort when it came undone. “So far, so good.”

Cat finished unwrapping it, then felt herself blanch at the sight of the nasty gash in his arm. “You need stitches.”

“Just tie the bandage back on, okay?”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“I disinfected it myself.”  Cain tensed as she began dabbing at the blood that trickled from the wound with the cleanest end of the dirty cloth. But he needn’t have worried. Her touch was as gentle as before.

“Disinfected it with what?”

“The beer you poured on the floor.”

Cat gave him a retiring look. “Beer hardly qualifies as a disinfectant, Mr. Cain.”

“Make do with what suffices, Mrs. Brown,” he said dryly.

She frowned at the caked blood that had come away with the cloth. “Have you got a clean bandage?”

He let his gaze drift around the empty room, then twisted his upper body toward her, narrowing her field of vision to his broad shoulders. “Sorry, but I’m fresh out of clean bandages.”

Quickly averting her eyes, Cat set about the business of rewrapping his wound. And felt her pulse leap when the backs of her fingers grazed the hard, bronzed bulge of his bicep. Telling herself it was the heat that was causing all these untoward reactions, she tied a square knot that would have made her old Girl Scout leader proud.

“Did this happen while you were in Hanoi?” she asked conversationally.

“No, it happened last night.”  He did a double take then that made his poor, sore head spin like a propeller. “And just how did you know I was in Hanoi?”

“I have my sources.”  Smiling smugly, she admired her handiwork.

He made a mental note to check them out. “So it seems.”

“Then it happened here in Cholon?” she persisted, bringing him back to the subject.

“No.”

“Oh?”

“It happened in downtown Saigon.”

Startled, Cat looked up at Cain. And noticed for the first time that his eye was a pale gray, with a charcoal ring around the outer rim of his iris. Given the darkness of his hair and brows, his tawny, almost amber complexion, she had assumed that his eye would be dark as well.

“Where in downtown Saigon?” she demanded nervously.

“No place you’re likely to frequent.”  His pirate’s grin was anything but reassuring, however.

“Where?”

“In an alley behind a bar.”

That figured, she thought, but only said, “I’d hate to see the other guy.”

His grin curled into a snarl that was nothing short of feral. “Now that I’ve marked them, you’ll recognize them easily enough.”   

“Them?”

“One is missing his nose—”

“You cut off someone’s
nose
?”

“And the other one’s ear.”

Cat couldn’t say which appalled her the most—the horrible injuries he’d inflicted on two other human beings, or his obvious relish in recounting them. Shouldering her bag again, she stood and looked everywhere but at him. “That should hold you until you can see a doctor.”

Too late Cain realized that he should have kept his big mouth shut. He’d witnessed so much senseless violence and needless death since his arrival in Vietnam that he’d become inured to it. But all she knew of this goddamn war and the grisly counting of its toll was what she read in newspapers or watched on television, where the bodies with their faces blown away or their intestines spilling out or their legs gone were always bagged before the cameras were turned on. And seeing her standing there, all stiff and guarded, he suddenly felt as if that knife had been plunged into his gut instead of his arm.

He stared up at her until she looked him in the eye again. “It was them or me.”

“I’m sure it was,” she responded tersely.

He felt like saying to hell with it and telling her that there were really two wars going on over here. There was the media spectacle where all the Walter Cronkite wannabe’s in their khaki bush jackets spent their time heckling the generals who proclaimed it fitting and proper to die for one’s country instead of talking to the grunts in the jungles and the mountains and the rice paddies who were doing the actual dying. And then there was the behind-the-scenes battle that was being fought against the growing force of North Vietnamese regulars who’d been seeping into Saigon since Tet to mingle with the Viet Cong and to kill those South Vietnamese who were working with and for the American “enemy.”            

Because that would prompt questions he wasn’t at liberty to answer, though, he just cupped his arm and cocked her a smile. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”  The words sounded stilted, even to her, but she relaxed her stance somewhat.

Silence fell, as sharp and crystalline as his eye.

“Tell me something,” he encouraged her after a moment. “Why are you here in Saigon instead of back home in—”

“Because Johnny said I should contact you if anything . . .” To her humiliation, her voice began to quaver.

“And it never occurred to you to just write to me?” he asked quietly.

“I did.”  Cat unzipped her shoulder bag and fished out the letter from Johnny and the one to Cain. “But as you can see,” she said as she handed them over, “you’d already moved.” 

Cain’s expression hardened subtly as he scanned Johnny’s letter. Given all he knew, that last sentence was almost laughable. Almost, but not quite. He didn’t bother opening the envelope addressed to him on Truong Minh Gian, but just passed both it and the letter back to her.

“Let me get this straight,” he said as she returned them to her purse for safekeeping. “When you got my letter back, you decided to hop on a plane and fly halfway around the world, into the middle of a war zone, to look for me.”

She hadn’t realized how imprudent it all sounded until he’d said it aloud. “Not exactly.”

“Then what, exactly?”

“At first I was just going to write to you and leave it at that. But then my brother told me that one of the reasons Johnny volunteered for a second tour in Vietnam was because he needed to talk to you.”  She briefly recapped the sequence of events that had brought her to Saigon.

Cain’s jaw locked tight as he listened. Damn that Brown for being such a blabbermouth. And double damn him for dragging his wife into this seething hellhole of plots and cabals and schemes. She was out of her element. Totally. Worse, she had no idea that what she was poking and prying into could blow up in her face.

“What do you want from me, Mrs. Brown?” he asked when she finally wound down.

She twisted the wedding band on her finger. “I want you to answer some questions for me, Mr. Cain.”

The planes of his face shifted slightly, until his mouth hovered on the edge of a smile. “Why don’t you drop the ‘Mister’?  Call me Cain.”

She gave him another nod, and then she gave voice to her worst fear. “Is Johnny in some kind of trouble that I should know about?”

Cain pushed to his feet, towering over her own five-feet-seven, and pulled his Zippo and a hard pack of Swisher Sweets out of his pants pocket. He took his own time, lipping a cigarillo and lighting it with a spin of the wheel. Then he took a deep drag and blew the smoke out slowly before proffering the pack to her.

Cat shook her head and eyed him askance, waiting for him to quit stalling and start talking.

Truth was, he wasn’t so much stalling as he was trying to come up with a way to deflect her questions without arousing her suspicions. Too many lies had already been told. Too many lives had already been ruined. There was no way he was going to add another name to the casualty list if he could possibly avoid it.

Squinting at her through the cigarillo’s smoke, he answered her question with one of his own. “What makes you think he’s in trouble?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, frustration sharpening her voice. “I just have this feeling—well, you read his letter.”  The third paragraph, especially that last sentence, was burned into her brain. “It was almost like he had a premonition that something bad was going to happen to him and he was trying to prepare me for—what?  Another woman, a divorce . . .”

Her gaze met his in a direct challenge. “You saw him last. You tell me.”

Cain looked at her with grudging respect. He’d never been married. Had never even come close. But gut instinct told him that not many wives would have confronted the possibility of their husbands cheating on them with even half of her composure.

Too bad he had to ruffle her pretty little feathers.

“Sounds to me like you’re more concerned about being dumped than you are about Johnny going down,” he said derisively.

To her credit, she didn’t flinch. Nor did she back off. She raised her chin defiantly and took a shot of her own. “Go to hell.”

“I probably will, Mrs. Brown.”  He shouldn’t taunt her like this, Cain thought. Shouldn’t be so deliberately cruel. But dammit, he had to get her out of here before she got drawn into the danger that swirled about him like some deadly nerve gas. “In the meantime, why don’t you go home and wait to hear from the Defense—”

“Excuse me.”

As one they turned and saw Loc standing in the open doorway, his anxious eyes darting between them.

“It’s seven o’clock,” he announced.

“Well, well, well.”  Cain pivoted on his bootheels to face Cat. “You do get around, Mrs. Brown.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Colonel Howard sends his regards.”

His laser-beam gaze homed in on her with what could only be called malicious intent. “If Kim loses her job because of you—”

“She sought me out and offered to help.”  Cat had the eerie sensation that Cain saw more with that one eye than most people did with two.

“That’s true.”  Loc vouched for her from the doorway.

She smiled at him, then frowned at Cain. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Go home, Mrs. Brown,” he said in a weary voice.

“It’ll be dark soon,” Loc reminded her.

“Oh, all right.”  Exasperated with the both of them, she stamped across the room.

Cain followed her out of his house and into that sorry excuse for a courtyard. The rat she’d seen on the way in appeared to have moved on to greener pastures, thank God. But that mangy cat, which had hissed at her, purred for him.

“I’m leaving now, but I’ll be back tomorrow,” she warned the barbarian at the gate. “And every day after that until I get some answers.”

At the curb, Cain flipped his cigarillo into the street with a fillip before he rudely turned his back on her and began speaking to Loc—not in English or Vietnamese, but in French.