I could see flashes of light where there were none, and I could see faces in the flashes; women, they were all women. I could see my mother on a grassy hillside, the summer sun shining through the sides of her pale blue eyes. I saw my wife, the first time I asked her to dance, and the gentle way her fingers first reached for mine. I saw Victoria Moretti, lowering her face to me with her bathrobe undone. I saw my daughter, her determined look in the weight room, and could only think, Ish okay, Daddy.
There was splashing, and there were other voices above the roaring of whatever had me and whatever I had. I made one last struggle to bury my thumbs into the front of its throat and could just feel my fingers making headway into the fragile, egg-carton-like cartilage of its larynx, a method I’d used to stay alive in Khe Sanh.
If I was going to die, something was going with me.
I heard a loud crack and felt a shift in the thing’s weight as it toppled to one side, just before the women’s faces disappeared and it all faded to black.
I sat there on the bank of the hillside as the EMTs worked on the back of my head. I continued to clear my throat and massaged my forefinger and thumb into my eye sockets in an attempt to replace the stars in my eyes with real ones.
Double Tough stood by as T.J. handed me another cup of coffee. I wasn’t sure I could swallow it, but it was reassuring just to be able to hold it. We all watched the faint glow of the sunrise on the horizon toward Pumpkin Buttes and Thunder Basin. I nodded thanks and cleared my throat, still unable to speak.
T.J. glanced back at the EMTs, who were finishing up the job. “I assume he’s going to be okay?”
Cathi leaned around and looked at the front of me as she finished doctoring the back of my head. “The long arm of the law’s gonna have a lump, but we’ve patched him up before.”
Double Tough smiled his slow grin and looked across the grassland to the wall of red rocks. “Lord Almighty, you see the size’a that son-of-a-bitch?”
I swallowed and tried a sip; it tasted pretty good but set off another coughing attack. “What did you use to get him off me?” My voice sounded rough and wheezy.
“One’a them pieces’a two-by-four.” He thought about it as Cathi and Chris gathered up the rest of their equipment to change venue. “I think ya surprised him.”
“Not as much as he surprised me.”
The creature from the cave was as big as a grizzly, and it took four men to carry him out of the tunnel. I noticed they used ankle bracelets at his wrists because the handcuffs would’ve been too small. He was an Indian, Crow from what we could make of him.
I started to get up but felt a little dizzy and sat back down. T.J. placed a hand on my shoulder and held me there. “Easy.”
I sighed. “He still alive?”
Double Tough snorted. “Yeah. I hit him hard enough to fell a mule, but he’s still breathin’.”
I watched as Chris, Chuck, and two HPs carried the now unconscious man up the hillside, his hair trailing all the way to the grass, snagging here and there as if it were trying to stay the progress. It was as if his hair, like the Vietnamese girl’s, had wanted to remain here until all the questions had been answered. He was wearing an old army field jacket, torn and ragged, with the remnants of a denim shirt and a wool sweater underneath. His legs were swathed in tatters of plaid-lined overalls. Everything was frayed and filthy except the intricately beaded moccasins that were on his gigantic feet. They were a design I’d never seen.
I tried to stand again, and this time succeeded, and I staggeredup the hill with Double Tough’s help. “Anybody checking all that stuff in the tunnel?”
“They’re gonna, but they’re not gonna be happy about it. The place smells bad enough to gag a maggot off a gut wagon.”
I nodded toward the giant. “What about him?”
“He’s goin’ to the hospital, and then he’s most likely gonna be in our jail.”
“Find anything in the tunnel to connect him with the Vietnamese woman?”
He shook his head at me. “Not yet, but we figured tryin’ ta choke the life out of the sheriff was good enough reason to hold ’im.”
We watched as they loaded the gurney into the EMT van, the rear suspension compressing with the weight of one woman, four men, and one very large Indian. “You guys knock him out with something?”
Double Tough gave a halfhearted laugh. “We didn’t have to. You jus’ about collapsed his larynx, and I pretty much battered his head in.”
They closed the van doors and departed toward Durant Memorial Hospital. After the sirens died down, he spoke in a soft voice. “That is one FBI.”
I didn’t bother to translate the acronym, but I knew he didn’t mean Federal Bureau of Investigation.
T.J. had left with her DCI crew and said she’d be in touch as soon as they knew anything, so Rosey gave me a ride back to the office. It was still early morning, and the darkness was slow to release its grip on the county. Ruby, my dispatcher, was always first in, but she was Dog-sitting and hadn’t gotten there yet. My dog, Dog, still didn’t have a name and after calling him Dog for the better part of a year I was concerned that he would be confused if I gave him a real name or maybe I was concerned about confusing myself.
I took advantage of the situation to go back to the holding cells to catch a quick nap on one of the bunks. I tried sleeping on my back, but the damage to the muscles in my throat made me feel like I was strangling, and the little yarmulke of bandages at the back of my head made that position even more uncomfortable, so I rolled over on my side and stared at the bars.
Where did he come from, and what was he doing there?
If he had killed the woman, why would he have left her in such a conspicuous spot? Why wouldn’t he have just dragged her into the tunnel with him?
Besides, what the hell was a Vietnamese woman doing in northern Wyoming, especially dead alongside Lone Bear Road?
Maybe I’d know more when T.J. called with the official report.
I thought about the girl’s face, the cyanosis discoloration, the hemorrhaging of the skin around the eyes. I guessed there would be small, linear abrasions at the throat, either from the perpetrator or from her attempts to dislodge the attacker’s arm or hands.
I thought about her bone structure, which was the big tip-off as to her nationality. If you spend any time in Southeast Asia, you pick up the basic differences pretty quickly, and I sure had spent time in Vietnam.
Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1967
“No beau-coups, you scat riki-tiki baby-san. He a Marine and they no boom-boom. He a Marine and they no boom-boom, just kill.” Baranski laughed, enjoying his own charm, elegance, and immense style.
I smiled, shrugged at the young woman, and took another swig of my Tiger beer, her image swimming in the blown-out sweat and strangeness. She shook her head and placed a provocative leg forward to test the theory. “He no killa.”
Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” pounded the room as the tiny Vietnamese woman swayed to the driving rhythm. Baranski crossed his ankles on the chair in front of him and belched loud enough to rattle the windows in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, if it’d had any—windows, that is. The lounge was just outside Gate 055 near the old French fort known simply as Hotel California. I had been in California a short while earlier and, from my perspective, I could not see the resemblance.
The concrete walls of the old fort were twenty feet high and three feet thick, forming a whitewashed rectangle. Each of the arch-ways had solid iron gates, and I expected Franchot Tone and his troop of French legionnaires to march through at any minute. There was an Army of the Republic of Vietnam company posted to the fort, but the real action was just outside the lounge, where there was a civilian mortuary and a cemetery with thousands of white grave markers. It was strange, having the local bar next to the cemetery, but I’d seen stranger things since arriving in Vietnam. Boy howdy.