Headlights ended that sentence. The car moved toward us from a block away. I gripped the Luger in
two hands and blew out a headlight. The car picked up speed and stopped an inch in front of mine. I
aimed at the other light and a voice behind me said:
“Drop it, or the girl goes down.”
Nance tried to gargle something through swollen, bloody lips. I dragged him off the hood and threw
him on the ground, dropped the clip out of his gun, and threw it at him with everything I had. It hit
him in the side and clattered harmlessly across the sidewalk.
A moment later something just as hard hit me in the back of the head. The street turned on end. Doe
Spun around me like a doll on a merry-go-round. The lights went out.
72
FLASHBACK: NAM DARY, END OF TOUR
The 556th day: We been on the ass of this crazy schoolteacher named Nim who‟s been raising hell u
and down the river and has maybe a hundred slopes tagging after him now. HQ says he‟s getting to
be some kind of God to these people and to terminate the cock-sucker posthaste. I mean, there‟s five
of us on this CRIP team, right, and we‟re gonna bust this crazy bastard and a hundred or so nuts that
are hanging out with him?
So I tell HQ I need about fifty, sixty first-class hunters, Kit Carsons‟ll do fine, but I ain‟t running u
against this fuckin‟ army of Nim‟s with a five-man team, I don‟t care how good we are, and I‟ll tell
you this, we‟re the best they got down here, goddamn it. Between the five of us, I‟d say we got
probably three hundred fuckin‟ scalps. Not bad for six months on the line, five guys. Corrigan, French
Dip, Squeak, Joe Fineman, and me. Five guys, one head. We‟re charmed. We got this daily bet, -we
start off with a bill apiece and each add a twenty every day we‟re dry. First one gets his kill, takes the
pot. It ain‟t ever gone over eight hundred, that‟s four days.
So anyway, we go down to meet the riverboat today and pick up this bunch of sharpshooters HQ sent
down, and the boat crew says the war‟s gonna be over any day now and I say, “Sure, I‟ve heard that
before,” but the team, they all buy it and they get a couple of jugs of Black Jack from the black market
guy on board and while I don‟t put up with drinking out here I figure, what the hell, we got all these
wild-eyed slopes from HQ, why not, they deserve it. So the rest of the team, they get juiced up to the
eyeballs and I have to sit guard all night to make sure this asshole Nim don‟t come crawling u on us,
blitz us all. The slopes are okay in the daylight, face to face, that kind of fighting. I don‟t trust them at
night when I can‟t see them, so I sit up.
All night I keep thinking about the cease-fire and about what that lieutenant, what was his name,
Harris? said, that night in Dau Tieng, about going back to the World and bowling every night and all.
Shit.
Turns out it was a false alarm, about the cease-fire, 1 mean. Another day of grace.
The 558th day: It was beautiful Last night we catch up to Nim just before sunset and we blitz the shit
out of his whole fuckin‟ bunch. We have them boxed in and we have a fuckin‟ field day. The Carsons
are crazy motherfuckers. They cut heads, drink blood, I mean really rubber-room crazy. We get in
close enough, the team is having some real sport. We all managed to acquire these Remington pumps
from the juice man upriver, and so the deal is, this time we have to use shotguns to win the pot. So
anyway we load up with rifle slugs; it‟s about an inch around and weighs about three ounces and it‟s
rifled so you get a little spin on it and when it hits anything solid it fuckin‟ blows up. You hit one of
those motherfuckers dead center, the body being mostly water, it‟s like shooting a fuckin‟ watermelon.
We call them splashers.
Anyway, it was like shooting skeet. So I take the pot. We just put it up this morning, six hundred bucks.
Nine scalps. A good day‟s work. The only problem is, this Nim and about twenty of his gooks got
away from us.
So this morning we track them into this little valley with a hump in the middle, looks like a tit in a
cake pan. Lots of trees, I call in some air and we do a little Macing. It‟s hotter than a whore‟s
mattress and we spread out around the perimeter and we give the fuckers a little while and that gas
starts mixing with their sweat, next thing you know one of these Kit Carsons, he stands up, starts
sniffing the air like a hyena, points down in the bush, here comes about fifteen of them, beating the
shit out of themselves because of the Mace, crying. The Kit Carson, he up and blows the first one
away, just like that if you please, and then he tells the rest of them to get their hands behind their
heads like good little gooks. Man, they took a beating, all covered with Mace burns, their eyes all
bugged out. Whipped dogs, man, they got as much fight left in them as a guppy. So we figure we‟re
lookin‟ at, what, five, six of them that are left maybe. Fuckin‟ Nim ain‟t in the group.
I got this American 180, a neat little submachine I won in a poker game with some civilian types in
Saigon, shoots .22‟s but, like, thirty rounds a second. You could drill a hole in a brick wall with this
motherfucker. That‟s what it sounds like, a dentist‟s drilclass="underline"
Brrrttt, brrttttt.
Like that. Jesus, what a nice piece of work. Two of these, the Alamo would have never fallen. So what
it is, you learn to do things quick over here, know what I mean? You move fast, shake „em up, they‟ll
tell you anything you want to know. The thing is, you don‟t spend a lot of time thinking, you just do it,
see. I call one of these little bastards over, he gets about four feet away, I give him a burst.
Brrttttt.
He hits the dirt, jerks once, it‟s all over. I call out the second one, ask him where this fucker Nim is, he
starts thinking about
Brrttffl.
Another one down. The third one I point at tells us all of it. The slopes don‟t call me Monsieur Morte
for nothing. What it is, there‟s this pool at the foot of the hill and Nim‟s holed up there in a cave. I
call the air back and this time he comes in and lands and the pilot, who is this fuckin‟ rosy-cheeked