“How do you get an ice chest into this hellhole, anyway?”
“I don’t know, Frye. I don’t care.”
“You ought to. It means there’s another way in here.”
He picked up the lantern again, and the flies hummed louder.
Built off of the main cavern was a smaller one. Frye held the lamp before him, cinched up the shirt around his face and ducked in. On the ground was a large canvas tarpaulin, and something underneath it was moving. His hand shook with the lantern, quivering the bright light. Something scraped beneath the tarp, then moved. Frye knelt down, took one corner of the material, then stood, peeling it away. Rats turned from their meal and peered into the light, then wobbled across the two decomposing bodies and headed for the shadows.
Frye hurled away the heavy tarp, let it drop. The bodies lay face up, strewn with lye. Rats had eaten the good parts. The ski caps they had used at the Asian Wind lay beside them, removed so the lye could do its work. Their bellies had swelled. One exposed and non-eaten hand looked like a glove filled with water.
Duc, Loc’s little brother, was still wearing his red high-tops.
Frye gave Minh the lantern and went back to the main room. The tunnels started tilting, and he braced himself against a damp wall. He couldn’t get enough air. His skin was hot, and a throbbing pressure felt as if it was about to burst his head. His eardrums roared.
Minh’s pale face looked around the corner from the other chamber. “Frye?”
What seemed important at this point was to get the hell out.
“Frye!”
The next thing he knew, the Dream Reader was helping him into her den. He lay there on his back, chest heaving, the light burning into his eyes.
She looked down on him. “No Li?”
“No Li.”
“You should listen to your dreams.”
“I tried, goddamn it.”
“The demons always win.”
A few minutes later Minh crawled up, bearing the lantern before him. Frye recognized the fear in his eyes.
The detective talked to the Dream Reader in Vietnamese. Frye gathered that some deal was being made. She protested, then nodded, then nodded again.
Minh used her phone to call Duncan. “Just come to the Dream Reader’s, I’ll explain it when you get here.”
He looked at Frye. “I’ll have questions for you, but I need answers from our friends below first. I appreciate what you’ve done. Can you keep your mouth shut for the next forty-eight hours? Tell me I don’t have to send you to jail again to make sure.”
“If you send me to jail again, I’ll get out and murder you. I promise.” Frye stood shakily.
Minh smiled. “You okay?”
“I think so. Just got kind of mixed-up.” He took one of the Dream Reader’s business cards and wrote “Cristobel Strauss” on it. He handed it to the detective and explained what had happened to her. “I want to know who did it,” Frye said. “I need to know who they are.”
Minh looked at him with new suspicion. “Why?”
“Three of them are still following her around. I’d just like to know who I’m dealing with, and I don’t want to get her upset. You can do it in one phone call to the Long Beach cops, or I can spend an hour at the courthouse. Either way, I’ll—”
“Okay, Frye. I know you well enough by now to realize you don’t give up. I’ll find out who they are.”
Chapter 19
Through the screen door, Frye could see his brother sitting on the couch. The room was dark, but a soft light played off Bennett’s face. There was a tall glass in his hand and a bottle of gin on the table in front of him. A movie screen was set up in front of the TV. A carousel projector sat beside the gin bottle. Bennett looked up, his eyes all wrong. “It’s late. Even Michelsen and Toibin are asleep.”
Frye stepped in. “Need to use your shower.”
“What happened to you?”
Crawley appeared from the kitchen.
“I found out where they first took Li. Where Eddie went. There’s a tunnel under the Dream Reader’s.”
“Jesus!”
Frye plodded to the bathroom, stripped and showered, put on some clothes that Donnell brought in. He looked at himself in the mirror. He had never looked so pale and drained in all his life. Li. Xuan. Eddie. Duc and the third gunman. The smell of death was so strong on him he got back in and showered again. He stopped when the hot water ran out.
There was a glass of ice waiting when he came back to the living room. He poured on the gin, sipped, and sat back. He told them about footprints on his floor, the mud on Li’s clothes, her song about the tunnel, his realization that she had been taken underground first. He told them of the trip down, every stink and horror still fresh in his mind. He told them he’d promised Minh to say nothing.
“Didn’t you call Wiggins?”
“I thought Minh would handle it better. He’ll tell the FBI soon enough, earn the points.”
“Me and Donnell spent the whole night at the plaza, asking people if they’d seen any new faces in town. If one gunman was an outsider, maybe more out-of-town people are involved.”
“Luck?”
“Zip. We’ll try again in the morning.”
Frye looked at the movie screen.
“I’ve been looking at some old stuff, Chuck. Absence doesn’t make the heart fonder, it just fucks it up.” Bennett drank from his gin. He looked at Frye a long while, then down. “I think about her every minute. Her face gets blurred and turns into something else. I’m trying to get a grip on it again, little brother. Pictures of me and Li. Want to see?”
Bennett had never once in twenty years showed him a candid picture from his seventeen months of war. A story here and there, a snippet, a recollection. A lot of nothing, Frye thought. Bennett slurped down more gin. He picked up the control. The projector fan eased on, and a slide rotated into place: Li and him standing outside a nightclub. She was dressed simply in a Western-style skirt and blouse. Bennett was in his dress uniform. It was night, and the club lights down the avenue were dense and bright. Bennett was smiling, his arm wrapped around her. “Saigon, March ‘seventy. I’d been in-country for seven months. I’d known Li for four.”
“You look happy.”
“Weirdest thing in the world, Chuck, to be happy in a war. Here’s some earlier shots.”
He flipped back. Shots of the 25th Infantry Headquarters at Dong Zu — ”Tropic Lightning,” said Bennett — a sprawling complex of one-story buildings and quonsets. A swimming pool. A golf course. Jeeps and grunts everywhere. Pictures of Benny and Crawley playing basketball.
Bennett stopped at a picture of a plain quonset surrounded by DO NOT ENTER signs. A guard stood out front. “Interrogation Central,” he said. “We called it Spook City. Between the CIA guys, the PSYOPS flakes and the civilian ‘reps’ who came and went, it was one weird fuckin’ place. There were cages inside, and rooms with a foot and a half of soundproofing on the walls so the screams wouldn’t get out.” Bennett’s head wobbled a little as he stared at the screen.
“What did you do there?”
“That’s where prisoners went before we shipped them south. That’s where I worked sometimes. Hell, that’s boring. Look, here’s Li. First one of her I ever took.”
The picture showed Kieu Li sitting on a stone bench in a courtyard. Frye noted the plantation mansion, lost to vines, in the background. Li had a worried look on her face, not sure how to react. Then a shot of her and Donnell. Then of her and a young Vietnamese man dressed in U.S. Army fatigues. He looked at the camera with a quiet arrogance.
“Huong Lam,” said Bennett. “The man you asked about.”
“Looks like a kid.”
“Seventeen. Same as Li.”