Before leaving, he checked the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. He wouldn’t be back.
Outside, bundled up in his down-lined jacket, his feet crunched in the snow on the dark, almost deserted roads. Scattered flurries of flakes powdered the city. Rats scurried off the sidewalk at his approach and disappeared into broad trenchlike gutters covered with perforated cement block.
He should’ve ditched the knife last night, he thought, but he hadn’t been thinking clearly. Too exhausted by the fight.
He shook his head. Not professional. Not professional at all. He’d allowed the fight to go on too long.
He remembered the terror in the Englishman’s eyes. He could taste it on his tongue. The delicious terror. The sure knowledge that he was going to die.
The killer fed off of it again, closing his eyes, reliving the final agony of the dying Brit.
He walked for almost a half hour in the darkness until he was two blocks from the site where he’d killed the Englishman. In the distance, blue and red lights flashed. Emergency vehicles.
He found a deserted alley, crouched, and dropped the knife into a rock-lined sewage ditch. The knife fell, cracked a thin layer of ice, and splashed into the filthy water below.
The killer straightened and walked away. They’d find the knife. No matter, he thought. They’d never find him.
An old woman pushing a cart laden with steaming chestnuts trundled past him. She stared into his eyes and, her face filling with fright, turned away.
The killer smiled to himself.
Terror. Everywhere he went. Terror.
But no time for that now. He had work to do. So much work to do.
His heavy boots plowed through the growing drifts.
10
Ernie and I sat in the jeep, shivering, sipping on hot coffee from a thermos, stomping our feet to keep warm. In the gray distance, the first glimmers of sunlight peeked over white-capped mountains. During the last couple of hours the temperature had plummeted-maybe five or six degrees. Still, an occasional flurry of snow fluttered to the ground.
“Whoever thought of this shit detail?” Ernie asked.
“You did.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s right. You shouldn’t have listened to me.”
“You finally said something that makes sense.”
We were parked beneath an overhang behind a cement-walled warehouse on a small army supply depot known as Camp Market, situated about fifteen miles east of Seoul. Riley gave us the tip. Electrical equipment had been disappearing from this compound at a steady clip for as far back as anyone could remember.
The pilferage had to be organized and it had to be the slicky boys. We were here to catch them in the act.
Last night, we’d run the ville in Itaewon and called in every favor we’d ever done for anyone, asking about the slicky boys.
The answer was always the same: “Moolah.” I don’t know.
After applying a little pressure, a few of our Korean contacts opened up with one more thing: Don’t mess with the slicky boys, it’s not good for your health.
Maybe it was because we’d been drinking soju. Maybe it was because we were tired from the long day and pissed off that no one would give us any information and frightened by all the warnings we’d received about the slicky boys. But whatever the reason, last night Ernie and I had come to a conclusion. The only way to contact the slicky boys was to flush them out. Start making arrests, disrupt their operations, force them to talk to us.
Of course, it was risky. How risky I wasn’t quite sure.
If nothing else, we’d get their attention.
We didn’t know how the electrical equipment here on Camp Market was disappearing, but we did know that there had to be inside contacts involved. The perimeter of the compound was secure: chain-link fence, barbed wire barricade, floodlights, guard shacks every hundred yards.
It looked more like a Nazi concentration camp than a transhipment point for lightbulbs and toilet paper.
The only way to move stolen property off-compound was through the front gate. But in addition to the Korean perimeter guards and the GI warehouse men, there was also a contingent of MP’s stationed here. An American MP checked everything that passed out of the gate.
American MP’s, like anyone else, can be corrupted. The small village of Pupyong-ni is right outside the gate and it’s chock-full of nightclubs and business girls and cheap booze. A little extra money can make life a lot more pleasant for a hardworking MP.
Still, we couldn’t be sure exactly how stolen goods were transported off the compound until we witnessed something being moved. That’s why we’d been here since before dawn. To catch the slicky boys in the act and stop them.
By the time we had slugged down the last dregs of our coffee, we heard the steady churn of an approaching diesel engine. A truck rolled between us and the next warehouse over, stopping near a cluster of metal drums.
“Trash pickup,” Ernie said.
“Let’s take a look.”
We climbed out of the jeep and slipped through the shadows until we could see the rear of the trash truck.
Four workers, dressed in heavy down coats and pullover caps and gloves, dropped four empty metal drums to the ground, next to the full ones. With deft precision, each of the empty drums was turned upside down. For no apparent reason, two men shuffled off to a nearby coal bin. We followed them. Grabbing broom handles, they poked through a small mountain of coal, raising black dust as they did so.
“This is it,” Ernie said.
After rummaging around for less than a minute, both men returned, a coil of copper wire held in each hand.
Copper wire. Not manufactured in Korea. Imported at a big premium. But here it was, on an American army compound. Easy to sell at a good profit margin. Prime pickings for an experienced thief.
My guess was that someone inside the warehouse had slipped the four coils of wire out the back door during working hours yesterday. Not being able to transport the coils off-post through the heavily guarded gate, the crook had stashed his loot beneath the pile of coal.
The trash collectors, armed with this information, had been sent back to collect more than just trash.
Maybe the slicky boys did this every day. Four coils of wire at thirty or forty dollars each-every day-could soon produce a tidy sum.
The two men back at the truck had turned the empty metal drums back to the upright position.
“What the hell are those?” Ernie asked.
On the ground, where the empty drums had been, lay four metal discs.
The four coils of copper wire were dropped, one each, into the four empty metal drums. Then the four metal discs were tossed in after them.
“False bottoms,” I said. “The copper’s hidden beneath perfectly fitted sheets of metal.”
One by one, the workmen dragged the empty drums over next to the full ones. They lifted the full ones and dumped the contents into the drums containing the false bottoms and the copper wire.
“Ingenious,” Ernie said.
“Also a hell of a lot of work.”
He shrugged. “Hard work, they’re used to.”
Once the four drums with the copper coils and the false bottoms and the trash were loaded onto the bed of the truck, the workmen climbed back aboard and one of them- the smallest-hoisted himself into the cab, started the engine, and drove off.
Ernie looked at me. “We follow?”
“No. They’ve got nowhere else to go. We wait for them at the main gate.”
“Right.”
The trash truck must’ve had other stops because it took about twenty minutes for it to reach the main gate. The back of the truck was fully loaded now with overflowing drums of garbage. How many of them contained false bottoms and copper wire, I couldn’t be sure.