“Halt! Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”
He didn’t have a gun, but what the hell. If the ploy worked, good.
Apparently the ploy did.
The shadow had reached the wall and Ernie was coming on fast. As the thief started to climb up, he glanced back and in the moonlight I saw a face. A young Korean man. Calm. Not worried. For a split second he seemed to evaluate Ernie’s threat.
The delay wasn’t long, but it was enough.
By the time the slicky boy started to pull himself up, Ernie was only a few feet from him. Still, the thief scaled the wall amazingly fast and had a handhold on one of the metal spikes before Ernie grabbed his foot.
Ernie tugged and the slicky boy strained upward. His body stretched taut, and for a moment I thought his leg would snap off until suddenly something popped and Ernie reeled backward, holding an empty boot in his hands.
I hit the wall running and, as the slicky boy rose, I managed to grab hold of his waist, hug, and pull down with all my weight. Ernie was up now and we both had the thief and suddenly the slicky boy’s grip gave and we all fell backward onto the hard-packed snow.
The air burst out of me but I rolled and felt myself on top of the slicky boy, and Ernie howled in pain.
“My thumb! My goddamn thumb!”
The slicky boy punched and kicked but I was in too close for his blows to have much effect and my weight was too much for him. As I reached for my handcuffs behind my back, his thumbs gouged my eyes.
I jerked back from the sharp nails and, in less than a second, he was up and heading for the wall again.
I bounded up. I caught him while he was still on the ground and plowed forward, ramming him face-first into the cement block wall.
My shoulder thudded, his head cracked, and we both fell in a heap at the foot of the cement block.
I couldn’t move, but he wasn’t moving either. Pain shot down my shoulder into my fist. Using my good hand, I grabbed hold of my handcuffs, rolled the slicky boy over, and secured his wrists behind his back.
Ernie cursed softly.
“What is it?” I asked, trying to catch my breath.
“Dislocated my goddamn thumb.”
I checked my hand. The fingers were still moving. Just a shoulder bruise. It would heal.
I checked the slicky boy. He was young, probably in his late teens. Thin, almost emaciated, but I knew from our tussle that he was as muscular as hell. A red welt on his forehead had started to puff up like a golf ball. His eyes fluttered and opened. He moaned.
I sighed with relief. He’d be all right.
I crawled over to Ernie. He held out his hand to me. The side of the palm was grossly distorted, bone jutting out beneath the skin at an odd angle.
“Yank on the thumb,” Ernie said. “Pop it back in place.”
I nodded toward the Emergency Room. “I can take you over there. Get a shot of Novocain first.”
“That lightweight shit? It don’t work on me. Hurry up. Do it now.”
I grabbed the thumb, jerked back on it, and felt it slide, bone on bone, until it crunched into place. Ernie let out a howl, recoiled away from me, and rolled in the snow, cursing.
After a few seconds the swearing subsided and he looked up at me, his eyes watery.
“Thanks, pal,” he said. “I needed that.”
He. held his hand up and wiggled all the fingers including the thumb. “Back in tip-top shape.”
I walked to the slicky boy and sat him up. He kicked at me and spat.
“Nice talk,” Ernie said, rising to his feet, still wiggling his fingers, pleased, I guess, they were all working. “Why don’t we kick his ass here? Nobody’s watching.”
I’m not sure if the slicky boy understood or not. The stonelike ridges of his face didn’t move. I stuck a fist in his face.
“You want that? You want us to hit you?”
When he didn’t respond, I said the same thing in Korean. “Choa hani? Deirigo shippo?”
I questioned him, but it didn’t do any good. He wasn’t talking.
We picked up the plastic bag of pharmaceuticals and dragged the slicky boy over to the Emergency Room. I used their phone to call for an MP jeep. While we waited, the medics stood around gawking at us. I tried to figure which one we had seen out on the platform, stashing the drugs, but it was useless. The only ones I could eliminate for sure were the nurses. Emie was watching them.
When the MP’s arrived, we shoved the slicky boy in the back and took him over to the Liaison Office of the Korean National Police.
When he saw the KNP symbol above the door his eyes widened, he tried to swallow, and for a minute I thought he was going to throw up. But he still said nothing.
Ernie and I sat in the waiting room for about forty minutes. During the entire time we heard no screams and no thuds of a body being flung up against the wall. I think the KNP methods were more subtle than that. I would’ve liked to witness their interrogation techniques-as long as I wasn’t the subject of the interrogation.
Lieutenant Roh, the night duty officer, emerged from the back room and sat down next to us. He was a frail man with straight black hair that hung over his eyes, and round-lensed glasses that made him look more like a mathematics professor than a cop. He tapped the tips of his splayed fingers together.
“He’s a slicky boy. That’s for sure.”
“Did he admit to the theft?” Emie asked.
“No,” Lieutenant Roh said. “He will deny. Deny all the way.”
“But we’ve nailed him, right?”
“Yes. Still, he will not talk. Not about the slicky boys.”
“Why not? He could get a lighter sentence, couldn’t he?”
Lieutenant Roh considered that. “Possibly. But if he mentions anything about his superiors, it would be suicidal.”
“They’d kill him?” Ernie asked.
“Of course. And anyway, while he’s in prison, they will take care of his family.”
I leaned forward. “Listen, Lieutenant Roh. I need to find the slicky boy honcho. To talk to him. I have to ask him some questions.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated. Certainly, this young slicky boy can give us some sort of lead.”
“No. He will give you nothing.”
“Then how can we contact the King of the Slicky Boys?”
Lieutenant Roh studied me for a few seconds. When he spoke, he spoke softly.
“You must not continue in this, Agent Sueno. All Koreans respect Americans. Even the criminals do. We realize how much you’ve helped our country, and we realize how important it is for you to stay here so we won’t be conquered by the North Korean Communists. Still, if you continue to disrupt their operations, the slicky boys will kill you.”
I said nothing.
“What I’m most worried about,” Lieutenant Roh added, “is that it might already be too late.”
He stood up and walked out of the room.
15
Maybe it was because we decided to be good soldiers for once. Or maybe it was because Lieutenant Roh’s warning the previous night put the fear of God into us. Whatever the reason, we actually spent the entire day working on the black market detail.
We busted three housewives and one buck sergeant. All for buying coffee and cigarettes and liquor and other sundry items and selling them in Itaewon for about twice what they paid for them on post. Resale of duty-free goods is a violation of military regulations. Also of Korean customs law and the Status of Forces Agreement. All four suspects were taken to the MP station and booked. We figured the sum total of the take came to about $346.57.
U.S. goods black-marketed in Korea per year are estimated to run about ten million dollars. From that vast sea of contraband, we’d siphoned off at least a couple of ounces.
The problem was that we weren’t any closer to finding Cecil Whitcomb’s murderer.
From what Riley told us, Burrows and Slabem had done nothing all day other than review our reports and insist on interrupting Lieutenant Pak down in Namdaemun, demanding a conference so they could be briefed on his lack of progress. Typical bureaucrats. Laying a foundation of paperwork to cover their butts when they failed to solve the case.