by Robert Greer
“Thank God,” said Flora Jean.
Carmen slipped off her helmet and turned to face Flora Jean. “You’re not meant for motorcycles.”
“You’re tellin’ me?” Flora Jean backed off the uncomfortable jumpseat and rubbed her butt. “Too much metal for these sweet buns, sugar.”
Carmen smiled. “I told you the Indian was mint, Flora Jean. No convenience packages—and that means no padded rumble seat.”
Flora Jean shook her head. “Next time we take my vehicle. Vietnamese or not, sugar, you’re gonna stand out like the icing on a cake if we follow Moc around on this thing.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Carmen, unconvinced. “One thing for certain, it’ll get us out of a tight spot a lot faster than a car if it comes down to it. Besides, we’re in Little Vietnam; there’re motorcycles everywhere.”
“Hope so. Just like I’m hopin’ that tailin’ Moc turns out to be more than just a joy ride. It cost me fifty bucks to get one of his car-wash buddies to tell me where he lived and another hundred to get him to tell me about that club Moc supposedly frequents.” Flora Jean eyed the apartment building. “Looks like he was right about one thing. Moc’s place is just as funky as he described it.” She glanced across the street. “That Neon, the one with the dent in the nose. It’s Moc’s. Now, if the little worm does spend all his nights at that China Bay club like his buddy claims, my money was well spent.”
“What do you expect to find there?”
“Information, and maybe a few contacts, sugar. People who’ll be willin’ to give us inside dope on Moc and maybe even Le Quan and that ice-queen daughter of his. Just remember, I do the trollin’, you do the throttlin’.”
“I will, but …”
“Surfs up,” whispered Flora Jean, watching a lone figure saunter toward the Neon.
“Is that him?”
“Yes.”
“Not much to him,” said Carmen, taking in Moc’s wispy five-foot-four-inch build.
“Maybe not. But I betcha he’s packin’.”
“What makes you think so?”
Flora Jean smiled. “Intuition, sugar. And them baggy pants he’s wearin’ with the ten different pockets. Now, let’s see where he’ll take us.”
Moc slipped into the Neon, turned on the engine, made a U-turn, and headed west on Kentucky.
“Hop on.” Carmen cranked the Indian as Flora Jean grimaced and reseated herself. “He sure ain’t headed back for Federal,” said Flora Jean.
“Maybe he’s got a pit stop to make before he hits that club.”
“Hope it’s a short drive,” said Flora Jean, her arms wrapped tightly around Carmen’s waist.
“Me too.” Carmen nosed the Indian away from the curb, her eyes locked on the taillights of Jimmy Moc’s Neon.
With a carton of cigarettes swinging from his left hand, Jimmy Moc made a cell-phone call outside a 7–11 fifteen blocks from his apartment, grinning and spitting love bouquets into the phone’s mouthpiece. His voice became louder as he walked toward his car.
“He’s high,” said Carmen, whispering to Flora Jean from their vantage point across the 7–11’s parking lot, where a popup camper obstructed Moc’s view of them.
“What makes you say that?” asked Flora Jean.
“He’s unsteady, slurring his words, and loud. I spent two years as an ER doc, remember?”
“Can you make out what he’s sayin’?”
“Only the words baby and fuck.”
“Horny little toad.”
“He’s in the car!”
Flora Jean waited for Moc to start the engine. As he pulled away, she said, “We’ll follow him ’til we’re sure he’s goin’ to that China Bay place, then pull in a few minutes later if he does.” Flora Jean was all business. “We go in the place and come out together. No potty breaks, and no movin’ away from me for drinks or food. You stick to me like glue, got it?”
Carmen nodded.
“And just so you know, Moc ain’t the only one packin’.”
Ten minutes later Jimmy Moc disappeared inside the corrugated-steel, single-story China Bay club, a square box that had been retrofitted with a facade to give it the look of a 1960s Saigon bar and nightclub. The low-hung ceilings, grass-cloth walls, bamboo furniture, smoked-glass-topped tables, and strobe lights gave the club the dark, eerie feel of one of the Vietnam war pleasure palaces frequented by American GIs. A small dance floor barely large enough for three couples flanked a fifteen-foot-long mahogany bar with a floor-to-ceiling mirror behind it. Both ran almost the entire length of the mildly acidic, Pine-Sol-smelling room. Piped-in Hawaiian music played in the background as Flora Jean and Carmen walked in.
“They call this a nightclub?” said Flora Jean, shaking her head as they headed for an empty table a few steps from the dance floor. “Shit, it ain’t nothin’ but a grimy-assed bar.”
As they took seats at a wobbly table, Flora Jean scanned the room, her eyes still adjusting to the darkness. A sign taped to the mirror above the bar read, Capacity 60 people. Noting that Jimmy Moc was nowhere to be found in the half-empty room, she scooted her chair up to the table and nodded for Carmen to do the same. Moments later, a waitress dressed in jeans and a gravy-stained pink blouse appeared. “Something to drink, ladies?”
“I’ll have a Seven and Seven,” said Flora Jean.
“A Coke,” said Carmen, smiling at the waitress and carefully studying her features before picking up a menu from the table. She opened the menu but continued eyeing the waitress as the woman retreated. “She’s Amerasian,” Carmen said, looking around the room. “So’s the tall guy over behind the bar and the man and woman three tables over.” She paused in disbelief. “And the two guys at the table next to the blacked-out window.”
“Still don’t see Moc,” said Flora Jean, nodding.
“Did you hear me, Flora Jean? Almost everybody in here’s Amerasian.”
“I heard you,” Flora Jean said, recalling the old Southern adage that one black person could spot another one anywhere in the world. “Maybe Moc’s more comfortable hangin’ out with his own.”
“They’re all my den, Flora Jean, half-breeds just like Moc and me. Everybody in the place.”
“Ain’t against the law.”
“But it’s noticeable and damn shit different.”
“Heady language,” said Flora Jean, arching her neck, unaccustomed to hearing Carmen curse. “I get your drift, sugar. Now we got ourselves some information we didn’t have before we came.” Glancing at a restroom sign above a doorway draped with a curtain, she nodded and said, “Moc’s back.”
Moc angled across the dance floor and took a seat at a table with a petite Amerasian woman.
“What do we do now?” asked Carmen as their waitress appeared with drinks.
“Keep an eye on our mark. He’ll spot me sooner or later. Everybody else in the room has. We’ll see what he does.” Flora Jean took a sip of her drink, sat back in her chair, and listened to the final melodic strains of “Blue Hawaii.”
A half-dozen more Hawaiian tunes had played and the woman he was talking to had left when Moc spotted Flora Jean. There was as much surprise as terror on his face. He quickly finished the drink he’d been nursing, walked over to another table, spoke to a muscular man with a tattoo of a snake encircling his neck, and returned to his table. A few moments later Snake Neck rose and walked over to Flora Jean and Carmen’s table. “You ladies don’t seem to be havin’ no fun,” he said, looking squarely at Carmen. “Maybe you’re in need of a man.”
“We’re doin’ just fine,” said Flora Jean.
Still looking at Carmen, the man said, “What do you say to that, sweetie?”
“The same as my sister,” said Carmen.
Looking astonished, the man leaned back and slapped his forehead. “You two are sisters? Wouldn’t have expected it. Guess the old man did a lot of wick-dippin’.”
“Just like yours,” said Carmen, staring at the man’s almond-shaped eyes, broad-based nose, lig
ht olive skin, and straight jet-black hair.
The man laughed. His breath had the rancid smell of stale liquor.
“Jimmy Moc a friend of yours?” asked Flora Jean.
“We know each other.”
“And Le Quan? Do you know him, too?”
The man eyed Carmen. “The shoe guy? Who don’t? He has one hell of a good-lookin’ daughter, but she can’t hold a candle to you. Can I get a name, sweetness?”
“Carmen.”
“Ummm, that’s different. Thought I knew every mixed-breed from here to the Utah border. Where’re you from?”
“Now you know one more,” Flora Jean interjected.
“What’s the story behind Amerasian City here?” asked Carmen.
The man broke into a full-gauge laugh. “It’s a tropical paradise for half-breeds. Can’t you hear the music in the background?” The man reached across the table and put his hand over Carmen’s. “Wanna dance?”
Carmen pulled her hand away. “Don’t think so.”
“Oh, I see. One of our uppity my dens.”
“Think you should probably move on,” said Flora Jean.
“Think I’ll stay,” Snake Neck said defiantly.
“Okay,” said Flora Jean, glancing across the room, noticing that Jimmy Moc was preparing to leave. “But you’re on your own.” She slipped a ten-dollar bill out of her pocket, slapped it on the table, and looked at Carmen. Nodding toward Moc, she said, “Let’s go.” Looking back at Snake Neck, she said, “Shame we didn’t really get to know one another,” as she and Carmen rose and headed toward the exit.
As they made their way across the China Bay club’s parking lot, Flora Jean took note of a couple of motorcycles parked at the lot’s edge that hadn’t been there when they’d arrived. Moc was standing next to one of the bikes. As they continued walking across the dimly lit lot toward the Indian, Moc called out, “Hey, ladies, want you to meet a couple of friends.” Seconds later Moc and two engineer-booted Amerasian men who looked to be in their early twenties had stepped in front of the Indian, blocking Carmen and Flora Jean’s way.
“Hell of a ride,” said one of the men, eyeing the bike.
“Bet you’re even better,” said his stocky friend, grinning at Carmen, who began edging around him toward the rear of the Indian.
“Move out of my way, sugar,” Flora Jean said to the stockier man, who now stood directly in front of her. She eyed Moc. “Better tell your friend I mean what I say, Jimmy.”
“Never really been able to get him to listen to me. Besides, I owe you for the other day.” Moc slipped a six-inch hunting knife out of one of the three pockets that stair-stepped down one side of his baggy khakis, unsheathed it, and moved toward Flora Jean. “Don’t know whether I should mark you on the right or left,” Moc laughed.
Stern-faced, with a look of intensity in her eyes that Carmen had never seen before, Flora Jean said, “You gonna get yourself killed, you don’t watch out, son.”
Moc inched the hunting knife toward Flora Jean’s face. He was halfway into a broad, toothy grin when the toe of Flora Jean’s boot caught him solidly in the groin. He spun backward, arms spread, and dropped screaming to the asphalt. The knife skated handle first into the Indian’s rear tire and stopped.
“Get on the bike, Carmen,” Flora Jean said calmly.
The chunky man moved toward her as the other man stooped to help Moc. “Take another step and I’ll blow off your nuts.” Flora Jean aimed the Walther .25-caliber pistol she’d pulled out of her pocket squarely at the man’s crotch. The Indian’s throaty roar punctuated fifteen seconds of stand-off silence. With the Walther still trained on him, Flora Jean sidestepped the man, took two steps backward, and straddled the uncomfortable jumpseat. Glaring at Moc, who was still on the ground, writhing in pain, she retrieved the hunting knife and said, “Think I’ll keep it.” Wrapping her arms around Carmen’s waist, she barked, “Let’s roll.”
Carmen throttled up, whizzed past a still dazed Jimmy Moc, the Indian’s rear tire screaming, and blasted onto Federal. As the Indian gained speed and she wove in and out of traffic, she could feel her heart pounding. But strangely, as tightly as Flora Jean was hugging her, she couldn’t feel Flora Jean’s heart racing one bit.
Chapter 29
Elliott cole sat at the edge of a floor-hugging frameless bed, naked except for his socks. The look of pleasure on his face broadened. Close to fulfillment, he glanced at Le Quan, who was seated across the room, and said, “There’s no other way to deal with Floyd and his partner,” as the nude, doe-eyed Vietnamese woman down on her knees in front of Cole lubricated his fully erect penis with a sandalwood-scented gel and returned to stroking it.
Le Quan looked out the second-floor bedroom window of the clapboard-sided farmhouse into the night, oblivious to Cole and the woman, wishing he were still at his shoe store making sales. Hours earlier following his encounter with CJ, Cole had demanded that Quan make the drive to the eighty-acre farm that had been in the Cole family for three-quarters of a century. The farm, eighty-five miles northeast of Denver, was surrounded by other farms and thousands of acres of corn, wheat, and milo.
Uninterested in the sex game being played out behind him, Quan asked, “How did Floyd end up in the way?”
Near climax, his buttocks now barely touching the mattress, his back fully arched, Cole said in a low rumble, “I don’t know.”
He then screamed, “Yes, yes, finish it!” as the woman brought him to a tumultuous climax. She quickly wiped away his semen and draped a large, moist, heated towel over him. Waving her off as if she’d never been there, Cole looked at her and smiled. “Get dressed and go downstairs.”
The woman nodded and quickly disappeared.
Cole rested back onto his elbows. Matter-of-factly, as if he’d never been aroused, he said, “Somehow Floyd’s tied to Blue.”
“Should’ve killed Blue at Song Ve,” said Quan.
“But we didn’t.”
“Now we pay.”
“I never pay,” said Cole. “I get paid, or have you forgotten?”
Quan gritted his teeth. “How we deal with Floyd, then?”
“We’ll use Chi,” said Cole.
“No!”
“She’s a woman. It’ll be easier for her to get close to him.”
“Won’t use her!”
“Then who?” asked Cole.
“Moc.”
Cole shook his head. “We can’t trust him. The little fucker spends too much of his time trying to figure out how to play both ends against the middle.”
“He’s family,” said Quan.
“And I’m the fucking king of Siam. Goddamn half-breeds like Moc are the reason our balls are in the fire in the first place.”
“And the reason you got all this,” Quan admonished, licking his right thumb, slamming it into his left palm, pretending to count out money.
Ignoring Quan, Cole said, “You’re awfully loyal to a my den lowlife like Moc.”
“He the son of my sister.”
Cole shook his head. “You’re a trip, Quan. A fucking trip. Today he’s the son of your sister. Thirty-five years ago you wanted every Jimmy Moc in the world’s head on a stick.”
“Times change.”
“That they do.” Cole raised himself off his elbows. “We’ll use Moc. But the little half-breed better not fuck up. I’ll keep an eye on him myself. Family, my ass. That cocksucker would sell you out for a dime.”
Quan was silent, having dealt with Cole’s arrogant outbursts for years. During the war he’d supplied Cole with women, which he continued to do. He’d catered to his wishes and listened to him whine. He’d made money because of Cole, a small fortune, in fact, but the Margolin thing had pushed him to his limit, and this time, when all the loose strings were knotted, he and the brash, over-the-edge former colonel whom he’d met on a rainy day in Quang Ngai province while at the zenith of his communist youth-organizing days would have to part ways. Eyeing Cole with disdain, he said, “I’ll conta
ct Jimmy.”
Cole, who’d seen the same look on Quan’s face scores of times before, simply smiled. “Still don’t like taking orders, do you, Quan? Well, here’s one more. Have Chi send Do Thi back up here to finish her business. And have her bring a gin and tonic with her.” Cole reached beneath the towel, cupped his penis, and laughed. “Don’t think too hard about things, Le, my boy. It might hurt your brain.”
Gritting his teeth, Le Quan turned and left.
Chi Quan was pacing back and forth in front of the farmhouse’s draped living room picture window when her father appeared at the foot of the stairway. The floors of the half-century-old farmhouse creaked as he walked toward her. He nodded for Do Thi, who was wrapped in a white floor-length terry-cloth robe, to go back upstairs. “And take his gin.” Quan whisked a half-empty bottle of gin from a nearby table and handed it to the nervous-looking woman as she left the room.
Angry at herself for not having put Cole in his place years earlier, Chi said, “What does he want us to do?”
“Have Jimmy take care of things.”
Chi stopped pacing. “Is he crazy? Jimmy can barely take care of himself. That black woman who came to see you will eat him for lunch.”
Quan frowned. “Only two choice—you or Jimmy.”
Chi thought about how far she’d come from the moldy bug-infested rat trap of a triplex she’d lived in for the first six years of her life. She thought back to having to share a building that should’ve been condemned with twenty other Vietnamese boat people, about years later losing her mother to cancer, about crying and nightmares and urinating in her bed. And Cole was the man who’d put them there. The man who had made her and Robert and her mother and father wait and suffer and struggle. Cole and Margolin, two men without conscience, men who’d helped destroy her homeland.
She had never known why it had taken so many years for Margolin and Cole to settle up with her father, only that it had. But she knew about Song Ve and what had happened there, painfully aware that her father had been a middleman between Vietnamese men without conscience and Americans in search of cash. Frustrated and boiling with anger, aware that she could never go back to being the equivalent of a boat person again, she asked, “What does he want you to do about the black woman and Floyd?”