Another Man's Moccasins

by Craig Johnson

  Her thin arms crossed its lid, and she looked like a computer with a head and legs.

  She didn’t move, and I found a word sliding up my throat and filling my mouth. “Hello . . .”

  She still didn’t move, but her head inclined just a little. “Hi.”

  I smiled and steadied the .45 on my knee. She stepped back, and I raised the other hand in reassurance. “Wait, I’m not going to hurt you.” She stood there, silent again. “I’ve been looking for you, and I think you’ve been looking for me.”

  Her weight shifted, but that was all. She looked like Mai Kim. “What’s your name?”

  “Her name is Ngo Loi Kim.”

  I snatched up the Colt and leveled it at Tuyen’s half- hidden face as he stood there on the last step of the stairs with his own arm extended. In his hand was Saizarbitoria’s Glock, and it was pointed directly at the girl. I’d neither seen nor heard him.

  Ngo Loi Kim dove for the trapdoor and scratched for the inset handle, but when it wouldn’t open she scrambled to the A N OT H ER

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  back wall and crouched against the floorboards. She held the computer like a shield in front of her and whimpered, terrifi ed.

  I was off the piano bench and had taken a step toward the edge of the stage. “You’re under arrest.”

  He took the last step from the darkness and, with the moonlight raising shadows across his legs, his voice seemed disembodied. “I’m willing to make you a deal.”

  “I don’t deal. Drop the weapon.”

  “Try to shoot me, and I shoot her.” He didn’t move. “The girl for the laptop.”

  I stared down at him and could see his muscles straining the sleeve of his leather jacket. I figured the only thing to do was shoot. His weapon was pointed at her chest and chances were he’d hit her, but it was possible that my first shot would be on target and would do more damage than his responding fire.

  I could feel the weight of the big Colt in my hand. What if I missed? What if he didn’t? I was willing to take those types of chances with my own life, but not hers. I thought about who she was, and what she’d gone through—all to find me.

  Talk. It was the only way.

  “Ho Thi wasn’t your granddaughter.”

  “No.”

  I swallowed and prepared myself for any opening that might present itself. “Did you kill her, or did Maynard?”

  He looked at me. “He did.”

  I didn’t believe him for a moment. Phillip Maynard hadn’t been the type, but Tran Van Tuyen was. “Okay, let’s say that’s the truth. Then why kill him?”

  His gun hand stayed steady, and he was focused on the whimpering girl at the wall. He’d had the better part of a week to get to know me, and he’d done his homework well—he knew that I wouldn’t endanger her. “He committed suicide, as you said.”

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  “You’re lying.”

  He glanced at me. “One of the ranchers, Mr. Dunnigan . . .”

  “You’re still lying.”

  “I am to assume from this that the bent bottle caps didn’t succeed in misdirecting you?”

  “No.”

  “It was a habit Phillip Maynard informed me of.” He actually smiled and finally took a breath. “Phillip was actually blackmailing me. He was supposed to retrieve the girls, and more importantly, the computer. He made a mess of it and killed Ho Thi. I suppose he thought that if he planted the girl near the culvert and threw the purse in with the Indian, there wouldn’t be any questions. I assume he was counting on a pre-conceived prejudice.”

  “So you drugged him, just like Rene Paquet, and hung him?”

  He didn’t say anything. The unspoken truth lay there between us like a bad smell, and I started formulating a new plan in hopes that he’d become so agitated with me that he might change his aim. “Paquet wanted to save Ho Thi and get her out of whatever human-trafficking scheme you’ve got going, which is why she got picked up by the undercover detachment in L.A.”

  He studied me. “You know, I really am unfortunate to have arrived in your county, Sheriff.”

  “So you killed him and, consequently, the forty-two people in Compton.” He took another breath but didn’t move or say anything. “So, under the auspices of Children of the Dust, you retrieved Ho Thi and returned her to the brothel, but once there, she met the sole survivor of the Compton truck massa-cre.” I nodded my head very slightly toward the young woman at the wall. “Ngo Loi Kim. She and Ho Thi were desperate, and I’m assuming Paquet was the one who had given them A N OT H ER

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  this laptop as an insurance policy in case something happened to him.” His resolve didn’t appear to be weakening, so I kept talking. “The wild card was the photograph of Ngo’s great grandmother, sitting in the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge with an unidentified Marine investigator who played Fats Waller, and once told her about a favorite fishing hole in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, USA.”

  “You have an overactive imagination, Sheriff.”

  “It doesn’t take any imagination at all, and you’re still under arrest.”

  There was a long silence, where we both reviewed our options. “My offer still holds—the girl for the laptop.” I was thinking about how I could prolong the conversation, but I was running fresh out of options and he confused my silence with my considering his offer. “You don’t know what is in the computer, nor should you care. It is nothing in comparison with the life of this girl—the great granddaughter of a wartime friend—and you can save her.” He took another step.

  “You didn’t know I existed last week, and I can assure you that you’ll never know I existed tomorrow.”

  “You can’t possibly think you’re going to escape.”

  “It is something at which I’m very good.” He smiled again.

  He wasn’t going for any of it, and now was the time I would have to choose—fire or give him the computer for Ngo Loi. I took a deep breath, and the darkness shifted. It was as if the entire stairwell was growing behind Tuyen, and a face appeared almost a foot and a half above his.

  Something was there.

  Somebody.

  Virgil.

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  notwithstanding. My expression must have changed, because the lithe man’s face suddenly stiffened and he spun.

  I held my fire in fear of hitting the big Indian but jumped off the stage in an attempt to get to the two of them as I heard the muffled report of the 9 mm. They slammed into me, and I slid backwards on the dusty wooden fl oor.

  The Glock fired again, but the bullet ricocheted into the wall, and I watched as Virgil lifted Tuyen, swung him through the air like an oil- pump jack, and dashed him against the fl oor.

  He had to be incredibly tough, because he held on to Virgil’s arm and made the big Indian stagger. I scrambled to get at them just as the smaller man planted two powerful kicks in the giant’s midriff.

  Virgil grunted and then closed a hand on Tuyen. The 9 mm fired for the third time, and I heard the round go through the ceiling before the semiautomatic clattered on the hardwood surface. I threw myself forward just as Virgil swung Tuyen again, his legs striking me across the face.

  It was silent for less than a second, and I was trying to push off the uneven surface of the broken plaster when Virgil let Tuyen go. It was like some modern dance crack-the-whip, and I saw Tuyen’s body crash through the glass door at the far end of the room and through the railing on the second fl oor balcony. He froze like that and was a tableau of desperation. His hands grabbed at the broken and rotten wood, and it looked for a moment as if he might just make it, his fingers snapping and curling at the collapsed pieces of railing.

  But he didn’t and fell from view without a sound.


  I scrambled forward and glanced back at the girl. She hadn’t moved, and I gestured to her with my open hand. “Stay there!”

  It was quiet except for Virgil, who was breathing raggedly A N OT H ER

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  in the center of the room like some towering Windigo. I ran past him across the wide planks of the dance floor and stopped just short of the gaping doorway and collapsed balcony. I stared down at the moonlit hillside.

  He had hit the rocks twice, first the ledge above and then the bigger one below. Somehow, he was still alive. At first, I thought he was trying to get up or roll over and escape, but that wasn’t it.

  I’d been right about where the rattlesnakes had been sleeping. Tuyen slapped at the fl at level of the shelf around him to try to keep the snakes off, but there was nowhere for him or the snakes to go. He stopped screaming, he stopped moving, and the night was silent.

  Epilogue

  Lucian studied his part of the file and then looked up from the faxed sheets. “You think this Dick Van Dyke character was the ringleader?”

  Jesus.

  Vic, Lucian, and I sat by Saizarbitoria’s bed at Durant Memorial. The Basquo was missing a kidney but looked pretty good, considering, as he flipped through the entirety of what we now called the Tuyen File, passing it on sheet-by-sheet to all of us. Ned Tanen had forwarded most of the information from the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department and, from the look on Santiago’s face, he was having the same sickening response as I had had.

  The report from the Immigration and Naturalization Service indicated that in the last few years as many as fifty thousand female illegal immigrants had been brought to the United States exclusively for use in the sex industry. Ho Thi Paquet and Ngo Loi Kim’s story was horrific, but it wasn’t exclusive.

  “Children of the Dust was the front for the importation of the young women, and Trung Sisters Distributing distributed them into the brothels worldwide, as far as London. It’s all in the report.” I took a deep breath. “Ngo had a facility with computers and a tenuous connection to Wyoming, and Ho Thi had learned to drive, so . . .”

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  Vic looked up from her part of the report. “Ngo doesn’t speak English?”

  “No, so the e-mails she was sending were phonetic Vietnamese, which looked to us like a garbled mess.”

  Saizarbitoria raised his head and looked at me as he passed the last of the file to Lucian. “So, Phillip Maynard was drugged before he was hung after all?”

  “Drugged like Paquet, according to the Yellowstone County coroner.” I plucked at a loose straw in my hat. “Maynard was the advance man Tuyen sent from their Chicago branch. Henry translated, and Ngo filled in the rest of the story. The girls had gotten separated—Ho Thi ended up in Powder Junction and Ngo ran to Bailey. Tuyen came to finish the job, found Ho Thi, but couldn’t find either the computer or Ngo. He killed Ho Thi when she wouldn’t tell him where Ngo had gone. He needed a fall guy, and he needed some time.

  He had seen Virgil and knew that he lived in the culvert near Murphy Creek, so he planted her body there and threw her purse in the tunnel, but when it didn’t look like I was going to bite, he sacrificed Maynard with the fake suicide.” The Basquo folded his hands on the bed covers, and I played with my hat in an attempt to soften the unease between us. “Tuyen’s wounds looked self- inflicted, and the bottle-cap thing just seemed too obvious—so I started thinking about who would gain from implicating the Dunnigans.”

  Saizarbitoria continued to study me as Marie pushed the door open with a tray that I assumed was lunch. “What about the quarters?”

  We’d been warned against tiring him, so I plucked my hat from my bent knee, put it back on my head, and stood.

  “I asked Ned about that. He said that they would bring the girls in, some of them as young as ten, and lock them in a A N OT H ER

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  manufacturing building that had been cordoned off into little twelve-by- twelve rooms. Then they were . . .” I glanced at Marie.

  “Trained—and told they owed Trung Sisters twenty thousand dollars apiece for their transportation to the U.S. and that they would work off the debt and be released. They were given twenty dollars a week in quarters, so that they could eat and drink from the vending machines in the building.”

  The Basquo let out a long slow breath.

  Vic handed the rest of the report to me as she and Lucian stood. “What happens to Ngo now?”

  “The people from INS picked her up about an hour ago and flew her back to Los Angeles under a Temporary Protected Status. Under the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, it looks like she’s going to be granted a T-Visa and citizenship through adoption.”

  Saizarbitoria watched as his pregnant wife rolled a stand and tray table over to his bed and removed the stainless covering from his lunch—it looked ghastly. No wonder he was trying to bribe all of us into bringing him food from the Busy Bee. “Adopted by who? ”

  I stuffed the thick fi le under my arm. “If I were a betting man, I’d say the sheriff of Los Angeles County has two daughters and is about to acquire a third.” I smiled at Marie as she seated herself as comfortably as she could in the corner chair and gestured for the staff to follow me as I crossed and opened the door. “We’ll leave you to your lunch and your wife.” I smiled at her again. “When, exactly, are you due?”

  She rested her hands on the sides of her stomach. “November.”

  I ushered Vic and Lucian out—the old sheriff was having lunch with Isaac Bloomfield, but the rest of us were on our own. I began closing the door behind me.

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  “Hey, boss?”

  I stopped and leaned back in. “Yep?”

  Santiago looked down at the boiled meat, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what he was contemplating. “I . . .” He stopped, looked up, and then started to say something again.

  “Don’t worry about it, Sancho.”

  Vic rolled down the window of her eight-year-old unit in the parking lot of Durant Memorial. “I guess that leaves only one more mystery.”

  I opened the door of my truck and watched as Henry moved the bags of groceries to the center and climbed in on the other side; Dog was asleep in the back. “Not really. Mai Kim had given birth to Ngo Loi’s grandmother three years before I ever got to Tan Son Nhut.”

  “I guess you’re off the hook.” She flared the canine tooth at me and started her truck. “You’re fast, but not that fast.” She slipped the vehicle into gear. “You do remember that you have a debate tonight.”

  I pulled out my pocket watch and checked the time. “Yep, but that should be over by eight.”

  “So?”

  I tucked my watch back in my pocket and considered the fact that I was about to ask my deputy out on a date in front of Henry. It was enough to curdle my fortitude, but I figured it was time to get the thing out in the open. “I was wondering . . .?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I glanced back at the Cheyenne Nation, who continued to watch us. “Henry has to tend bar and Cady and Michael have plans, since he’s leaving tomorrow, so I was thinking . . .”

  She studied me. I thought I should say something else, but then she started to speak and I stopped. “I’m washing my hair.”

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  I stood there looking at her drive away, her vehicle barking the rear tires as she turned out of the parking lot. I tried to fi gure out what I’d done wrong. I knew I was out of practice, but the response seemed a little abrupt. I started the Bullet and put my seat belt on. Henry sat there without saying a w
ord; Dog didn’t speak either. “What?”

  He turned his head to look out the windshield. “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  I watched as he tried not to smile. “Just a small piece of advice.” He turned and looked at me again. “Next time, try not to make it sound like you have nothing better to do.”

  Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam: 1968

  I didn’t have anything better to do, so I figured I might as well get drunk.

  My right shoulder still hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, but I found that after a little practice, I could drink with my left hand. I’d been practic-ing steadily since being released from the base hospital two hours ago. I wasn’t wheels-up till 1820 hours; the flight itself would be only twenty minutes back to BHQ, and then the provost marshal wanted a personal debriefing on my investigation. He wouldn’t be happy that I was drunk, but he wasn’t going to be happy with me anyway, so I figured what the hell. I stared at the empty piece of paper on the piano bench next to me and knocked back another whiskey. It was not my usual weapon of choice, but I was in a hurry. Things were just starting to pick up at the Boy-Howdy Beau-Coups Good Times Lounge, and the place was getting crowded, but nobody came near me.

  If you’re unlucky enough in life, there’s a time when people will start associating you with death.

  I had written three letters already, and I was getting depressed 28 4 CR A I

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  writing about dead people. Le Khang promised to deliver this one to a girl who knew someone near the village where Mai Kim’s family supposedly lived. Would the letter actually get there? Would the family care? Did any of it really matter?

  I picked up the bottle, refilled my glass, and struggled with the wave of regret, depression, anger, and disgust that continued to churn under the flood of alcohol. I thought that there should be somebody in the place that I should say good- bye to, but there wasn’t anybody left.

  Letter number one would go to San Antonio, Texas. Baranski had indeed shot Mendoza in the back of the head along Highway 1.

  Letter number two would go to West Hamlin, West Virginia. The one-eyed sergeant’s name had been George Seton, and he’d survived another four days after his two rounds of AK fire had taken most of Baranski’s chest. Before he succumbed to the wounds he’d sustained during what they were now calling the Tet Offensive, he’d made a statement to the 377th Security Investigators that had exon-erated me in the death of Baranski. I was probably going to end up getting a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for my efforts in driving back the offensive; I figured that, and a dime, would get me a phone call.