Jungle Rules

by Charles W. Henderson

  “When I go to taking pictures for the Chicago Tribune, you want to see my name in that paper, you need to look for Junior Potter,” Harris said, and then gulped down his beer when he saw Bao step into the daylight outside the saloon’s front door and give him a nod.

  “Hey, check it out, I got to get back to the press center,” Mau Mau said in a hurry, making an exaggerated glance at his gold Rolex wristwatch and stepping away from the bar. Then, as an afterthought, he reached in his pocket and laid a five-dollar bill on the counter. “Let me catch another round for you guys, and for your buddy, too, when he gets back.”

  As the deserter nervously walked to the saloon’s entrance, and then jogged to the street corner where the black Mercedes sat with its engine running, waiting for him, he cursed under his breath. His abrupt departure from the newfound friends, and his clumsy exit raised a host of red flags in his mind. He realized that the conversation with the two Marines had never mentioned their third friend. The blond had already left the saloon when Harris had joined the two playboys at the bar. Another thought, too: buying two complete strangers a second round of beers went overboard. Picking up the tab on the first serving seemed a little odd to him, now that he thought about it. When their buddy would eventually fail to return, and their search for him would turn up nothing, they might smell the rat and connect Mau Mau to his disappearance.

  Speeding down a back street, Harris thought, “Why should I give a shit? I’m out of here anyway. Soon as I kill that rat bastard Elmore.” With a new life and fresh identity, and his share of three million dollars, why should he ever worry?

  However, as the car whisked out of the heart of Da Nang, the bumping and kicking from the automobile’s trunk troubled him.

  A COOL BREEZE stirred from the South China Sea brought the marine layer ashore and shrouded the low-lying lands and river bottoms with fog south of Da Nang. Huong switched on the yellow lamps mounted on the front bumper, near the center of the Mercedes-Benz’s grill, as he followed a narrow dirt road westward alongside the Cau Do River.

  Hidden by the fog and the night, at a spot where the road branched north, a quarter of a mile east from its intersection with Highway One, Huong shut off the lights and stopped the car. He said nothing to James Harris, who sat in the backseat, smoking a cigarette, but simply looked at his brother, Bao, who got out of the car and opened the trunk.

  Huong lifted the latch on the driver-side door and stepped out of the car when Bao dragged the first victim to the road’s edge, atop a steep bank, ten feet above the Song Cau Do’s low-tide water. James Harris looked at the foggy silhouette of the person the two cowboys had bound with communications wire and gagged with a knot tied in an old T-shirt. While Bao held the short man by the wrists, Huong put his .45 Colt to the back of the fellow’s head and sent a bullet out his face. Just as the gunshot popped, Bao let go of the dying cowboy’s hands and he splashed into the mud at the water’s edge.

  The younger Nguyen brother returned to the trunk and pulled the young whore from it. Seeing her, James Harris jumped out of the car.

  “Oh, now, wait, man,” Mau Mau pled with Huong. “That’s Wild Thing, man! She one of us!”

  “She Benny Lam whore now,” Huong said, putting his .45-caliber pistol at the back of the girl’s head as Bao held her by the hands, and quickly pulled the trigger before the frantic black deserter could do anything. Then the cool older brother shrugged at the terrified American as he slipped his pistol back in its waistband scabbard. “She talk too much. She tell anybody, all this be no good then. No work. Not buy any time. CID keep looking. Benny Lam cowboy, he talk, too. We no need anybody talking. You understand?”

  “Yeah, man, I understand,” James Harris said, looking at the muddy edge of the river where the girl and her watchdog lay dead, their hands and feet bound, and the rags tied around their mouths. “It’s just, I liked that chick, you know? She’s sweet.”

  “Sweet like bamboo snake,” Huong said, taking a pearl-handled straight razor from the dead girl’s black velvet clutch purse with the long, thin gold chain shoulder strap. He flipped open the weapon under James Harris’s nose and made a quick swipe with it in front of his face. He snapped the blade shut and then dropped it in Mau Mau’s shirt pocket as a souvenir. Then he found the fifty dollars along with two more American twenty-dollar bills and a ten plus three fives, and folded the cash into the two hundred dollars he had recovered from Benny Lam’s watchdog. Turning the small handbag inside out, spilling the whore’s wallet, compact, and makeup onto the road, Huong dropped it over the side where it landed in the mud next to the two bodies.

  Harris followed Huong to the back of the car, where Bao now pulled the bound feet of the unconscious blond Marine out of the trunk and waited for his two cohorts to take the young man by the shoulders.

  “No, not here,” Huong told Bao in Vietnamese, and pushed Harris’s hand away from their barely breathing victim. “We no do here. Him dead someplace else much better.”

  “You don’t want the cops to tie those two with this guy, right?” Harris said, realizing that authorities finding the three corpses together would naturally investigate the homicides as connected, and eventually tie the identity of the blond Marine with the missing man from the bar. As he climbed in the backseat and Huong slammed the trunk shut, with their captive safely inside it, Harris reminded himself that he had to think matters through better.

  “GUNNY JACKSON,” THE sandy-haired CID lieutenant called as he walked through the doorway of the III MAF Criminal Investigation Division work quarters where the gunnery sergeant with the gold badge pinned on his green utility uniform sat behind one of three desks crowded into the small office space. “Somebody took out the Snowman.”

  “Oh, really?” the seasoned veteran criminal investigator said, and leaned back in his chair, taking a sip of hot coffee from a white mug with a gold Marine Corps emblem and the name “Jack” painted on one side and gunnery sergeant chevrons painted on the other. “You sure, sir, or are you just supposing?”

  “Supposing, I guess. We won’t be sure until they confirm the ID on the body at Hickam Air Force Base, in Hawaii,” the lieutenant said, pouring a cup of coffee and then walking to his desk. “Graves and registration are packing him out today. We may know something in a few weeks.

  “Chief Toan claims it’s Brian Pitts for sure, though. And you know, he knew him better than we ever did. A pair of his patrolmen found the body this morning on the edge of Dogpatch, not two blocks from the Snowman’s villa. Staff Sergeant Lyons and Sergeant Knight got the call on it, about five o’clock this morning. We’re going out to investigate the scene in the daylight, as soon as they get in. Probably around noon. I let them catch forty winks this morning, since they got hauled out of the rack last night.

  “Toan thinks that Benny Lam’s boys took out Pitts last night after somebody, most likely the Snowman’s crew, whacked one of Lam’s best whores and her watchdog. A patrol from Seventh Marines found the two bodies in the tidal wash of the Cau Do River this morning, near that big, green, iron bridge on Highway One.

  “So the chief concluded that Lam’s boys must have caught Pitts trying to sneak back to his ranch, sometime after one or two this morning, some six to eight hours after the whore and the cowboy bought it, based on the time-of-death estimates, and shotgunned our man Pitts in reprisal. Blew his face off with a couple of blasts of twelve-gauge, ought-two man-stoppers.”

  “You know, Lieutenant Biggs, Hickam will take a hell of a lot longer than a few weeks. We could be sitting here three or four months. Can’t we just run his fingerprints and make an ID? The FBI can turn it around in two weeks flat,” the gunny said, running his index finger down an incident report as he read through its data.

  “Be nice, Jack,” the sandy-haired CID lieutenant named Melvin Biggs said, leaning back in his chair and sipping coffee. “Apparently Pitts saw it coming, and put his hands in front of his face. You know the typical defensive wound. Turned both his mitts into hamburg
er.”

  “Convenient if you’re Brian Pitts and want the world to think you’re dead,” the gunny called Jack Jackson said, drinking more coffee and tossing the report he had just read across to the lieutenant’s desk. “Check out the description of this lost soul, a newbee from MAG Eleven, one Lance Corporal Michael Jerome Scott, age twenty-one, six-feet-nothing tall and 180 pounds. My last sighting of our infamous Snowman, Corporal Brian T. Pitts, matches this boy top to bottom.”

  “That certainly casts a new light on the discovery of Pitts’s dead body, doesn’t it,” Biggs said, picking up the report passed to CID from the military police watch commander from the previous night.

  “You know, sir,” Gunny Jackson added, “we were damned lucky to get that report you’ve got there in your hot little hands. We wouldn’t have had a clue about this kid, otherwise, had Scott’s two buddies not raised holy hell with the night watch, demanding that they call out the cavalry because their newbee lance corporal had gotten himself snatched.

  “After these guys spent a couple of hours scouring the area around that bar, searching for Lance Corporal Scott, they beat feet to the MP shack and reported him kidnapped. That’s right, kidnapped, right off the bat. No missing-person bullshit. And they stuck to their guns about it being a snatch job, too, not just another Marine in love suddenly gone native, like we see more often than not.

  “Given that this was the lance corporal’s first trip to the ville, and that he was nervous about being out of sight of his two buddies, the watch commander ordered a full sweep of that area. Of course he turned up zipzilch, but because the incident involves a possible kidnapping, it landed the report and Scott’s description right in our hands this morning.

  “Talk about dumb luck. If these guys would have just gone back to the barracks, like so many other people would have done, and let their buddy just get listed as absent, failing to return from liberty, we wouldn’t know a damned thing other than a body fitting the description of Pitts turned up dead.”

  “Hmm, maybe our luck has changed,” the lieutenant said and cracked a smile. “Any hope of getting our hands on some physical records telling us a little more about Pitts?”

  “I doubt it. I’d sure like to see his SRB, medical and dental files, but most likely they got shipped to St. Louis many moons ago, him being a longtime deserter and all,” Gunny Jackson said. “Ten to one they’re not here, if our luck lately holds true to course.”

  “The body they found in Dogpatch this morning had Pitts’s dog tags and ID card on it,” the lieutenant said, reading the report on the corpse and then looking up with a big smile at his noncommissioned officer in charge. “Besides religion, service number, and name, a man’s dog tag has his blood type imprinted on it, like his ID card.”

  “Bingo!” the gunny said, and laughed. “I guess even a blind hog finds an acorn now and then, doesn’t he? Maybe our luck has changed! Be a hell of a note if the blood type of the body is not the same as the blood type listed on Pitts’s ID card and dog tags.”

  “Tell you what I’m going to do,” the lieutenant said, snatching the telephone on his desk and putting it to his ear. “I’m having a copy of this Lance Corporal M. J. Scott’s medical and dental files sent to Hawaii with that body. We may not have Pitts’s records right now, but we do have this missing lad’s. At least they can bounce the physical data they collect from the body to what this boy has on his medical and dental charts. If it matches, then we’ve located our missing soul, and it answers the Pitts identity question, doesn’t it.”

  BY NOONTIME, THE March heat in Da Nang had both the lieutenant’s and the gunny’s uniforms soaked with perspiration. Staff Sergeant Tommy Lyons and Sergeant Billy Knight also sweated in their civilian clothes as they walked behind the uniformed officer and senior NCO. Two Vietnamese policemen stood watch over the section of Dogpatch dirt alley while a Naval Investigative Service detective who had arrived ahead of the four CID Marines squatted next to a dried blood puddle, poking the ground with his pocket knife.

  “Mister Walters, I see you’re hard at it,” Lieutenant Biggs called to the man as he ducked under the ropes strung across the alley, barricading the crime scene.

  Special Agent Bill Walters looked up and smiled. “Good job here by your sergeants. They roped off the area immediately, and preserved the scene intact before Major Toan’s hamsters could fuck it up beyond value.”

  “Gunny Jack taught them well,” Lieutenant Biggs said, and then knelt by the NIS investigator. “What you digging up?”

  “Blast particles from the shotgun,” Walters said, and then showed the Marine officer the speck of black residue he had plucked from the ground. “Our man was shot lying down. Check out the splatter pattern. We have body materials spread in a twelve-foot circle. Right here, we have spent powder and other debris from the shotgun blasts. Definitely, our guy died lying on his back right here.”

  “Could he have been dead beforehand, and just shotgunned here?” the lieutenant suggested, and then looked around at the many windows that viewed the alley. “Of course, no witnesses, right?”

  “Nobody’s talking, and I don’t expect any of the good citizens of Dogpatch to step forward either,” the forty-year-old naval investigator grumbled. “I guess it is possible that he died elsewhere, but judging from the massive volume of blood puddled here, it leads me to believe that his heart pumped for a while after he took the two blasts to the face and hands.”

  “Unconscious then,” the lieutenant said, surveying the bloody scene as the three sergeants stood above him.

  “Could be that he got hit from behind, knocked to the ground, and then shotgunned,” Walters said, standing and giving Gunny Jack a smile and a handshake. “Probably the most likely scenario. Then, too, just about as likely, someone could have clubbed the guy elsewhere, kept him alive, and brought him here to kill him. A lot of trouble to go through to stage a pretty scene for us.”

  “My thoughts from the get-go,” Gunnery Sergeant Jackson said. “This ain’t Brian Pitts we’re talking got clipped here. We’re talking about a kid named Michael Scott who looks a lot like Brian Pitts, and they killed him here to throw us off Pitts’s trail so he can beat feet out of the area.”

  Bill Walters slapped the gunny on the shoulder and smiled at the lieutenant. “The man has a point. It also explains a hell of a lot more than that dirt-bag Toan’s hare-brained theory of a reprisal over a dead whore and a cowboy.”

  “We never turned up even a shoebox of money stashed in that villa of Pitts’s, either,” Jackson said, looking at the lieutenant. “Elmore the magnificent claimed the Snowman had a room full of seabags stuffed with American cash. How many seabags is yet to be seen, but I think the snitch may have a basis of truth underlying his bullshit. Pitts did have a major corner in Dogpatch, and did a lot of dope business, so we’ve come to learn. We check his hooch and find no dope and no money. Just a nervous old broad with a string of whores. My point is this: he saw us coming and got his shit out of Dodge. He killed this poor kid to try to throw us off his trail. Somewhere, he’s out there with a shitload of cash, and maybe a bunch of dope, too, and he needs to get someplace where it can do him some good.”

  BRIAN PITTS CLOSED his eyes, pulling the rice-straw conical hat over his face, shielding it from the afternoon sun as he bounced in the center of the bench seat inside the cab of the baby-blue dump truck loaded with pig manure atop the half-dozen duffel bags stuffed with three million dollars in American cash, zipped inside nylon-reinforced, black polyurethane body bags. Once the truck had made its way past Duc Pho and Phu Cat, the fugitive crime lord relaxed and began to doze off, sitting between Chung, who drove the old diesel, and Ty, who rode shotgun. The Snowman felt much safer once they had entered the central military region of South Vietnam, overseen by U.S. Army forces and ARVN units from its Second Army Corps headquartered at Pleiku. Here, these soldiers didn’t know him, weren’t looking for him, and cared nothing about Brian Pitts.

  When the blue diesel final
ly rolled through Nha Trang and turned southwestward toward Saigon, the Marine deserter felt euphoric. Seeing a seafood restaurant on the outskirts, he had Chung pull to the roadside, and the trio strolled inside the establishment and casually ate a magnificent dinner of broiled prawns and fish stew. A few more hours down Highway One, and they would make the turn westward toward a village near Cu Chi and their new home where Huong, Chung, and Bao’s grandparents and his two uncles awaited their arrival.

  While Brian Pitts, Chung, and Ty enjoyed their seafood dinner with ample cold beer to wash it down, James Harris, Huong, and Bao ate warmed-over rice with salt pork for flavoring.

  “This shit, hangin’ out in the hooch ain’t cuttin’ it, man,” Harris complained, choking down the rice dinner. “Why we ain’t got some beer and real food?”

  Huong looked at Mau Mau and then tossed a hunk of salt pork from his bowl to Turd. Bao took a kettle of hot tea from the stove and refilled Huong’s cup and then his own. He took a step toward James Harris, to refill his cup, but the black man glared at him so he stopped, and set the kettle back on the stove.

  “This tastes like your sister washed her hair in it,” Mau Mau said, sipping the last of his tea, and then setting his cup on the floor next to where he sat in one of the straight-back chairs. He fought back his inclination to throw the cup across the floor, along with his bowl of rice. His memory of the day he saw Huong kill the cowboy for cheating at mah-jongg kept him from any excessive belligerency.

  Turd wagged his tail, and James Harris fed him his piece of salt pork, too. Huong smiled at the gesture as he scraped his rice bowl clean.

  “When we goin’ to find that rat fuck Elmore?” Harris then said to Huong.

  “We do soon,” Huong said, sipping his tea and going to the wooden porch across the front of the frame house with the thatched roof. “We need know where Elmo stay now. Then we see if we can make good plan. We kill him then.”