Little Mountain

by Sanchez, Bob

  “What happened to him?” Was he missing, too?

  Julie shrugged. “Who knows? Hey, I’ve gotta go.”

  “What was his name?”

  “It’s eight thirty, Sam. Stop working. I’ll see you ’bout ten.”

  When the door closed behind Julie, he thought about the woman’s fifty dollars and half wished he’d popped Viseth in the jaw this afternoon.

  That old woman was going to get her money back.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sam had come so close to hitting Viseth that evening that he scared himself. One good clip on the chin, and the punk would have had to eat his lunch through a straw. But hitting wasn’t Sam’s style.

  Of course, there had been the soldier he’d caught with his pants down a mile from the Thai border.

  After the Khmer Rouge reign of terror collapsed, Sambath had been a border guide, taking families across the Thai border into freedom. His path through the jungle was lined with Seikos and cigarettes, but he carried a .45 just in case the bribes didn’t work.

  On one trip, a woman cried out and a child screamed. In a clearing on the other side of brambles and vines, he saw Sith standing with an erect penis over a young woman while her little boy whimpered. The woman wore a dirty grey krama wrapped on top of her head, and she lay on the thick leaves of the forest floor and cried, her trousers thrown into a puddle and her legs spread wide. Sith showed a gap-toothed grin and gestured toward the woman, who trembled miserably and covered her face with her hands. Sambath’s muscles tensed. The hard steel of his pistol pressed against his hip.

  Perhaps Sith could tell from Sambath’s eyes that something was wrong, and his face filled with doubt. “You can fuck her first,” he said.

  This woman had gotten so close to the safety of the camp. Then Sambath did what he had sworn to himself he would never do: he balled up both fists and hit a communist soldier squarely in the mouth, then pounded until Sith fell backwards into a puddle and started choking on blood and teeth. Sambath pinned him to the ground, then pulled his .45 from under his shirt. He pointed the barrel at Sith’s forehead.

  “No! Stop! Don’t be like him!” the woman cried. As he squeezed the trigger, he felt the woman’s urgent tug. The slug landed beside Sith’s ear and splattered water on the side of his bloody face.

  Sambath stripped Sith of everything but his trousers: shirt, sandals, watch and cigarettes, and an American M-16. Then he escorted the woman and her boy to a small border camp, shaken that his rage had gotten out of control, grateful that the woman had saved him from becoming a murderer.

  Later that day, Sambath met Keo, the local communist commander. “I heard you beat Comrade Sith,” he said. “Lucky for you, Sith has soggy rice for brains, and he told me a whore had spread her legs for him. He knows comrades aren’t supposed to have sex. I promise you, by tomorrow he’ll be just a lump inside a python. When you see him again, Sith will be snake shit.”

  He never saw Comrade Sith again, but a week later the woman was raped in the camp; she and her son were found dead in the morning light. Sambath never knew their names.

  Now the more he wanted to hit Viseth, the more he had to lose. When he began taking ESL classes with Julie and wanted to pop her fiancé in his upper-crust jaw, he stood to lose her respect and perhaps a chance at citizenship. And then, when Viseth’s name hovered on the tip of every frightened tongue on Mersey Street and now cropped up in other neighborhoods, Sam wanted to shatter his jaw like crystal. Of course, wanting and doing weren’t the same thing at all. Decking a punk wasn’t worth losing his badge or his self-respect.

  Viseth might have planted the buckshot in Chea’s face, but so far there wasn’t much evidence. Would he hang out on 11th Street the day after committing a murder there? Sam could never tell what Viseth would do. Plant a 9-millimeter slug in Sam’s spinal cord, maybe.

  Barbra Streisand’s voice wafted from the radio while Sam scribbled notes on junk mail envelopes with a pencil. Sarapon’s voice had been higher and more delicate when she sang to him on the swing, and then years later when she sang love songs on the radio. Big sister would be thirty-seven now, would probably have married and made Sambath an uncle if she hadn’t been taken to see Angka. He drew a stick figure with a baseball bat and an outline of Cambodia, then crossed it out. Cambodia looked like an old, battered pan. Every pleasant memory of his native land brought a batch of painful ones, as though he’d reached for a rose and come up with a fistful of thorns. On the back of one envelope were four names, addresses, and phone numbers, the ones he couldn’t get anyone at the station to check out for him.

  Only three names. The search had taken over an hour, about a half minute for each of about two hundred pages. With luck, he hadn’t missed any Khems. His eyes burned after the close attention to thousands of lines of black print. How far could Khem What’s-His-Name have gotten in the last twenty-two hours, if he’d decided to run? As far as he wanted.

  The telephone rang. “Am I calling too late?” Fitchie’s voice sounded like gravel.

  “No problem, Julie’s out for a while. What’s up?”

  “Man, I think my brain’s been fried,” Fitchie said. “Called the Assessor’s office before knocking off work. You remember the trust I mentioned?”

  “Paradise Trust, yeah. You find any real names?”

  “I’ve got one here. First name S-I-S-A-P-O-N, last name T-H-O-M. That a man or a woman?”

  Sam wrote down the name. Where had he seen it before? Offhand, he couldn’t remember. “Could be either,” he said. “A lot of Cambodian names are like that.”

  “Well, he or she has owned Bin Chea’s building since April. Looks like we want to talk to this person.”

  “What about Chea’s life insurance?”

  “Think two hundred K is enough to kill for?”

  “We can let Mrs. Chea tell us that.”

  Before they hung up, Sam asked Fitchie to see what he could find out about Samson Cleaners.

  Julie arrived home at quarter past ten and closed the door softly behind her. She smiled and hung her purse on the chair, and he put his hand behind her head and drew her to him. He ran his fingers through her hair and smelled a trace of the Ciara that he’d given her last Christmas. Her scent mixed with the air that the fan pulled in through the window. He kissed her softly at the source of the fragrance, a spot just beneath her ear, and listened as she sighed. “Come on to bed, Sam,” she said. Maybe he could forget about the murder long enough to enjoy Julie’s love.

  Soon they lay side by side on the sheets in the darkened room, their arms around each other, her fingers gentle on the small of his back. Sam’s troubles disappeared into the city’s night as though he and Julie were the only two people in the world. He tasted the moist skin between her breasts, felt her pounding heart, heard her inarticulate whispers and the hum of the summer fan. Then she tugged at his waist and urged him on top of her, and there was Julie, only Julie, and gentle movement and spasms of joy.

  Later, Julie slept with her head on his shoulder, her hair soft against his chest. Sam lay half awake as the hazy image of a cement stoop drifted into his brain. A cement stoop with a footprint. A door opened, and Bin Chea smiled back at Sam with rotted teeth. He carried a handful of palm fronds--or were they knives? Sam tried to wipe away his thoughts and let the tension seep from his muscles. “You don’t know me,” Father said. “They will kill you.” Father’s face pressed close, magnified and twisted, and his body jerked in time with Julie’s rhythmic breathing.

  The flames--the flames again. A flashlight in the face, a straw torch, a knowing smile, a man on a cross who looks like Jesus. “Here, take this. Warm this criminal’s feet and I know you’re not his son.” Blisters crawling up Father’s legs. Worms from the oven.

  “You don’t know me,” Father said. “You don’t know me!”

  The flames again. Run like hell, somebody’s in there! The front of the cruiser is underneath a truck from the gas company. What if it burns? It’s Callahan, he�
��s bleeding, it’s burning. Pull him out, is he awake? Oh-h! I’m dead. Father, I’ll save you. I won’t let them burn you. It should be me. I deserve to burn--Callahan is screaming Holy Jesus, dear holy Jesus. It’s going to blow.

  Sam sat up with a start, his face covered with sweat. In the darkness, red digits glowed one oh one. He sighed, walked to the kitchen where he ran the tap and splashed cold water on his face. The water ran down his arms and off the crooks of his elbows. He folded his arms on the kitchen table and put his head down to let the breeze course over his neck and shoulders. If he couldn’t clear his mind, he’d try to fill it with more pleasant thoughts--of Julie, for example, who lay on her side and breathed softly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sam’s first order of business the next morning was to check both cars, his and Julie’s. Look at the tires, under the hood, on the seats, just as he’d done last night with other officers present. There was no sign of tampering except for a small spot of blood where Mouse Cop had been. Was it feline or human blood? The lab would let him know today. Last night, Comrade Bin’s bloody rib had ripped into Sam’s memories again--or was he simply crazy?

  Memory and nightmare had swirled together like tea leaves and ditch water. Bone became steel that sliced out of Comrade Bin’s body. Sambath tumbled into the foundation of an old building where a tangle of bodies cushioned his fall, and a volley of screams tore at his eardrums. Comrade Bin stood at the edge of the pit, splashing gasoline on his victims below and lighting a match. Sambath frantically shielded his father from the flames.

  “Save yourself! You’re not my son!” Father screamed.

  Sam sipped on his coffee as he arrived at the station, ten thousand miles from his dreams.

  Damn dreams. If only Sam could sleep without them, the way that Shakespeare character had wanted. Was that Hamlet or Lear? Julie would know. Only a fragment of a dream survived from his straw-mat nights at Little Mountain, when he’d imagined a huge plate of prahoc, fish sauce, and rice. He’d once awakened thinking that he had gorged himself on a marvelous meal, so how could he still be so hungry?

  Why did dreams reflect either desperate wants or deep, unsettling fears? When Sambath lay on the grass after fourteen hours of carting away the dead, his bones aching to the marrow, his family often came back to him wrapped inside a dream. They laughed again as they swung in the hammock. They drove past women wearing sampots who sold dried fish on racks on the outskirts of Siem Riep. They drove in his father’s dusty Peugeot to the ancient temple of Angkor Wat where five magnificent spires pierced the sky. Now that he was free, those pleasant dreams evaporated like the mists that hid the stilt-houses off the shores of Tonle Sap.

  Vacheran had swung viciously at Comrade Bin. Would a trace of broken ribs show up in an x-ray after so much time had passed? Were there any x-rays in Bin Chea’s file? There were none mentioned in the autopsy report. But Sam was kidding himself. How would he have known if Comrade Bin had a broken rib?

  In any case, it didn’t matter.

  Comrade Bin was dead.

  Sam found Wilkins and Fitchie in the midst of a conversation next to Sam’s desk.

  “You said that Justo knew Viseth and beat the bejeesus out of him,” Wilkins said. “If the Diaz girl can place Viseth in front of Chea’s house, then what’s your scenario?”

  “Who’s Diaz?” Sam asked.

  “Carmela Diaz, she went through a windshield the same time as the shooting,” Fitchie said. “Justo was the DOA in the same car.”

  Sam drained his coffee cup. “Viseth shows up to shoot Bin Chea, and the kids see him.”

  “While they’re making out,” Fitchie said.

  “A few days earlier Justo beats up Viseth, and now there’s Viseth with a shotgun. Justo panics, but Viseth isn’t after him.” Wilkins popped a piece of gum into his mouth and looked at Fitchie.

  “Doesn’t notice him, maybe?”

  “Or has other priorities,” Sam said. “Right now he wants Bin Chea.”

  “But why skip Justo for Chea? You need a motive.”

  “I’ve seen hundreds of killings with no motive, Lieutenant. No point at all. But there’s something here. Chea was his landlord. I’d start with money.”

  “Just deal with it,” Wilkins said as he walked away.

  “Keep walking,” Fitchie mumbled, then said, “Whose money, Sam? Who wanted Chea dead?”

  Sam would have wanted Bin Chea dead if he had known of the bastard’s existence, but some wishes were best left unspoken. “Somebody who believed the rumors about him.”

  “Viseth flashing any dough on the street?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. Most people who know him don’t have much money.”

  “Maybe it didn’t take that much money.”

  “I have to run a couple of errands. Then I’ll visit Viseth. Maybe he’ll confide in me.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Fitchie said. “So I can say hello.”

  Before they paid a call on Viseth, Sam drove back to Bin Chea’s street. He parked three houses up the street, and the two men walked casually. The neighborhood had pleasant yards, if small ones. A couple of small children waved at Sam from the shade of a dirt driveway. What was it that bothered him about that footprint? When they reached Chea’s house, Sam squatted on his haunches in front of the cement stoop. Wait a minute. Which step was it, the third one? The footprint wasn’t there anymore.

  The entire step was covered with a thin layer of fresh cement.

  Wilkins would kick Sam’s butt for wasting time like this, and he’d be right. But Chea had been the stickler for neatness; with Chea dead, who would take the trouble to fret over details like this?

  “What’s this about?” Fitchie asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Sam said.

  The sun had dropped below the flat rooftops and left a late-afternoon wedge of shadow across Mersey Street. Sam parked his Ford three houses down from Kim’s, a safe distance from the fire plug. Why invite trouble?

  A mix of smells permeated the air: asphalt, gasoline fumes, fried garlic, fresh paint. Fresh paint and Mersey Street. An odd combination. A boom box played rap music on a porch.

  A bare-chested girl of about Trish’s age pedaled a tricycle across the street. Sam waited for a mother to scream at the child, but no one seemed to notice. He escorted her back across the street and told her to stay there. The mother was out now, telling him and Fitchie to mind their goddamn business. Teenagers sat on porches and smoked and drank and yelled in Spanish at a white girl of about sixteen, whose hair was the color of lilacs and frizzed like cotton candy. She wore hoop earrings and a yellow blouse that hung straight down from the tips of her breasts. She had bare feet garnished with crimson nail polish on her toes. Her eyes looked past Sam’s shoulder.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “He’s still there.” She crossed into the shade across the street.

  Next door, Viseth’s house was painted the color of a pumpkin. It had a small porch on both floors. An Asian woman sat alone in a folding chair on the top floor, her face in the fading sun. Sam recognized her as Viseth’s mother. Witch grass grew between the concrete squares in the sidewalk. A boy Sam figured for seven years old picked a cigarette butt out of the gutter and put it in his mouth.

  In the cement square at the base of Viseth’s steps was a spray-painted picture of a skull and a pair of crossed baseball bats. Viseth held up a cigarette lighter and spoke in English. “Hey kid, you want a light? Step around the picture. You touch my art work and I’ll light your pants on fire.”

  The outline was a sticky red. Sam took the cigarette from the boy and ground it into the face of the skull. Viseth sat on a wooden step and glared through malevolent eyes. He had a bony, angular face and slick black hair. A cigarette was tucked behind his ear. Between his legs sat a spray can of automobile touch-up paint. Sam stepped closer until his shadow covered Viseth’s face.

  “Get off my picture,” Viseth said in English. “You’re fucking it up.”

  “You have
a foul mouth, Viseth. Marking your territory?” The boy came back sucking on another unlit cigarette butt. A small crowd gathered: an old Cambodian man, a boy on a bicycle, a teenager who might have been a Battboy.

  “Whole street’s my territory.”

  Fitchie scratched his neck and laughed. “Soon your territory will be a cell with a bunk, a toilet, and a boyfriend.”

  “Tried to get me before, you came up with shit. You got nothing now.” Steel balls clicked as Viseth shook the spray can between his legs. Viseth was right. Sam or Willie could--and did--arrest him, but how could they hold him when no one would press charges? His girl friend Ky’s swollen jaw turned out to be from a fall. The old man in the emergency room with the razor slice across his cheek just cut himself shaving. Viseth had never spent a night in jail.

  “Still, it’s a dangerous neighborhood,” Sam said. “I worry about you, Viseth. Pregnant girls fall. What did Ky fall on? Your fist? How soon before you have an accident the way your friends do? My colleague Fitchie wonders if you might fall out of a moving car, but I say no, you’re much too careful. My colleague Fitchie thinks you’re stupid, though, and you’ll probably forget your seatbelt. Or you might trip and fall over your own razor blade. Who knows when one of your friends will run you down with his Trans Am? My colleague Fitchie says one of these days you’ll get careless and drown in the sewer. But I stood up for you. I said rats can swim.”

  “You’re pissed ’cause you got nothing on me.”

  “You’re scaring your neighbors.”

  “Who told you that lie? The whole street’s my friend.”

  “You don’t have any friends. People get too close to you, they have accidents. So they cross the street when they see you outside.”

  “You got no proof, and you suck besides.”

  Nearby, the boy gave up trying to light the cigarette and tossed it back into the gutter. Sam nodded in his direction. “You keep away from that boy,” he told Viseth.