Little Mountain

by Sanchez, Bob

  The woman looked puzzled. “Khem Chhap? No, he doesn’t work here. I’m afraid I’ve never heard of the gentleman. We do keep a database of people who come to us for help. If you can wait a minute, I’ll check it.”

  Sam sat in a metal folding chair and waited. The woman tap-tapped at her computer and peered at the screen. The CSHO had been in business for eight years. Americans helped launch and run it, but Cambodians themselves kept it going, as the name implied. Sam was out of that loop. She pursed her lips and frowned, then looked up at Sam.

  “I’m sorry, officer. I can’t help you.”

  The man on the telephone placed his hand over the receiver. “Wait a minute, please,” he said, and pushed a hold button. “Khem Chhap? Maybe sixty years old, gray hair, skinny fellow? I talked to him last week. Said he wanted to borrow the price of a bus fare to Los Angeles.”

  “Did you lend it to him?”

  “We have no money to lend. I told him he could come in Monday to interview for a job in the office. Never showed up, though.”

  Sam thanked them and left. So Khem had lied to his roommate and had probably left town. Keep running, Khem. I have to catch you, but hope I don’t.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  When Sam arrived home, Julie hugged him as though he’d been away for a month. “What a relief you’re home,” she said. Then Trish reached out with both arms to take in his hug, and she planted a wet kiss on the tip of his nose. Father and daughter. Pure love and acceptance. Now he was beginning to understand his father’s devotion to Sarapon. Sam’s link with Trish felt as pure as a strand of silk, and as strong as his heart. But a family could be snatched away in a moment, plucked like petals from a lotus. The way Father, then Mother, then Sarapon had been taken from him. The way Julie’s brother Carl had been taken from the Nordstroms in one explosive moment.

  “You had a phone call,” Julie said, her voice with an edge he couldn’t read. Something was wrong.

  “Read to me, Daddy!” Trish’s voice rang in his ear.

  “Anything that can’t wait a few minutes?” Sam asked, and Julie said no. He reached down and picked up one of the library books scattered on the floor at the head of her bed. Julie patted his rear end and left the room. Shafts of rose-colored light shone through the window as the sun set beneath a bank of heavy clouds. “We might have a thunderstorm tonight,” Sam said. “Do you want to hear Thunder Cake?”

  Trish nodded, her brown eyes wide with excitement. Thunder Cake was her favorite story when the clouds built up and the sky growled and snapped. The story was about a girl who learned from her Russian grandmother how not to fear thunder. One day, Sam would tell her about the monsoon thunderclouds, the towering gray beasts that raced across the Cambodian plains of his boyhood, where they spit shafts of lightning and boomed like giant firecrackers above the rice fields.

  Outside, a cat let out an awful wail as lightning slashed the Lowell sky.

  Sam had loved reading to Trish since before she was born. Julie used to pat her stomach and sing flat, toneless lullabies, and he was glad her singing was nothing like Sarapon’s. “Read to her, Sam,” she had said. “They say babies love it. Maybe they even learn something.”

  “Why not?” Sam said. “I can always use the practice.” As often as not, he read to his unborn child from the Lowell Sun. When Trish was two years old, Sam occasionally read to her from the study guide for the patrolman’s civil service examination.

  “If she passes the test, you’re in trouble,” Julie had said, and their laughter seemed to ease the tension over the direction his freedom was taking him.

  “Four generations of police in the family,” he said. “I hadn’t looked at it that way.” Freedom was an illusion anyway. He was bound to spend his life trying to live up to his father’s standards, to make him proud--an impossible task even if Father were alive.

  Before the babushka and her granddaughter finished baking their thunder cake, Trish drifted off to sleep. Sam closed the book and stepped quietly into the kitchen.

  “So who called? Fitchie?” Sam asked.

  “No, it was a crank who said you were in some wreck on Route 3 tonight.” Julie’s face tightened.

  Wreck? “I didn’t hear about an accident.”

  “I called the station. They checked it out and called me back. There wasn’t one. Whoever called earlier had told me you were dead. Someone in the background was laughing.”

  Outside, lightning exploded over the city as night fell. From the bedroom, Trish cried out for her mother. “Sam, close the kitchen window,” Julie said, then she went in to comfort their daughter. He slammed the window shut; the rain fell in sheets. The call could have had nothing to do with the money. It could have been from a cousin of someone he’d arrested for B & E last year, or that kid he’d busted for car theft in the spring. Whatever this was about, they didn’t have to involve his family.

  Outside, a man approached Sam’s car in the driveway. The small figure stood out of the light, soaking in the downpour. Sam watched through the curtains as the man slowed to face the car.

  Him!

  Sam turned and ran for the door. He was going to nail the son of a bitch. “Where are you going?” Julie asked, but Sam was out the door at full speed.

  The young man seemed startled for a moment as Sam bounded off the back steps toward him. Then he turned and ran toward the street, angling across a front yard. Sam chased him, getting drenched, knowing he couldn’t go for long without leaving his family exposed. Julie didn’t even know what he was doing.

  A car sped through a street puddle and broadsided Sam with a sheet of water; he took it splat! in the face. His eyes stung, and he was about to give up the chase when the man suddenly turned left across a lawn. Sam cut a corner and gained a step, but the man’s shirt was just out of reach.

  “Watch out for the wire!” Sam cried. The man slowed for a split second and looked down, then Sam brought him down in a bellyflop onto the grass. They were in the path of a lawn sprinkler, not that it mattered much.

  The young man wore a white shirt with mud and grass clinging to the front. Mud streamed in rivulets down his face; he looked like a frightened muskrat that had climbed out of a swamp. Lying on his back, he connected with a right to Sam’s jaw, a big mistake. Sam knocked the wind out of him with a punch to the solar plexus, then patted him down for weapons, almost disappointed he hadn’t caught Viseth.

  “What were you doing around my car?” Sam asked.

  “Don’t hurt me. I was just cuttin’ through the yard.”

  Julie watched from the kitchen window.

  “You were messing with my car, I saw you.”

  “No I wasn’t. I just seen--I had nothing to do with it--all’s I did is looked, is all I did, honest to Christ.”

  “Then you won’t mind showing me what you saw,” Sam said. They walked back to the car, the man’s arm twisted so that he could scratch between his shoulder blades.

  Mouse Cop lay on the front seat of Sam’s car on the passenger’s side--eyes open, teeth bared, neck broken. “It wasn’t me!” the man said. Acid burned its way up Sam’s throat.

  “Put your hands out, flat on the hood. Now!” There were no scratches on the man’s hands and arms, and none on his neck or his face. Mouse Cop would have fought back, giving his killer something to remember him by. How had the poor cat gotten here? Li Chang’s daughter would be devastated at the news.

  A cruiser arrived within a few minutes, because Julie had called. Jimmy Staggers, his driver’s license said. It sounded like a perfect name for the town drunk, but Jimmy was no such person. As it happened, he lived with his parents one street over, and was probably just cutting through back yards.

  “He hit me,” Jimmy said to the patrolman.

  “I doubt it,” the patrolman said. “You’re still standing. Sam, we’ll take care of the cat.”

  Sam explained the incident to Julie, everything except for Mouse Cop. “Seems like you over-reacted,” she said. “That Staggers kid
cuts through all the time. You ought to change out of those wet clothes.”

  Sam went into the bathroom and changed into fresh slacks and a flowered shirt. He was beginning to feel paranoid, as though evil had traveled halfway around the world expressly to keep him company. A bribe, a phone call, a dead cat--what was going on? And this cat in particular, blocks away from its home. Meanwhile, this murder had better be resolved in the next couple of days, before the trail was as cold as Bin Chea’s ashes.

  “I was hoping to go out tonight and look at a couple of houses,” she said. “Would you watch Trish for me, please? I looked through the real estate ads. They have some two-family homes--”

  “Go right ahead. Trish and I will be fine.” As if Sam had a choice. Julie left her summer teaching job at two-thirty every day and arrived home by three with Trish in one hand and a briefcase in the other. By the time Sam arrived home, she had been alone with Trish for over five hours.

  Sam scrounged for a beer in the refrigerator as Julie left, and from the second-floor window he watched her back her car out of the driveway. The rain had stopped, and he opened the window again, knowing he should have told her about the cat. But then she’d have worried about him even more than usual, and for what? As long as Julie and Trish were safe.

  Yes. As long as they were safe.

  A warm breeze blew in and rustled the newspaper she’d been looking at, and he anchored the page with his beer can. What had she noticed? There was a red circle near the bottom of the page, marked with the pen she used like a scalpel on freshman essays. “Lg 2-fam hse, 4 rm ea side, fncd yd, 2-car grg.” The ad had no name, just an address and a phone number.

  Outside, the sound of Julie’s engine disappeared and was replaced by the thunder of drag-racing Harleys. A fenced-in yard. When he was the same age as Trish and living on the outskirts of Battambang, his yard had no fences. It stretched as far as the edge of his father’s fish pond, and as high as the second branch of the old sdao tree, where he could look down on Mother in her hammock. The road in front was off limits, of course. But he’d always had plenty of room to play, and he wished his daughter could have the same.

  Trish would have loved his old family house, two spacious stories of white stucco surrounded by shade trees and mango orchards and plenty of room to climb and run. Sam imagined Trish in their shaded hammock while her grandmother combed her hair and Sarapon sang love songs in her heavenly crystal voice. Inside, Trish would find her own likeness in almost every room, next to the publicity photo of Sarapon in her glittering sampot that wrapped her in hues of emerald and gold.

  What a life, to watch the egrets in the fish pond in the evening light, to chase the walking-fish back into the pond. He felt a sadness he hadn’t felt since he’d come to America.

  Sam turned to the front page, where Wilkins’ picture appeared along with an article about the killing. Some Cambodians were clamoring for results in the investigation. “The city doesn’t care about Asians,” a source was quoted as saying. Which was wrong, but the Lieutenant didn’t dispute it.

  “This was a brutal murder, and our best people are working on it full time,” Wilkins had replied. “Detective Sambath Long is an experienced officer who knows the Cambodian language. We have placed top priority on this unfortunate incident.”

  Unfortunate, yes. Why had the reporter interviewed the Lieutenant and not the Captain or the Chief?

  If Sam didn’t know any better, he’d think Wilkins had paid him a compliment. Wilkins would no more pay Sam a real compliment than invite him over for afternoon tea. In fact, Sam was the only officer working full-time on the Chea case. “Bet on it,” Callahan had said. “Nail the killer, Wilkins is the hero. Don’t and you’re the scrapegoat.”

  Don’t correct his English. Julie would never let a blunder like “scrapegoat” pass. Not for anyone. Meanwhile, his real concern was to get a killer off the streets. If Wilkins wanted to be the hero, that was fine with Sam. He just wanted people to live in peace.

  A picture of Sam in a molded plastic frame stood on the telephone table in the living room. Sambath Long, police academy graduate, son of Kruy Long, Battambang district chief. He wished he had his father’s photo.

  Already he felt much older than the recruit in the photo who had just turned thirty. He had a slightly flat nose and solid, muscular arms that came from the daily Nautilus and barbells at Cochran’s Gym. “You’re built like a halfback,” Julie had told him, and he hadn’t understood the compliment right away. He didn’t want to be half of anything to Julie. His father’s sense of mission showed in his eyes. Who are you, Sam?

  I am Sambath Long: refugee, survivor. Citizen, cop. Julia’s husband, Patricia’s father. My father’s son, my father’s--no, not his avenger. Bin Chea is dead, and I have a job: find his killer and bring him to justice.

  His face flushed with heat. Where was the justice for my father while his killer lived in freedom for 15 years? No matter who did the job on Bin Chea, they did it right. Why do I give a damn about catching him, even if he’s just Lowell street scum?

  But maybe Cal is right: what better kind of justice than to find Chea’s killer and let him go? Let Wilkins gloat over my failure while I wish a stranger well, like returning a walking fish to the safety of my father’s pond.

  Sam’s eyes were dry--he hadn’t cried since he was 19, and he had no intention of starting now. The last time he cried, Sarapon was being led away from Little Mountain and into the jungle--one soldier in front, two behind. For about a hundred meters he followed, desperately trying to formulate a plan, a ruse, a rescue. A light breeze rustled the forest leaves and blew the stench of the killing field into his face. In the clearing not three hundred meters away was the end of his sister’s world, a tangle of bodies dissolving in the swamp.

  In front of Sambath was the corpse of a tree choked with vines, blocking his view of Sarapon. He stepped around it and found himself looking at a girl with a rifle. Her eyes were two coals glowing with heat. She was just a flat-chested child who should have been home playing with her friends and singing songs by the riverbank.

  “The wheel of history turns!” she said, jamming the barrel into Sambath’s gut. A roar of pain exploded in his body, and his bladder gave way like a broken dam.

  “Go back to work, comrade,” she said. “Comrade Bin says she is a capitalist singer. She will meet Angka, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

  Sambath turned his back on Little Mountain and cried. He beat his head on the rotted trunk, and the girl with the rifle left him alone.

  Part of Sam wished he could cry now. He had never taken the time to grieve properly for his family. Old hurts drifted back, because he had never said goodbye. Maybe he should have a ceremony at a Buddhist temple to remember them, though he had not set foot in a temple since the day his father stopped forcing him to go, about a year before the revolution. What did they look like, his family? No photographs survived, just memories with edges that faded and lines that blurred.

  “Oh, Sam, it’s such a great house,” Julie said. “It’s got hardwood floors, a carpeted stairway up to the bedrooms, a big back yard with a maple tree where we could put up a swing for Trish. Oh, and this very nice Cambodian woman owns it.”

  Her sudden appearance had startled him. She could pull him out of the depths--God, he shouldn’t brood about his past anyway.

  The lamplight glinted in her eyes, and the touch of her hand made him forget his pain for a minute. “You should see the place,” she said. “We have to go back and see it in the daytime. It’s a white two-story house with black shutters and a screened-in porch. She said it has aluminum siding so you don’t have to paint it. And there’s a nice fence around the back yard so Trish can play. Oh Sam, you’ve got to see how they keep the inside. It’s immaculate.”

  That night Sam lay on top of the covers with only the moonlight to help him see. Julie wore a filmy nightgown that Sam had bought her for Valentine’s Day. The curtains rustled in the fan’s soft breeze, and
light danced across the faint image of her breasts. She touched his lips with her fingers, then gently kissed his chest. God, how he wanted her, now and always. Soon her legs were wrapped around him, and their shadows moved slowly against the wall.

  That night, he dreamed of Bin Chea’s corpse on the medical examiner’s table. “Autopsies aren’t pretty,” Dr. Katsios said as he pulled the cord on a chain saw. Then the dead man reached out and grabbed at Sam’s chest.

  Comrade Bin smiled as he clutched Sam’s bloody, beating heart.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The next morning, Viseth drove his shitbox down to the park and waited. Rocky would come by sooner or later as he always did, eating an ice cream or tossing a stone. Viseth parked in the shade of a tree, but the goddamn sunlight kept moving. There was that Cambodian woman again, Bin Chea’s neighbor. The nice-looking broad with the ass going to waste. She looked at him once and went back to playing with her kid. Damn shade was gone now, and the car seat felt like a hot skillet.

  Finally, Rocky appeared in his rear view mirror, sucking on a popsicle. I’ll give you something to suck on, Rocky.

  “Hi Rocky,” he said. Big smile. “Want a ride?”

  “Nah. My name’s not Rocky, it’s Ravy.”

  Viseth didn’t give a damn if the kid’s name was Buddha. “Come on! Want to make five bucks this time? Easy money!”

  Rocky’s eyes lit up. “Five? No way!”

  “Bet your ass,” Viseth said. “Get in the car and I’ll show you.”

  “I’m not supposed to go with strangers.”

  Viseth sighed and put on his best you-hurt-my-feelings look. “Oh, get serious. Do I look like a stranger to you?”