Five Classic Spenser Mysteries

by Robert B. Parker

  “He say they recruited out of refugee camps in Thailand. Say if they make trouble they get shipped back to Vietnam.”

  “Tell him that’s not so,” I said.

  “Told him that,” Hawk said. “He doesn’t think I know.”

  “And he thinks I do?”

  “You white.”

  “Ahh,” I said.

  “Says he knows chocolate soldiers got no power. Wants to hear it from you.”

  “What would happen if they did get shipped back to Vietnam?”

  “Ky was working with us in counterinsurgency,” Hawk said. “Special task force. Root out the Commie vipers and kill ’em. All of a sudden the Commie vipers in charge, and we fighting each other for a spot in the helicopters. Say the Commie vipers be inclined to kill him with bamboo slivers. Says most of the workers got that kind of problem.”

  I nodded. “What color was the guy that signed him up to counterinsurgency?”

  Hawk grinned. He spoke to Ky. Ky answered and looked at me and nodded and grinned.

  Hawk said, “Some honkie major signed him up. Said it would be to his advantage once us Yanks had rooted them Commie vipers out. Said he could count on us Yanks.”

  I nodded. “So much for trusting honkies,” I said.

  Hawk relayed it. Ky replied.

  “It lose a little in the translation,” Hawk said, “but he say he got the idea.”

  “He’s got to trust me and you, or not trust me and you. There’s no way we can assure him that we won’t bolt, and leave him holding the ass end of a tiger. In fact we will.”

  Hawk nodded. “Good point,” he said.

  He talked some more with Ky. Ky nodded and made a short reply and Hawk spoke some more and Ky still nodded and then sat quietly and looked at me. No one else around us said a word. Nobody moved. All of them smoked cigarettes.

  “I told him what we’re up to,” Hawk said. “I told him that we had some influence with the feds. I told him that we wanted them to tear this place up as a diversion so we could get at Susan.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He say the Vietnamese equivalent of un huh.”

  I looked around the bright circle that the fire made, at the semi-shadowed faces of these distant foreign men. Uprooted for decades, used in the service of other people’s goals. One of the things I noticed was that the way they sat shielded us from the sight of the Transpan security types.

  “Here’s what I think,” I said, talking directly to Ky. Every few sentences I paused and Hawk translated for me. “I think that you are probably illegal aliens and run the risk of being deported if you get caught, as you are likely to if you leave here. But I think the deportation, if it happens, will be back to the refugee camp. I don’t think there’s any danger of getting deported to Vietnam.” I was getting very cramped squatting on my haunches. “We will speak to Ives about you, and he will assure us that you won’t be deported, and he might mean it or he might not. And if he does mean it, he might be able to deliver, or he might not.”

  I waited while Hawk spoke.

  “But,” I said, “what I would almost guarantee, is that when Transpan no longer needs you, you’re going to get worse than we’re offering.”

  When Hawk spoke again, Ky nodded and looked at me steadily. Then he spoke.

  “He wants to know what about you,” Hawk said.

  “I’m going to try and get Susan away, and if I succeed I’ll split,” I said. “Hawk too.” I was looking directly back at Ky. “You’ll be on your own.”

  Hawk spoke it to him, Ky nodded some more. And was quiet, looking at me, smoking his cigarette in slow deep drags, holding the smoke in his lungs a long time before he exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he spoke.

  “He wants to know how come you going to all this trouble. Whyn’t you just call up the immigration people and report a bunch of illegal aliens.”

  “Because I need chaos. Immigration comes down, it will be legal and orderly and Russell will be long gone with Susan.”

  Hawk translated, Ky nodded.

  “I can try to get some kind of contact set up for them,” I said. “I can talk to Ives and see if there’s some Vietnamese underground they could disappear into.”

  Hawk told him. Ky shrugged.

  “But I can’t promise,” I said. “And I can’t trust what Ives will say.”

  Hawk translated. Ky nodded and smiled.

  Hawk said “He like that, you don’t trust anyone, and he don’t trust you.”

  “Calls for a lot of negative capability,” I said.

  “They used to it,” Hawk said.

  Ky said something to the men around us. There were murmurs, and one fast staccato of Vietnamese. I looked at Hawk. He shrugged.

  “Too fast for me,” he said. “I don’t know what they saying.”

  Ky turned back to me and looked at me while he dug a package of Camels out of the waistband of his pants and lit one from the butt of the old one and dragged in a lot of smoke and held it. And held it. And looked at me. And then the smoke slowly trickled out through his nostrils.

  He made a sharp nod of his head. “Yes,” he said in English.

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll need some planning.”

  “We done some of that,” Hawk said, “already.”

  “We get the arms room for them,” I said.

  “Yeah. And they got some gasoline. Been stealing it a quart at a time and storing it.”

  “This isn’t a new idea for them,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  My legs got a lot more cramped before we were through, Ky talking, Hawk translating, me replying. But before dawn we knew what we were going to do. And when.

  CHAPTER 35

  The night man at the Transpan armory was a blond guy named Schlenker who spoke English with a German accent. He wore rimless glasses when he read, and he was reading a copy of something in German with his feet up on the counter when I hit him behind the ear with the government issue sap that Ives had given us. He slid sideways out of the chair and his glasses fell off as he hit the floor.

  I squatted beside him and fished the keys out of his right-hand pants pocket. I opened the door to the gun room and the sound of a siren exploded into the quiet night.

  Behind me Hawk said something in Vietnamese.

  A single line of Vietnamese men filed into the gun room. Each grabbed an M16 rifle and a clip of ammunition and moved back out of the armory. Every fourth man took an ammunition box.

  Ky stood beside Hawk speaking softly to the men in Vietnamese. Hawk said something to him in French. Ky nodded.

  The siren screamed and a series of spotlights glared suddenly throughout the compound. I went out the side window headfirst and landed and rolled and got up running. Behind me I heard the first chatter of automatic fire. Then more of it. I was behind the nearest Quonset now, and behind me I heard soft footfalls. I turned with my gun out and it was Hawk.

  “So there was an alarm,” I said.

  “Don’t matter,” Hawk said. “They got the guns.”

  I nodded toward the far side of the compound and we headed for it on the run. No one was worried about us. They still thought we were on their side and, like the rest of the forces, were running around wondering what the hell happened.

  Behind us there was a sudden great whoosh, a giant thud, and the armory burst into a mass of immediate flame.

  “Gasoline do work nice, don’t it,” Hawk said. We paused in shadow along the perimeter fence. “Lead free,” he said. The fire modified the harsh white glow of the spotlights and gave a bronze cast to everything and the men running across the open space became shadowed and distorted as the flames surged and wavered. The automatic fire echoed in short rippling bursts and then the ammunition left in the armory began to explode in festival bursts.

  We edged our way along the fence toward Costigan’s compound. Something big went off in the armory and sent a volcanic spurt a hundred feet in the air. The gunfire had spread and came from ever
ywhere, or seemed to. Someone had set off a fire alarm and the bell clanged steadily in counter-point to the siren.

  “Lucky they’re ringing that bell,” I said. “Never know otherwise there was a fire.”

  “Alert,” Hawk said.

  At the edge of the fire’s roar and the siren’s shriek and the bell’s clang and the gunfire and exploding ammunition I could hear small sounds of human yells, but only bare wisps of sound, almost illusory, the cries of the men overwhelmed by pyrotechnics. Only when I saw the black shadowy distorted elongated forms flit briefly in front of the flames were the cries audible, as if it required the sight of near human form to connect sound with source. Around the mercenary barracks there was no sign of activity. Most of them had been in combat and most of them knew when to stay low and when to fight. When they had guns and you didn’t was the time to stay low.

  CHAPTER 36

  We reached the compound and crouched on our heels behind a low hedge. The picket fence was no problem. It was merely ornamental. Beyond the picket fence a big gussied-up Ford van was parked, with its motor running and its lights on. The van had been customized with porthole windows in back and a big chrome roof rack, and a lot of fancy custom paintwork in the form of swooshes and stripes. The back doors of the van were open and two men carried luggage from the house and stowed it away. Around the van, near the back doors, there were four men with Uzi machine guns and flack jackets. There was a light on upstairs in the house. The men carrying the luggage put the last of it in the van and closed the back doors. They both had Uzis slung over their shoulders. One of them got in the driver’s seat of the van, the other opened the side door nearest the house.

  “They bailing out,” Hawk whispered.

  “I figured they would,” I said. “I was hoping we could get them while they did.”

  Russell Costigan came out of the back door of the house, and Susan came behind him. She wore a black leather jacket and pants. Her face in the reflected light from the car headlights looked serious but not scared. The fire across the company area made everything look reddish and a little satanic.

  The guards closed around them as they stepped to the van.

  “No chance,” I whispered.

  Hawk said, “Um.”

  Susan got in first, Russell behind her. Then the bodyguards got in, the doors closed, and the car lurched slightly as the driver put it in gear.

  “The roof rack,” I said. And Hawk and I stood and sprinted for the van. It began to move slowly across the darkened compound. I caught it from behind and put one foot on the bumper, jumped slightly, caught the rear bar of the roof rack and slithered up onto the roof of the van. The van picked up speed, I felt it rock slightly and Hawk was beside me. Both of us sprawled out flat, side by side on the van roof, holding the front bar of the roof rack as the van moved faster but not yet fast through the flame-tinged darkness.

  There was no one at the facility gate, and as we pulled through it the sound of gunfire behind us became desultory, as if the fight was nearly over. Outside the facility the van picked up speed and Hawk and I held hard as the wind began to rush past us.

  “We stowed away,” Hawk said. “Now what?”

  “Hope the road’s not bumpy,” I said.

  CHAPTER 37

  The road was smooth enough, if you were riding on a springy upholstered car seat. If you were lying on your stomach on the metal roof of a van on top of steel rack ridges, you tended to wish for smoother. The van drove east through the uninterrupted night following the tunnel of its headlights. We jolted along atop it, holding on to the roof rack, keeping our faces turned away from the rush of air that boiled up over the hood and windshield of the van. There was no other sound. We could hear nothing from the van beneath us.

  “Susan wasn’t there we could start shooting down through the roof,” Hawk said. “Ain’t but a thin piece of sheet metal.”

  He had his mouth close to my ear.

  I answered him the same way. “Don’t want to hit the driver, either,” I said. “Having him roll this thing over would not be in our long-term interests.”

  “They got to stop sometime,” Hawk said.

  “And there’s six bodyguards, plus Costigan,” I said.

  “Good idea,” Hawk said. “Getting up here. We no better off than we was if we tried to take them back there.”

  “But it gives me time to think,” I said.

  “Oh good,” Hawk said.

  Now and then a car would come the other way, heading west in the dark, and its headlights would sweep over us. But if they saw two guys riding on top of a van they were by before they could react. And what was there to do in the way of reaction?

  “How fast you think we’re going,” I said to Hawk.

  “Hard to tell. Nothing to compare it to.”

  “Probably fifty-five,” I said. “No reason to go faster. No one’s chasing them. No point getting nabbed for speeding and all the aggravation that might ensue,” I said.

  “Ensue,” Hawk said. “We riding on top of a fucking speeding truck with six armed guys in it in the fucking dark and you talking about ensue.”

  “I’m going to shoot out a tire,” I said.

  “They’ll think the gunshot is just the tire blowing.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “And I figure the guy’s a good driver or they wouldn’t have him driving Russell.”

  “So he won’t panic and roll the van,” Hawk said. The conversation was slow as we took turns talking into each other’s ear.

  “And when he slows down we jump off and get out of sight, and when they all get out to change the tire we make our move.”

  “Which is what,” Hawk said.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Hang on to me.”

  Hawk held the rack bar with one hand. With his other he took hold of my belt. I twisted out over the edge of the moving van and looked down at the black road rippling by below me. With my left hand I clutched the roof rack, with my right I edged my gun out. I arched myself farther out away from the van, halfway off the roof, held by my grip on the rack and Hawk’s grip on my belt. I struggled to be steady, the muscles in my lower back were cramping. The position was nearly impossible. I tightened up my stomach and strained all the muscles in my body to hold steady and aimed and shot out the rear tire on the driver’s side. Almost at once the van began to swerve, the decompressed tire thumped loudly and the van heeled over toward the driver’s side as it lost its level. Brakes squealed. I was concentrating all I had at not dropping my gun. I could feel myself slide a little farther out as the van swerved again and then the brakes caught and it slowed, still swerving, and bumped off the road onto the shoulder. Hawk let go of my belt and I fell headfirst off the van and hit the ground and held on to the gun and rolled twenty feet down the road shoulder, into the ditch that ran beside it. Hawk landed silently and in two steps was beside me. We scuttled along the ditch, on all fours as the van careened to a halt, on the shoulder. There were weeds in the ditch.

  We were ten feet down the ditch from them in the dark when the driver’s door opened and the driver got out. He walked back and looked at the blown tire, then he walked back to the door.

  “It’s blown, Russell. The jack and the spare are in the back under the luggage.”

  Someone in the van said something we couldn’t hear. Then the side door of the van opened and Russell got out. He went back and looked at the tire.

  “Only flat on one side,” he said. He walked back to the open door. “Okay,” he said, “everybody out. Got to jack up the truck and change a tire.”

  Susan leaned out, took Russell’s hand, and stepped onto the highway.

  “Leave the guns in the van,” Russell said. “Don’t want some state cop to come by to help us and see six guys with machine guns.”

  The bodyguards piled out of the van and stood along the highway looking at the van.

  The driver went back to the rear door and opened it.

  “Somebody gonna help me?” he said.


  “Curley,” Russell said, “you help him. Rest of us will check out the heavens.”

  He stood beside Susan. “Like those stars, baby? Romantic, huh?”

  Susan didn’t say anything. She stood quietly beside him. The four bodyguards stood near them at the front of the van, while Curley and the driver unloaded the luggage.

  I touched Hawk’s arm and pointed toward the two unloaders. He nodded and moved back down the ditch soundlessly. I edged in the other direction so that I was ahead of the van. When they finished with the luggage, the driver deployed the jack and the spare, while Curley squatted with the lug wrench and loosened the flat. The driver jacked up the van and then squatted beside Curley while both of them removed the bad tire. As they were in the midst of this Hawk came silently out of the ditch. He hit Curley across the base of the skull with the barrel of his gun and kicked the driver in the face. Curley’s shout of pain turned everyone toward him and I scrambled out of the ditch behind the others and put my forearm under Russell’s chin and my gun hard into his ear. From the back of the van Hawk, in a half crouch, aimed his gun at the remaining guards.

  “Susan,” I said, “step away from the group.”

  “My God,” Susan said.

  I said it harder. “Step away.”

  She did.

  “You four,” I said. “Facedown, on the ground, hands locked behind your head.”

  The four bodyguards looked at me without moving, Hawk shot the one closest to Russell. The bullet hit him and spun him half around and he bumped into the van and slid to the ground leaving a smear of blood on the side of the van.

  “On the goddamned ground,” I said and the three guards still standing dropped to the ground, facedown, and put their hands behind their heads.

  “Spenser,” Russell said. It wasn’t a question.

  “You finish the tire,” I said to the driver.

  “I’m hurt,” he said. He was sitting on the ground with his face in his hands.