He had gotten an anonymous letter that told him about Preacher’s frail condition. The letter simply said it was from one of his teammates who wished to remain anonymous, and asked that he send some picture postcards from Thailand, where Preacher had spent some quality R&R.
“Preacher likes to look at Oriental things, just like when we were all together on the team,” it read. “Please keep it brief and simple, and no need to tell him who’s sending them.” That’s all the note said, and Gunner was ready to dismiss it as a prank until he saw the imprint of the Special Forces Insignia in the lower left-hand corner. Someone was fucking with him, but Gunner had figured the best thing he could do was to comply with their wishes until he knew who it was. Still, he had played nice for as long as he intended to. The next postcard Preacher would receive would comply with no one’s wishes but Gunner’s.
The skull’s-head ring was placed into the body bag on the last day the team was together. Sliding the ring onto the bloody finger of his decapitated comrade was particularly disgusting, even for a man like Gunner. He had thought about it for a long time, even hoped that an opportunity would present itself, an opportunity for him to become dead without dying. An opportunity to start over with a new identity. An opportunity to make the kind of big bucks that he saw being made by all the drug and gun kingpins in Southeast Asia. He saw his chance on that terrible day, and being the assertive guy that he was, took it. For Gunner McConnell, it had seemed to work out fine. For over twenty years, he’d traveled to Los Angeles several times a year to maintain his supply lines, becoming connected with the Little Saigon version of the Yakuza. Gunner McConnell had his life tied into a neat and profitable bundle, except for this one loose end.
For the past three months, Gunner had put out hundreds of feelers, but was unable to get one lead on the person or persons that knew he had not been inside that body bag twenty-two years ago. He wasn’t sure what kind of scam was going on, but was certain that it must be one of his ex-teammates who had found out about the switch and was now contemplating extortion. The writer had used the operative word “we” when he asked Gunner to send postcards. For now, he would have to just bide his time, but he knew in his heart that he would severely punish the perpetrator once he found out who it was. Gunner could feel his groin start to tingle at the thought of running his blade inside another body. A thin smile touched his lips as he reached into his right pants pocket and wrapped his fingers around his reassuring folding six-inch knife.
SIX
Jerry transferred the postcards to an evidence envelope and got into his unmarked police cruiser for the short drive back to Rampart Station. The postcards were his first substantial lead, and he knew from experience that they could be a real break in this case. Back in ’80, he had been on a serial murder case where all of the victims, all eight of them, had been strangled with a thin wire and their nuts cut off. The killer was cold and calculating, and Jerry never had a substantial clue until he found a business card in the shirt pocket of one of the victims identical to one found in the wallet of one of the other victims. It read: Ruby Dee’s Gourmet Foods. Your Wildest Dietary Dreams Are the Reason for Our Existence. It was a double-sided card, and the other side had a name, Ruby D’Angelo, Proprietor.
It was just a hunch at first, then it had mushroomed into a full-blown theory which consumed Jerry’s waking and sleeping hours. Business cards and balls hammered his brain day and night until he finally came up with a plan. Twice while he had a surveillance crew watching Ruby Dee’s, new murders occurred. Each time there was a murder, there was a delivery to her shop by a guy that came late in the evening. Not just any guy, but the same guy. Correlations and coincidences were the stock and trade of good detective work. Find a correlation or a coincidence, and you had a lead that was usually solid, a pattern that would yield another piece of the jigsaw puzzle. This time, he had two correlations: the same guy and the same timing.
It was easy after that to get Superior Court Judge Amos Wallace to give a search warrant. Jerry had found the human testicles on one of the shelves that lined Ruby Dee’s store, in a jar marked “Lamb Fries.” A simple genetic sperm analysis was all it took to tie the nuts to the last two victims, and they wrapped up the case. The delivery boy was the killer, because one of Ruby Dee’s customers had a penchant for nuts. The murder conspiracy trial only lasted five days, and with the evidence they had collected, the outcome was never in doubt. Ruby and her cohorts were convicted and put away for life without the possibility of parole, perhaps worse than the death penalty for gourmets who would have to eat prison food for the rest of their lives.
Jerry turned the evidence envelope over to Howard Wong, the resident forensic expert, for identification, tagging, handwriting analysis, and latent prints. “You finally get a break on the Little Saigon murders, Jerry, or are you planning on visiting a friend in Bangkok?”
“Possibly a little of both, Howard. I know it will take some time for you to do a complete analysis of these postcards, but I’d appreciate it if you could do the latent prints right away. I can wait for a couple of days for the rest of it.”
“Very generous of you, Jerry. I’ll see what I can do for you in getting a print match. Who’s touched these cards besides you?”
“A couple of my old Army buddies, William Beal possibly. I think a guy by the name of Gunner McConnell wrote them to another one of my ex-teammates, a guy by the name of Paul Abrams. We called him Preacher.”
“Anyone else you can think of?”
“Just every doctor and nurse at Santa Monica Veterans’ Hospital.”
“Well, let’s hope not. I’ll dust these, computerize the results using our scanning equipment, and try a cross-match through military files. With any luck, I should be able to come up with something by the end of my shift.”
“Thanks, Howard. If I’m not here, you can get hold of me at the 44 Magnum.”
“What do I get out of this deal, Jerry?”
“Dinner for two at Mama San’s in Little Saigon.”
“That’s right next to Baker’s Alley, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, have you eaten there before?”
“No, and I don’t think I’ll take you up on your generous offer anyway. I prefer Chinese. Maybe a rain check until after you’ve solved this case.”
SEVEN
By the time Jerry arrived, the 44 Magnum was full of smoke, booze, and tall tales. It was just after five p.m. After yesterday’s visit to the VA Hospital, Jerry was trying hard to push Preacher out of his mind. Armando was leaning on the bar, his ear bent toward one of the patrons, who was telling him a dirty story. It must have been good and saucy, because several patrons on each side of him were also leaning toward him in an effort to get all the juicy details. As Jerry approached an empty stool at the end of the bar, raucous laughter told him the story had been terminated.
Mondo caught his eye. “Yo, Jerry, I got a great story to tell you. Double scotch, right?”
“Right, Mondo. Double scotch, hold the story.” Mondo brought Jerry’s drink over and placed it on a bar napkin.
“You’re just a barrel of laughs today, Jerry. Rough day at the orifice?” The whole bar cracked up laughing as Mondo swung his arm around in an enticing manner.
“No, Mondo, I’ve just been down in the barrio doing a little cleaning up. Know what I used?”
“No. What did you use, Jerry?”
“Spic and span.” The whole bar laughed even harder as Jerry swung his arm around in a tight circle.
Mondo put his head down and made for the glass washing machine, where he proceeded to break several glasses. He was obviously pissed, but Jerry knew that he would forget about it in a few minutes. “Hey, shitbird,” he shouted in Jerry’s direction.
“You talking to me, Mondo?”
“Yeah, I see you know your name. In case you haven’t noticed, your scruffy buddy is sitting at the back table.”
“No, I hadn’t noticed. Thanks for the tip.”
Mondo grabb
ed his crotch with his wet hands. “That was just information! This is the tip I’ve got for you,” he said with a chuckle.
Mondo had managed to get his machismo back at Jerry’s expense, and that made Jerry happy. If there was one thing Jerry had learned since he got out of school, it was this: don’t piss off your bartender. Jerry turned on his barstool and sure enough, there was Willy Beal, half nodding off at a back table.
“He’s been hitting the sauce pretty hard for the past couple of hours, Jerry. He’s been mumbling about seeing a preacher or something like that. He doesn’t strike me as being a regular member of the ‘God Squad.’”
“Thanks again for the information, Mondo.” The two men smiled at each other as Jerry got up and went to the back table, over which Willy B. now slumped like a bearded sack of spuds.
Jerry reached over and shook Willy’s shoulder, trying to revive him. “Willy, Willy Beal. It’s me, Jerry. Wake up, we’ve got to talk.”
Willy was mumbling, almost incoherently. “I got bad news from the hospital . . . Preacher’s dead!”
“What?” Jerry was stunned at the news. “I was just out to see him yesterday, Willy. He looked bad, sure, but . . . ”
“I went to the hospital to visit him today, Jerry. The head nurse on his wing said he died in his sleep last night. Just up and fucking died on me. The fucking drugs are what killed him, Jer. He never would’ve got AIDS if he hadn’t been hooked on scag in the first place.” Willy B. let out a long sigh, and then put his head down on his arms and started to sob inconsolably.
In all the years that Jerry had known Willy, he couldn’t remember ever seeing him cry. It was sad to know that one of the team members was gone, especially the way Preacher went out, but it was even sadder to watch an old friend sobbing like a baby into a tattered, filthy coat sleeve. “Calm down, Willy. At least he went quietly in his sleep. It could have been worse.”
Willy abruptly stopped crying. “I guess you’re right, Jer. One thing . . . He did leave something before he went to sleep last night.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know if this means anything, but I found this postcard on his tray table. It was all crumpled up, that’s why it looks so bad.”
Willy B. reached into his coat pocket and pulled out another postcard from Thailand, and like he said, it was really crumpled up. It looked like something you might do if you received a letter with bad news in it or a card that had gone through a laundry cycle. “Mind if I see that, Willy?”
“No, but it’s not very nice, Jerry. Whoever sent this wasn’t very charitable to our teammate.”
Willy unrumpled the postcard as he handed it across the table to me. Jerry read it carefully to himself, several times.
“That motherfucker. That scumbag. If I ever get my hands on Gunner’s throat, I’ll choke him so hard his eyeballs will pop out of his head.”
“I told you you wouldn’t like it, Jerry,” said Willy with more than a hint of sarcasm.
The postcard was postmarked the same as all the others, from the same postal station in Bangkok. It was the words that were different. The friendly text was gone and replaced with the angry words, “I hope the AIDS kills you . . . with extreme prejudice, and soon! You are an embarrassment to your teammates, you faggot junkie son of a bitch. Do us all a favor and kill yourself like a real man.” The card was printed just like the others and signed “Gunner.”
Seeing the signature momentarily snapped Jerry’s mind back to GRU in Vietnam, and for the first time told him his long-held suspicions about Gunner were indeed true. The son of a bitch was alive.!
“Do you know for sure how Preacher died, Willy?”
“Like I said, the nurse told me he just died in his sleep. They came into his room in the morning with his medication and found him staring at the ceiling.”
“I’d better check this out for myself. Mind if I keep this postcard?”
“Course not. Jerry, you’ve got to stop Gunner. Promise me!”
Jerry hated making promises that he might not be able to keep, but if it would comfort Willy a bit, then what the hell. “I promise I’ll get the guy who is behind Preacher’s death. There, does that satisfy you?”
“Yeah. Hey, Jerry, you think there is a connection between Preacher’s death and the Little Saigon murders?”
“Well, if what you say is true about Preacher, that he just died in his sleep, then I guess not. Now on the other hand, if his ear turns up missing, maybe. I’ll work on it and let you know if I find out anything.” Jerry didn’t like lying to his friends, but he had no intention of letting Willy Beal in on the details of an active, ongoing murder investigation, just to reduce his anxiety.
“Yeah, thanks, Jerry. You know Preacher, he was a good guy. Never hurt anyone that I know of, except Charley.”
Jerry got up from the table and walked to the bar, where he took out a twenty and passed it across to Mondo. “Don’t let my friend’s glass get empty, Mondo. If I hear from Willy that you didn’t keep him in suds, well, you can just consider your ass the grass and me the lawnmower.”
Armando grabbed the twenty. “Yo, Jerry, is my tip included in this?”
Jerry grabbed the front of his pants with both hands and Armando knew he shouldn’t have asked. “Your tip is in here, Mondo.”
“You always were a small tipper, Jerry,” he said with raucous laughter.
EIGHT
It was ten a.m. Bangkok time when Gunner McConnell, AKA Mack Connelly, boarded the Thai Air 747 bound for Los Angeles. “Mack” had made this flight many times before, preferring to fly first class in spite of the extra five hundred bucks it cost him. To him, money was no object, just a commodity to be freely spent so he could continue his extravagant lifestyle.
As he sat back in the wide, plush seat, a rocks glass of scotch filled his meaty right hand. His mind dropped off the precipice of reverie to another time, another place. It was 1967 and he was in a mid-sized Vietnamese hamlet by the name of Long Binh. Long Binh was the home of what some servicemen used to call the “LBJ.” A smile rolled onto Mack’s face as he thought of those initials and what they stood for, and LBJ didn’t mean Lynden Baines Johnson, then America’s revered leader. It stood for the Long Binh Jail, a hellhole run by the Marine Corps, housing some of the baddest dudes that ever pissed on their C.O.’s leg. These guys would frag a lieutenant just to raise the membership rolls of their stateside Disabled American Veterans Chapter.
Then-Sergeant, not-yet-Corporal McConnell had spent the last thirty days in the LBJ, scrubbing floors and toilets with a toothbrush, and constantly being kicked around by his marine tormentors. Let’s face it, they especially didn’t have any use for U.S. Army grunts, even Special Forces grunts, that were sentenced by the code of military justice to stay in their hotel.
It wasn’t as if he’d killed anybody he wasn’t supposed to have. Gunner had been incarcerated for tattooing his initials with his Ka-Bar on an ARVN Captain’s forehead. No harm, no foul, he thought, but Daiwe must have thought different, so here he was, and here he’d stay until his thirty days were up. Sergeant Romanowski was his main tormentor. He couldn’t figure out where the corps got such big guys. They didn’t even have a college football team to draw from, but Romanowski looked like a circus strongman from Gunner’s childhood. It was no great mystery why he had drawn jailhouse duty. He was such a big target that he wouldn’t last five seconds on the front line. Instead, “the Hulk” got his rocks off by beating on Army personnel. His weapon of choice was his swagger stick. If you complained to the LBJ’s C.O. about his use of the stick, he would start using his foot to kick the shit out of you, so either way, it was better to just take Romanowski’s discipline and do your time. In his school, the LBJ Institute for Higher Learning, they taught his “Three R’s,” and they weren’t, reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic. Romanowski’s Three R’s stood for RETRIBUTION, RETALIATION, and REPRISALS, and if you wanted to matriculate from his school in one piece, you had to take the shit he han
ded out and quietly do your time.
Rewards can be found, though, even during the toughest of times. McConnell got his at Mama O’s Bar, a small, one-room dive right on the edge of the prison compound. On the day he got out, McConnell, so the story goes, went down the road to Mama O’s and spent the day “drinking and dropping.” While he was drinking several beers, he was dropping several cans of Vietnamese lighter fluid all over and under the barstool on his right. From what he had learned from Rosie, “the Hulk” came in here every night after work. McConnell, leaving nothing to chance, paid a bar girl to sit on the stool to his left all afternoon. She didn’t feel right just being paid to sit, so every once in a while, he’d allow her to give him a hand job. Never let it be said that Gunner’s time in the service hadn’t taught him the value of safe sex.
About six thirty, The Hulk arrived and Gunner waved him over, offering him the stool on his right. “No hard feelings, Sarge. You won’t see me in your hotel again. Rosie, please get this gentleman a beer.”
It all happened so fast! Romanowski took his beer with his left hand and tossed it in Gunner’s direction as if saluting the Commander in Chief. “Semper Fi,” he says. McConnell’s right hand took his own beer. After he raised it and repeated the “jarhead” national anthem, “Semper Fi,” he smashed it over Romanowski’s forehead. Romanowski blinked, as the suds and the embedded glass momentarily obscured his vision. Next, one of McConnell’s knives came out and slammed through the back of Romanowski’s hand, spiking him to the bar top. Romanowski screamed as blood spurted out the back of his hand and tears streamed down his face. Gunner pulled the second knife out and quickly and painfully nailed the end of Romanowski’s limp dick to his stool. Next came Mack’s Zippo lighter, which he struck and threw onto the floor under Romanowski’s stool.
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