UP IN NARCOTICS and Vice, Fox was at the computer, scrolling through U.S. Army travel orders for the Republic of Vietnam, alphabetized lists of soldiers and serial numbers. He’d worked his way from January, 1968 to June, 1968. Peetey sat across the room, his feet up on one of the metal desks, paging through a year-old copy of Guns and Ammo, watching the back of Fox’s head and glancing up at the clock every few minutes.
Finally, he put the magazine down, pulled back his pony-tail, and took his feet off the desk.
“Let’s hit the street, man,” he said. “Find out what’s going on.”
“It’s all in here,” Fox said, tapping the “page down” key, scrolling down through alphabetized names on the still-classified Special Orders dated May, 1968, assigning Special Forces personnel to foreign duty. “Everything we need to know, and I’ll find it. All it takes is …”
He hit another key, the list of names replaced on the screen by the words: NOT A VALID COMMAND. ACCESS DENIED. SEE DOD SPECIAL ORDER (AR 210-10) and the reflection of the office door opening. “… I’m beginning to think I’ll never access these files.”
“Exactly,” Rivas said, standing in the doorway to the outer office. Peetey started up from the chair, then caught himself, pretending he’d known Rivas was there all along.
“How’s it goin’, Peetey,” Rivas said, on his way across the room, stopping behind Fox, looking down at the computer screen over his shoulder. “Any luck?”
“These D.O.D. files are tough to break into, I’ve tried …”
“I wouldn’t know,” Rivas said, raising his hand, “anything about breaking into classified files. And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to violate any federal laws.
“Hanson’s record speaks for itself. I just get curious sometimes. My wife tells me not to bring the job home, but I get curious. No big deal. If you can’t access those files, nobody can. Don’t waste any more of your time or expertise on it,” he said, walking away.
He stopped at the door. “You’re due to go on vacation in a week or so, aren’t you?” he asked Fox.
“Postponed it for a while. Need to clear some of these cases before I go.”
“You work too hard,” Rivas said. “Take her easy, Peetey.”
“That little spic motherfucker,” Peetey said, when the door closed behind Rivas.
Fox watched names scroll down the screen.
“You got a lot of vacation time built up,” Peetey said. “If you don’t use it …”
“I’m planning to take a couple weeks in September,” Fox said, his eyes on the screen.
“You going to the same place down there in …”
“Panay,” Fox said, keying another file, the cursor blinking on a blank screen. “On one of the little islands.” He looked up at the clock, flipped through his notebook, typed in a command for yet another name search.
“I’m jealous, man,” Peetey said. “You’re buying two of ’em?”
“It’s more like a lease. A two week lease for a pair of sixteen year olds. I give ’em the money and for two weeks they do whatever I want.”
“Like what, man? I mean, I gotta ask.”
Fox typed in another code and the screen filled up with words– CLASSIFICATION–SECRET–DOD AND USARPAC REG CATEGORY II–NOFORN–NEED TO KNOW ONLY. PRESS ENTER TO CONTINUE.
“What did I just say? Any thing,” Fox said, hitting the ENTER key, “as long as it doesn’t cause permanent damage. Sometimes you have to pay a bonus.”
“Real pros.”
“They’re not whores, like these, nothing like some nappy headed blow job junkie up on the Avenue who smells like her last fifty tricks, with sores on her mouth.
“These girls are clean, like geishas, ‘the floating world,’ you know? Trained since childhood to give a man pleasure. At the end of two weeks, it’s “bye-bye” girls, whatever name you decided to call them.
“And they say, ‘Bye, bye. We aw-rays ruve you.’ You never hear, ‘Call me tomorrow?’ or ‘Where were you last week-end?’”
Peetey laughed.
Fox stared at the screen, tapping the page down key, running text down almost too fast to read.
“You know,” Peetey went on, “a few times last year, when you were down there in the Philippines? With two girls? And I’m in bed with Trish? I’d look over at her, sleeping, putting on weight while she sleeps, man.” He shook his head. “I’d think, what if she died? Just died. I don’t mean kill her, nothing like that. At all. But …”
“Bingo,” Fox said, freezing the names, highlighting one halfway down the screen:
HANSON, C.K. SGT. 240-60-3427–NEW DUTY STATION–ASSN CO. C. 5TH SPECIAL FORCES GROUP (ABN), USARPAC RVN. SECURITY CLEARANCE: SECRET–DOD NAC CENTER >>>
“We’re in business.” Fox said.
• • •
Hanson drove slowly down Mason Street, maneuvering through the district to keep the afternoon sun out of his face, while Dana looked through the newspaper real estate ads. He was about to decide whether to jog left on Vancouver when a woman ran out from behind a house, waving her arms, followed by a little girl in a yellow sun dress.
“It’s that Topper,” the woman shouted. “He’s killing her.”
“Hurry,” the little girl cried. Her eyes were huge and her dark brown cheekbones glistened with tears.
Hanson pulled to the curb, threw the car in PARK, pulled the keys from the ignition, and slid his nightstick out of its holder as he opened and closed the door. Dana was already out. “Where?” he said.
“Does he have a weapon?” Hanson asked, about to pull his packset to call for a cover car.
“Back here,” the woman said, turning and running. “Hurry.”
The little girl ran behind her, stopped and looked at the cops, then ran some more.
“Does he have a weapon?” Dana said.
“Don’t have no weapon. It’s Topper,” the woman said. “In the back.”
As they ran between houses, Hanson thought he heard cursing and grunting in the back. He kicked through a broken gate into the back yard.
There at the edge of a little garden, in the tomato plants, a brindle pit bull was eating a German shepherd. The shepherd’s throat was matted with blood, his stomach torn open, but he was still alive. His eyes were rolled back to the whites and his front legs twitched as if he were asleep and dreaming of a chase. The pit bull had pulled a translucent blue and gray coil of intestines out of the shepherd and was chewing it, without anger or relish or urgency.
The little girl shrieked and ran toward the dogs. Hanson caught her by the arm, and she fought him, screaming, tearing the neck of her sun dress. The pit bull turned at the noise and walked, stiff-legged and growling, toward them, a length of intestine caught in his teeth, trailing behind him.
Dana shot the pit bull once, square in the chest, and he raised slightly up on his hind legs, then dropped back down, stiff-legged on all fours. He turned and went back to the twitching shepherd and began chewing again, blood pumping out of the bullet hole in his chest. “Hold her,” Hanson said, picking up the kicking girl and handing her to a man watching from the back porch. He pushed through the crowd that was gathering, and ran to the patrol car.
Neighbors were walking up the street now, crossing the yard, drawn by the patrol car and the sound of the shot. Hanson popped the magnetic lock on the cuff that held the shotgun against the dashboard, pulled the gun out and ran back around the house. The crowd moved aside when they saw the shotgun.
The pit bull’s maul-shaped head was half-buried in the shepherd’s stomach, jerking from side to side, worrying something inside loose. The shepherd’s jaws opened and closed convulsively, vomiting gouts of blood, shiny as paint, that splashed on the dark leaves of the tomato plants and the brown soil.
Hanson jacked a round into the shotgun and fired into the dogs, pumping another round and another. Each twelve gauge round fired a dozen lead pellets the size of pencil erasers, hitting the dogs and the fat tomatoes like a killer wind, blowing a red mist of meat and fur and bloody mud and tomato flesh across the garden. When the shotgun was empty, Hanson jacked the action open. The stink of gun smoke mixed with the rich smell of fresh tomatoes. The two dogs looked like something on the freeway after a lot of traffic had run it over.
“We didn’t call you all to shoot her dog,” the woman holding the little girl shouted. “We could of took her to the vet.”
Hanson looked down at the dogs, his ears ringing. The shotgun was hot in his hands.
“Could I get your name, ma’am,” Dana said to the woman, holding his pocket notebook.
“No, you can’t get my name,” she shouted, “what good that gonna do anything now? He killed ’em both.”
“Ma’am,” Dana said, “there wasn’t anything we could do for the little girl’s dog except put it out of its misery. If I could just have your name …”
“You don’t know that. You could of took it to the vet. That’s all you know is how to kill something.”
“His guts were torn out and all over the yard, ma’am,” Hanson said. “A vet can’t fix that.”
“Let’s get outta here,” Dana said, “and write it up somewhere else.”
As the two of them walked back through the crowd, a teenage boy, held back by two men, screamed at them, “Why you kill Topper? Why you kill my dog? It was a fair fight, man, till you shot him.”
“You proud of yourselves?” someone in the crowd yelled.
Hanson snapped the shotgun back into its holder as they drove off.
“Well,” Dana said, “I think there’s gonna be a whole lot of paperwork on that. What do you think?”
“We’re gonna have to write a book on that,” Hanson said. “We’re gonna have to do some creative writing.”
“I don’t want to sound critical, my man, but I think maybe you overreacted a little bit. With the shotgun and all,” Dana said. “We’ll be lucky if we don’t have to go to Internal Affairs on this.”
“Fuck Internal Affairs,” Hanson said, wrenching the wheel, fishtailing a little onto Vancouver Street. “You know? Fuck them. They can stick it up their ass.”
They passed the Muslim Temple and the boarded-up Egyptian Theatre. Dana looked at Hanson, then back at the street. The hot smell of the shotgun filled the car.
All you know is how to kill something.
“One time,” Hanson said, “up in Northern I Corps. A few days after we’d been overrun and taken the camp back. The Montagnards were out burning the grass in the perimeter wire, so sappers can’t crawl through the wire by hiding in the grass. The ‘Yards were being lazy, and they didn’t police up all the claymore mines. The grass fire set one of them off. I heard the explosion and saw the smoke in the wire, and at first I thought we were taking mortar fire. Then I ran out there.
“The claymore had caught the squad leader from the One-oh-One company, dead center, from his hips up into his chest. We weren’t good buddies or anything, but I knew him, you know? His name was Kraang-The-Hawk. We’d been on operations together. I talked to him sometimes. He’d shown me pictures of his family and was always saying how he was gonna take me down to Hue sometime to meet them. He’d had to pay a fortune in bribes to get them out of a Vietnamese resettlement camp.
“They’d gotten a poncho under him and were trying to use it like a stretcher, but it kept slipping out of their hands. I worked my way over to him–kept getting caught on the concertina, the grass burned black and still smoking, burning my feet.
“He was rocking on his elbows. I could see his hip bones, pieces of his fucking pelvis. Rocking up to look at himself. Then he’d slip in the blood and fall back. Splashing blood.”
Hanson turned his head at a threatening flicker of movement, a Doberman watching them from behind a chain-link fence. The sleek dog was poised as if he was ready to jump, his ears up, alert, shivering with excitement as they passsed.
“Like a bathtub of blood. He humped up again, on one elbow, and reached down there like maybe he could stuff his guts back in. He was, keening, is the word I guess.”
Hanson pushed back into the broken-down bench seat. He turned off Haight Street onto Failing, opening and closing his hand. A sound down in his chest, so faint at first that he wasn’t aware of it, rose in his throat before he choked it off. Dana hadn’t heard the sound, or was pretending he hadn’t.
Hanson tried to relax his neck muscles, looking out the filthy windshield at the passing neighborhood. “Then he saw me standing behind him. Carrying my Car-15. And gave me this look. Rolled his eyes up and looked at me.”
At a stop sign, Hanson took his pistol belt in both hands and tugged at it. “I knew what he wanted.” He pushed up out of the seat and jerked the belt, heavy with equipment, into a more comfortable position.
“I fuckin’ looked away, man. I ran back to the teamhouse and yelled for the medic. The medic. Shit. The medic couldn’t do anything for him.”
They passed a broken-down pickup truck with four flat tires. Its engine and hood had been removed and piled in the back along with a muffler and an old TV set. The blocks were lined with gutted cars that looked as if someone had taken them apart and then couldn’t figure out how to get them back together. “We need to tag some of these junk cars,” Hanson said, “and get ’em towed.
“We brought a stretcher out from the medical bunker–the grass was still burning–and rolled him onto it. He kept opening and closing the hand that still worked. Making a fist. I wish I could go back, for thirty seconds, and act like a fucking man this time. It’s, the truth is, I don’t feel bad about anybody I did shoot …”
Five Eighty
“Five Eighty, go ahead.”
Uh, Five Eighty, take a cold burglary report …
“Sometimes,” Dana said, “with that kind of damage, the pain’s not as bad as you might think. Shock and …”
“We had an agreement. Me and Quinn and Silver and Doc. If one of us got real fucked up, lost our legs or balls or faces, whoever was with him would see to it that he was dead before the medivac got there. We got drunk in the team house one night, cut our hands with an NVA bayonet, and made a blood oath.”
Hanson looked at the scar on the heel of his hand, a livid knot at the end of a fine white line, like a tiny comet. “A blood oath. Like a bunch of boy scouts.”
Small children playing in the streets waved as they drove past, calling PO-lice, PO-lice, a sound like cooing doves. Hanson and Dana waved back and said, “Hi, young man,” or “Hi, young lady, how you doin’?” The cops were already as regular a part of their young lives as breakfast or bedtime.
They drove the blocks for half an hour without getting a call, angling through the district, turning left or right at random, circling back, watching over the district. They looked for trouble, stolen cars and open doors, for people who looked away too quickly or walked wrong when they saw the patrol car, yet it was relaxing, like cruising the neighborhood. Hanson felt at home. It was home.