Nightmare Range Read online

  “Janson has good taste,” Ernie said. “First his late wife and now this joint.”

  “Living his life to the full.”

  After about twenty minutes, Billings walked in, which didn’t surprise us much, but what did surprise us was the guy he had in tow. Chief Janson.

  We were at a table in a dark corner; my back was to them, and Ernie adjusted his seat so his couldn’t be easily seen from where they sat at the bar.

  “Looks like the chaplain’s counseling has done wonders for Janson,” Ernie said.

  I heard their laughter as the excited barmaids brought them drinks without their having to order. Regulars. Through the smoke-covered mirror on the back wall I made out the smiling woman who leaned over to serve Janson. She was tall, thin, and elegant. Gorgeous, all in all. Black hair billowed around her pale, heart-shaped face. Her eyes slanted up, painted heavily with shadow.

  The Spider Lady.

  Ernie had checked with one of the girls earlier and gotten her story. She owned the joint, having apparently earned the initial capital outlay from working as a nurse. Some of the girls claimed it didn’t come so much from her salary but from making extracurricular arrangements with a few of the doctors. On a cash basis.

  That would explain her infatuation with the white-coated types who worked in the Preventive Medicine division.

  I wondered if she knew that Janson was actually a veterinarian—a horse doctor. But maybe it was just the rubber gloves that turned her on.

  Could this be it? Could it be as simple as Janson’s wanting to break free from his present old lady to hook up with the Spider Lady? We waited until Janson walked into the latrine and Billings was deep in conversation with one of the Spider Lady’s girls, then we slipped out of the club.

  We walked into the crisp night air of Itaewon, rejected two propositions, and sauntered down the hill toward our favorite beer hall.

  “We have the motive,” Ernie said. “All we have to do now is find the opportunity.”

  The big beer hall was on the outskirts of Itaewon. We drank draft beer, rubbed elbows with Korean working men, and bantered with the rotund Mongolian woman who slammed down frothing mugs in front of us.

  All I could think about was the small Oriental doll and how she had looked with that bloody gash beneath her breast.

  In the morning we slipped out of the office as early as we could, supposedly on our way to pump up Colonel Stone-heart’s black market arrest statistics but actually on our way to see Captain Kim and get the key to Janson’s house. It went smooth. Captain Kim liked the way we didn’t try to revamp four thousand years of Korean culture every time we ran into a procedure we didn’t approve of. He gave us the key.

  The first sergeant would have had a fit if he’d known we were entering the restricted premises of a murder site. But we didn’t plan on telling him.

  Janson had moved most of his stuff out and was staying in officers’ quarters on the base. White tape in the shape of a small woman surrounded a caked blot of blood. The Korean police usually use tape instead of chalk since it’s hard to make an outline of the victim with chalk on vinyl floors that are heated from below by hot-air ducts. The floor we walked on in our stocking feet was cold now.

  We surveyed the apartment. It was a one-bedroom job with a small kitchen and a cement-floored bathroom. There was no beer in the refrigerator.

  Metal clanged and I heard an old man wailing for his life.

  The rag dealer.

  We put our shoes back on and hurried out to stop the old man and ask if he’d seen anything unusual yesterday afternoon.

  I greeted him in Korean, “Anyonghaseiyo.”

  The old man halted his cart, smiled, and his leathery brown face folded into so many neat rows that I almost thought I heard it crinkle. He kept his mouth open and didn’t seem to know what to say. Talking to Americans wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence for him. Folks in the UFO society probably have more conversations with aliens.

  “Yesterday,” I said, “we were sitting in that store over there when you came by.”

  The old man nodded. “Yes. I saw you.”

  “You bought some aluminum cans from this woman in this house here.”

  “Yes, yes. That’s right.”

  “And then you went around the corner, down the hill.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual?”

  “Unusual?”

  “Yes. Did you see any American people in the neighborhood?”

  “No. I saw no American people. The Korean police already asked me that. Look, I am an old man and I have to support myself and a sick wife. Do you want to buy something?”

  “No. We don’t want to buy anything.”

  We went back into the house and the old man trundled his cart down the road, clanging his metal shears and wailing his plaintive song.

  We searched the grounds, passing through a narrow passageway that ran between the side of the apartment and the big sandstone brick wall that separated the building from the two-story house next door. Out back, a small cement-floored courtyard sat behind Janson’s apartment and the landlord’s apartment next door. It was enclosed by the big ten-foot masonry wall topped with the shards of glass.

  The entire complex was on a corner, formed by the alley that ran up the steep hill we had originally come up in our Jeep and the street that ran in front of the little store from which we had conducted our surveillance.

  The only way for someone to enter this house while we were watching from the store was over the back wall, which seemed unlikely since it faced other people’s residences, or over this ten-foot stone wall, which faced the public street. We had already checked the other side and it was sheer and very difficult to climb. But the inside of the wall was not as high since the level of the back courtyard was higher than the street by a few feet. It also provided a number of footholds, from a clinging vine and from some protruding rocks imbedded in the wall.

  The wall had been designed to keep out intruders. But from inside it could be easily climbed.

  So I climbed it. Ernie stayed on the ground, clicking his gum and telling me—sarcastically, I think—to be careful.

  The tricky part about the climb was the handholds on the top of the wall, since you had to be careful to grab a spot between the randomly spaced shards of glass. If you were in a hurry you’d cut yourself for sure.

  The jump down into the street would be rough also, although not impossible. About twelve or fourteen feet, depending on which part of the rapidly descending pavement you landed on. An airborne trooper, with a good hit and roll, would have no trouble with it.

  As I gazed over the wall and out into the street, I noticed something fluttering in the gentle breeze. It was blue and stuck to the base of one of the shards of glass. Fiber. Wool maybe. A clump of it. I reached out and pulled the material off the jagged edge of the glass. It was soft and blue. Baby blue.

  It didn’t look worn. It looked new, but it would impossible to tell much about it without a lab analysis and that would be difficult since I wasn’t officially on the case. And anyway the lab was in Tokyo. Before a packet could be sent there it had to be approved by the first sergeant.

  So much for high technology. I fell back on my meager allotment of common sense.

  It looked like threads from a woman’s sweater. Maybe a woman climbed this fence and got part of her clothing caught on these jagged shards of glass. It would be easy, of course, with a ladder, but the Korean police had already interviewed everyone in the neighborhood and no one had seen any workmen or anyone setting up any sort of apparatus.

  I climbed down and showed the fiber to Ernie.

  He thought for a while and then he said, “The problem is how did she get over the wall? It would have to be something that would give her a lift without causing any particular notice from the neighbors. Trashcans maybe?”

  That was it. “Or a trash cart?”

  Ernie and I ran outside and scoured the nei
ghborhood until we found the old rag dealer.

  “Yesterday, when you rounded the corner away from the store, you stopped calling and clanging your shears for a while. You had a customer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A beautiful young lady. Very tall. Very fancy.” The old man slashed his fingertips across his eyes and up. “She locked herself out of her house.”

  “So she had to climb the wall?”

  “Yes. I rolled my cart over and tilted it up. She climbed over easily.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I went about my business.” The old man looked at the ground, shaking his head slightly. “But she was a very strange woman. Later, down at the bottom of the hill, I saw her again. She was all out of breath from her climb and she had torn her sweater.”

  “Her sweater? What color was it?”

  The old man reached under some stacks of cardboard. “Here. She sold it to me, cheap, because it had been torn. My wife repaired it, and it looks fine now. I should be able to sell it for a good price.”

  The old man held it up to us, and I reached into my pocket for my small wad of Korean bills.

  It was soft and fluffy and baby blue.

  Since the Spider Lady was a Korean citizen and therefore not under our jurisdiction, we contacted Captain Kim and had him go along with us to make the pinch.

  She was behind the bar of the Spider Lady Club, just getting ready for the evening’s business, laughing and joking with the other girls.

  Ernie and I came in the door first, wearing our coats and ties, and when she saw Captain Kim behind us and the blue sweater in my hand, the exquisite lines of her face sagged and her narrow eyes focused on me, like arrows held taut in a bow. Blood drained from her skin, and she stood stock-still for a moment. Thinking.

  Then she reached under the bar and pulled out a long glistening paring knife, and as her girlfriends chattered away she kept her eyes on me and pulled the point of the blade straight down the flesh of her forearm.

  She kept pulling and ripping until finally the other girls realized what was going on and by the time we got to her, her arm was a shredded mess.

  Her nurse training had come in handy because she knew that stitches weren’t likely to close arteries that had been cut lengthwise. We applied a tourniquet, but somehow she managed to let it loose while she was in the ambulance and, turning her back to the attendant, kept her secret long enough to do what she wanted to do: die.

  Janson was put on the first flight out of the country by order of the commanding general, his personal effects packed and shipped to him later.

  Billings spent a lot of time at the NCO Club, restricted to post. He spun romantic tales about his two friends and what he saw as their self-sacrificing love.

  The girls at the Spider Lady Club told us the truth. About how proud the Spider Lady had been to be marrying a doctor.

  Through it all, from bar to bar, all I could think about was the doll-like woman with the nice curves.

  Whose smile had been filled with life.

  PUSAN NIGHTS

  “The last time the USS Kitty Hawk pulled into the Port of Pusan, the Shore Patrol had to break up a total of thirty-three barroom brawls in the Texas Street area. Routine. What we didn’t expect was the fourteen sailors who were assaulted and robbed in the street. Six of them had to be hospitalized.

  “From eyewitness accounts, the local provost marshal’s office ascertained that the muggings appeared to have been perpetrated by Americans, probably the shipmates of the victims. However, no one was caught or charged with a crime.”

  We were in the drafty headquarters building of the 8th Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, two hundred miles up the Korean Peninsula from Pusan. When the first sergeant called me and Ernie into his office, we expected the usual tirade for not having made enough black market arrests. What we got was a new assignment. The first sergeant kept it simple.

  “First, make sure you take the right flight out of Kimpo. Then, when you land in Pusan, infiltrate the waterfront area and find out who’s been pulling off these muggings.”

  Ernie adjusted his glasses and tugged on his tie.

  “Maybe the gang who did it has left the navy and gone on to better things.”

  “Not hardly. The Kitty Hawk was here only six months ago. The tour in the navy is four years, minimum. Not enough time to break up the old gang.”

  Ernie got quiet. I knew him. He didn’t want to seem too anxious to take on this assignment, an all-expenses-paid trip to the wildest port in Northeast Asia, and he was cagey enough to put up some objections, to put some concern in the first sergeant’s mind about how difficult it would be to catch these guys. That way, if we felt like it, we could goof off the whole time and come up with zilch, and the groundwork for our excuse was already laid.

  I had to admire him. Always thinking.

  “And you, Sueño.” The first sergeant turned his cold gray eyes on me. “I don’t want you running off and becoming involved in some grandiose schemes that don’t concern you.”

  “You mean, stay away from the navy brass.”

  “I mean catch these guys who are doing the muggings. That’s what you’re being paid for. Some of those sailors were hurt badly the last time they were here, and I don’t want it to happen again.”

  I nodded, keeping my face straight. Neither one of us was going to mouth off now and lose a chance to go to Pusan. To Texas Street.

  The first sergeant handed me a brown envelope stuffed with copies of the blotter reports from the last time the Kitty Hawk had paid a visit to the Land of the Morning Calm. He stood up and, for once, shook both our hands.

  “I hate to let you guys out of my sight. But nobody can infiltrate a village full of bars and whores and drunken sailors better than you two.” His face changed from sunshine to clouds. “If, however, you don’t bring me back some results, I guarantee you’ll have my highly polished size twelve combat boot placed firmly on your respective posteriors. You got that?”

  Ernie grinned, a little weasel-toothed, half-moon grin. I concentrated on keeping my facial muscles steady. I’m not sure it worked.

  We clattered down the long hallway and bounded down the steps to Ernie’s jeep. When he started it up, he shouted, “Three days in Texas Street!”

  I was happy. So was he.

  But I had the uneasy twisting in my bowels that happens whenever I smell murder.

  By the time we landed in Pusan I had read over the blotter reports. They were inconclusive, based mainly on hearsay from Korean bystanders. The assailants were Americans, they said, dressed in blue jeans and nylon jackets, like their victims and like all the sailors on liberty who prowled the portside alleys of Texas Street. The Navy Shore Patrol had stopped some fights in barrooms and on the streets, but they were unable to apprehend even one of the muggers.

  By inter-service agreement, the army’s military police increased their patrols near the dock areas when a huge naval presence moved into the port of Pusan. The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, with its accompanying flotilla and its over five thousand sailors, more than qualified as a huge naval presence.

  The MPs were stationed, for the most part, on the inland army base of Hialeah Compound. They played on Texas Street, knew the alleys, the girls, the mama-sans. But somehow they had been unable to make one arrest.

  Sailors and soldiers don’t often hit it off. Especially when the sailors are only in town for three days and manage to jack up all the prices by trying to spend two months’ pay in a few hours. It seemed as if the MPs would be happy to arrest a few squids.

  Something told me they weren’t trying.

  We caught a cab at the airport outside of Pusan and arrived at Hialeah Compound in the early afternoon. We got a room at the billeting office, and the first thing we did was nothing. Ernie took a nap. I kept thumbing through the blotter report, worrying the pages to death.

  There was a not very detailed road map of t
he city of Pusan in a tourist brochure in the rickety little desk provided to us by billeting. Hialeah Compound was about three miles inland from the main port and had gotten its name because prior to the end of World War II the Japanese occupation forces used its flat plains as a track for horse racing. The US Army turned it into a base to provide security and logistical support for all the goods pouring into the harbor. Pusan was a large city, and its downtown area sprawled between Hialeah Compound and the port. Pushed up along the docks, like a long, slender barnacle, was Texas Street. Merchant sailors from all over the world passed through this port, but it was only the US Navy that came here in such force.

  Using a thick-leaded pencil I plotted the locations of the muggings on the little map. The dots defined the district known as Texas Street. Not one was more than half a mile from where the Kitty Hawk would dock.

  Ernie and I approached the MP desk.

  “Bascom and Sueño,” Ernie said. “Reporting in from Seoul.”

  The desk sergeant looked down at us over the rim of his comic book.

  “Oh, yeah. Heard you guys were coming. Hold on. The duty officer wants to talk to you.”

  After a few minutes, a little man with his chest stuck out and face like a yapping Chihuahua appeared. He seemed lost in his highly starched fatigues. Little gold butter bars flapped from his collar.

  “The commanding officer told me to give you guys a message.”

  We waited.

  The lieutenant tried to expand his chest. The starched green material barely moved.

  “Don’t mess with our people. We have a good MP company down here; any muggings that happen, we’ll take care of them; and we don’t need you two sending phony reports up to Seoul, trying to make us look bad.”

  His chest deflated slightly. He seemed exhausted and out of breath.

  “Is that it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ernie walked around him and looked back up at the desk sergeant. “How many patrols are you going to have out at Texas Street tonight?”