He lets out a tortured squeal. Henry’s got hold of his finger and is twisting it back on itself. Should have known not to poke the fucking bear.
“Aaaaa! Get off!”
“You want to do this the hard way?” says Henry.
“I ain’t afraid of you! I was in Vietnam!”
“Yeah?” says Henry, letting go of the guy’s finger as Mr Jones comes on the TV. “Which bit?”
“Da Nang, 1969.”
Mr Jones doesn’t look too good. I haven’t noticed before, but he’s really starting to look his age. Probably something to do with Laura being snatched. They say it ages people, when something like that happens.
“Da Nang, eh? Who with?”
The old guy sticks out his chest, not knowing that it brings his beer-belly with it. “Magnificent Seventh, Second Batallion.”
“You was a marine, eh?” Henry smiles. “Semper Fi.”
“Damn right, I was a marine! And that’s why pieces of shit like you don’t scare me.”
Which maybe wasn’t the brightest thing to say. The smile slips from Henry’s face.
“Saturday,” he says, “10th of February, 1968, four days west-southwest of Hue. Eleven days after the Tet Offensive and you can still see the fuckin’ smoke from the burning city, all greasy and black ’cause of the bodies.” I’ve heard this story before. Only once though and Henry was very, very drunk at the time. “We’re out looking for one of our recon patrols. No one’s heard from them for two weeks. There’s six of us slogging our way through the mountains — fuckin’ jungle and snakes everywhere. We come across this little village, just some crappy shacks, couple of families. And that’s where they were, the recon patrol. The Viet Cong had crucified them on trees all round the village. They’d left the families alive, though. Broke their ankles and wrists, then gouged their eyes out so the last thing they’d see was the patrol they’d given water to being nailed up and gutted.”
Henry leans in real close. “It took us three weeks to find the fuckers that did it. And when we did, we made Saddam Hussein look like Santa fuckin’ Claus.”
The old guy in the bath-robe looks away, then sags back into his chair. On the TV screen Mr Jones is replaced by some scary-looking woman with orange skin and perfect teeth, going on about drain cleaner.
“I don’t want to get involved,” says the guy, picking at a tomato sauce stain on his robe.
“I don’t give a shit what you want.” Henry takes his jacket off and unbuttons his shirt. “You’re going to tell me everything you know. Starting with that Winnebago…”
Chapter 7
“Where the fuck you two been?” asks Jack when we get back to the car. The wind’s getting up again, rain speckling the ancient Ford’s windscreen.
Henry smiles. “Had to talk to an old army buddy.”
I climb back behind the wheel. “Did you have to dangle the poor bastard off the roof?”
Shrug. “Jogged his memory, didn’t it?”
He has a point. I put the car in gear — getting a nasty grinding noise — and pull out onto the road.
“Christ,” says Jack from the back seat, “not another one. We’re leaving a trail of bodies all over the place. . Someone’s going to notice!”
“Relax.” Henry lights up another one of his stinky cigars. “He’s not dead. Just needs to change his underwear. And now we got something the Feds don’t.” He smiles and opens the passenger window, letting the smoke spiral out into the cold night. “Seems that Winnebago had Iowa plates — Polk County — with some sort of little man on them. And up front, on the dashboard there’s a little statue of Jesus and one of them hula Elvises.”
He grins, saving the best for last. “And a bumper sticker: ‘In God We Trust’.”
Yup, it’s amazing what being dangled by the ankles sixty feet above a car park can do for a guy with a bad memory who doesn’t want to get involved.
Jack leans forward, all excited. “We gotta tell the cops. Call the Feds or something — they can chase down the plate!”
Henry takes a good long draw of his cigar. “Fuck the FBI.”
“Oh, come on, you gotta be kidding me! We want Laura back, don’t we? They got contacts and shit — computers. They can track him down!”
“And then what? Arrest him? Lock him away somewhere nice and safe where he’ll get three square meals a day, Oprah and Doctor Phil on the TV? Pert little nurse with big tits giving him fuckin’ sponge baths?” Another lungful of smoke. “Ain’t going to happen. You and me both know Laura’s already dead. Yeah, she looks like butter wouldn’t melt, but I seen her kick the shit out of guys twice her size. Mr Jones taught her all that stuff we learned in basic training — ninety ways to kill a guy with your bare hands. No way some weirdo grabbed her and bundled her off in his shit-brown Winnebago. He’d have to kill her first.”
Henry takes the cigar from his mouth and stares at the glowing red tip. “This ain’t a search and rescue mission, Jack, this is revenge. We’re going to find this Sawbones asshole and we’re going to take him back to New York. Where Mr Jones will make sure he spends the last few months of his miserable life in a shit-heap of pain.”
I point the car west on the Interstate, coaxing it up to a lumbering fifty miles an hour. Damn engine sounds like it needs the last rites and a decent burial.
It’s a shame about Laura — she was a good kid. Smart. Bit kooky, but nice with it. I’ve known a lot of guys like Mr Jones, and their kids are always assholes. They see their dads with all this power and people afraid of them and shit, and they think they deserve some of that too, just ’cause they’re the boss’s son or daughter.
Laura was always like a normal person. And she’d make you coffee if her dad was on the phone or something and you had to wait. I liked her.
But Henry’s right — if this Sawbones guy has got her, she’s dead.
Chapter 8
Laura Jones — Not quite dead yet
It’s dark, and it’s raining.
She’s sitting with her back to the stove, rocking back and forth as the motor home bounces through yet another pothole. Trying to brace herself so the noose around her neck doesn’t choke her as the Bastard driving weaves his way along some God-forsaken back road.
Laura closes her eyes and tries to doze. Maybe if she can get some sleep she wouldn’t be too tired to come up with a plan.
A final lurch and the Winebago stops.
One of the other girls — with a bruised face, her eyes like something caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, starts to cry. Her sobs are muffled by the gag. Not loud enough to drown out the sound of rain hammering on the roof.
There are four of them in here. Laura and three others. None of them much older than nineteen at a guess. All of them scared.
Up front, the Bastard is singing softly to himself — some sort of hymn — and then he pushes through the
