“You look like shit,” he said.
I tried to move my lips. They weren’t working very well. Finally, I croaked out a sound. “Where’s Ernie?”
“Oh, he’s fine. A couple of scratches and bruises. Nothing serious. Lucky for you Sergeant Norris and his partner hung around the area.”
Probably on Messler’s orders, to keep an eye on the CID guys from Seoul who were messing around in their area of operations.
“Who hit me?” I asked.
“Don’t know. Probably a third-country national. Try to remember, Agent Sueno, Eighth Army encourages us to make friends with our international neighbors.”
I meant to say “Screw you,” but I think it came out more like “Scoo you.” I can’t be sure, because my hearing wasn’t too great either. Suddenly I felt dizzy staring at Lieutenant Messler, and a nurse came over and shooed him away. “What about Weyworth?” I managed to croak before he walked away.
“Who?” he said, stepping back to the edge of the bed.
“Spec Four Weyworth.”
“Nobody else was there when Norris and his partner found you. Just you and Bascom. Knocked out. Lying on the floor.” Then he grinned a weasel-like grin. “Good show, old chap.”
He chortled and disappeared.
My eyes popped open. I’m not sure how long I’d been out, but it was still dark outside. A yellow-bulbed lamp glowed dimly next to my bed. A figure sat in a chair, so silently that I almost hadn’t noticed he was there. He grinned and leaned into the light.
Ernie.
“They say you’ll be fine,” he said. “Just a mild concussion. Nothing to worry about.”
“Good.”
I started to get up. He held out his hands. “You should rest. At least until the morning.”
“What time is it now?”
“Zero five hundred.”
I groaned. “Do you know who hit me?”
“Greek sailors,” he replied. “I popped a couple of them good. Would’ve popped more if Norris and his partner hadn’t interrupted me.”
“Chased them away?”
“Yeah.”
“What about Weyworth?”
“One of the Greeks managed to get hold of my keys somehow.”
“He escaped?”
“Yeah.”
Ernie hadn’t been “popping them good” like he’d claimed. He’d been overcome just as I had. Sergeant Norris and his partner had apparently saved our butts.
There was a metal guard taped to my nose. I pulled it off.
“You look mah-velous, dah-ling,” Ernie said.
“Screw you.” I climbed out of bed, found my clothes stuffed in a bag beneath the nightstand, and started slipping them on. “Maybe we should wake up the armorer,” I said.
Ernie opened his coat. The butt of a. 45 peeked out of a holster.
“‘Great minds’ and all that,” he said.
Two hours later, we were sitting at the PX cafeteria sipping coffee and perusing the morning edition of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. I was very conscious of my nose. It was puffed up and bright red and almost glowed, and it was very tender to the touch. While drinking, I was careful not to tilt my coffee mug back too far.
We’d already been out to Weyworth’s hooch. Jeannie’s mother woke up angry and remained angry while we asked about Weyworth, claiming he hadn’t come home last night. We searched her hooch and its environs just to make sure. Ernie thought she was cute when she was angry.
“She’s cute when she does anything,” I replied.
We returned to the compound, and by then the cafeteria was open.
Now that the grill was heated up, I hobbled over to the serving line and ordered a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, hold the mayo. Ernie had scrambled eggs and sausage. While we ate, I gradually started to feel more human.
“So, if you were Weyworth,” I asked Ernie, “where would you go?”
“Back to my hooch.”
“To face your angry girlfriend?”
“Hell, yeah. She’s cute.”
“But eventually you’d be arrested by the likes of you and me.”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t be locked up long. The Greeks don’t talk-mouthing off to cops isn’t in their nature-and if I kept my mouth shut and said nothing more than that I wanted to talk to a lawyer, I’d be out in a couple of hours.”
“You know that because you work in law enforcement. Weyworth doesn’t necessarily know that.”
Ernie shrugged and continued shoveling eggs in his mouth.
“All we want to know,” I continued, “is what he saw on the Blue Train.”
“And if he’s the killer.”
“There’s that.”
“And if he’s not the killer, who is.”
“There’s that too.”
I walked to the serving line and pulled myself a cup of joe from the huge stainless-steel coffee urn. When I reached in my pocket for my receipt, the tired female cashier waved me past. There were so few customers, she remembered that I qualified for the free refill. I studied her face. She didn’t look much like Mrs. Oh Myong-ja, the first victim, but there were similarities. They were both Korean, they were both in their early thirties, and I could tell by her ring that they were both married. Did she have children? Probably. Why else would she be working so early in the morning on a G.I. compound?
When I returned to our table, I clunked my coffee mug down and asked Ernie, “What do you think Runnels meant about the Blue Train rapist having a ‘checklist’?”
Ernie looked up from the sports page. “I think the guy has a lot of people he hates.”
“What makes you say that?”
Ernie shrugged. “What he did on the train was an in-your-face act. Like flipping the world the bird.”
I already knew that Ernie had more brains than people gave him credit for. And more brains than he usually bothered to show.
“And what he did next,” I said, “here in Pusan, is an act even more brutal than the first.”
“Right.”
“So the ‘checklist’ probably becomes progressively bloodier.”
Ernie looked back at the sports page. “Unless we catch him first.”
Mr. Kill was waiting for us at the Pusan Police Station.
He rose as we walked in, and within seconds we were in a police sedan being driven over to the Pusan-yok, the train station.
“The local police,” Kill told us, “are checking with every cab driver who picked up a fare at the Pusan station yesterday. They should have a report for us some time today. Not only did Mrs. Hyon and her three children take a cab from the train station to the Shindae Hotel, so did the killer.”
“So if they’re checking that,” Ernie asked, “why are we going to the train station?”
Mr. Kill raised a paper bag he’d been holding in his lap. “This.” He pulled out a woman’s purse. “This is the one the rapist showed to the desk clerk,” he told us. “So he could follow Mrs. Hyon up to the third floor.”
“Already dusted for prints?”
“There weren’t any. He must have wiped it down.”
“If the guy’s so smart, why’d he leave the purse?”
“Probably thought we couldn’t do anything with it,” Kill said. “And he might be right.”
