I strained to pick up any sound. Nothing. Still, I felt as if there was a presence out there. I reached inside my jacket, pulled out the. 38, and clicked off the safety.
The gun felt heavy and reassuring in my palm. Cold. Loaded with death.
Footsteps. Slow at first but then faster, with more authority. Heading this way.
I slid out of the chair and stepped behind a filing cabinet next to the door. If someone entered the room I’d have a straight line of fire. Into the back of his head.
The footsteps stopped in front of the Admin Office. Hesitated. As if the intruder were peering into the room. Then the footsteps came closer and I pointed the business end of the pistol at the back of a skull. It was fuzzed with close-cropped gray. As I was about to squeeze the trigger, he turned and I saw the wrinkled face. The bleak eyes.
“Sueno!”
“Top! What are you doing here in the middle of the night?”
“Put that goddamn pistol away, will ya?”
Slowly, I lowered it and stuck it in the shoulder holster. “Sure.”
He switched on the light. Our eyes blinked.
“That’s the second time you almost goddamn shot me,” he said.
I grinned.
“I thought someone had broken in here.” The First Sergeant looked at me more carefully. “About time you showed up, Corporal.”
“Look, I can explain that. One of the ration control numbers turned up in Taegu. I had to check it out.”
“Did it come to anything?”
“No. Turned out Shipton sold the card and phony ID to some gullible buck sergeant down there.”
The First Sergeant’s eyes drilled into me. For a minute I thought he was going to start cursing. “I told you to get your ass back here.”
“Yeah, well, I was on a case.”
“I don’t give a shit about your damn case. When I tell you to get back here, you get back here! You understand?”
I could’ve argued with him. I could’ve told him that he’d just put his finger on the trouble with the entire army. The army didn’t care about the cases. Bureaucratic shuffling, the next promotion, how it looks in the newspapers. All those things are more important than the case. More important than catching a murderer. I could’ve told Top all that; I wanted to. Instead, I shut up.
In the army, taking an ass-chewing is a lot easier than accepting a court-martial.
“Yes, I understand,” I said.
Top glared at me, trying to gauge my sincerity. In the end he decided to accept what he got.
“Don’t let it happen again,” he said.
I nodded.
He noticed the perked coffee and walked over and poured himself a cup. As he stirred in the creamer he kept staring at me.
“You guys must’ve spent a lot of time carousing in Pusan.”
I walked back over to the chair and flopped down. “Yeah. Carousers. That’s Ernie and me.”
He kept studying me, not coming to any conclusions but getting more and more suspicious.
“What the hell did you do down there?”
“Came close to catching Shipton,” I said. “But he got away.”
The First Sergeant perched on the edge of Riley’s desk, spreading his fingers, studying his stubby knuckles.
“I got some bad news for you,” I said. “Ernie’s in the hospital.”
Top scowled. “I know. The One-two-one notified me. I just came from there.”
“How’s he doing?”
“In intensive care.” The First Sergeant shook his head. “The asshole should’ve listened to the doctors in the first place.”
“You’re not taking me off the case again, are you?”
“No. Stick with it. But the next time I tell you to get back to Seoul right away, you get back to Seoul, you understand me, Sueno?”
“I understand, Top.”
“Good.”
I shrugged on my jacket and left the First Sergeant. I trudged through the thick snow toward the 121 Evac.
The big double doors of the Intensive Care Unit blared in stenciled red: Authorized Personnel Only.
When you want to do something in the army, don’t ask for permission. I didn’t.
The room was dark, with only little red lamps on the nightstands next to the beds. I scanned the charts rather than trying to make out the bandaged faces. Ernie was third bed on the left.
When I leaned over him, he seemed to be asleep.
I stood there for a moment, silently. He was hooked up to tubes. One eye cranked open.
He croaked. I didn’t understand but I knew he was trying to say something. He shook his head from side to side, then lifted his arm, grabbing the tube in his mouth.
As he pulled, an endless plastic serpent emerged from his throat. Finally, it popped free and he rotated his jaw as if to get the muscles working again.
“Son… of a bitch… busted… my spleen.”
His voice sounded as if he’d been wandering through the desert for three days.
“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that you’ve been running all over Texas Street, chasing after a half-crazed killer, with your insides rattling around?”
Ernie grinned. “I guess I have. Give me some… water,”
It didn’t sound like a good idea. If they were feeding him intravenously it was because they didn’t want anything in his stomach. He saw my hesitation.
“Just enough to… rinse… my throat.”
There wasn’t any water on his bedstand. I tiptoed across the aisle, found some next to another guy’s bed, poured a little into a small paper cup, then sipped it to make sure it was water. I held the cup to Ernie’s lips. He sucked greedily until it was all gone. Then he leaned back and convulsed his throat as if enjoying the full magnificence of the life-giving fluid.
“Did you catch him in Taegu?”
“False lead,” I said. “He was there but sold the ration control plate to some dumb buck sergeant.”
“Clever.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Now he knows we’re onto him.”
Ernie groaned. I don’t know if it was from pain or from thinking about Shipton.
The skin around his nose and mouth twisted, his stomach moved like a rising bowling ball beneath the sheets, and suddenly blood and water squirted from his mouth. I ran around the bed and grabbed a towel, and now he was retching yellow bile and I handed him the towel and ran out of the ward.
Down the hall a sleeping medic sat behind a counter. I yelled, “The guy in the third bed, Intensive Care, he’s vomiting up blood!”
The medic pressed a button, jumped up, and a few seconds later three people in green smocks and I stood around Ernie’s bunk. He’d stopped throwing up but his breath still sounded bad.
One of the medics turned to me.
“You didn’t give him any water, did you?”
“A little.”
The medic’s chest puffed out and he was about to read me my rights as a prisoner or the riot act or something when we heard a knock against the bedside table.
“Get the… fuck away from me.”
It was Ernie, growling. Somehow, he’d yanked out his tubes, tumbled off the bed, and pushed away the medic who was trying to restrain him. From the locker behind his bunk, he grabbed his socks. The medics kept
