“Mama-san here wanted more money, for the blonde girl’s hospital bills and shit like that, but Boltworks told her to go screw herself. Then she took her girls and left and the next time we came out to Nightmare Range, she and her little bitches weren’t out here. Everybody was pissed, but nobody said nothing to Boltworks.”
“Too scared?”
“They were. Not me.”
“And that’s it?” Ernie said.
“I told you, ask the mama-san.”
“I’m asking you.”
Taggard shrugged. “You going to turn me in, or what?”
“Depending,” Ernie said. “Talk.”
“So we come back to Nightmare Range and suddenly mama-san’s back, with new girls and everything, and the blonde girl, she back, smiling as usual and she takes Boltworks by the hand and leads him out into the high grass and… ”
As if a bolt of lightning had struck, the world was suddenly full of light. I covered my eyes, cursing myself for not staying alert.
“Freeze!” a voice shouted.
Shading my eyes from the glare of a half-dozen beams of light, I could still make out dark shadows standing in front of us. A few of them held long, dark objects. Rifles.
Ernie lifted his. 45 straight up in the air.
“Set it down, mister,” a voice said. “Slow and easy.”
He did.
Something poked me in the arm.
With an effort, I opened my eyes. Something was pressing against my hip, my elbow and shoulder, and my neck was twisted at an awkward angle.
I looked up to find a stern-faced Korean man glaring at me. Wearing khaki. I sat upright.
Where was I?
Then I remembered. We were in the police station in the village of Uichon. Was I locked up? No. This was the police station lobby, in front of the desk sergeant’s counter. Both Ernie and I had passed out on the wooden benches against the front wall. There were no hotels in Uichon; not even a yoguan, a Korean inn. So the local KNPs had allowed us to sleep here rather than in our open-topped jeep.
Ernie sat up and rubbed his eyes. The Korean cop stared, making sure we were awake. He was a slightly cross-eyed young man and the dull curiosity in his eyes made me understand how a gorilla in a cage at the zoo must feel when being stared at by tourists. The young cop turned and walked back behind the partition, where his desk overlooked the public entrance. Cold air poured in through open doors. Outside, the barest glimmer of gray appeared at the edges of a dark sky.
“I feel like shit,” Ernie said.
“Don’t ask me how you look.”
Last night, while we were busy interviewing Private Taggard in the tall grass, the perimeter guards around the Charley Battery encampment had noticed something amiss. They’d alerted their commander, one Captain Floyd Lewis, and he’d organized a detail of men and surrounded us before we knew what was happening. After taking Ernie’s. 45, Lewis marched us back inside the Charley Battery area and sat us down on folding stools inside the ten-man tent that served as temporary Command Post.
I tried to tell him that the business girls outside the wire were getting away, but all he said was, “What business girls?”
Typically, he pretended he hadn’t seen the women, and he also pretended that he didn’t know what was going on outside his concertina wire. The brass monkey act: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. The road to advancement in the United States Army. Captain Lewis was much more concerned with the fact that Ernie had pulled a gun on one of his soldiers.
We showed him our identification and told him why we were here. When Ernie mentioned General Armbrewster’s name, Captain Lewis fired up his communications equipment. After a few minutes, he received confirmation via radio that he was to provide us with full cooperation. Butt first, Lewis handed Ernie his gun back.
After slipping the. 45 into his shoulder holster, Ernie pulled out the three sketches and laid them on the wooden field table.
Taggard flinched. “What the hell did he do?”
Instead of answering, Ernie said, “You know him?”
“That’s Bolt.”
Taggard pointed at the sketch of the man we’d been calling “the Caucasian GI.” We now had a name to go with the face: Private First Class Rodney K. Boltworks, absent without leave from Charley Battery, 2nd of the 17th Field Artillery.
“How about her?” Ernie asked Taggard studied the sketch of the smiling woman.
“She looks a little more cleaned up now,” he said. “But that’s her. The blond bitch who used to work outside the wire.”
“She’d been one of them?” Ernie asked.
“Yeah,” Taggard answered. “Same crew. Same mama-san. Everything.”
“What happened to her?”
Taggard shook his head slowly. “Bolt liked her. Used to hog her, matter of fact, like I was telling you. Not give the rest of us a shot. Got so bad he started beating on her when she complained about not making enough money. Then one night a couple months ago, he took her out in the bushes, and while he was out there, somebody started beating on him.”
Taggard grinned at the memory. One of his front teeth was missing.
“Who?” I asked.
“Don’t know. But Bolt was bruised up pretty bad. Must’ve been a good fight. Wouldn’t tell us who did it to him.”
“And the girl?”
“She disappeared. Later that night, so did Bolt.”
Captain Lewis stood with his arms crossed, rocking on his heels, not liking this testimony at all. He was a tall, lean man with a short crew cut.
“How about it, Captain?” Ernie asked. “Is that when Rodney Boltworks disappeared?”
“Almost two months ago. July seventeenth,” he said. “While we were camped in this area. Haven’t seen him since.”
I spoke to Taggard. “So Boltworks goes out in the bush with this business girl. He gets in a fight with somebody who wastes him pretty bad. He limps back to the encampment and, later that night, he disappears?”
“Exactly what happened.”
“Why?” I said.
Taggard grinned again.
“Why?” Taggard repeated. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he liked it.”
“Liked what?”
Taggard’s grin grew wider. “I think he liked the ass-kicking he got.”
Ernie and I glanced at one another, not sure how to proceed on that line of questioning. Ernie pointed at the sketch of the dark man with the curly brown hair.
“Do you know who this guy is?”
Taggard shook his head. So did Captain Lewis.
I wasn’t surprised. The sketch was pretty vague. A dark man with an oval-shaped face and opaque sunglasses covering his eyes. He could’ve been a Korean, an American. He could’ve been a lot of things.
We prevailed on the good captain to bring every soldier in Charley Battery into the Command tent, one at a time. We paraded them past the three sketches. To a man, everyone knew Boltworks. A handful recognized the smiling woman, but not one recognized the dark man with the curly brown hair.
