Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Trin lifted Nina without apparent effort and jogged from the room. They were alone with Virgil Fret, who continued to die in breathy slow stages.

“I couldn’t talk today, Phillip. He was having me watched,” said Lola, stepping back from Virgil, who was now madly pumping his elbows. “Caw.” Pump, pump. Maybe he was going to fly away and save them the trouble of disposing of his worthless ass.

Trin dashed back in the room with a horrible grin on his flushed face. “Grab him, quick.” Trin rushed for Virgil. He seized a fifth of whiskey from the night table.

“What now?” said Broker, going with him.

“Inspiration,” said Trin, grinning, taking a quick slug of whiskey and holding the bottle out to Broker. Broker shook his head. Trin shook a dollop of whiskey on Broker’s shirt and then splashed some on Virgil’s inflated face. They yanked him to his feet.

“Quick, he’ll get away,” yelped Trin, dragging Virgil toward the door. They had him upright, his flailing arms over their shoulders, running now down the steps, Broker following Trin’s lead. “You stay here.” Trin waved the whiskey bottle in his free hand at Lola.

Rock and roll spooled in the inky night, neon spun behind dark trees. They galloped down the driveway and burst into the street. Tight lipped, Broker said, “I didn’t see a gun in there-”

“I checked the whole place, no gun,” said Trin.

“This punk would have a gun.”

“They don’t want us to have one. It’s a trap. This piece of shit is a throwaway.”

Several snoozing cyclo drivers spotted them and rose from their cabs. “There,” panted Trin. Down the block Broker saw the bear-walking drunken Aussie. His broad back was naked, streaked with sweat over a sarong. He stumbled down the street, staying upright mainly by the support of his right shoulder bumping on a cement wall. Patient as jackals, several cyclos padded on silent rubber tires, trailing his slow progress.

“Hey, buddy,” shouted Trin as they pulled abreast. “Have a drink.” He thrust out the bottle. “Let’s party.”

The giant yawned and pawed the bottle. Trin quickly analyzed the cyclo situation and selected the oldest driver, who also had the widest seat. He heaved Virgil in. The driver inspected Virgil and began to protest.

“What’s he say?” said Broker.

“He says this American is dying and he won’t ride him. We need dollars.” Broker dug in his pocket. Trin tugged the staggering Aussie and pulled him toward the cyclo. He pointed to Virgil whose protruding tongue was deep purple in the bounce of neon and who was feebly inching his hands back toward his throat. “Hey, mate, he knows where the girls are. Number one boom-boom.”

“Caw,” said Virgil. A newly hatched vulture chick mouthing the air.

The Aussie lit up, having found kin who talked his twittering dialect. Trin steered the giant into the cyclo and grabbed the handful of twenties from Broker. He turned to the agitated driver.

“I’m telling him he’s only had too much to drink,” said Trin who then broke into machine-gun Vietnamese as he counted out bills into the driver’s wrinkled hand.

The driver continued to protest, but his posture and voice had turned sly. The other cyclo drivers craned forward, crowding in as Trin and the older driver argued. Trin turned back to Broker.

“He’s a hard sell. He says, bullshit, he knows a dying American when he sees one.” Trin grinned insanely. “He says he was a fucking guerrilla in the fucking jungle for fifteen fucking years. Give me a hundred-dollar bill.”

Broker handed over Mr. Franklin.

“He says,” said Trin, “that’s the drunkest goddamn American he has ever seen in his life.”

In the cab, the Aussie tenderly poured whiskey into Virgil’s weakly moving mouth. With an evil smile creasing his leathery face, the former Viet Cong bent to his pedals and moved the bike cab out into the street. Virgil Fret disappeared into the teeming bicycles and motorbikes of Hue, wrapped in the meaty embrace of the cooing Aussie, who bent over him like a mama feeding her first child.

Trin spun on his heels and marched back toward the villa. “I told him to dump them in a rice paddy halfway to the coast.” They jogged back to the van parked in the shadows next to the villa. Lola’s outfit made a voluptuous, unmistakable fashion statement in the humid buzzing night.

“White,” said Broker.

“So nobody will shoot her by accident, say in the dark on a confused beach,” said Trin.

“I can’t stay now. I’m coming with you. That was our deal…” Lola, breathless with excitement, coming to meet them.

“I’m satisfied. You satisfied?” said Trin.

“Roger,” said Broker. He pivoted and his sand-busted tennis shoes crunched in the gravel as he put his left fist on stun and popped Lola LaPorte with a short left jab, hard enough to knock her cold, not quite hard enough to cave in her surgically enhanced, gorgeous right cheek.

They dragged Lola into the van and stretched her out in the aisle perpendicular to Nina. Trin picked up her purse and threw it in after her. Then he dug under the seats and pulled something out and grinned. “Duct tape. The only good thing the American army brought to Vietnam.”

Quickly he taped Lola’s ankles, hands, and ran two strips around her mouth. Then he scrambled to the wheel. “Now, we run like hell.”

“It’s all right,” soothed Broker as he cradled Nina in the backseat. She opened one eye.

“Don’t bullshit me, Broker,” she croaked.

“It’s better,” he allowed.

He had sponged her off and opened Trin’s first-aid kit and had attempted to clean up the ear. Then he’d wrapped her in a blanket. Like a morbid footnote to the mad night, he remembered that the rest of her ear resided in a little glass jar, pickled in rice alcohol, in the house on the coast.

He dribbled mineral water on her caked lips and used his bandanna to clean more of the ugliness from her face. He didn’t know what to use to medicate the emotional wounds on the inside.

Unconditional love, maybe.

Fitfully, Lola stirred against her binds and moaned from the floor. Trin drove Highway 1 north out of Hue with agonizing restraint, cautious, now, of drawing attention. The headlights made a weaving tunnel of illumination that was regularly invaded by impassive Vietnamese crouched over handlebars. Occasionally a truck. It took forever to get to the turnoff to the coast. As the black farmland closed around them, Broker entertained paranoid fragments of the past: driving through the countryside at night with the lights on. Unarmed.

They were in the paddies now, going slow. Shadowy bicycles jostled the van. Nina turned in his arms, dug her face against his chest, and used her forehead for leverage to push herself up.

“She’s coming around,” said Broker.

With her face still buried in his chest, her marble cold hand worked up his throat and chin and felt his face. “Just barely,” she said in a hoarse voice.

“How you doing?”

“Sloe gin,” she muttered. “First time I had a horrible hangover, was sloe gin. I feel like sloe gin. ’Scuse me, open a window. I gotta puke.”

Broker quickly pulled back the sliding side window and helped her lean out. Her ribcage heaved and she retched down the side of the car. He pulled her back in and wrapped her in the blanket. “Got anything to drink?” she said in a dry voice.

“Water.”

“That Trin up there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Give us a drink, Trin,” said Nina. “Got this horrible taste in my mouth.”

Trin reached under the front seat and handed back an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid. “Watch it. That’s home-made rice whiskey, it might not mix with what they gave you,” he cautioned.