Martin Limón - Nightmare Range

The Widow Po smiled through her tears and thrust out her chest. “They were afraid of me.”

“You allowed Whiskey Mary to go to prison.”

Widow Po shook her head rapidly. “For a while. There was no choice. But I sent spirits to protect her.”

I briefly translated everything that had been said to Ernie. He took a step toward the Widow Po. Miss Choi stopped chanting, alarmed.

“Why did you ask Miss Choi to bring us to the kut ?”

“Because Moretti kept interrupting me,” the Widow Po answered, looking surprised, as if it should be obvious. “Sometimes he took over the whole ceremony, upsetting everyone. Making my clients unhappy. How can they talk to their dead parents if some GI is always in the way?”

Miss Choi translated the answer for Ernie.

Ernie grabbed the Widow Po’s elbow. Miss Choi gasped.

“Moretti won’t be interrupting any more kut s,” Ernie said. “Because you’ll be in the monkey house. No kut s allowed.”

The Widow Po understood the GI slang. Monkey house meant prison.

I was watching intently and as best I could tell, the Widow Po made no move. But maybe the light was bad, or maybe the glow from the orange moon and the candlelight in the hooch and the neon flashing from the city below caused me to miss something. But suddenly a rush of air escaped from Ernie’s mouth and he doubled over as if punched by a two-by-four.

Miss Choi resumed her chanting, frantic now, garbling her words.

Ernie knelt in the dust. The Widow Po spoke once again in broken English.

“No monkey house. The Widow Po no go there. I show Moretti he can’t beat me. That’s why I called you. No one will ever know what I did to him. No one alive.”

A glimmering butcher knife slipped out of the Widow Po’s long sleeve.

Before I could move, Miss Choi shouted and leapt toward the Widow Po.

The knife was in the air but Miss Choi rammed head first into the body of the Widow Po. Amazingly, the mudang maintained her balance and hopped back a few steps, still holding the knife. I ran toward Ernie but he was in so much pain that he couldn’t rise to his feet.

The Widow Po bounced nimbly on the balls of her feet, holding the butcher knife aloft, her long hair swaying loose in the mountain breeze, daring us to come at her.

I grabbed Miss Choi and held her. She bowed her head once again and started her chant. A different one this time, more guttural. Not Korean, I didn’t think. As if she were speaking some ancient language of the dead.

The Widow Po stopped bouncing. The knife dropped from her hand. She took a huge intake of breath, held it, and then a roar emitted from her frail frame. A roar of pain. Deep voiced. Thundering. The voice of a wounded man.

The Widow Po staggered, clutching her chest. She twisted, turned, knelt to the ground. She roared again in her deep-throated voice and then spat blood straight out into the air.

I rushed toward her but before I could reach her she crumpled to the ground. I turned her over. Still breathing. A pulse in her neck but she was out cold.

I rushed back to Ernie. He was on his feet, staring at me. “What happened?”

“She sucker punched you.”

“How the hell did she manage that?”

I looked back at the Widow Po. She still hadn’t moved. “I don’t know.”

Miss Choi was on her feet now, no longer chanting. She pulled off her white skirt and blouse, revealing blue jeans and a red T-shirt below. Carefully, she stuffed the white clothing in her canvas bag.

Lights flickered on throughout the village. Electric bulbs. A television chattered to life. The announcer spoke in rapid Korean: Ilki yeibo . The weather report.

People emerged from their hooches, completely ignoring Miss Choi and Ernie and me, except for three neighbor woman who approached and tried to help the moaning Widow Po to her feet. The exhausted mudang collapsed, the muscles in her legs like straw. I stepped forward to help but the women waved me back. Unbidden, two men emerged from a nearby home. Together the five of them carried the Widow Po back into her hooch.

Ernie and I looked at each other.

Miss Choi grabbed our hands and led us back down the dark pathway to the bottom of Kuksadang.

The next time I attended the classroom of Miss Choi Yong-kuang, I sat up a little straighter and paid a little more attention to her instruction. After the lesson, I waited behind until the other students had left. I didn’t have to say anything. Miss Choi read my mind.

“The Widow Po is crippled,” Miss Choi told me. “She hasn’t moved from her hooch since the night we were up there.”

“How will she live?”

“Rich people make offerings to her.”

“They’re still afraid of her.”

Miss Choi nodded. I watched as she packed her lesson notes and her textbook into her leather briefcase.

“You knew what was going to happen,” I said.

She shrugged.

“The Widow Po brought all this upon herself,” I continued. “Because of a guilty conscience.”

Miss Choi clicked the hasps on her briefcase and looked me in the eye. “The Widow Po is a brave woman.”

I nodded in agreement.

“What about Moretti?” I asked.

“No need to do anything further. Mori Di ’s taken his revenge.”

I studied Miss Choi for a long moment. “You really believe that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

I helped her lock up the classroom and then walked her out the main gate of 8th Army Compound and escorted her to the bus stop. No muggers jumped out at us.

Neither did any evil spirits.

Freezing outside an Asian brothel in the middle of the night with a cold rain blowing in off the Yellow Sea is enough to make even the most dedicated investigator ponder the worth of a career in military law enforcement. Fabulous pay and benefits. Fun, travel and adventure. Three hots and a cot. And, if President Ford was to be believed, a raise that would bring my corporal’s pay all the way up to $450 per month by the end of this fiscal year.

Wow.

The wet pellets slapping my face suddenly didn’t sting so badly. Still, I shuffled deeper into the shadows beneath an overhanging eave.

Tonight, Ernie and I were after an MP gone bad. Last we heard, he was shacked up inside Building Number 36 in this maze of narrow alleys known as the Yellow House. Down the lane, light flickered out of large plate glass windows. Behind those windows sat groups of Korean women in flimsy negligees, waiting for the foreign sailors who periodically invade this port of Inchon on the western coast of Korea on the edge of the Yellow Sea. Merchant marines from all over the world-Greece, the Philippines, Japan, Holland, Sweden, and even the United States-are regular customers here.

The local US military contingent is not huge-just one transportation company, which trucks supplies from the Port of Inchon to the capital city of Seoul, and one platoon of Military Police to provide security for the duty-free shipments.

A door slammed. A tall, dark figure emerged from the foot of the stairwell just outside the glow of the plate glass window. Then I saw someone behind him. A girl, bowing; telling him in a nice way: thanks for the money but now it’s time for you to get lost. The tall man didn’t acknowledge her farewell. He turned, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strode toward the alley.

As he passed the light of the big window I caught a glimpse of his face. Dark eyes, pug nose, heavy stubble of an eight-hour beard. Our quarry. The MP gone bad: Buck Sergeant Lenny Dubrovnik.

Ernie was on the other side of Building 36, making sure Dubrovnik didn’t slip out the back. My.45 sat snugly in the shoulder holster beneath my armpit but I didn’t expect to have to use it. Dubrovnik knew the deal. He was a GI in Korea. Once you’re busted, there’s nowhere to run. The peninsula is surrounded on three sides by choppy seas. The only land route is across the Demilitarized Zone. And all international ports of embarkation are monitored with a degree of efficiency that only a militarized police state can provide.