Martin Limon - Slicky Boys

I was up, plowing toward Shipton. He regained his feet amazingly fast, but as he rose I kicked for his face. He dodged, caught my unbooted foot in his chest, and threw me back. I flailed wildly with my arms, lost my balance on the slick ice, and went down again.

The men who had pushed the coal carts backed up toward the safety of the brick buildings, as if to observe the outcome of the battle between these crazy foreigners.

Breathing heavily, Shipton braced himself on the edge of an overturned cart. He pulled the. 38 from his belt, cocked the hammer, and aimed the barrel at me.

All over now, I thought.

His eyes focused, his big paw seemed to tighten around the. 38, then something dark leapt out from behind the pile of coal.

Shipton’s eyes widened. Behind him, I saw Ernie, holding something between them like an offering. The Ml4.

Ernie thrust upward. Shipton let go his grip on the. 38 and it tumbled to the ground.

Ernie shoved up-and kept shoving-ramming the bayonet deeper into Shipton’s neck. Shipton’s mouth opened in a scream that had no sound. Slowly, like a metal tongue emerging from hell, the spike of the bayonet appeared between his teeth.

Pushing with all his might, Ernie lifted him higher into the air until Shipton let out a sort of groan and then a growl of agony rattled over the frozen snow.

Gore bubbled from his throat and flooded out of his nose. Finally, Ernie jerked back on the bayonet and Shipton flopped facedown into the snow, shuddered, and lay still.

I staggered to my feet, stumbled over Shipton’s body, and picked up the. 38. I pointed it at Shipton. His head lay twisted on the ice. Blood poured from his neck and mouth. I felt for a pulse. Then, I dropped the. 38 and sat down next to him.

Ernie was on all fours, breathing heavily, drooping his head, saliva streaming from his lips.

One of the men who had pushed the coal carts now approached. A few feet away from us he stopped and shoved back his hood. Herbalist So. The King of the Slicky Boys.

“Are you hurt, Agent Sueno?”

I surveyed my body. The cuts I’d received all seemed to be superficial. Plenty of blood but no gushing from an arterial wound. My wrist, even if it was broken, could wait until we reached the 121.

“I’ll live,” I said. “But you’ll find Mr. Ma’s corpse in the Geographic Survey building.”

No emotion showed on Mr. So’s face. He barked swift orders to the hooded men behind him. Two grabbed a cart and shoved off, heading for Geographic Survey.

I studied So’s face, thinking of how he’d manipulated me. How he’d manipulated all of us.

“The slicky boys have their compound back,” I told him, gesturing toward Shipton’s body. “No more North Korean agents to worry about. No more Whitcomb. The Eighth Army honchos will be satisfied. Everything can go back to normal.”

The leathery features of the Emperor of the Slicky Boys didn’t move but somewhere, maybe it was at the corners of his mouth, I thought I saw a trace of a smile.

He turned back to his men. “Kaja!” Let’s go.

They grabbed their carts and rumbled into the night.

Ernie and I lay in the snow like two victims of a plane crash. A few minutes later, a pair of heavy boots pounded toward us. An MP skidded to a halt.

“Jesus Christ!” he said. “What in the hell happened to you guys?”

Ernie rolled over-groaning-and flipped him the bird. “Dick,” he said and passed out.

The jeep engine purred along the country highway. Ernie had the heater turned up full blast and insisted on driving, telling me that he was feeling a lot better. We wound through rising foothills terraced with frozen rice paddies. Farmhouses huddled in companionable clusters, their thatched straw roofs frosted with ice.

Last night, the MP’s had taken us over to the emergency room at the 121 Evac. After he stopped the bleeding, the medic on duty put a brace on my forearm saying that nothing was broken, just a few nasty ligament tears. He patched up all the cuts and bruises Shipton had perpetrated on me, and stitched up a few more.

“Just meat,” the medic told me. “It’ll heal.”

He gave me a shot of antibiotics to ward off infection and a tetanus shot for the rat bite. Finished, he stood back and gazed proudly upon his handiwork. From the shoulder down I looked like something constructed by Dr. Frankenstein. Nothing I couldn’t hide inside a coat, though. Except for the brace.

Ernie was supposed to stay in the hospital to allow his spleen rupture to finish healing, but after all he’d been through, no one had the nerve to tell him again he couldn’t leave.

While Mr. Ma and I were struggling with Shipton, a Korean janitor at the 121 Evac had woken Ernie and told him that I was in trouble. After he’d sneaked out of the hospital, the slicky boys hid him under a canvas tarp and wheeled him in a coal cart over to the Headquarters complex.

On 8th Army compound, Slicky King So had his thumb on the pulse of everything.

After the medics patched Ernie and me up, they released us from the emergency room and I made a few early morning phone calls. Things were beginning to become clear to me. I explained to Ernie, but despite my protestations that I could take care of the problem myself, he had insisted on coming along.

Maybe I was all wet. Maybe there was something else behind this. But since last night, when Shipton told me that he hadn’t killed Miss Ku, I hadn’t been able to think of anything else.

I’d always been troubled by the circumstances of her murder.

Miss Ku had been tortured, as if someone had been trying to pry information out of her. And she must’ve been abducted, because you can’t torture someone in the little alley behind the Tiger Lady’s kisaeng house and not have anybody notice.

So if Shipton hadn’t been the one who killed her, who had?

Using old-fashioned deductive logic, I’d been eliminating each possible suspect.

Except one.

One of the things that still bugged me in this case was that the ROK Navy had never notified us about Shipton being wanted for the murder of the daughter of an admiral. If they had, maybe we would’ve picked him up earlier and none of this shit would’ve happened.

Also, when Ernie and I went to the ROK Navy Headquarters in Heing-ju, this admiral-the father of a murdered daughter-hadn’t even bothered to come out of his office and talk to me. I know if my daughter had been killed, and some investigator was offering to help, I wouldn’t have missed the chance to talk to him.

The other thing that nagged at me was Commander Goh’s language ability. When he’d first seen me, he’d spoken in Korean. I’d responded and we had a long conversation. But when he walked out to the jeep before we left, he immediately spoke to Ernie in English. How had he known that I speak Korean and Ernie only speaks English?

At the time, it seemed like mere coincidence. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

The highway rose higher into the mountains. Ernie passed an overloaded country bus, flashed his headlights, and sped into a tunnel carved into the side of a granite cliff.

Despite all that had happened to him recently, he honked the horn and hooted at the echo, laughing in the darkness like a demented child.

The calls I had made this morning were to set up an appointment with Commander Goh at ROK Navy headquarters. As it turned out, that would be impossible. Today, all the brass would be attending a reenactment of one of Admiral Yi Sun Shin’s victories over the forces of the Japanese Shogun Hideyoshi in 1592. The entire celebration, complete with replicas of the old sailing vessels, was being held on the coast of Kanghua-do, an island across a narrow inlet west of Seoul.

When we emerged from the tunnel, a natural harbor curved like a half-moon around the choppy gray waters of the Yellow Sea. A long wooden pier extended from the shoreline. Nearby, a parking lot was chock-full of military vehicles.