T. Parker - Little Saigon

He stood over the woman. She looked up at him with contempt. Her thick hands were folded on the table, her huge bosom tight within the ao dai.

“You may leave now,” she said.

“Get up, please.”

“I stay.”

“Up, doll.”

She sat back and glared at him.

He stepped around her, took the back of her chair and towed it away with her in it. She grasped the arms like a frightened airline passenger and cursed him in Vietnamese. Then he pushed the table aside and ran his hands over the carpet. Nothing but a scrap of string.

A loop.

He slid his flashlight through it and pulled.

The trapdoor rose. It was roughly square, the same size as the Dream Reader’s table. The smell of earth wafted up. Minh jumped to his side. When Frye shined his light down he could see the rounded sides of the tunnel and a ladder made of rope. “I knew I’d get my fifty-bucks’ worth,” he said.

She stared at him, still and silent.

Minh smiled. “I’ve heard rumors of a tunnel, but no one could ever find an entrance. This is quite impressive, Chuck.”

“That was the truth I was telling, about small, dark places, Detective. If I start to freak, I’m coming up.”

“You’ve got the light. You first.”

Frye considered the Dream Reader. “What about her?”

Minh snapped something at the woman. She talked rapidly until he cut her off. “She says she’d have told me sooner, but she was afraid of the gangs. She’ll stay right where she is,” said Minh.

Frye shoved the flashlight into his belt, then lowered himself down one rung at a time — nine in all — until he found himself stooping in a small earthen room. It was cool and damp, and the ceiling was too low for his head. His first instinct was to scramble back up and get the hell out of this place. He breathed deeply — a loamy, ancient smell, like the cave-house’s, but stronger — and tried to slow his galloping heart. Above him the round shaft of light diminished, and he could see the Dream Reader’s thick face gazing down before she shut the door. It was totally black inside. He held a hand in front of his face and saw nothing.

He could hear Minh breathing beside him.

Using the flashlight now, he saw that two tunnels led off in opposite directions, right toward Bolsa and left toward the inner part of Saigon Plaza. He looked at Minh, who shook his head. He went left.

The tunnel went straight for nearly fifty feet, then bent to the right. It was impossible to judge, but Frye had the feeling that he was moving deeper. With the walls close around him, he could feel the first quivers of panic spreading up his back, that feeling of being trapped, of never getting out, of losing direction. He stopped, turned off the light, and closed his eyes. Breathe deeply. Control.

“Are you still alive, Frye?”

“Yeah.”

With his flashlight on again he went fifty feet to where the tunnel opened into another small room. A camping lantern hung from one wall. He found a pack of matches on top of it, worked the pump a few times, and lit the wick. The room coalesced in a soft orange glow. A sleeping bag lay on the earth, neatly flattened. He pulled it open. Inside, pheasants flew across a background of red flannel. “It’s Eddie’s,” he said. “I saw it in his room. When he was sneaking through the plaza, he had a bag with him. He’d gone home to get something to sleep on.”

Beside it was a white sack with a half-eaten hamburger inside. Frye held it and felt a truly unpleasant coolness settle on his nerves. Next to the sack sat a white bowl filled with what looked like used napkins. Minh smelled them.

On the other side of the sleeping bag was a candle in a small brass dish. The wax had melted into a pool, now hardened. Frye reached out to touch it, but Minh’s hand clamped over his. Propped up against the dish was a thin gold earring. Minh reached out with a handkerchief and picked it up. “It looks like the one I found in his house. He brought her here first. It explains the earth on her clothes.”

“You don’t want to hear this, Minh, but Eddie Vo never brought her here at all.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he wouldn’t. That’s all.”

“Then who did, Frye?”

“I don’t know.”

A small stack of Vietnamese magazines and newspapers sat beside the candle. Sacks from fast-food restaurants were piled next to one wall: several days’ worth of rations. Leaning beside them was a short, sawed-off shotgun. The barrel was rusted, the old wooden stock dark and beaten. The box of .20-gauge ammunition that sat beside it was brand-new. Frye examined the red plastic cylinders — high base, expensive. Next to that, another lantern and a can of fuel.

A trickle of sweat started at his neck and dribbled all the way down his back.

Something rumbled overhead; the floor vibrated. Cars, he thought — cars in Saigon Plaza. He could feel his pulse rising, a fresh wash of sweat break over his scalp. He checked his watch: ten minutes down. The lantern mantles glowed brightly, charging the room with clean, white light. Frye turned down the gas.

The tunnel continued, a neat hole in the far wall. He put the flashlight in his belt and unhooked the lantern. Thirty steps later the tunnel emptied into a concrete passageway with a dark sluggish stream moving slowly along the bottom. Spikes of old re-bar sprouted from the side walls, leaving brown stains and skewed shadows in the lamplight. From the darkness in either direction came liquescent echoes, intermittent splashes. Mud slid and shifted under his heels. He looked back and held up the lantern to see his footprints refilling with ooze.

It was then that he saw the man, maybe fifty feet away, crouched too, looking at Frye with a shocked, feral face.

“Halt! Police!” Minh pushed down on Frye’s shoulder with one hand and aimed his revolver with the other.

The man never looked back. He just turned, loped down the tunnel into the darkness and disappeared.

Minh charged ahead. Frye stood there, listening to the splattering from the detective’s shoes. Finally he commanded his heavy legs to move, the echoes of Minh’s footsteps still sounding in his ears.

When he caught up with him a moment later, Minh was standing in the mud, gun at his side. “Gone,” he said. “Like all the rest of them. Stay close, Frye.”

“Don’t worry.”

A hundred yards down, the river narrowed and disappeared through a grate. The concrete walls and ceiling tapered to almost nothing. Frye could hear the constant rush of the water, spilling over to wherever it went. He stopped a few yards short, unable to go any further without wading. Holding up the lantern, he could see that the grating was stuffed with captured debris — branches, a dripping black tumbleweed, a car tire, something that looked like a patio chair. The end of the line, he thought, for everything.

He held up the lantern again, looking for a connection, a way in or a way out, but all he saw was solid concrete, an aging drain system doing its thankless subterranean job.

“What do you think, Frye?”

“There’s got to be a way. Another trapdoor maybe, or a ladder. Something.”

“Lead on. Your luck is good so far.”

Frye turned and headed back out, still hugging the cool wall. Minh sloshed behind him. Frye tapped with his knuckles, about waist-height as he went, hoping. “Must be on the other wall.”

Landing on a pile of trash that formed a small island in the middle, he made the other side in two jumps and worked his way back down the wall, tapping, lantern held high and casting its bright glow against the stained and pitted concrete.

His fingers found the trapdoor before his eyes did; it was hidden that well. But it gave a hollow thud when he hit it, and a bit of concrete dust fell from the plywood that had been cut to fit the opening, then smeared with cement to look like the rest of the wall. He pried it with a car key. It scraped toward him, then fell, dangling from the hole by a piece of rope.