Robert Jones - Blood Tide

He glommed Lotta Tung’s left tit. A falsie! Wait a minute—Asian girls are notorious for that. Titless wonders, but they make up for it in other respects. He slid the hand down over her butt. Real enough at that end. She was breathing harder, panting—another minute and she’d hyperventilate, or die of terminal dry throat. Curt grabbed at her pussy. She pulled away with a gasp before he could touch her.

“Hey, Joe, no! We go back here.” She pulled him toward a doorway beside the juke. “I’m hot! I suck you off, right?”

Curt pulled back on her hand, slammed her against the juke. He socked his hand between her legs.

Jesus Christ! There was a cock and balls under the dragon-lady skirt!

“ Tah-dah! ” A spotlight from the bar flashed on the two of them. The bartender was laughing his ass off. Everyone in the bar was looking and laughing—GIs, airmen, hookers, B-girls, sailors, Flips in business suits and those faggy embroidered shirts. . . . Lotta Tung was laughing, too, in a much deeper voice than before. In the light it was easy to see she was a guy—five-o’clock shadow on the upper lip, a frigging tent pole under the skirt.

“I tole you, Joe!” the bartender yelled. “Da ones in da skirts, hey? Dat’s da famous Pilipino Benny boys, Joe! Welcome to Manila, where da sun never sets and da cock always crows!”

Curt blasted out of there in a hurry.

It was dark now and raining like a bastard—the rain of the thousand fire hoses. Curt had been soaked in it from Haiti to Hawaii. It falleth on the just and the unjust alike, he mused, absolving all sins, cooling all passions. He danced in place, soaked and laughing. The traffic roared past unbroken, throwing oil spray as high as the Be-Bop’s thundering roof. Then a car peeled out of the mainstream and splashed to a halt in front of him. A white man’s face leaned out the back window. It was Phil Chalmers.

“Pile in!”

Curt piled. Chalmers yelled something to the driver, and they hydroplaned back out into a sea of spume and blaring horns.

“Goddamn it, Curt, don’t ever call me at the office.” Phil was pissed. “ Ever! ”

“Good to see you, too, old buddy.”

“Well, goddamn it, I mean it. There’s CIA all over the place. And other initials, too. You shoulda—”

“The only address I had for you was MATS,” Curt said. He was whispering, but there was no need to. The driver had the tape deck on full blast—sounded like Jan and Dean’s “Deadman’s Curve.” Appropriate.

Curt pulled out his Marlboros. Brown slush. Chalmers gave him a Benson & Hedges and a light from his gold Ronson. Just like downtown. They both cooled off.

“Where we going?”

“A little place up the way a bit.”

It was a dark, loud little place on a dark, quiet street, full of diddy-bopping Filipinos. But Chalmers found a booth in the back where they could talk. They ordered a couple of beers—Chalmers drank 33, smuggled in from Ho Chi Minh City, he said. He was hooked on the formaldehyde, he added, kept him youthful. Curt stuck with San Miguel.

“Whatta ya got?” Curt asked.

“Not much,” Chalmers replied. “It’s tight as a spinster’s pussy right now, has been for the past year or more. Worse than it ever was in Panama. Not just the drug guys, either. Actually DEA’s a minor nuisance since Marcos left. The whole place is crawling with spooks—round-eyes, Chi Coms, even some Japanese. There’s a spook under every toilet seat, under every manhole cover. They’re scared of a Commie takeover. Dominoes again. The same old paranoia—who knows? They could be right. Aquino’s weak. The government’s full of the same brand of crooks that ran it under Marcos. Only the names have changed. Trouble is, nobody knows which way to jump just yet. There’s a million deals being cut every minute, and another million welshed on. The bottom line is, with all the spooks in the country, you can’t get anything in or out. Certainly not from Manila.”

“Well,” Curt said, “looks like I came a long way for nothing.”

“Looks like you did, pal.”

“You said Manila. Anyplace else where it’s looser?”

“I don’t know,” Chalmers said. He sucked on his 33. When he belched, it smelled like a funeral parlor. “Taiwan, maybe. Bangkok? Hong Kong? Singapore? I just don’t know, I’ve been keeping my nose clean for so long now.”

“I mean in the Philippines. There’s a lot of islands in the PI. More than they got spooks to cover each one of them.”

“Don’t count on it,” Chalmers said. “What kind of boat you got?”

“Small yawl with a kicker, not much for fast. Seven knots tops. But it’s beamy. I could carry a lot, and nobody’s gonna mess with a mere sailboat.”

“Oh yeah? I’d sell it and buy a Pan Am ticket Stateside,” Chalmers said. “Cut your losses.”

“No way. I’m on everyone’s computer by now.”

“You got a problem, all right.” Chalmers sucked down the last of his beer and socked the bottle down on the table. It sounded final. His eyes were remote, a man listening to a disaster report from a minor-league country. “I just can’t help you at the moment, Curt. Maybe Bangkok, I don’t know . . .” His voice trailed off, and he started to stand up.

“Hey Phil,” Curt said quietly. “Remember Colón? Remember Port-au-Prince? I made you a lot of money, pal .” He didn’t want to say the obvious: he could blow a whistle on Chalmers that would be heard clear back to the Pentagon. “We had some good times.”

Chalmers sat back down and signaled the waitress for more beers.

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “Good times. Okay. This is just hearsay, let me warn you, but I’ve been getting stuff on a guy down south of Palawan. Round-eye, calls himself Commodore Millikan. He’s supposed to have his own private navy of fast boats down there and run a lot of stuff out of Thailand. He’s got the mundo —the pirates—” Chalmers winced at the word—how hokey can you get? “He’s got them eating out of his hand. I don’t know what this is—Millikan is what they call any American down there, like Joe up here—but it smells kind of strange to me. Maybe a DEA scam, maybe Langley, or the mob, I don’t know.”

“That would count me out.”

“Not necessarily. They take all kinds in that church nowadays. And you’re good in a fast boat. I can vouch for that.”

“So what do I do?”

“I’ve done business with one of his people, his CEO I guess you’d call him. Strictly on the up-and-up. They’ve got a shipping line down that way as a kind of front. Millikan Shipping. The exec’s name is Torres, Billy Torres. He’s got an office in Zambo City—that’s Zamboanga, nice town, on Mindanao. Sometimes he’s there, sometimes he’s out at Millikan’s private island south of Palawan. I gotta call him tomorrow anyway on some machinery he’s got coming in from the States. I’ll make an appointment for you.”

“Fine,” Curt said.

“How long will it take you to get down there?” Chalmers asked.

“I guess a week or ten days.”

“I’ll ask Torres to look you over, or one of his people. I’ll give you a good introduction. That’s really all I can do, pal. Right now, anyway . . . no, no, I’ll buy the beers. You need any money? I’m about tapped out, but I could spare you a couple a thousand pee. Just don’t stop along the way to rescue any drowning dogs. You read about that in the papers? Guy uses his dog as bait to rip off tourist boats. These Flips have got initiative, all right.”

“That was me,” Curt said. “Me and my dog, Brillo.”

Chalmers stood up, half-laughing. He checked his watch—a Rolex, the platinum one. He peeled off some pesos from a wad in his pocket. He was shaking his head in admiration. True or bullshit? Then he remembered the dog from Colón.