Little Mountain (12 page)

         “I don’t live here. I live next door.”

         “Then I suggest you go there and stay out of trouble. Move along.
Out!”
Chun got up slowly.

        
Viseth looked directly into Sam’s eyes.
“You guys need to practice,” he said. “Your good-cop bad-cop routine sucks.”

         “I’m going to put you in jail,” Sam said.

         “You must have something new on me. I’m scared shitless.”

         “You’re never shitless, Viseth. And I’ll never get out of your face.”

         Willie picked up the smoldering cigarette butt and he dropped it in Viseth’s shirt pocket. “
There’s
something on you,” Willie said. “Leave the place as clean as you found it.” The boys ambled out the front door before Viseth yelled and slapped at his shirt.

         “Wish you wouldn’t do that,” Sam said. He knew
he’d
hate to be burned again. Willie just smiled.

         Sam looked up the stairway. How could this be an apartment building owned by Bin Chea? At the top of the stairs, a hole in the plaster wall suggested something ripped away. An empty nip of Beefeater’s gin stood against the wall. Names and phone numbers were carved in the wall, and the stench of urine drifted into his nostrils.

         Maybe the hole in the wall meant a stolen bicycle. His first transportation in America had been a 26-inch Columbia that he rode to work during the spring and summer. At night, he’d bolted it to the wall after finding out that the landlord didn’t care. Within two nights the bicycle was gone, leaving only a hole in the wall much like this one. Would anyone pay Chea’s widow for the damage, as Sam had done with his landlord?

         Sam knocked on the door while Willie stood in the background. Feet shuffled slowly to the door, and Sam showed his face and his badge in front of the peephole.

         An old Cambodian woman let them in and invited them to sit at the kitchen table. She had thin white hair, and wore an old blouse that might have come from a second-hand clothing store. Once it might have been blue, but now Sam could see through it to her wrinkles and her underwear.

         He described Chun and Viseth to the woman.

         She twisted her fingers in her palms as though she could wring the worry out of her bones. Her knuckles protruded with arthritis; the backs of her hands showed the dark spots of age.

         She hesitated, and then the words tumbled out.
“Those boy not good.
Last week, they say ‘old man, lend us fifty dollar.’ We say no, but they don’t let us go, we very scare. Think maybe
we
--” She paused and looked down at the floor, as though the right word had slipped away and blended into the tattered carpet. “A lend? They not pay back.
Cannot afford.
Husband work, I care for my sister.
She very old.
One day she carry bag, they trip her, steal her food. My husband go help, they punch him. Five
boy
! They say we call police, maybe we disappear. Now my sister not leave apartment.”

Sam gently placed his hands around hers, feeling her tremble. “That’s okay, Aunt, everything will be okay. We will help you, but we need a little time.” How long had it been since he’d called a woman Aunt, they way he used to in Cambodia? More than fifteen years. “That’s okay, Aunt.” Her shaking eased a little.

         “Would you like to file a complaint?” he said.

         The woman’s eyes opened wide, and she shook her head. Of course not, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? No one ever pressed charges against these kids.

         Sam gave her hands a final squeeze and let go. “Have you ever seen them carry guns?”

         “No gun, not need.
They young and strong.
They get angry, maybe they kill with hand.”

         And Sam could kill those creeps with his hands.

         Sam and Willie could easily pick up these kids, but they would be out on the street in no time. This family would need a lot of courage to press charges, and they seemed to have more sense than courage.

         Meanwhile, Sam would arrange for more patrols in the area.

         “By the way,” Sam said. “How often did you see Mr. Chea?”

         Her voice turned bitter, like tea from the
sdao
leaf. “Never see. Only see wife she collect rent.”

         “What do you mean, you’ve never seen him?
Never at all?”

         “We never at all meet.”

On his way home, Sam stopped to check out Samson Cleaners. The place was closed, though Nawath was supposed to work there nights. Sam shook his head. What was that all about?

         He opened the door to his apartment at eight o’clock, and Julie met his smile with an exasperated sigh. Strands of hair stuck to her forehead, and she looked less like a community-college English teacher than a mother who’d been stuck at home with a whiny four-year old. Trish ran out of the bathroom wearing only the bottom half of her bathing suit, and she gave him a cool, wet hug. He picked her up and kissed her on the tip of her nose. “I’ve been swimming in the tub,” she said, but Julie interrupted.

         “Where have you been, honey? I was worried about you.”

         “Developing leads on the shooting. I’m sorry I worried you.”

         “Any luck?”

         Sam shook his head. “Luck is what I may need. Willie and I just finished talking to a couple of Battboys who robbed an old woman.”

         “Make an arrest?”

         “No one wants to press charges. But that woman is going to get her money back.”

         She pulled two cans of ginger ale from the refrigerator and handed him one. “How’s that, Sam?”

         “I’m going to persuade Viseth to return it.”

         “Meaning you plan to force him? You’re a law officer and not a vigilante, Sam. Don’t forget that.”

         “And I won’t forget the look in that woman’s eyes. I think half of her fear was of the punks, and half was of Willie and me.”

         “She’s afraid of the authorities--”

         “We Cambodians don’t have good experience with authorities.”
We Cambodians
slipped off his tongue by accident. For years, Cambodians had been
they
.

         “Was she afraid to talk to you?”

         “Afraid not to, I suppose.”

         “Well, I have to tutor Larisa tonight. I’ve already told her I’ll be late.” Larisa was a Russian woman paying for extra English lessons.

         They both said their good-nights to Trish, who went to sleep quickly now that the night air had been wrung dry. She held the pink bear that Sam had won for her at the state fair last fall by firing one of those fixed pellet guns at a row of bobbing ducks. Sam smiled. Finally, my marksmanship training was put to good use. What better use than making my little girl happy?

         Sam piled a plate with diced chicken and boiled rice, and sprinkled it with hot sauce. Julie had tried her hand at making spring rolls; he grabbed two from the fridge, and sat down at the table to eat. She didn’t much like cooking, so the effort had to be an act of love.

         He sat at the kitchen table across from Julie while the FM radio played rock music that was barely audible above the soft hum of the window fan. A Rush song was on, and Sam turned up the volume.

        
We are young

         Wandering the face of the earth

         Wondering what our dreams might be worth

         Knowing we’re only immortal

        
For a limited time.

        
Rush had it right. Like so many refugees, Sam had come to America with little but his dreams: he wanted to belong somewhere, to wipe away his past, to plant flowers in a garden where human bones didn’t poke through the soil. But evil left its traces everywhere. Even in America.

         Sam washed his supper down with a can of ginger ale and stacked it on top of two rows of cans to form a soda-pop pyramid. The cans wobbled in the gentle breeze of the window fan. Later on, he planned to redeem the cans and put the nickels in the gallon jug that sat on the floor.

         “When we fill up this jug, I’ll take it to the bank. It can go toward the down payment on a house,” Sam said.

         “That’s silly. You don’t pay for a house with a bottle full of nickels and dimes.”

         “But we’ve got to start somewhere,” he said.

         “Yes, a journey of a thousand miles and all that.” She smiled and tucked a dollar bill into the jug.

         As the cans rattled slightly in the breeze, Sam tapped the eraser of his pencil on a yellow legal pad. Did Mrs. Chea set up her husband the other night?
If so, why?
And who was the shooter?
And what about Bin Chea at the video store?
What frightened people about the man? Sam caught a whiff of Julie’s perfume. Her hair was combed back, and she wore earrings and a pale lipstick that brought him out of his thoughts of work.

         “Are you signing up to teach your class in the fall?” Sam hoped she’d say no.

         “Sure I will. It’s very satisfying, you know. People finish my ESL classes, and they come up and shake my hand. I feel like I’m helping people get started here.”

         Sam smiled. She’d been teaching for years, and was Sam’s first and best English teacher. “You helped
me
a lot.”

         Her voice became low and sultry. “You’re the only one who got so much of my time, ’cause you’re such a hunk.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and started to leave. “Really, you were my best student ever, even though I have a good class now. Except for one Cambodian fellow who dropped out--too bad, he was a good student.”

         “What happened to him?” Was he missing, too?

         Julie shrugged. “Who knows? Hey, I’ve gotta go.”

         “What was his name?”

         “It’s eight thirty, Sam. Stop working. I’ll see you ’bout ten.”

         When the door closed behind Julie, he thought about the woman’s fifty dollars and half wished he’d popped Viseth in the jaw this afternoon.

         That old woman was going to get her money back.

CHAPTER NINE

Sam had come so
close to hitting Viseth that evening that he scared himself. One good clip on the chin, and the punk would have had to eat his lunch through a straw. But hitting wasn’t Sam’s style.

         Of course, there had been the soldier he’d caught with his pants down a mile from the Thai border.

         After the Khmer Rouge reign of terror collapsed, Sambath had been a border guide, taking families across the Thai border into freedom. His path through the jungle was lined with Seikos and cigarettes, but he carried a .45 just in case the bribes didn’t work.

         On one trip, a woman cried out and a child screamed. In a clearing on the other side of brambles and vines, he saw
Sith
standing with an erect penis over a young woman while her little boy whimpered. The woman wore a dirty grey
krama
wrapped on top of her head, and she lay on the thick leaves of the forest floor and cried, her trousers thrown into a puddle and her legs spread wide. Sith showed a gap-toothed grin and gestured toward the woman, who trembled miserably and covered her face with her hands. Sambath’s muscles tensed. The hard steel of his pistol pressed against his hip.