Little Mountain (26 page)

         And he should have saved his father. Should have seen it coming, what they did to him. Should have snuck him into the jungle and taken a chance with the snares and land mines.

         Sam headed up the hill to Bin Chea’s house.
A couple of cars passed by, their tires hissing on the wet pavement.
Then the street became still as Sam squatted in front of the stoop and took out his father-in-law’s hammer.

         Which step was it? He shone the flashlight on the steps. In the rain and the poor light, all the steps looked the same. He tapped on the third step, just to the right of center, and the veneer of new cement shattered. When he brushed away the thin shards, there it was, much clearer than before.

         It wasn’t a footprint, but the heel of a boot.

         Sam tapped harder, making tiny chips in the older cement. Was it only a boot, dumped into the cement for--God knew for what reason?
Carelessness?
That was impossible--no, improbable. Sam drew in his breath and hammered with all his might.

        
Wham! Wham! Wham!

         A fissure appeared next to the boot.

        
Wham! Wham! Wham!

         Sam’s ears rung, his bones shook, his right arm ached. For a moment the boot seemed no longer there; now it was Bin Chea’s face.
God damn him, God damn his memory, God damn his wife and children.
Sam had to turn the face into splinters, and the splinters into powder.

        
Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!

         And once more for my father--

        
Wham!

         The stair split into a dozen large pieces. Chunks fell away. Sam cleared the debris with his hands,
then
aimed his flashlight inside the crater.

         The porch light went on and the front door opened and slammed.

         “What’s
all the
racket?
My God!”

         It was Li Chang’s brother Someth; his wife and Li Chang stood in the doorway. He stood on the top step and stared down, saying nothing.

         The leg looked like a ghost stepping out of his grave. It was a left leg. The pants were probably denim, and were coated with gray. Raindrops speckled the leg, which was exposed almost to the knee. The right leg was stuck in what remained of the step. Sam took a deep breath to steady
himself
, then looked up at Someth.

         “Call the police,” he said. “I’ve found your brother-in-law.”

The police camera flashed as it captured the scene. “Now
that
is a stiff,” Sergeant DeVito said. “How much of this mess did you make, Sam?”

         “All of it.”

         “You could
of
waited till day shift, you know. I mean, where was this guy going in the freaking meanwhile?”

         Sam’s head buzzed. Every muscle in his body had its own private grudge against him. The flashing blue lights on the cruisers reflected on the exposed leg, on the chips stuck to the victim’s jeans, on DeVito’s face. “Nobody would
care
about a repaired stoop! I had to see for
myself,
and--and--”

         “Take it easy, Sam. Catch your breath.”

         “I just meant to expose it the way I’d seen it before. But once I’d done that, I couldn’t stop. It couldn’t have been a footprint anyway,” he said. “The heel was in the middle of the step. The shoe disappeared into the next step. That’s why I came back to look.”

         DeVito placed an arm around Sam’s shoulder. “The wife, is she okay?”

         “Yeah, she’s resting.”

         “Look at your
knuckles,
for God’s sake. They’re all scraped to shit.” Sam looked down at his right hand: the skin was torn, and blood dripped from two knuckles. “We don’t need you here anymore. Where’s your car?”

         “I walked.”

         DeVito shook his head. “We’ll have somebody drive you home, then. But no more venting, okay? You
all done
venting?”

         The poison in Sam’s brain must have prevented his feeling the pain in his knuckles, because now the throbbing began. It radiated all the way up his arm.

         “Sam? You got it out of your system?”

         “Yeah,” Sam said.
“For now.”

Back at his in-laws’, he cleaned off his scraped knuckles. Then he sat in a comfortable chair in the living room and stared at the television, which was off. What an idiot he was, thinking he could be a policeman like his father. For someone, catching Viseth Kim was going to be a matter of time. The little runt was stupid--there was nothing like an attack on a cop’s family to galvanize attention to a case. Still, this wasn’t worth it for Sam. Being a cop wasn’t worth it. A sharp pain shot across his forehead.

         Sam had to get out while he still had a family.

         Upstairs, Trish began to cry. Sam moved slowly at first,
then
the cries turned to screams. “Mommy, you’re bleeding.
Don’t die, Mommy.
Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” Sam took the stairs two at a time and found Trish sitting on the bed. Her eyes were wide, and her wet cheeks glinted in the dim nightlight. Her little body shook with rapid, shallow sobs. Sam wrapped his arms around her and rocked her gently back and forth. “Don’t let Mommy die,” she said, over and over.

         “Mommy’s not going to die, sweetheart. Mommy’s going to be okay.”

         “Will Patricia be all right?” Dottie Nordstrom stood at the door and whispered, as though she didn’t want to intrude on a private moment.

         He nodded. “I’ll stay with her.”

         Trish’s arms reached almost around his chest, and her fingers dug against his back.
Clinging for life to the edge of a cliff.
Her breathing began to slow, cool puffs against his neck, and he remembered clinging to his father’s hand when he was a small boy. The poison in his veins began to melt away in her embrace.

         “You said you wouldn’t leave me, Daddy,” Trish said.

         “I’m not leaving you, sweetheart. I’ll stay with you the rest of the night. I’ll just bring up a chair from the kitchen.”

         “Get me Courtney, Daddy.” Trish looked up with pleading eyes.

         “Your dolls are at home, sweetheart. I can’t go get Courtney and stay with you at the same time. Tomorrow we’ll get her.”

         Sam sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand until she fell asleep.

         At around five a.m. he dozed upright and dreamed.

        
The colors are stark: the leaves too green, the sky too blue,
the
mourning veils too black. A jeep burns and sends up billows of black smoke. A hundred cops mourn a brother officer, and Tommy Wilkins winks. You more or less had it coming, he says. Two coffins are lowered into the moist black earth. Someone unwelcome is here. Is that you, Viseth?
No, someone much older--Bin Chea, who wears a red and white checkered krama around his neck.
A third open grave sits and waits. I’ve had enough of you, Julie says. Trish buys an orange ice from the man on the cyclopousse while she holds Courtney by the feet, draining the doll’s blood into the soil. Sam wants to chase Bin Chea and strangle him with the scarf, but he cannot get around the beckoning grave. If he tries, he will fall in.

        
“Go away!” Sam awoke himself with a yell.

         He showered and shaved, hoping to wash his depression down the drain, but it didn’t help. How could he tell Trish that Courtney was a victim of Daddy’s
work, that
Courtney had caught the full force of Viseth’s rage and that half of her had been driven through the back of the couch?

         Later, Sam drank coffee as black as his mood. Trish was still in the bed her grandmother had unfolded last night. His spoon clinked against the inside of the cup, and the sugar bowl remained untouched. Dottie said good morning, slipped an onion bagel in front of him, and went about getting ready for work. He forced a smile, and she did the same.

         Eric stumbled into the kitchen, wearing pin-striped pants, a tee shirt, and a pair of withered suspenders. He was tall and thin, with a face that was all angles and creases in a carpet of stubble. He capped the vodka bottle and poured himself a cup of black coffee. As far as Sam could tell, there was no resemblance at all between father and daughter.

        
“My granddaughter okay?”

         “She had bad dreams. Who wouldn’t?” Some people were made to be kept apart, like Sam and Eric. Sam’s confidence vanished around his father-in-law.

         “Any kid would.” The old man gulped his coffee and looked Sam in the eye. “She and her mother needed protection and their old man wasn’t there. Of course she’d wake up screaming in the middle of the damn night.”

         “I feel guilty--”

         “You
should
feel guilty, you son of a bitch.” Sam felt like a dartboard, and the old man was scoring tens.

         “Then why did you let me stay here last night?”

         Eric nodded toward his wife. “It was her idea, not mine. You don’t exist as far as I’m concerned, and one of these days my little girl is going to come to her senses about you. Anyway, my granddaughter is always welcome here. If you had gotten Julie killed, I’d fight you for custody of Trish. And win.”

         “If I had--
wait
a minute.” Sam’s head pounded as though it
were
inside a vise, and he felt the urge to grab the old man’s skinny little neck and snap it. “You’re not splitting up my family.
Never.”

         “I told her not to marry a cop.”

         “We were already married when I joined the force.”

         “But you were just dying to wear a uniform and carry a gun.”

         “You told her not to marry an Asian.”

         “I never said that. I said she should go to graduate school.”

        
“Which she did.”

         “Marry somebody with a future.”

        
“Which she
did.
”

         “There’s no future under a granite slab.” Eric poked his finger at Sam’s chest.

         Sam had to shut up right now before he upended the kitchen table and proved
himself
unfit once and for all.

         “I’m going out for a few minutes,” he said. He drove to the grocery store to buy milk and cereal for Trish’s breakfast. While he was there, he called his landlord from a pay phone.

         When he came back Trish was at the kitchen table, staring at a bagel as though it were a moon rock. He tossed the bagel into the trash and poured Trish a bowl of Count Chocula cereal with whole milk. Where did they come up with rock-hard bagels for five-year-olds? It was a wonder Julie didn’t starve as a kid.

         Trish ate the cereal. “Is Mommy going to die?” she asked. Sam hugged her and said no.

         “I want to go to the beach, Daddy,” she announced.
“With you and Mommy and Courtney.”
Her voice was firm, as though she could will it to happen.

         “We’ll have to wait for Mommy to get a little better, I think. There’s a nice park nearby. Would you like to play there, you and me? We can go from there to the hospital.”