Retirement Plan (7 page)

“A C-section is risky,” she told Nghuy. “She’s placenta previa. She and the baby’ll die if we don’t do something.”

Without further discussion, they began to prepare for surgery. Only moments had passed before Nghuy made the incision. The girl didn’t handle the anesthetic well; her blood pressure dropped.

Even all these years later, Lois remembered the events vividly. The infant was tiny—probably less than four pounds, though they had no scale. Her cries sounded weak and far away. By the time Lois turned back to the table, the patient was dead. They tried to work on her, but the medical unit had taken most of the big equipment. Lois closed the girl’s empty brown eyes and covered her face with the cleanest thing she could find, a somewhat bloody towel. Nghuy Tran arranged with locals for burial. No one claimed to know the dead girl.   

Their first mistake was naming the little brown baby. They’d called her Ruby for a nurse who’d died in the first days of Tet, the med unit’s only casualty so far. That evening Nghuy Tran found a scrawny goat outside an abandoned hut, and they’d fed the infant from a makeshift bottle. Lois had been sure they’d lose Ruby eventually, but she thrived.

When Lois prepared to rejoin her unit, she asked Nghuy Tran to take the child and find her a good home. Nghuy’s response surprised her.

“Like a stray dog, you mean? In a country where orphans starve and die on the streets, you want me to find this one a home?” Nghuy’s English was hard to understand when she was angry, but Lois caught her meaning. Nghuy said, “I thought you would take her. We should have let her die.”

Lois asked, “What should I do with her?”

Nghuy Tran turned her back and walked away. At the entrance of the tent she hesitated, looked over her shoulder, and said, “She is your daughter now. Take her with you or kill her today, before the others know about her.”

Lois had been twenty-one and in Vietnam for fifteen months. Men were pulling long stretches back then. Most of the guys who went home before their time was up traveled in a body bag. With a sinking feeling, Lois gazed at the baby sleeping in a cardboard box that once had held two-dozen bottles of Ringer’s lactate. Ruby was wrapped in a camouflage T-shirt that some soldier wouldn’t need again.

Of course a Vietnamese mother wouldn’t take her. They struggled to feed the children they had. Most South Vietnamese women had lost a father, brother, son, or husband. Women lined the backstreets of Saigon begging and selling themselves. Lois had known all that on some level, but she hadn’t connected it to the situation with Ruby until that minute.

The tent was hot. Through the open flap, Lois could see that rain threatened.  Boxes sat all around her. She and Nghuy Tran had packed early that morning after the wounded were loaded into a helicopter. Nghuy wouldn’t move with the unit. She had a grandmother and a sister in Saigon to care for. Only women cared for women in Vietnam.  After a moment, Lois heard the soft beat of raindrops on the tent. Then Nghuy Tran was beside her.

“We got to load up—the truck is here.”

“What about Ruby?”

Nghuy met her eyes and said softly, “Leave me a little morphine. She will feel nothing. It’s a better death than most children in this country get.”

Lois stared at the sleeping child for a long time and finally said, “I can’t.”

“Then take her with you.”

And that was that. She didn’t know how to care for the child or even if that would be possible, considering the long hours she often worked. But she set the Ringer’s box in the seat of the truck, and while the marines dismantled the tent, she helped Nghuy Tran arrange boxes on the truck bed and make room for the frightened goat. When the truck was loaded and Lois had squeezed into the cab with the box in her lap, Nghuy stepped up onto the running board, and through the open window she said, “You give Ruby a good life in America, yes?”

At that moment the sky opened up and rain ran down Nghuy Tran’s face in rivers. With sudden clarity, Lois realized she would never see this woman again. She nodded. “I’ll do my best.” Then she touched Nghuy’s shoulder and said, “Good-bye, old friend.”

Nghuy looked in the box one last time. The baby was awake, but quiet. The woman gave Lois an uncertain smile and said, “Good-bye, Lois Burnett.” Then the truck began to roll. Nghuy jumped down from the running board and stepped back. Lois adjusted the rearview mirror and watched the tiny woman, standing unfazed by the tropical downpour, until she was out of sight.

As it turned out, six months later, Ruby and Lois were among the few survivors when artillery hit the hospital. Lois got her ticket home; the price was two pieces of shrapnel—one in her left thigh and the other (the one that was still there) in her lower back. Getting Ruby out of Vietnam turned out to be easier than getting her into the States.  But in those days, it wasn’t uncommon for a G.I. to bring a child home—often his own child.

Myrtle’s voice startled her. “What you got there?”

Lois looked at what she had there. How could she hide it now? Hadn’t Myrtle been in the bedroom on the computer? Lois stammered, “It’s an old rifle we’re planning to sell on eBay.” Lois didn’t know what eBay was, but she’d heard others in the pinochle group talk about it.

Myrtle said, “Would you be willing to post my gun?”

“Your gun?”

“The ex left it. Thirty-eight revolver. That’s how she planned on starting our retirement plan.”

Lois chuckled. “Could you shoot somebody?”

Myrtle considered this. “I sure could if it was that or live in the streets. I might even be able to shoot the next woman that leaves me for an ex-Playboy Bunny in the kneecap.”

“You’re a cold woman, Myrtle Dixon,” Lois said.

Myrtle’s face lit up.

Then Sophie put a hand on Myrtle’s shoulder and guided her toward the door.

When Sophie returned, Lois asked, “You find anything for her?”

“Actually, there are a couple of lesbian dating sites for seniors.”

“You’re kidding.”

Sophie shook her head. “I am not.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Why were you working on that thing with Myrtle in the house?”

“I thought you’d be busy for ten or fifteen minutes,” Lois said.

“We were on the computer for close to an hour.”

“Oh.”

Brushing aside the topic of Myrtle, Sophie said, “I just put the ad up on a Web site called Dirty Work for Hire this morning, and we have a customer already.” She laid a piece of printer paper on the table. It was an e-mail.

Lois quickly snapped the rifle back together. “Who?”

“That’s the trouble. On the Internet you never really know for sure.”

“Could be undercover police or that
60 Minutes
guy who busts into your kitchen with cameras.”

Sophie shrugged. “I suppose so. I figure we should charge a lot on this deal and put some money away against the day we get arrested—if we ever do.”

“What exactly did the ad say?”

“Something like, ‘Mature, reliable, and honest, we will do your dirty jobs and resolve your biggest problems for a fee. If you want it done right, hire a woman.’”

“How the heck are our customers supposed to know we want to bump off their enemies from that?”

“Several scary ads said something similar. Look, this customer knew what we meant.”

The kitchen was silent for several moments. One of the cats stretched, then jumped onto the table and lay across the gas port. Sophie scratched its ears.

Finally, Lois said, “I killed deer and geese when I was a kid on my grandma’s farm. In Nam I killed at least two of the enemy. But I don’t think I could stand it if the bad guys employ us to go after the good guys. There’s a difference for me when I consider the things I shoot as meat for dinner or as the enemy.”

Sophie passed the paper to Lois. “Well, take a look at least.”

Lois read, then looked up. “This is a lot of money.”

Sophie grabbed a paper towel and began working on spots of gun oil that shone on the checkered tablecloth.

 Lois said, “I need a new spring and a cleaning kit before I can use this weapon again.”

“Should we order from the Internet?”

“Don’t think so. They’d have to mail the stuff to this address. A gun show’s coming up in Rockford. No one would trace the stuff I need from there. I’ll see what I can get. I’ll need cash though.”

Sophie pulled the gas port from beneath the indignant cat. “You know, pipe cleaners might work for this—they come in fairly large sizes.”

Lois stood and crossed the kitchen to the sink, where she filled an empty Tupperware pitcher with cool water.

Sophie said, “You’ve been thinking about Ruby again, haven’t you?”

Lois nodded. “I sometimes wonder what her life would have been like if I’d left her in Vietnam.”

“The war went on for several more years. She wouldn’t have survived.”

“I told Nghuy Tran I’d give her a good life. Maybe death would have been better than the way things turned out here.”

Sophie stood behind Lois and lightly massaged the back of her neck. “You gave her the opportunity to have a good life. She threw it away.”

Lois sighed and turned around. They embraced, and Lois said into Sophie’s shoulder, “Will you ever forgive her?”

The kitchen was quiet again. The refrigerator motor kicked on. Finally Sophie said, “I don’t know.”

Lois pulled away and went to the back door. A leather leash was looped over a coat hook near the mudroom and the basement steps. She pushed the back door open and said, almost as an afterthought, “I’m going to give Daisy some water and walk her before it starts to rain.”

As it turned out, thanks to word-of-mouth, they got another ex-husband job in Indiana, up north in Muncie, before they met the woman who contacted them through Dirty Work for Hire.

Chapter Five

Morgan Holiday’s pager went off at four fifteen in the morning. The room was cold and dark except for narrow strips from the streetlight that fell through the slats in the plantation shutters. Still half-asleep, she shut off the pager, nestled down under the blanket, and closed her eyes again. It seemed like only a few seconds had passed when the thing went off again. She rolled to a sitting position, placed both feet on the cold hardwood floor, fumbled for the lamp switch, and grabbed the pager. As she tried to focus on the number, she realized she could hear the telephone in the kitchen ringing. She stood. Two pages and the telephone; this couldn’t be good.

In the kitchen, squinting at the harsh overhead light, she picked up the phone. “What?”

Henry’s voice was raspy. “You awake?”

“No.”

“Night-shift dispatcher just woke me. They got an officer out on a call. He needs Homicide.”

Morgan ran her tongue over her dry lips. Nestling the receiver between her ear and her shoulder, she pulled a juice glass from the dish drainer, filled it with tap water, and gulped it down. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I need to find something to write on.”

*

The sky in the east was turning gray by the time Morgan unlocked her car door and slid behind the wheel. As she turned the key, she hit the windshield wipers to remove the condensation. Then the loud rhythmic beat of the stereo filled the little red Saturn. She quickly turned it down.

A kid she’d babysat years ago had given her the CD, ironically titled
Ready to Die,
before what turned out to be his last tour in Afghanistan—his last tour anywhere.  “Get past the profanity and listen to the lyrics,” he’d told her. “This guy was a poet.”

Morgan remembered that day clearly. It had been his last day home and her first day home. She hadn’t even unpacked her things in her old room yet. Her father’s broken leg had left him helpless, and so many things needed doing. Her mother couldn’t take care of him alone. But she started to suspect, when she walked into the house, that things with her mother weren’t right.

Morgan had attended the kid’s going-away party the day before he left. Tragically, as if their futures were already written, the boy never came home and she never left her parents’ house.

Instead of toward town, Morgan headed the opposite direction. There’d been a shooting in the county, at one of the parks. The music of Notorious B.I.G. (the kids today simply called him Biggie) kept her company as her car sped through early morning gray and empty streets toward the river road.

She could see the flashing lights from the entrance to the park, so she tossed the directions she’d written in red pencil on a paper plate into the backseat with the rest of the trash and followed the winding road toward the riverbank.

Looking old and tired, Henry stood next to his car waiting. He started talking without formality. “Body’s down near the edge of the water. Two kids parked over there”—he pointed toward the parking-lot entrance—“decided to take a moonlight stroll. Found him.”

“How long’s he been dead?”

Henry shrugged. “Don’t know. Crime-scene tech is waiting on you.”

“Me? Aren’t you the primary?” She looked at him more carefully now. Had he been drinking? His eyes were puffy and he needed a shave, but other than that, he seemed okay.

“Not me. You’ll know why when you see him.”

She started walking toward the riverbank. The wet grass abruptly ended, and the muddy bank dropped about eight or ten feet down and leveled out at the edge of the river. She cursed, then stepped off the bank and climbed and slid downward. She was thankful for the mud, really. It was the only thing that kept her from losing her footing. Maybe she was primary because Henry couldn’t make the climb down. It was all right with her. But he’d have to take the next two dead bodies, no matter where they were.

The body was facedown and shirtless, with jeans and underwear gathered around its ankles. As she moved closer, the lab technician—the new girl who got all the crappy assignments—stepped backward.

“What we got here, Rachel?”

“Looks like he fell from up there.” Rachel pointed.

“Then why did the first-on-the-scene call Homicide?”

“Sorry,” the girl stammered. “I wasn’t clear. I think he was shot up there and, as he fell, he rolled down here.”