We raced back out of the rabbit hole so fast I clobbered my head on the underside of Morrison’s desk. Ashley flung herself to the side, eyes wide and dramatic as she gasped at the ceiling. I rubbed my head and spluttered, then finally began to applaud. “How’d you do that, kid?”
“He said Tar Baby wouldn’t work, but he didn’t say anything about a Honey Baby!” Ashley pushed up on her elbows, eyes still very wide. “I just had to build it real fast while you and him were talking. I pretended real hard that I wasn’t doing anything and hoped he wouldn’t see!”
“I didn’t even see.” And I was supposed to be a grown-up who noticed things. “That was brilliant, Ashley. That was fantastic. You’re amazing.”
She beamed at me, though the expression went away again almost instantly, turning instead to conspiracy. “I think we shouldn’t tell my mommy, okay?”
I laughed, a sort of frantic noise in the back of my throat, and fumbled around for her case file. “I think that might be a good idea. How about we go find this instead, so she can be impressed when she gets back?”
Ashley scrambled to her feet and took my hand a second time. “I’m going to be just like you when I grow up, Detective Walker.”
I followed her out of Morrison’s office, wondering if she just might be.
Forgotten But By A Few
“Forgotten But By A Few” takes place at the same time as SPIRIT DANCES (Book Six of the Walker Papers), while Gary is in San Diego.
I woke up on the plane with the feeling somebody’d been sittin’ on my chest. Ain’t a nice feeling, ‘specially when a heart attack snuck up on you a year or so back. Well, it hadn’t snuck up on me, I’d been witched into it, but when you’re lying in a hospital bed with a nurse who don’t never say more than two words together at once scowling down at you, whether it snuck up or got sent don’t really matter. So waking up with that feeling made me a lot more nervous than it used to woulda, and that was a lousy way to start a holiday weekend.
‘course, it coulda just been the warm humid air in San Diego feelin’ thick in my chest. Not that Seattle ain’t humid, but it just ain’t the same. San Diego’s got no winter, plenty of sunshine, beautiful women hanging out at the beaches, and one of the best zoos in the world. In the long couple years between my wife dying and me meeting Joanne, I’d wondered why I still lived in Seattle. Now I knew, a’course, but that didn’t mean I was gonna miss my St. Patrick’s Day weekend with the boys.
And it was getting important to show up every year. The number of us who could make it was shrinking, and not because we couldn’t afford to come. Whether we liked to admit it or not, none of us were spring chickens anymore. I was one of the youngsters, and my seventy-fourth birthday had been a couple months ago. Korea had been a long time ago, and nothin’ but M*A*S*H re-runs kept it fresh in folks’s minds.
Two of my buddies were waitin’ for me at the luggage carousel. One of ‘em held a sign that said my name in big ugly Army-style stencils: GARRISON MATTHEW MULDOON, with a military rank that hadn’t meant anything to me in fifty years. The other guy, Dave Ackerly, had a sign reading ANDERSON COLVER LEE, MASTER SGT. tucked under his arm. Andy was the guy holding my sign, and I had one in my bag that said CORPORAL DANIEL BAE KIM. Sun would have the next one, and the last guy in would have a sign for Ackerly, the first fella in. That sign would say WHERE THE HELL’S THE LIMO, ACK?
We’d been doing this a while. There were rituals. Sometimes it meant we spent about six or eight hours at the airport, waitin’ for everybody to come in. Truth was, we could spend our whole weekend in the airport and none of us would care much, except for it was hard to get beer at baggage claim. Mostly it was about seein’ each other again, always maybe for the last time. Don’t much matter where that happens, as long as you get to say goodbye.
Andy pounded my back while the sign with my name on it jabbed me in the ribs. “Muldoon! You look good, you look great, you look—” He let me go and took a step back. Andy was a little black guy from Alabama whose skinny bones had gotten him out of more tight spots in Korea than any of us could count. He was strong as hell, made up of baling wire and sprung steel, and every time I saw him his eyes had sunk farther into his head. He looked terrible, though I wouldn’t tell him that to his face.
“You look great,” he said again, except this time he meant it. “What’s going on, Muldoon, you got a new girl?”
“Yeah, Andy, a hot young thing who can’t get by without me.” Funny thing was, it was true, not that he’d believe me. “You’re looking good too, old man.”
“Bullshit, I look like hell, but that’s okay, I been through hell.”
Anything else he said was lost as The Ack-Man elbowed him out of the way to shake my hand, then, who were we kidding, offer up a bear hug as big as Andy’s. I felt his ribs when I hugged him. Dave was closer to my size, couple inches over six feet, but his muscle had withered away over the years until he was tall and skinny and old. We were all old. It just looked better on some of us than others. We grunted each other’s names into each other’s shoulders, no sentimentality here, no sir, then stood back and all three of us looked each other up and down, seeing what the past year had done to us.
We were so busy doing that, that Daniel snuck up on us before I got his sign out. He said, “I see how it is,” out of nowhere. “You make a fuss for all you white guys, but you don’t give a damn about the Korean.”
“Man, I am not white!” Andy and Danny had gone around on that one for fifty years and would keep doing it til they were both dead. I scrambled for Dan’s sign, held it up, checked it, and flipped it right-side up, putting as big an innocent grin on my face as I could manage.
“You’re still a goddamned sneak, Danny.” Danny had been our secret weapon, the American-born Korean who walked in and out of enemy territory without ever raising an eyebrow. He was the only one of us without any body scars from Korea. Fifty years later I still didn’t know just how deep the other ones cut, the ones on his heart. “Thought your plane didn’t get in for another twenty minutes.”
“And you’re still goddamned blind.” Another round of hugs and hand-shakes went around, Dan saying, “Tailwind, we got in early,” between greetings. If I looked good, he looked like an anti-aging commercial. He had that luck of the draw a lot of Asians seemed to get, the tight smooth skin over bone structure most women would kill for, and his hair was still black as pitch. He coulda been anywhere from his late fifties to a couple weeks older than God, and I knew for a fact he was the oldest of us, turnin’ eighty-three in another week. He stepped free of Ack’s hug, then, with a sigh, took his sign from his duffel.
It said WHERE THE HELL’S THE LIMO, ACK?
We all stared at it, hardly understanding. Then the breath wheezed out of me, my chest feelin’ as heavy as it had on the plane. “Wait, what the hell, where’s Mick?”
“His wife called me this morning. You guys had all left already.” Dan was up in San Francisco, the shortest flight any of us had to get to San Diego. My shoulders fell. There wasn’t much else Dan had to say, though he went ahead and said it: “He’d been having a hard time breathing the past few days, she said. He went to the doctor, they said he was fine, so he was planning to come up just like always. He went to bed early last night, and when she came to bed…”
“Dammit. Dammit.” Seventeen of us had come back together from Korea. Time and trouble had taken most of us away, but these five—me, Andy, Dan, Mick and Dave—we’d stuck through. The last three years it had been us five, and just last night it had looked like it would be all five of us again.