A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux 4)

"Find it," he said.

"What?"

"The trapdoor."

"I don't see one."

He bent over and pulled on an iron ring set next to a sprinkler head, and a door covered with grass sod raised up out of the lawn and exposed a short, subterranean stairwell.

"It's an atom bomb shelter," he said. "But I heard the guy who built it used to pump the maid down here."

We went down inside, and he clicked on a light and pulled the door shut with a hanging rope. The walls and floor were concrete, the roof steel plate. There were two bunk beds inside the room, a pile of moldy K rations in one corner, and a stack of paperback novels and a disassembled AR-15 rifle on top of a bridge table.

"I come down here when things are bugging me," he said. "Sometimes I make up a picnic basket and Paul and me spend the night down here, like we're camping. It's got a chemical toilet, I can hook up a portable TV, nobody knows where I am unless I want them to know."

He sat down on the bunk bed and leaned back against the concrete wall. A dark line of hair grew up the center of his stomach from the elastic band of his underwear. He stirred the ice in his drink with his finger. Then he was quiet for what seemed a long time.

"After I got hit they didn't send me back to my old platoon," he said. "Instead I got reassigned to a bunch of losers. Or maybe they'd just been out too long. One guy had a scalp lock from a woman on his rifle, another guy gave a little boy a heat tab and told him it was candy. Anyway, I didn't like any of them. Which was all right, because they didn't like me, either, and they kept treating me like a newbie.

"So one night the lieutenant tells us to set up an ambush about four klicks up this trail, so we pass a real small ville by a stream after one klick and we go on another klick, and finally everybody says, 'Fuck it, we sandbag it, let the loot set his own ambush.'

"But while we're sitting out there in the dark it's like everybody's got something else on his mind. It's hot and quiet, and water's dripping out of the trees and we're slapping mosquitoes and smelling ourselves and looking at our watches and thinking we got six

more hours out here. Then the guy with the scalp lock on his rifle—his name was Elvis Doolittle, that's right, I'm not making it up—Elvis rubs his whiskers with his hand and keeps looking back down the trail and finally he puts a cigarette in his mouth. The doc says, 'What the fuck you doing, Elvis?'

"He says, 'I'm going back to the ville.'

"Then nobody says anything. But everybody had seen these two teenage sisters with their mama-san in front of the hooch. And they know what Elvis is thinking. Then he says, 'We'll leave Mouse and the new guy. Nobody'll know. That ville's got something coming anyway. That booby trap that got Brown. They set it.'

"'You don't know that,' Mouse says.

"'If they didn't set it, they know who did,' Elvis says.

"Then they all talked it over and my heart started beating. Not because of what they were going to do, either, but because I was afraid to be left on the trail with just one guy.

"Elvis turns to me and says, 'You ever say anything about this, you ain't getting back home, man.' Then they were gone. The trees were so thick all those guys just melted away into the blackness. You could hear monkeys clattering around in the canopy and night birds and sounds like sticks breaking out there in the jungle. Sweat was running out of my pot and my breath started catching in my throat. Then we hear something clank.

"Mouse whispers, 'It's up the trail. It's up the fucking trail.'

"I tell him to be quiet and listen, and he says, 'It's NVA, man.'

"I tell him to shut up again, but he says, 'They dideed out on us, man. It ain't right. I ain't staying.'

"His eyes look big as half-dollars under his pot, and I'm trying to act cool, like I got it under control, but the sweat keeps burning my eyes and my hands are shaking so bad it's like I got malaria. Then I hear something up the trail again.

"'That's it,' Mouse says. 'Let's get out of here.'

"I put my hand on his arm. 'All right, man, we go back to the ville,' I say. 'But what are you gonna do with what you see back there?'

"'I ain't gonna see nothing,' he says. 'It ain't my business. I got eighteen more days, then it's back to the world. I ain't gonna get pulled into no court-martial, either. You do what you want to, Cardo.'

"He takes off, and a minute later I follow him, tagging along like a punk to something I don't even want to know about, all because I'm scared.

"When we get back to the ville, Elvis has put all the zips in their hooches and has sent the doc with a flashlight into the hooch that's got the two teenage sisters. The doc comes out and says, 'They're clean,' and then Elvis and this big black dude go in. About ten minutes later Elvis comes out fixing his fly and sees me and Mouse squatting by the trail.

"'You dumb shits,' he says. 'You get the fuck back up that trail.'

"'I ain't gonna do it, Elvis,' Mouse says.