Chapter 13
Ti Manchu's stoic-faced composure easily twisted into numbing hatred when he heard his father's directions to contact his Karenni friends in Wei Phu Long and enlist their help in firing a few rounds into the blonde English girl and her companion with the limp.
Nonetheless, he obeyed as any son with a temperamental father like Bu Manchu would and, with a deep bow, he took leave on foot, skirting the muddy river bank toward the small village not seven kilometers away. Confusion rattled in his brain and something morally unsound thundered in his conscience. In essence, he was murdering the woman he had risked his life to save, a woman who was the embodiment of the only goodness he'd seen in his life. Somehow, that didn't make sense in any philosophy.
The low hanging branches slapped him in the face as he crept down the path, his decision cementing in his mind. In a small clearing not far away, he made out the thatched roof of a small dwelling and, assuming it to be the crazy white man with the M-16 rifle, he closed in and peeked through the window. Ti sucked in his breath and mumbled a mantra as his dark eyes fell on the stretched out naked form of Shirlee Canan laying on the straw mat looking horribly exhausted and used.
Shirlee lay half-comatose, waiting for the rounds of rifle fire and saying her prayers, expecting any minute to see Bu Manchu's lecherously, perfidiously grinning face in the but door. Would he shoot her, strangle her? No, both of those means sounded too simple for Manchu. He would probably hand her over to one of his thugs and let them karate chop her to death with their meat cleaver hands until she was a pulp of bloody meat. "Ohhhhhh . . ." she whimpered.
Ti was doing some quick thinking. If he should frighten Shirlee, she would certainly scream (that he knew; he'd heard her bloodcurdling voice plenty of times) and if she screamed, her short fused boy friend would come bolting through the door, killing everybody.
Like a jungle panther, he swung through the open window and leaped to her side and clamped a strong hand over her mouth.
Shirlee's scream strangled in her throat and she prepared herself for death in that second of terror . . . until she recognized the face behind the hand. "Do not be afraid. It is only me . . . Ti. I have come to help you kill my father. It is a deed that must be accomplished."
Shirlee listened wide-eyed and trembling. What could she do but trust him? Tom must know. .
Bailey was busy as a housewife on Saturday morning, arranging his ammunition for the big blast off. He was bending over, emptying the hand grenades out of their boxes when, squinting, he saw Shirlee's lush body crawling through bushes over the muddy river bottoms. Again, he squinted, his eyes adjusting but not believing what they were seeing. He raised his gun and aimed squarely at Ti's face.
"Nooooooooooo!" Shirlee shook with urgency. "He's come to help us."
Bailey stiffened. The gullibility of the female mind never failed to amuse him. "You think I'm going to trust that yellow bastard?" he rasped heatedly. Something about a son killing his father didn't set well with Tom, and how was he to know this wasn't some Commie trick to blow his head off? Still, it would be a relief to let somebody else do the dirty work; the taste of death still lingered in his mouth from this afternoon's killing.
Shirlee and Ti were on their feet, hovering in the shadows.
"I need only the weapons to kill my father. I need nothing from you as a man." Ti stood squarely facing Bailey who drew in his breath and spurted it out his flaring nostrils, appraising the man who was willing to accept the responsibility that, he, Bailey feared most: witnessing more death. Still . . . Shirlee had faced her worst fear and conquered it. His tired penis could testify to that.
With a curt nod of the head, Thomas A. Bailey stalked off into the night, the moon reflecting silver streaks off the M-16 slinked over his shoulder. This one-man war against Bu Manchu and his black belt cut-throats (not to mention the Karennis whose weapons he was preparing for fire now) was no fantasy fulfilled.
Keeping guard out in the bushes, Shirlee's nakedness goose bumped with fear, knowing that she might be a widow before she'd been a wife. At this point she would happily relinquish her post with the Hong Kong Border Investigation, if it promised Tom's safety.
The plan went into fruition. Ti Manchu would be Bailey's back-up man while the pilot took careful aim with his M-16. Directly across from Shirlee, Ti plastered himself behind tree after tree as he advanced barefoot and silent, skirting the river bank to a point less than quarter of a kilometer past his father's boat where he could see in the skimpy night shadows the outline of his father and bodyguard awaiting reinforcements from Wei Phu Long. Now and then his father's high-voiced chatter wafted up with the night winds onto the river bank where Ti stood sweating, staring at his father as an enemy and knowing he had to kill the man because of his evil dominance.
Deftly, Ti's strong fingers plucked the hand grenade from his belt and, without waiting for the gunshot to fire from Bailey's rifle, he pulled the pin and took careful aim, throwing the explosive into his father's boat. It exploded in a rain of blood and shredded flesh, not giving them time to scream. A blood river darkened the murky waters, choking the fish and sending a flock of ultramarine birds into flight.
"Goddamn . . ." Bailey lowered his rifle, after watching through the scope Bu Manchu's eyes bulge for a quarter of a second, before his head exploded like a water-filled balloon, squirting blood and brains into the air.
Shirlee wondered how it felt to have just killed your own father, but Ti Manchu was stingy with his answers.
"It is foolish to speak of the dead," he said curtly. "I have freed myself from my father's dishonor and now you can go where you wish. The Cove of Good Fortune has done well by all of us. I foresee much happiness for both of you."
With that simple statement, he bowed reverently and turned to leave, leaving Shirlee and Bailey staring at each other in silence. Now that the trauma had ended, the curtains drawn, they stared at each other blankly.
Bailey shrugged. "What do you say, Shirlee? Would you like to share my hut and fishing pole?"
Shirlee contemplated the offer a second, sorted out fact from fiction and assayed the situation quickly; she surveyed the virile body of her hero and was nearly carried away with the intrigue of it all, until she remembered the crazy set of circumstances that had landed her on this river bank in the first place.
"First, my love, I have to get back to Chad Barker with this story. If you don't want to come along, I'm sure Ti will help me get back into China."
Back to civilization? Was he ready for that yet? Bailey stiffened and something within him withered. People, hassles, money, quarrels . . . Maybe he'd been too close to Nirvana to realize this wasn't the wrong side of the world.
"I'll be here when you come back, Shirlee . . ."
"And then we'll go to England together and have babies?"
Bailey shuddered and nodded dumbly. "Yes, by then I should be ready to get back to it all . . . 1 suppose."
After a tight embrace, he watched the curly headed blonde English girl who'd brought havoc into his life disappear down the river bank beside Ti Manchu. Would he ever see her again? Her departing words echoed inside his rattled brain, and he felt a certain inner calmness. Yes, perhaps by the time she returned he would be ready to leave this peaceful existence.
Maybe . . .