Nightmare Range Read Online Free PDF Page A

and peered around the corner. The cab driver was helping her unload the groceries. I went back to the Jeep and waited.
    Most Korean wives of GIs will finish their black market activities in the afternoon before their husbands get home from work. They don’t want to jeopardize his military career by getting caught selling a few jars of mayonnaise and maraschino cherries for twice what they paid for them in the commissary. Sometimes the husbands are a little squeamish about the whole thing, but most of them like the extra income just as much as their wives do. An extra four or five hundred dollars a month. Easy. And if they get serious, go for the big ticket items—TVs, microwaves, stereo equipment—they can make as much as fifty thousand dollars during a one-year tour.
    Ernie and I usually get stuck with the black market detail. Our job is to bust housewives, embarrass their husbands, and cut back on the flow of duty-free goods from the US bases to the Korean economy.
    So far we’d managed to keep the deluge down to about a couple million dollars a week. Exactly what it has always been.
    The cab driver finished unloading the groceries, accepted his tip with both hands, bowed, and in a few seconds the walled street was empty and quiet.
    Ernie and I walked by her front gate. Stopped. Listened. Nothing I could make out.
    Down about fifteen yards on the other side of the road was a small neighborhood store, fronted by an ice cream freezer and a couple of rickety metal tables under an awning emblazoned with the Oriental Beer logo. We rummaged around, Erniebought some gum, and the old woman smiled as she came up with two paper cups to go with the liter of beer we bought. We sat outside, under the awning, and waited.
    Spring was becoming summer in Korea and the afternoon was clear and bright but not hot. It reminded me of the endless days of sunshine I’d survived in foster homes throughout East LA. The sun had been as glaring and unrelenting as the gaze of the adults I’d been forced to live with. I’d cursed my mother for dying and my father for disappearing into the bottomless pit south of the border.
    It hadn’t all been grim. One of my foster parents, Mrs. Aaronson, made sure I brought my schoolbooks home and then took the time to correct my homework. She showed me that arithmetic and spelling and science are all puzzles. Games. The greatest games. And as I lost myself in these games for hours, I looked forward, for the first time in my life, to being praised by the teacher and respected by the other children for something besides my fists.
    The first payoff was when I joined the army and my high test scores earned me a brief stint in the military police. Later, I found myself graduating from the Criminal Investigation School—and on my way to Korea.
    Ernie and I had gravitated toward each other somehow. The two duds of the CID Detachment. The first sergeant kept us together mainly to keep an eye on us. We both had this bad habit of following an investigation even after the right slots had been filled in the provost marshal’s statistical charts. They wanted a body count of GIs caught selling coffee in the village—not a report on how it was a customs violation for a general’s wife to ship Korean antiques back to the States at government expense and then sell them at a three hundred percent profit.
    There was no briefing chart for that.
    By all rights Ernie should have been in Georgetown trying to pass the bar exam or working his way up through the ranks of young stockbrokers on Wall Street. His dad, a big honchosomewhere in the government, expected it of him. But for Ernie, Vietnam had interrupted everybody’s plans.
    Most people would blame his choices on the pure China White he was able to buy there from snot-nosed boys through the wire. But I knew him better than that. It was the loathing of routine, of predictability, that had caused him to reject a life of seeking riches in the States and caused him to