Booth Stallings shifted his gaze to the hurrying Japanese Imperial Marines, then to the dead American medic, and back to the Filipino guerrilla. It occurred to him that this was the second Filipino he had come to know well, the first having been Edmundo something or other from San Diego who, like a robin, had appeared each spring near Stallings’ grade and junior high schools, dispatched by the Duncan Yo-Yo people to demonstrate their product. Edmundo could make a Yo-Yo do anything, and for three childhood springs Booth Stallings had taken a limited number of private lessons at an exorbitant fifty cents an hour until, turning thirteen, he had discovered masturbation, Lucky Strikes and girls in approximately that order.
“So what the fuck do we tell the Major?” Stallings asked.
The twenty-two-year-old guerrilla seemed to ponder the question with care. “We—you and I—will tell Major Crouch that our fallen comrade died bravely defending the rear.” He paused to gaze thoughtfully at the dead Profette. “The wild pigs’ll eat him by morning.”
For a dozen seconds Booth Stallings stared at the still squatting guerrilla with a frozen expression that agreed to nothing. For during those twelve seconds Stallings had stumbled across what to him was a new and comforting credo, an epiphany of sorts, that neatly excised the moral imperative and left him not only comforted, but also wiser and older. Much older. At least twenty-six.
Still wearing the frozen expression and oblivious to the sweat that ran down over it, Stallings spoke in his new cold grown-up voice.
“You’ve got a whole lot of elastic up in that head of yours, don’t you, Al? I mean, you can make it stretch and wrap around just about anything you want it to.”
“I think,” Alejandro Espiritu said, almost smiled, thought better of it and started over. “I think we should recommend poor Profette here for a posthumous medal—a Bronze or Silver Star perhaps?”
Booth Stallings gazed down at the dead medic and lapsed Quaker. “What the fuck,” he said. “Let’s go for the DSC.”
also by Ross Thomas
The Cold War Swap
The Seersucker Whipsaw
Cast a Yellow Shadow
The Singapore Wink
The Backup Men
The Porkchoppers
If You Can’t Be Good
The Money Harvest
Yellow Dog Contract
Chinaman’s Chance
The Eighth Dwarf
The Mordida Man
Missionary Stew
Briarpatch
The Fourth Durango
Twilight at Mac’s Place
Ah, Treachery!
OUT ON THE RIM.
Copyright © 1987 by Ross E. Thomas, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2003 by Donald E. Westlake.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
www.minotaurbooks.com
First published by Mysterious Press, a division of Warner Books, Inc., in October 1987
eISBN 9781429981705
First eBook Edition : October 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thomas, Ross, 1926—1995.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-29059-4
1. Durant, Quincy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—Pacific Area—Fiction. 3. Wu, Artie (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 4. Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. 5. Pacific Area—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.H58 09 2003
813’.54—dc21
2002032505
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: January 2003