The staked Goat

it was like a chess game, and you could see checkmate in maybe a few moves.”
    ”I don’t know—”
    ”So,” I talked over him, ”you had to set up a safety valve for yourself. An out. But a big problem. You’re in Saigon, not the U. S. of A. If you want to get back to The World, you’ve got to get out of the country and then back into this one. Shipping out of ‘Nam other than with Uncle Sam’s blessings is touchy and expensive. Slipping out with Uncle Sam focusing especially on you is touchier and very expensive. So you set up a trap door as your out.”
    I paused. His jaw worked a few times, but no sound.
    ”You arrange a meeting between yourself and one Bouvier, a ballsy, reasonably connected holdover from the colonial heydays. But there’s a double cross, and a bit of explosive takes somebody’s head off. Your double cross, my Mend, but, more’s the pity, not your head. You and Bouvier are roughly the same size and coloring, and with everybody thinking he killed you, attention is shifting from the crooked noncom to the dastardly drug dealer. Of course, you need some help there, but it doesn’t have to be much. Just one man really. The MP who takes the prints off the corpse. No head means no face or dental charts for identification. So you draw Belker into it ahead of time, and after he roll-prints the corpse, he switches fingerprint cards for you. No big problem. The prints on the switched card match the ones of yours on file, and you just lay low for a couple of weeks, then fake enough ID to come out as, what, a British journalist?”
    He stared hard at me. ”Canadian,” he said.
    ”Ah, of course, no accent for you to fake. Anyway, you get back to the States, but you realize then, or maybe you realized beforehand, that you’d be short one important item without which you’d be doomed to menial, unpleasant jobs and frequent relocation.” He swallowed hard.
    ”You also had a loose end dangling. A potentially dangerous one. The absence of the item and the potential of the loose end would make it tough to enjoy your profits much.”
    I gave him my best smile. ”The item was a social security card. The loose end was Belker. My guess is that you decided to kill both birds with one stone.”
    My passenger laughed. It startled me. The noise was like a little creature chirping, then stopping to listen. ”You know,” he said, almost nostalgically, ”it was a stone I used. I mean, I could have bought a social security card, you know, but you never really know whose card you’re buying. Then some computer or compulsive, low-level auditor spots some discrepancy and where are you? Nowhere, except the slammer or back on the run. No, Belker was perfect. I knew about him, you see. I checked his 201 file very carefully. Neither of us had any family. To know him was to dislike him, so no friends to worry about coming to look him, or me, up. Just in case, though, I went through everybody’s 201 file who had anything to do with him. That left me with quite a choice, geographically. I decided I liked Boston the best.” He frowned. ”How did I miss you?”
    ”I wasn’t in Saigon then. I arrived a few months later.”
    He smiled. ”Well, even so, you would have been no danger. I changed my appearance, and good God, there must be dozens of Clay Belkers in this country anyway. If somebody did stumble on the name, I just wasn’t that Clay Belker.”
    ”To avoid even that, why didn’t you just change your name? From Clay Belker to something else, I mean?”
    ”I looked into it, but it required a birth certificate. I was older than Belker and, well, applying for a driver’s license or broker’s license is one thing, going before a judge is another. Besides, like I said, there didn’t seem to be much risk.”
    My passenger was doing an excellent job of lulling me. He came across as a reasonable, thoughtful man. A sweetheart of a guy who had tortured and mutilated a good friend.
    ”You used a stone?”
    He blinked.
    ”You used a stone, you said.”
    ”Oh, yes. To kill Belker. I arranged for him to meet me in San Francisco when he got rotated back to the States. I told him that I wanted to wait till he was discharged, so that he could take off without leaving any tracks that would be followed. He was discharged on a Thursday. He had all his gear in a duffel bag and met me in Golden Gate Park. We drove out to a place called Muir Woods. Heard of it?”
    ”No.”
    ”It’s a stand, actually I guess