Free Cambodia Noir by Nick Seeley

menstrual blood and sex, but me the drug took, like some deep-sea creature come up beneath a swimmer in dark water. Three times I tried it, and always the same: a terrible sense that the world beneath my fingers was a dream. I could be dead, or lying in a hospital bed, eyes twitching away in a coma. . . . I could wake and discover I was someone else altogether.
    So now I roll a spliff with the best of them, but I definitely don’t inhale. Which, possibly, was why I was slightly less messed up than everyone else . . . so when the call came, there was Gus, waving the phone around and talking about “some NGO, claims they’ve been broken into and the government’s behind it,” and the crime writer could barely raise his head and the econ writer was asleep in his chair, so his eye fell on me . . . looking wrecked and wretched, I’m sure, but just conscious enough I might be able to turn around a story, and he stuck the phone in my hand:
    â€œGet directions and go. Take Khieu, just in case.”
    â€œJust in case of what??”
    As I was heading out, Barry woke up enough to catch my eye. “Khieu was with Gus in ’98,” he muttered. “Guy knows how to drive while being shot at.”
    Indeed, it turns out that Khieu, despite doing everything else at quite a leisurely pace, drives insanely fast. I tried to tell him that speed was actually irrelevant if you didn’t reach your destination alive . . . but the wind whipped my words away, and there was nothing to do but keep my arms wrapped tight around him and hang on. He was worse than the moto drivers. We reached the main boulevard, packed with cars, and rather than wait he just swung left into the wrong lane, and for nearly two blocks we dodged oncoming traffic until finally he saw his chance to cut right and get back to our side of the road. I’d just started to breathe again when traffic seized up and he started squeezing between cars, still going as fast as he could. Right when I thought we were going to get out, a white Toyota behind us tried to pull out, too, knocking us off-kilter against some SUV. Khieu kept us upright and I thought I was fine, until I realized the cool wind on my leg was carrying away little drops of blood. I ruined my scarf for a makeshift bandage, but I didn’t think it would do to show up at a crime scene bleeding.
    The NGO office wasn’t far from my house—a big grimy office block on the grassy swath near Independence Monument. The bottom floor was all glass windows, except the glass was all over the pavement and there were cops everywhere. Cops: I almost couldn’t get off the bike my heart was pounding so hard—but I remembered myself. I am a fearless reporter. I’ll take my notebook and stick my nose anywhere. The pain in my leg was actually kind of steadying. I just marched across the lawn to the busiest person, a tall Chinese-American guy with Frodo hair, and asked to talk to him.
    His name was Luke, and it turned out he wasn’t in charge, he was just a project manager. The real boss was a woman named Wendy, the one who’d called Gus in the first place. She was a major head trip . . . the whole thing had completely spun her out, and Luke was having to spend most of his energy calming her down, rubbing her shoulders and telling her it was okay. Hey, if I were his boss, I’d make him do that all day. . . . He’s not pretty like the boy, though he’s got all the right bumps in all the right places—but he was handsome, like drown-you-in-testosterone handsome. Think ER -era Clooney, only Chinese. He reminded me of the men who used to hang around Father’s businesses: children of immigrants with hungry eyes, looking for a way into a world of glass. He had a smile that said: “You won’t believe the day I’ve had.”
    I took my time interviewing them. Their story didn’t make any