Free Slicky Boys by Martin Limon

set the mug down, and pulled the pencil out from behind his ear.
    “You were right, George. The stats on stolen office equipment have risen sharply over the last three months.”
    “Up ten percent,” I said. “Prior to that, they ran steady for years.”
    Riley shook his head. “Not the smooth operations we’re used to either. Crude. Clumsy. Doors broken. Windows shattered.”
    “The slicky boys are going downhill,” I said.
    Riley nodded.
    “Slicky boys” was a term that had come into use during the Korean War, more than twenty years before. The entire peninsula, from the Yalu River on the border with China to the tip of the peninsula at the Port of Pusan, had been completely ravaged. Hardly a factory or a business enterprise of any sort still stood. Crops had been allowed to rot in the fields after terror-stricken families fled to evade the destruction by the armies that stormed back and forth across the land. People were desperate. People were starving.
    In the midst of this desolation were a few military enclaves, surrounded by barbed wire and sandbags. The only places that had food, that had clothing, that had shelter.
    Some of the people would barter with the GI’s for the wealth they held. They’d trade anything, even their bodies, for something as insignificant as a bar of soap.
    Others took more direct action. These were the slicky boys.
    “Slick boys” is what the GI’s called them, but the Korean tongue is incapable of ending a syllable in a harsh consonant. They must add a vowel. So “slick” became “slicky.” And the GI’s picked it up. “Slicky boys” stuck.
    And some of them really were boys.
    Six, seven, eight years old. They could more easily slip through the barbed wire and hide on the compound for hours and bring out something precious to their waiting families. A handful of dried potatoes, a can of preserved beans.
    It didn’t take long for their activities to become organized and their thievery to become bolder. The disappearance of supplies and equipment became a serious problem during the war, and the American generals made sure that precious warehouses were heavily guarded. Armed soldiers were given orders to shoot.
    As the war dragged on, desperation kept the slicky boys at their work in the military compounds. And there were many compounds to choose from. By 1952, the United Nations had sent soldiers from sixteen different countries to help defend the Republic of Korea from the Communist aggressors.
    In one incident, a slicky boy broke into a stronghold of the Turkish Army and was captured. The Turks tried the twelve-year-old on the spot and convicted him of thievery. After being tortured for a few hours, the boy was decapitated. The severed head was set atop a spike at the gate to the compound and allowed to rot until the unit moved back to the front.
    Riley rattled the paperwork in his hand.
    “This stealing just isn’t professional enough to be the work of the slicky boys,” he said. “It had to be an amateur.”
    “Maybe Whitcomb?” I asked.
    “Maybe.”
    We thought about that for a moment; I voiced what we were both thinking.
    “Even without Whitcomb butting in, how can thievery statistics stay so constant?”
    “That’s a hell of a good question.”
    Riley loved a puzzle. You could almost see him salivating. He picked up the heavy black receiver and started dialing.
    I sat back, sipping on my black coffee. Relaxing. Letting him do the work for a while.
    After talking to Whitcomb’s houseboy, Ernie and I had tracked down one of the guys on the “best buddies” list the Sergeant Major had provided us: Terrance Randall.
    The picture Randall gave of Cecil Whitcomb wasn’t what we’d expected. Pictures of real people seldom are.
    Whitcomb was born into a poor family on the south end of London. His father worked on the docks of the River Thames packing fish and had to make his daily appearance at the market well before dawn. Somewhere along the line, Whitcomb’s