Jungle Rules (53 page)

For the snuffies in the office, it felt good to see the officers slurping down the rotten crap and complimenting the chef who stood the previous night’s office duty and mixed the concoction of odds and ends. Pounds had even suggested putting a turd in the pot, but Movie Star shot down the idea, citing that diseases like hepatitis came from shit, and they might catch it, too, if they got it started in the office.

“Here you are, sir,” Happy Pounds said, offering a freckle-faced grin at the triumphant prosecutor, handing the hot cup to the captain and watching as he kicked back in his swivel chair and took a big sip.

“Damned fine stuff, Happy!” Heyster sighed contentedly and then flipped half a dollar in the air toward the sandy-haired Marine, whose skin was spotted from head to toe with big, brown freckles, like the mottled skin on a salamander. “You had the duty last night, so I guess I owe you the compliment for another great pot of coffee.”

Movie Star and his three buddies from the motor pool crowded around Heyster’s door and looked in with Happy Pounds in front of them.

“I guess you won, sir,” Lance Cool James Dean said from behind the group.

“Am I smiling that much?” Heyster said, and grabbed the pipe off his desk.

“Afraid so, sir,” Movie Star chimed back. “Guess you’ll be celebrating another scalp on your lodgepole.”

“Correct again,” the major-select said, knocking out burned tobacco crumbs from the briarwood pipe and then unfolding his pocket knife to dig out the tar-soaked chunks stuck to the bottom. After scraping the bowl well, he put the stem of the device in his teeth and blew through it as he picked up his pigskin pouch and gave the leather bag a good shake, stirring up the Cherry Blend tobacco mix inside it.

Movie Star started laughing as he saw the walls of the pouch bounce from the lively bug kicking after the good shaking he got. The other Marines held their breath as they watched the captain take hold of the zipper and pull.

“Ahhh!!” Heyster screamed as the big brown cockroach jumped from the pouch and ran up his arm, finally spreading his wings and taking flight off the captain’s neck. “Holy shit!”

The prosecutor fell backward in his chair and flung pipe tobacco to the ceiling, showering his desk and both of the Brothers B, who sat blinking wide-eyed at the startled lead attorney.

“Motherfucker!” Heyster bellowed and jumped to his feet. He immediately began searching the room for the cockroach, and then found him clinging to the top of the wall at the edge of the ceiling, swiveling his head a full circle to the right and then a full circle to the left, sizing up the chaotic situation.

“That has to be the largest roach I’ve ever seen!” Captain Miles Bushwick commented, brushing tobacco off his shoulders and standing to get a better look at the reddish-brown bug that followed his movements with his turning head and flicking his long antennae with nervous snaps back and forth.

“Why he’s as big as a CH-fifty-three helicopter!” Philip Edward Bailey-Brown exclaimed as he, too, stood to look at the massive insect and watched in awe as it again took flight, buzzing the crowd of hysterically laughing enlisted Marines and lighting on the wall in the administration office, then darting to hide in the shadow behind an overhead pipe.

“McKay! Carter! Kirkwood! You motherfuckers!” Heyster yelled, and shoved his way through the crowd of lance corporals who cackled and howled with no remorse nor showed any kind of reservation for fear that the officer might blame them for the prank.

Derek Pride stood behind his desk and smiled, offering an innocent shrug at the enraged prosecutor as he stormed through the administration office and then broke into a full-out run toward the defense section.

“You motherfuckers! You rotten motherfuckers!” Heyster kept screaming as he kicked open the opposing lawyers’ door and tromped his way into their office.

From his shadowy hiding place behind the pipe, the cockroach swiveled his head, looking for anything that might again threaten him. Then he zeroed on the open door of Dicky Doo’s office, and flew into the unoccupied room to find better refuge.

Chapter 14

JON KIRKWOOD LAY with his head at the foot of his rack so that he could see the barracks door and not miss T. D. McKay when he came to get ready for this evening’s bash that would celebrate the lawyer lieutenant’s going back to the world, home, and Texas, along with the departure of the staff judge advocate. Lieutenant Colonel Prunella had planned an especially festive hail-and-farewell party for Tommy Touchdown and himself, and had combined it with their Fourth of July celebration. Monsoon rain had washed out the last Friday night in June, their regular hail-and-farewell date, so the colonel had moved the soiree to the first week in July and doubled it with their observance of Independence Day.

Even though duty in Vietnam had little respect for the Monday-through-Friday workweek typical of life “back in the world,” a slang expression for civilization in America that even Jon Kirkwood found himself frequently using as he passed the midway point of his thirteen-month combat tour, Lieutenant Colonel Prunella had made great efforts to make duty in his shop as much as possible like the weekly routines Stateside. He believed that the more things he could keep consistent with those at home, the Marines under his supervision would encounter less stress in their lives and duties.

This week, since the Fourth of July fell on a Thursday, the colonel had
closed shop on Friday, too, and gave all hands four days off, like most people back home in America would enjoy. Kirkwood thought about how much he really liked Colonel Prunella, even though he kept himself removed from the daily grind of First MAW Law, and spent the last several weeks mostly on the tennis court with Movie Star or the wing adjutant, who had won a national tennis championship in college and whom Prunella had only beaten in the game once in six months.

The captain sighed as he thought of the good boss leaving in days, and Dicky Doo with Charlie Heyster at his side taking over. As Kirkwood rolled on his back, he could hear Michael Carter snoring below his self-styled altar to his martyred political heroes, who now included black-bunting-draped photographs of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy alongside those of Pope Paul VI and Bobby’s big brother President John F. Kennedy.

Carter had barely finished his wall of martyrs rearrangement and gotten the objects balanced with the addition of Martin Luther King’s photograph, and had finally stopped crying every time he knelt at his footlocker to pray, when word of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination flashed on American Forces Vietnam Radio. The devout stick man began a prayer marathon on the morning of June 6, Vietnam time, as soon as news of the younger Kennedy brother’s early-morning shooting on June 5 in a Los Angeles hotel by an Arab terrorist had reached that side of the world. The Boston defense lawyer held a rosary in his hand, chanting constant prayers, until the next day, when word finally came that Bobby had at last died without regaining consciousness. The lawyer refused to eat, sleep, or work while Kennedy clung to life, devoting his full attention to prayer for the mortally wounded presidential candidate and his family.

As Kirkwood lay on his back, looking at the wall of smiling, dead politicians looming beneath Carter’s wooden crucifix, across the barracks from him, where the stick man snored below the garish scene, and as Terry O’Connor busily scratched a fountain pen across stationery with a light-blue map of Vietnam in the upper right corner and a gold Marine Corps emblem centered at the top, seated at the little desk by the window, writing a letter to Vibeke Ahlquist, the slamming of the front doors startled the daydreaming lawyer from his daze.

“Carter, you maggot! I’ve got the goods on you now!” Charlie Heyster shouted as he stomped down the aisle, where the blond man now sat up on his bunk and rubbed his sleepy eyes.

Jon Kirkwood swung his stocking feet to the floor and cut off the major-select before he could lay his hands on stick man.

“Whoa!” Kirkwood said, putting out his arm, stopping the enraged lead prosecutor and soon-to-be interim military justice officer for the wing. “What goods? As this Marine’s attorney, I advise him to remain on his rack and keep his mouth shut.”

“Oh, get out of my way!” Heyster snapped, and pushed Jon Kirkwood backward.

“That’s assault,” Kirkwood said, and looked at Terry O’Connor, who stood and walked to the side of his pal. “I have witnesses. You’ve had it now.”

“You’ll feel like joking when Major Dickinson writes Miss Carter up for robbing marijuana from the evidence locker, and you two join him in the brig for your complicity,” Heyster said, and scowled at the trio.

“What are you talking about, Captain?” Michael Carter said, combing his tangle of unruly blond hair with his fingers as he spoke, and yawned out a breeze of bad-smelling sleep breath when he finished asking his question.

“Major Dickinson has launched an internal investigation after he discovered a large number of kilogram-sized bags of marijuana missing from the evidence locker,” Heyster said, looking directly at Carter. “We know that someone from inside took the dope, because the only evidence taken were those bundles associated with cases that we have completed, and were now awaiting disposal by the provost marshal. The major has focused his search on the enlisted troops working in the office, such as the colonel’s driver. However, I suspect culprits elsewhere.”

“Namely us?” O’Connor said, smiling. “You sure Dicky Doo didn’t peddle the stuff on the side, and now wants to pin blame on someone unknown so he can clear the books with CID? Sounds mighty suspicious and very convenient to me.”

“It would take a low-life scum like you to suggest that a regular Marine officer might commit such an act, Captain O’Connor,” Heyster said, and then looked at Michael Carter, who had reclined on his bunk and blinked lazily up at the men. “Look at him. He’s all dulled out on reefer right now. How much you smoke of it, Michael, and how much did you sell?”

“You have no idea how stupid you sound, Charlie, do you,” Jon Kirkwood said, looking at Carter and then back at the belligerent lead prosecutor.

Heyster glared at the dark-haired captain.

“What motivates a person to sell dope?” Kirkwood asked, raising his eyebrows.

“Money, of course,” Heyster responded, and then looked at Terry O’Connor, who stood next to his taller friend and cast a sarcastic smirk at the prosecutor.

“Michael Carter’s family owns half of the office buildings in downtown Boston, and several more on Park Avenue in New York City,” O’Connor bubbled, blinking his eyes and smiling at Heyster. “Stick man counts his money by the millions of dollars. His butler makes more than the three of us put together.”

“So maybe he rips off the evidence to get high, and gives the rest of it away to those lunatic friends of yours,” Heyster said, jutting out his jaw. “That character Lobo, I’ll bet he would smoke a joint. Even Buck Taylor, too. He’s pretty radical, now that I think about him. Oh, yes, and let’s not leave out that bleeding-heart sister, Mike Schuller, trying to reform inmate life at the brig.”

“You’re reaching way out of bounds with your stupid accusations on this one, Charlie,” Kirkwood said, and took the major-select by the arm and began leading him toward the barracks door. “Now, crawl back under your rock. Oh, and say hello to Chopper if you see him.”

“Fucking assholes! I’ll get you, Kirkwood, for that cockroach trick. Don’t think that I’ve let it slip from my mind,” Heyster said, stomping out of the barracks.

Jon Kirkwood smiled and shrugged at the two captains.

“Well, with that comment, I guarantee you that he believes you’re the one who put the roach in his tobacco,” O’Connor said, walking to the foot of his rack and sitting down.

“He’s never gotten over it, has he,” Kirkwood said. “Even Dicky Doo eventually gets past the harassment. The day he got back from Okinawa and sat in his chair, and the arms fell off on the floor, I thought he would explode. He got over it.”

“Well, I think that the drawers crashing out of his desk, and the one entire pedestal collapsing to the floor under it had a lot to do with him getting past the chair,” O’Connor said and laughed. “He still hasn’t figured out the electrical problem! Lights flicker in his lamps and he yells at poor Derek Pride to call base maintenance.”

“Dicky Doo as staff judge advocate and Charlie Heyster at his left hip is really scary, gentlemen, all joking aside,” Michael Carter said, standing up and putting on his pants. “I think I will go to the club and have a few drinks before the party, just to get myself in a better mood now, and try to get this internal investigation off my mind. I find it deeply disturbing.”

“Hold on and we’ll tag along,” O’Connor said, walking to his wall locker.

“I’d still like to catch Tommy McKay before tonight, so we can have that last good talk,” Kirkwood said, looking at his watch.