Nightmare Range (12 page)

We found Rawlings at the NCO Club, on his favorite barstool, having a shot of bourbon with his lunch. It looked like the Chef’s Special was pretzels.

He was a burly guy with wrists as thick as my biceps, so we didn’t bother with any formalities. Ernie slammed his head down on the bar, I pulled his left wrist back and cuffed it, and then we both wrestled him off the stool until his arms were cuffed behind his back. Ernie took his knee off his spine long enough to read him his rights.

“Why’d you kill the girl, Rawlings?”

“What girl?”

“Miss Ma. Out at the Golden Night Club.”

“Stuff it.”

He clammed up and said he would tell us nothing until he talked to a lawyer. That’s what I like about old NCOs. They always take a common sense approach to problem solving.

Captain Calloway’s neatly painted jeep sat in front of the logistics office. I checked the odometer, yanked the trip ticket off its clipboard, and compared the readings.

Everything clicked, like a bunch of zeros lining up at a hundred thousand miles.

When we went in, he was talking on the phone and thumbing through paperwork, acting way too busy to talk to us.

When he finally hung up, he said, “Who the hell are you?”

I showed him my badge. He smirked.

“Undercover, huh? Well, you won’t find anything missing here at Supply Point Fourteen. And all that copper wire, that can be explained.”

Like I said, some people just want to get caught.

Ernie spoke first. “We’re not here about the wire.”

Captain Calloway flinched but quickly straightened his face. I held up the trip ticket.

“Your driver closed out the jeep’s log last night at twelve thousand four hundred sixty-three miles, but now the odometer
reading is twelve thousand four hundred sixty-six miles. Three miles. It’s a mile and a half to Kumchon, so the jeep has traveled the equivalent of one round trip.”

Captain Calloway’s neck muscles worked up and down his throat, and his right hand crawled toward the telephone receiver, as if he were going to call for help.

I continued. “You started watching me when you noticed I was speaking Korean to Miss Ma at the Golden Night Club. Not your typical GI on his first tour in the Orient. That’s why you were raising hell in the orderly room. An excuse to check me out. And then you followed me when I broke into the warehouse last night and clubbed me over the head when I came out.

“You’ve probably already destroyed the invoices, but you knew that with a little homework we’ll uncover the whole scheme. You could deny any accusation Rawlings might make against you, just accuse him of trying to bargain his way out of trouble, but in the end you’ll be charged with dereliction of duty; with letting your subordinates get away with pilfering hundreds of dollars’ worth of supplies. That, at least. Even if you’re found innocent, it will mean the end of your army career.

“Hitting me over the head and destroying the invoices was only meant to give yourself a little more time. A little time to go out to Kumchon and take your revenge on Miss Ma for finding a new boyfriend. Or maybe take your revenge on the new boyfriend and stop him from blowing the whistle on your little black market scheme. What you didn’t expect is that I wouldn’t go out there. And when I didn’t show up, you took it out on her.”

Calloway stared directly at me, but for him I wasn’t there.

Ernie clicked his gum a couple of times.

“We can check with the MPs on duty last night,” I said. “They’ll remember you driving your jeep off post.”

Calloway stood up slowly. “There’s no need.” He bowed his head for a moment, and then he looked up at us. “It was Rawlings’s idea. He said he’d sold copper wire before, on previous tours over here. It was easy money. I used the money at first to
spend weekends down in Seoul. In first class hotels. But then I met Miss Ma, and instead I spent all my time in Kumchon. I tried to get her to quit her job, stay with me, but she wouldn’t do it.”

His eyes widened, as if he were amazed at something.

“I’m an officer, with a good future, and I was getting rich, but she still turned me down. Can you believe it? But
you
! You with no money, just here for a few days …”

He shook his head, angry at the tears that were squeezing themselves out of his knotted face.

Ernie’s gum clicked faster. He didn’t like this kind of thing. He twisted Calloway around and made him assume the position up against the wall. Then he cuffed him and read him his rights. All the while Calloway cried, and when Ernie was finished, he had to unwrap two more sticks of gum and pop them nervously into his mouth.

We stayed at RC4 for a couple more days, wrapping things up, trying to enjoy the freedom of being away from the flagpole, but it didn’t work.

Someone from Miss Ma’s family came and took her body away. And the little girl.

We went back to Seoul.

On cold winter nights I still think of the woman from Hamhung, with her big warm smile, and the little girl who refused to cry.

S
trange asked us to meet him at the Snatch Bar.

Its official title was the Snack Bar, but Strange liked to call it the Snatch Bar because he claimed he always found some “strange” there. That is, lonely female dependents of officers and NCOs who were unable to resist his charms. What charms those were, though, was beyond me. He was overweight and balding, always wore wrap-around dark glasses and sucked on a greasy plastic cigarette holder that never left his lips. His real name was Harvey and he was the non-commissioned officer in charge of classified documents at headquarters, working directly with the Commander of 8th United States Army and the Chief of Staff and everyone who made the most important decisions for the United States forces in the Republic of Korea. So my partner, Ernie Bascom, and I put up with Strange. We listened patiently to his fantasies, no matter how perverted, and, as a quid pro quo, we fed him fantasies of our own. The information he provided was just too good to ignore.

At the stainless steel serving line, I purchased a thick porcelain mug of steaming hot black coffee, carried it through the crowded cafeteria, and plopped it down on the table in front of Strange.

“Nothing for me?” he asked.

“Not until we hear what you have to say.”

“I’ll take hot chocolate,” he replied, “with two marshmallows.”

Ernie joined us at the table. As he sat down, he flicked Strange’s cigarette holder with his forefinger. “How’s it hanging, Strange?”

“The name’s Harvey.”

“Yeah, I forgot.
Harvey
. What’ve you got for us?”

Strange frowned at my cup of coffee. “I want hot chocolate,” Strange repeated, “with two marshmallows.”

“Talk first,” Ernie said, “then the reward.”

Strange glanced between us. “You guys going cheap on me?”

“Not ‘going,’ ” Ernie replied. “We’ve always been cheap.”

Strange shoved a new cigarette into his holder, tossing away the one Ernie had bent. He never lit them, just kept them dangling. He said he was trying to quit. As far as I knew, he’d never started. The sunglasses, the slicked-back hair, the cigarette holder were all part of the apparatus that he thought made him look intriguing. Actually, it just made him look like what he was, a pervert gone to fat.

Ernie and I waited. Strange surveyed the busy snack bar, making sure no one was listening, and then he leaned forward, whispering.

“You CID assholes have your butts in a wringer,” he said.

“We always have our butts in a wringer,” Ernie replied.

“This time it’s different.” Strange leaned in even closer. I could smell some sort of cologne or aftershave, like musk. It made me want to throw up. I jolted back some of the hot coffee. It didn’t help much.

“This time,” Strange continued, “they’ve got you dead to rights.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Ernie asked.

Strange leaned back, startled. “The Officers’ Wives’ Club. Who else? They’ve been pissed off at you for years for letting all those
yobos
into the Commissary and PX.”

Yobo
was GI slang for a Korean girlfriend.

“They’re not
yobos
, they’re wives,” Ernie said. “They have dependent ID cards and we have no choice but to let them into the Commissary and PX.”

“Maybe so. But the honchos at the OWC think you’re letting them off easy on the black marketing. You should be busting each one of those sweet little Korean dollies, one by one, and taking away their privileges.”

The US military in Korea meticulously controls the amount of goods a GI or his dependents can purchase each month out of the PX or Commissary. The official reason is twofold: to protect fledgling Korean industries from being swamped by duty-free US goods and to save the US taxpayer the expense of shipping excess consumer items across the Pacific. The real reason—the visceral impulse behind the mania to enforce ration control regulations—was because most Americans didn’t like seeing a bunch of Korean female dependents, the wives of lower ranking GIs, in “their” Commissary or “their” PX. Racism is a cleaner word for it.

“You know how many black marketers there are,” Ernie asked, “buying and selling every day? And do you know how many there are of us?” With his left hand Ernie indicated me and him.

“
Mox nix
,” Strange replied. “The OWC thinks that if you weren’t wasting your time on other assignments, you’d be able to do your job and clear the Commissary and PX of all those
yobos
.”

The “other assignments” Strange was referring to were cases involving murder, rape, kidnapping, torture, extortion and various and sundry other acts of mayhem. The Officers’ Wives’ Club, however, thought that having to compete with three Korean women for the last bunch of bananas was more important than dealing with felonies. We’d heard this criticism before. But the 8th Army CID was spread thin. Most of the other agents were assigned to chores like investigating the pilfering of supplies from transshipment points or breaches in internal security involving Top Secret documents. That type of work meant dealing with the 8th Army hierarchy and required a certain amount of tact, which left me and Ernie out. We went after crime and to hell with kowtowing to someone’s rank. Naturally, any shit detail—like the black market detail—devolved onto us.

Working crime out in the ville, which was GI-on-Korean crime mostly, took up most of our time: rapes, robberies, burglaries. Since I was the only CID member in the country who could speak Korean and since Ernie Bascom could blend in with the lowest dregs of any society, it was usually me and Ernie who were assigned to those cases. Therefore, fighting black market crime in the Commissary and the PX was left to twist slowly in the wind.

“Okay,” Ernie said. “The OWC has a case of the jaws. So what? They’ve had it before. What are they going to do about it?”

Strange leaned back and puffed on his cigarette holder as if he were actually smoking, which he wasn’t. “How about a little hot chocolate?”

Ernie glared at him, sighed, and pushed himself up from the table. As he stalked away, Strange said, “Don’t forget the marshmallows.”

I studied Strange. He was pleased with himself for having commanded our attention. A GI’s life is controlled, from the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he goes to sleep at night, by the officers appointed over him. They can leave him alone if they want to—leave him alone to do his job, leave him alone to live his personal life—or they can mess with him constantly. Having been in the Army for the better part of a decade, Ernie and I had each experienced both levels of control and there was no question about it, being left alone was better. This is why we were listening to Strange so intently, out of respect for the heat that the OWC could bring down on us.

Ernie returned with the hot chocolate. Strange frowned at the steaming concoction, picked up the little metal spoon and bounced the two marshmallows in the hot liquid, making sure they both became completely soaked. Then he levered one out of the mug, stuck out his tongue, and slid it wriggling into his mouth. Ernie and I grimaced. Strange had the odd talent of being able to make the most mundane action appear obscene.

The marshmallow muscled its way down his throat. Burping
slightly, he turned and smiled. “What the Officers’ Wives’ Club is going to do,” he said, “is bust you two down.”

“Bust us down? For what?”

“For not busting enough yobos. But not right away,” he added. “They’ll give you a chance to get off your butts and start enforcing the ration control regulations.”

Ernie groaned.

“Who’s the OWC point man?” I asked.

Strange stirred his chocolate, watching the last marshmallow start to sink. “Who else?” he asked. “The Chief of Staff.”

“Colonel Wrypointe?”

“Bingo. His wife just got elected president of the OWC.”

Millicent Wrypointe. I’d run into her before. When she shopped she actually wore her husband’s rank insignia on the lapel of her blouse. One day, when I was in the Commissary’s accounting department checking purchase records, she’d barged through the big double-doored “Employees Only” entrance and asked, “Are you CID?”

When I’d nodded, she literally pulled me out onto the Commissary floor. In aisle number seven she pointed at a gaggle of Korean women loading up on a shipment of frozen ox-tail. The Commissary manager had taken the ration limit off. Usually, the shopper was limited to two packets of any given meat item per day. This batch of sliced ox-tail, however, had arrived from the States late because of a power outage on the refrigerated transport ship. If the Commissary didn’t sell it quickly, the meat would spoil.

Mrs. Wrypointe pointed at the women loading up their shopping carts. “You have to
do
something!”

When I explained why the ration limit had been lifted, she exploded. “Nobody can eat that much meat. They’re going to sell it on the black market.”

I nodded. “Probably.”

“That’s a crime. You’re a law enforcement officer. Do something!”

“I’d have to follow them off compound and catch them in the
act of making the sale,” I told her. “Right now, I’m working on another case.”