A Mortal Terror (31 page)

“I think so, sir.”

“He did, Colonel, I can vouch for that,” I said.

“Good to meet you, son. Take care of yourself. Stay low out there,” Harding growled.

“I will, sir. That’s just what Billy tells me.”

“Danny, see if you can find Lieutenant Evans. Flint probably brought him here.”

“Okay, Billy,” he said, and he and Charlie began searching the wounded.

“Do we have our killer?” Harding asked.

“Sure looks like it. He had you lined up to be part of his royal flush.”

“I was in the wrong place at the right time, for him anyway. I never was so glad to almost be killed by a German 88.”

“I don’t think he’s going anywhere soon, but can you keep an eye on him? I want to find Father Dare.” I handed Harding Stump’s .45.

“Not a problem,” Harding said. “I hear the padre does good work as a medic.”

“He does,” I said, thinking about the .45 that he carried. Plenty of guys who weren’t officially issued automatic pistols, like Father Dare, got them one way or the other. How many of those weapons were out there today, in the smoke? A fair number, but most wouldn’t have been fired at all. This fighting hadn’t been at close quarters. I stared at Stump’s face, cleaned of blood and grime, and wondered why. Why did the killings start, and why did they have to go on?

I asked around and a medic told me he saw Father Dare enter the village church, a few buildings down. I climbed the steps and opened the carved wooden doors, feeling the weight of centuries behind them. The small church had been hit by a shell on the roof, and thick, heavy timbers had fallen in, crushing rows of pews. Father Dare knelt at the altar, his helmet on the floor, his head bowed. He swayed, and it seemed as if he were so lost in prayer that he might lose his balance. I stepped closer, not wanting to interrupt his prayers, but unwilling to let him crack his head against the marble altar. I went to steady him, and only then noticed the pool of blood spreading under his left leg.

“Father,” I said, kneeling at his side. Even though he was a rough-and-tumble padre, and we’d dodged bullets together, here in God’s house I felt ill at ease, like the altar boy I’d been, unsure of the ways of adults and especially priests. “Are you all right?”

“I am praying, Billy. Praying for God himself to come down and save us. I told him to leave Jesus home, that this was no place for children.” He folded his hands in prayer once again, and fell into my arms.

“Shrapnel in his calf,” the medic told me after I’d carried Father Dare back. “He must have been bleeding into his boot, and when he knelt down, it all came out.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“He won’t be dancing anytime soon, but it should heal up. It’s mostly shock that concerns me, losing all that blood. It would have been a lot worse if you hadn’t gotten him back here.” With that, he went back to tending to the last of the wounded, the less serious cases who’d had to wait.

Danny had found Evans, on a litter, waiting for the next ambulance. His arm and shoulder were heavily bandaged, and an IV drip had been set up on a rifle set in the ground by its bayonet. He looked as white as a sheet.

“Doc said he lost a lot of blood,” Danny told me. “Flint saved his life getting here.”

“How you doing, Evans?” I asked as I squatted down next to him.

“They gave me enough morphine that I think I’m okay,” he said lazily. “But I don’t think I am.”

“That’s a million-dollar wound you got, Lieutenant,” Flint said, appearing at Evans’s side. “Doc told me himself. You’ll live, but you’ll do your living back in the States.”

“I’m sorry,” Evans said. “Sorry to leave you guys so soon. Did we lose many men?”

“It would have been worse without you, Lieutenant,” Flint said. “You did real good for your first time out, you can be proud of that.”

“Thanks. Tell Louie and Stump so long, okay?”

“Sure,” Flint said, barely missing a beat. “Soon as I see them.” He walked away, giving me a secretive wink as he passed. No need to burden Evans with the bad news. Danny and Charlie said their good-byes, and I sat next to Evans.

“What was it you wanted to ask me back there?” Evans said, his eyes closing.

“When you were assigned to the supply depot in Acerra, did you ever go the Bar Raffaele?”

“Sure, lots of guys did. But I never … you know.”

“Never paid for a whore?”

“Right.”

“You talked with the girls though,” I said.

“Couldn’t avoid it,” Evans said. His eyes were fully closed now.

“Ever meet a girl named Ileana?”

“Oh yeah, Ileana. A looker.” His head nodded off as the morphine took effect. He mumbled something under his breath. “… one of the guys … wanted …”

“What? Who?” But there was no waking him, the drug had taken him far away from this ruined village and the jagged steel buried in his shoulder.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

T
HE JEEP CAREENED
around an antiaircraft emplacement, hitting forty as the driver gunned the engine and sped by a fuel dump, jerrycans stacked ten high for a hundred yards. He was trying to outrun a stick of bombs dropped by a Ju 88, exploding in a ragged line behind us. I held my breath, waiting to be blown to kingdom come if one came close to all that gasoline.

“Listen,” I said, grabbing the driver’s shoulder from the backseat. “I want to get to the hospital, not be admitted to it. Slow down.”

“Not the way it’s done, sir,” he said, downshifting as he cleared the burning wreckage of a truck and towed artillery piece. “This hospital is set up next to an airfield, ammo dump, supply depot, and most of the ack-ack in the beachhead. It ain’t a healthy place to linger, wounded or healthy.”

“Why the hell did they put it there?”

“On account of there’s nowhere else. You mighta noticed real estate is at a premium around here. I’ve been ferrying wounded from the aid stations for two days straight, and I’ve brought guys here and seen ’em hitching a ride back to the line on my next trip. They say it’s too damn dangerous.”

He slowed as we drove through a gap in the five-foot-high sandbag wall surrounding the field hospital. Rows and rows of tents marked with giant red crosses were set up, the ground between them churned into mud. Engineers were excavating one area, digging in tents so only the canvas roofs were above ground. A field hospital was supposed to be behind the lines, far from enemy fire. This was not a good sign. If the walking wounded started walking away from a field hospital for the relative safety of their foxholes on the front line, something was seriously wrong.

The driver backed up the jeep to an open tent as medical personnel scurried out. Stump was still unconscious, strapped to a litter across the rear of the jeep. By the time the orderlies got Stump off and I had one foot on the ground, the driver had hit twenty, one hand waving good-bye.

“Welcome to Hell’s Half Acre, Lieutenant,” said a nurse clad in fatigues several sizes too large and GI boots caked in mud. “We’ll take good care of your pal, don’t worry.”

“He’s not my pal,” I said, pointing to his wrists, tied tight. “He’s my prisoner.”

“He’s my patient, and the rope comes off. I don’t care what regulations he broke, he gets treated just like everyone else. Now get out of my way.”

“Okay, okay. But I’ll be watching. And give me his clothes, I need to search them.”

“What’d he do, swipe General Lucas’s pipe?”

“He’s murdered at least six people.” Landry, Galante, Cole, Inzerillo, Arnold. Probably Louie Walla from Walla Walla. Cole was by proxy, but he was a victim just the same.

“You mean six on our side? Who’d want to kill his own kind in this hellhole?”

“Good question,” I said. I watched as she checked his eyes and another nurse cut away his clothes, looking for wounds. She called for a doctor as I gathered up Stump’s uniform and sat on a cot to check its contents. Like a lot of GIs, Stump fought out of his pockets, not wanting to carry a pack and risk losing it. The medics had made sure to empty out ammo and grenades, but they didn’t bother with personal effects.

Cigarettes, a lighter, packs of toilet paper. Chewing gum. A letter from his mother, asking if he’d gotten the mittens she’d knitted him, and reminding him to keep clean and change his socks. It sounded like he was at summer camp, not war. He’d started a letter back to her, saying how swell Naples was, and how their barracks were warm and dry. Odd that a six-time murderer would fib to his mother so she wouldn’t worry about him at the front.

Other than a half-eaten Hershey’s bar, that was it. No clues. No deck of cards missing the ten through king of hearts.

All I knew was that I was hungry. I ate the rest of the chocolate, and waited.

“Lieutenant,” a voice said, from somewhere off in the distance. “Lieutenant?”

“Yeah,” I said, waking up with a start. At some point the cot must have reached up and grabbed me, since I was laid out flat.

“The doctor can fill you in now,” the nurse said, pointing to a guy in a white operating gown, removing his cotton mask. But I would have recognized him anyway, with that blond hair.

“Doctor Cassidy, right?”

“Boyle! I guess we were both headed to the same place. Did you find that murderer back in Caserta?”

“I think I found him here. The sergeant you just treated.”

“No kidding? Did you give him that whack on the head? Nearly did him in.”

“No, that was courtesy of a German 88, or at least a piece of a farmhouse that was hit by it.”

“He did have some small bits of shrapnel in his legs, but nothing serious,” Cassidy said, leading me to another tent that served as the post-op ward. “He’s got a pretty severe concussion, but that’s it. Not from shrapnel, most likely flying debris, like you said. His helmet must have absorbed most of the blow, otherwise he’d have been a goner.”

“Can he be moved?”

“No, we need to watch him for a day or so, in case there’s any other damage. We’ll know within twenty-four hours.”

“Is he awake?”

“In and out. He’s got one helluva headache, and is a bit disoriented. Is he really the killer?”

“I found him next to a colonel he was trying to strangle, with this in his hand.” I showed Cassidy the crumpled king of hearts.

“A colonel? So he got his major?”

“Yeah, Major Arnold, just before we pulled out.”

“Arnold, now he was a piece of work.” Cassidy shook his head, his grief at the loss of Arnold easily kept at bay.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked as he opened a canvas flap and we entered a long tent, with wood plank flooring and rows of cots along each side, filled with the wounded, who were bandaged in every possible place.

“Like I told you, he and Schleck didn’t believe in combat fatigue. Or I should say, Arnold believed whatever Schleck told him to. And he was a souvenir hound of the worst kind.”

“Hey, everyone wants a Luger or an SS dagger,” I said, interested in what Cassidy thought the worst kind was.

“Yeah, but with Arnold it was business. He took loot from homes, and collected soldbuchs—you know what they are?”

“Sure. German pay books, with a photo of the soldier.”

“Something macabre about that, don’t you think? Collecting pictures of dead Krauts? And all that other stuff—caps, medals—he didn’t exactly pay top dollar for them. I heard he took them for favors. Not right for an officer. Well, it doesn’t matter now. Here’s Sergeant Stumpf.”

Stump had a thick bandage around his neck, and several on his legs. His eyelids flickered open, then shut. I knelt by his cot.

“Stump, can you hear me?”

“What … happened?” His voice was weak and raspy.

“Remember the Tigers at the farmhouse?”

“Yeah. My squad?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Can you open your eyes?” He did, and I held up the king of hearts. “Tell me about this.”

I watched his eyes blink and his brow furrow, as if he couldn’t understand what I was showing him. Then came the sound of artillery, the metal-on-metal screeching sound like hitting the brakes at high speed with pads worn clean away. Every doctor and nurse in the tent instantly covered the wounded with their bodies, leaning over the bandaged men and cradling heads with their arms. I did the same with Stump, just as the first rounds landed—
whump, whump, whump
—close enough to shower the canvas tent with debris that sounded like hail. I felt something burning my back and stood up, swatting at myself.

“Shrapnel,” Cassidy said, pulling off my jacket. I noticed small tears in the tent, and one patient dousing his blanket with water. “From that far away, it has lost most of its momentum, but it’s red hot.” He shook the jacket and a sharp, jagged piece of metal fell out. Another round of artillery echoed across the sky, but was a good distance away. No one paid it any mind, except for one GI, both arms swathed in bandages, who rolled out of his cot and began scratching at the floor, trying to dig into it with damaged hands. Two nurses took his arms as Cassidy raced over with a syringe, jabbing the screaming soldier in the thigh. He went limp, moaning as the nurses lifted him back onto his cot.

“Thanks,” Stump said, then pointed to the card I still held. I showed it to him again.

“Some colonel dead?”

“No, no thanks to you. This was in your hands when that German shell knocked you out, as you were strangling Colonel Harding.”

“Who? God, my head hurts.” He tried to raise his head and check out the rest of his body.

“Bad concussion, a bit of shrapnel in the legs. Nothing to worry about,” I said. “It’s over, Stump. We got you dead to rights. Found you next to Harding, with that card in your hand. You were trying to strangle him with his binocular strap. Almost had him, too. Then one of the Tigers blasted the farmhouse, and you got hit on the side of the head.”

“Harding? The colonel who got us out when we were pinned down?”

“The same.”

“Why the hell would I do that? You think I’m Red Heart?” He winced, the effort of speaking painful.

“Why would you have this in your hand?” I held up the king again.

“Dunno. Someone put it there?” His voice was weaker, and his eyes closed.

“That’s what they all say, Stump,” I said, leaning closer. “Tell me the truth. Why did you kill all those people? What did you have against them? What did you have against Louie?”