Murder Key (15 page)

             
Caldwell began to pull the billy club from his equipment belt.

             
A low raspy voice, menacing and confident, escaped from Jock. “If you’re planning to use that on us, you’d better do some re-thinking,” he said. “You’ll be dead before you can hit me. If you get lucky and connect, I’ll come for you another day.”

             
A look of rage danced across Caldwell’s face. “I’ll kill you, you smug son-of-a-bitch.
”

             
Jock’s voice grew quieter, more menacing. “And if that happens, some very bad men will come and kill everybody in your family out to second cousins. You’ll be the last to go.”

             
The deputy hesitated, then grinned. He had decided not to believe Jock’s threat. After what had happened in Mexico, I pretty much believed it.

             
The billy came out. Caldwell swung it one-handed back over his shoulder like a tennis racquet wielded by a poor player, and then started
his swing toward Jock’s head.
Jock pivoted on the ball of his right foot, turning inside the billy’s swing radius and ended up with his back to the deputy, close in, as the club swung around harmlessly.

             
As Jock started his pivot, I whirled to my left, turning three-hundred-si
xty degrees, and slammed my right
foot into the side of Caldwell
’s left knee. I heard the ligaments snap under the impact, and at the same time, was aware that Jock had butted the back of his head into Caldwell’s face. Blood flew from the battered man’s shattered nose, and a hoarse
scream erupted from his throat.

             
The deputy went down on his back, with Jock on top of him. Caldwell was holding his broken nose with both hands, moaning softly, not even aware of his ruined knee.

             
I sat on the ground next to the deputy, my back to him. I reached for the deputy’s key ring with my cuffed hands. I wanted the key to the handcuffs.

             
Jock saw what I was trying to do. “No, we’ll leave the cuffs on,” he said. “I want the man in charge to see that we’re harmless. Take his gun, though.”

             
Jock walked over to the cruiser and sat in the driver’s seat. “Let’s get the law out here,” he said.

             
“Do you think that’s a good idea?’

             
Jock was quiet for a moment, his brow wrinkled in thought. “Maybe not,” he said, “but we can’t just leave this like it is. See if you can get dipshit’s keys and unlock my cuffs. I’ll hold my pistol behind my back while you show whoever comes that you’re cuffed. If there’s a problem, I’ll take care of it.”

             
That sounded like a plan. We walked back to the wounded deputy and retrieved his keys. I unlocked Jock’s cuffs, and he retrieved his pistol.

             
Jock went back to the cruiser and picked up the radio microphone. “We’ve got an emergency on county road 496 A, about two miles south of the turn-off to the labor camp,” he said. “Get somebody out here right now.”

             
The radio crackled with static
. “What kind of emergency?
Who are you?”

             
Jock looked at me and grinned. “Ignore that.
Somebody will be on the way in a very short time
”
.

             
The radio crackled again as we got out of the car. We walked over to the deputy who was writhing on the ground, aware now of the pain in his knee. We leaned against the cruiser, waiting.

             
Within minutes we heard sirens. Two sheriff’s vehicles, one an SUV, screamed to a stop behind Caldwell’s car. A young deputy got out of the first one, his gun drawn, pointing at us.
He
walked over to Caldwell, still on the ground, moaning, blood seeping from his nose, his knee at an odd angle.

             
A tall man with brown hair and a round face climbed out of the SUV and came towar
d us, gun drawn. He appeared to
be in his late thirties and was wearing chinos and a green golf shirt with a gold sheriff’s badge embroidered on the left breast pocket.

             
“Who is it, Bobby?” he asked over his shoulder.

             
The young deputy was upset. “It’s Casey Caldwell, Sheriff. He’s hurt bad.”

             
“Call an ambulance. I’ll take care of these two.”

             
I said, “We’re handcuffed, Sheriff. We can’t give you any trouble.” I turned slightly to show the man my bound hands. Jock stood still, his hands behind him.

             
I said, “Deputy Caldwell cuffed us and then tried to take us out with his billy club. We resisted. He had no reason to try to rough us up, other than sheer mea
n
ness. He never told us why we were stopped.”

             
“Who else was involved?” the sheriff said.

             
“Just us, Sheriff,” I said.

             
The sheriff looked skeptical. “You did all this damage while you were in handcuffs?”

             
Jock spoke up “We’ve had some training.”

             
The sheriff looked at Jock. “What’re your names
?”

             
“I’m John Algren and this is Matthew Royal, a lawyer.”

             
Jock could have left that last part out. I didn’t think this sheriff was going to be intimidated by the fact that I was an attorney, and sometimes cops make it tougher on lawyers, just because they can.

             
“I’m Sheriff Kyle Merryman. Tell me what happened.”

             
I related the events since arriving at the labor camp. I didn’t want to get into any detail about why we were there.

             
I added, “Once we were stopped, the deputy seemed to go berserk. Told us he was going to teach us not to mess around in other people’s business. That’s when he took a swing with the billy club.”

             
“Why didn’t you get Caldwell’s keys and uncuff you
r
selves?” the sheriff asked.

             
Jock said, “We didn’t want
anybody to think we were danger
ous. In an officer-down situation, trigger fingers some
-
times get a little twitchy.”

             
The sheriff nodded and turned to look south as the distant wail of a siren pierced the air. “You two stay put,” he said, and turned to walk to where Casey Caldwell lay on the ground moaning softly.

             
I could hear a whispered conversation between the sheriff and the young deputy as they stood over Caldwell, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then, the sheriff squatted on his haunches next to the injured cop, and they had a discussion.

             
Merryman rose and walked slo
wly toward us, a look of determ
ination on his face. The siren
had gotten louder, and the ambu
lance appeared in the distance, coming toward us at high speed.

             
The sheriff planted
himself in front of Jock and me.
“My deputy says you attacked him first. I suspect he’s lying. Did you attack first?”

             
I said, “No, Sheriff, he had a gun and we’d been disarmed.”

             
The sheriff looked at me quizzically. “Mr. Royal, where are you from?”
             

             
“Longboat Key, now, Sheriff. But I practiced law in Orlando for a long time.”

             
The ambulance pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, its siren abruptly dying. The young deputy waved the medics over to Caldwell. Merryman ignored them.

             
The sheriff took a deep breath, exhaled. A brief expression crossed his face, disappearing too quickly for me to read. He breathed again and slapped at a small insect crawling up his neck.

             
I could hear the rattle of the leaves on the citrus trees as they were disturbed by a light wind blowing out of the west. The hum of insects living in the brush beside the road gently assaulted my ears.

             
The sheriff was staring at me, not moving. Everyone else was still. Even Cal
d
well’s moans had ceased
. It was as if time had stopped
and we were actors in a
tableau viva
nt
staged in
a
bizarre setting.

             
Probably no more than a second had elapsed, but in retrospect it seemed longer. The sheriff shifted his weight to his left leg, and
looking directly at me, asked,
“Do you know Jimbo Merryman?”

Murder Key

TWENTY-FIVE

             
Did I know Jimbo Merryman?

             
A long time ago, in a faraway place called Vietnam, a team of U. S. Army Special Forces troops, the toughest fighting men on the planet, eased its way single-file along a jungle path. It was December, 1972, and the Americans were withdrawing, tasting the bitter fruit of defeat. Apparently, nobody had bothered to tell the North Vietnamese troops we were leaving, because they were still trying to kill us.

             
A nineteen year old soldier was at the head of the column, alert, scared, waiting for whatever was going to happen. That was me. A kid with a rifle. I’d been in-country for several months, and I had been in battle. The firefights always started without warning, rifles going off, men grabbing the ground, sighting on the enemy, pulling triggers, killing and wounding each other.

             
And that’s the way it happened that hot day in December.

* * * * *

             
I’d joined the Army the day after I graduated from high school, and during the summer of 1971, I had enjoyed the
Army’s
hospitality
in
basic training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. I was offered a slot in Officer Candidate School if I could pass the entrance exams, and after I finished my advanced infantry training, I was sent to Ft. Benning, Georgia, to the Infantry OCS to learn how to be a leader and a gentl
e
man. Six months later, some Colonel pinned gold bars on the epaulets of my dress khaki uniform, and I started Ranger school. From there I went to Special Forces training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

             
The boys in green berets taught me how to eat lizards, navigate in a jungle, climb up or down mountains, kill with rifle, pistol, machine gun, mortar, knife and bare hands. They had a ceremony and put a green beret on my head an
d
assured me that I was one mean son-of-a-bitch.

             
They put me on a big jet airplane with 150 other kids and took me off at a place called Thon Son Nhut airport in the city of Saigon, in that showpiece of democracy, the Republic of South Vietnam. They herded several of us onto a helicopter and dropped us off in a pigsty called Base Camp O'Conner in the mountains that traipse across the waist of the Indochinese peninsula.

             
I was introduced to a ragged group of boys and a man about forty years old. This was my A team. Together, we were supposed to kill all the little yellow men we could.

             
There were eleven of them. With the exception of the older man, the sergeant, their age averaged mine. They were good at their job. The lieutenant I replaced had been mailed home in a box.

 
             
The sergeant was on his second tour and was a wise man indeed. Back in OCS, a sergeant-instructor had told us that we should never let those little bars go to our heads; that we should cozy up to a sergeant and learn everything we could from him. It might just keep us alive. I took that advice and learned a lot from Master Sergeant Jimbo Merryman. That knowledge saved my life more than once.

             
We scurried about in the jungle for eight months, killing a few sad looking little fellows, and then getting shot at by the ones that replaced them. America was fighting a limited war, but the enemy wasn’t. We'd blow up an ammunition dump and get choppered back to Base Camp O'Conner. After a few days of boredom, we'd get choppered back to blow up the same dump again and kill a few more of the same gu
ys we'd killed the week before.

             
We’d been in the boonies for about four days on some long- forgotten and unimportant mission when what seemed like the whole North Vietnamese Army jumped us. We were snaking down a trail in jungle so thick we couldn’t see four feet on either side. The overhanging branches, like an inverted sea of shaggy green with cerulean highlights and scudding whitecaps, gave us an occasional peek at the sky. By then
,
we were so attuned to the jungle that we were like the animals that lived there. We could walk for miles in the stifling heat without making a sound.

             
We had become immune to the insects that took their daily meals out of our hides. We didn’t even bother the animals any-more, and the buzzing and crackling in the bush became just background noise to us, like that droning music in elevators that you are subliminally aware of, but don't hear.

             
Suddenly, there was a shot, and Myers, the point man, fell. H
e was about ten yards ahead of
me, and I could tell he’d never get up again. He dropped with a looseness of the bo
dy that only the dead achieve.

             
I hit the ground and rolled into the brush beside the trail. There was a lot of gunfire, all of it the distinctive bark of the Chinese-made AK-47 automatic rifle. I saw t
wo more of the good guys fall.
One was completely quiet, but Abernathy, a big blonde kid from Arkansas, was screaming and rolling
on the trail holding his gut.
All the firing was coming from ahead of us, near the clearing we had been making for. I knew that three were hit, but I couldn’t see the other eight. They had been spread out at ten yard intervals when the shooting started. I hollered for Jimbo.

             
“I'm hit, Lieutenant,” he called back.

             
“How bad?”

             
“In the shoulder. I can make it.”

             
“How about the others?”

             
“Smitty and Kines are down. I think they're dead. Cate is with me. I can't see the others.”

             
“Sing out!” I said, hoping that most of them would answer.

             
“Galis.”

             
“Sims.”

             
“Craft. I can see Sandifur, Loot. He ain't movin'. Looks like he got it in the head.”

             
“Beemis,” I yelled. “Are you okay?” No answer. “Can you see the bastards, Jimbo?”

             
“Nossir. But they're all over the place. We're
taking
fire from all sides.”

             
“Aber's hit. I'm going after him. Cover me,” I said to no one in particular.

             
The kid was about twenty yards behind me, lying near the middle of the trail. Little puffs of dirt were expl
oding around him.
He was still screaming. I strapped my M-16 across my back and began to crawl toward him, staying as close to the cover of the trees as I could. The jungle was so thick in places I had to crawl onto the trail, and the little puffs of dirt would begin to explode around me. One was close enough to splatter gritty sand into my eyes.

             
By the time I reached Abernathy, he had quieted down and was moaning in little short gasps. I rolled him onto his back and stuck a compress over the hole in his belly. I la
id
on my back on top of him, my rifle between us, put his arms around my neck, and rolled onto my stomach.

             
I started crabbing to the nearest cover, about ten yards in front of me. I felt Aber twitch once, and then he was quiet. When I reached the trees he was dead. He had taken one in the back. It entered his side just below his right armpit and came out on his left side about waist level. I was sticky with the boy’s blood.

             
I laid him on his back. He was staring at me accusingly, but he wasn't seeing anything. I closed his eyes and started shak
ing, uncontrollably.

             
Suddenly, all the months of futility and terror, the dead and the maimed, the terrible waste of it all, overwhelmed me. I was hyperventilating, gasping in shallow breaths, not getting enough oxygen. A part of my brain told me to snap out of it, but I had no control over my body. It was as if I were standing to one side watching my body dessert me for the first time ever.

             
I told myself to slow down, to get hold of my panic. I’d been in situations this bad before, and I’d always handled them. I prided myself on never panicking, no matter what the danger. I told myself that I was in charge, and I owed these guys some
leader
ship. Nothing worked. I couldn’t get control of the panic. It was overwhelming me, and I knew, with absolute and terrible certainty, that it would kill me.

             
I remember thinking that this was a lousy place to die. I wasn't ready yet. I had about fifty more years to live according to the insurance tables. I was scared. Bone-shaking, teeth-rattling scared. I curled up in a little ball and said goodbye to the world.

             
I wondered how my mother woul
d handle the memorial service.
I saw my name on the little plaque that hangs in the main hall of my high school, announcing the names of the alumni who had died in every conflict since World War One.

             
Jimbo was shaking me and hollering loud enough to be heard by the staf
f in Saigon. “Goddammit, Matt.
You chic
k
enshit little wimp. You no good goddam
n
shavetail asshole. You crap out on me now, and I swear to God I'll kick your sorry ass all the way back to Florida and feed the alligators a meal of chickenshit lieute
n
ant.”

             
I was still standing there, outside my body, watching the sergeant bring me back. It was like one of those stories you read of near-death experiences, except that I was only near-death emotionally. I wasn’t even hu
rt, not in the physical sense.

             
I’ve read of aborigines in Australia who have been boned. A shaman points a bone at one of them and tells him that he is going
to
die. The man, even though in the peak of health, dies within a few days, because he believed in the power of the shaman. He had willed himself dead.  Maybe that’s what I was trying to do. I never f
igured it out, and I never had
another similar experience.

             
I
began to pull out of it. I gulped lungfuls of air. I was as tired as I'd ever been. The lack of oxygen in the shallow breaths of the hyperventilation had taken its toll.

             
Suddenly, I was back in my body. “I'm all right, Jimbo,” I said. “Thanks. Let
’
s figure a way to get the hell out of this.” I was lucid and in control and figured I had at least a fighting chance of surviving this mess.

             
The big sergeant grinned. “That clearing is about a hundred yards in front of us,” he said. “It’s big enough to bring in choppers if we can get there. We've still got the radio. I hope the chopper boss hasn’t stopped monitoring it.”

             
I got the men into a circle, firing into the trees on all sides. The guys were mad and doing their damndest to earn their pay. In the process they were shooting up one hell of a lot of Uncle Sam’s ordinance.

             
The little radio was working, and I called the chopper boys. Our group was code-named Riding
Hood for some unknown reason.
Probably a little joke dreamed up by the staff bo
ys back in Saigon.
I called for Bald Eagle, another ridiculous name, but one that could save our butts if they were listening, and if they were in position as they were supposed to be.

             
“Riding Hood, this is Bald Eagle. What are your coord
i
nates?”

             
I gave him our map coordinates and told him that we were up to our asses in Charlies. I described the situation and asked for a lot of fire power to be laid in between us and the clea
ring. I suggested he have a gun
ship make a pass and then hold off until we called again. We’d move as soon as the chopper passed, and we’d come out shooting.

             
I told the men that as soon as the area was strafed, we’d move ahead about ten yards firing everything we had in all directions.

             
The gun ship came in low, firing all those big machine guns. As he was angling up, our little group, still in a tight circle firing on all points of the compass, moved ten yards down the trail. On the fourth move my leg went out from under me. As I hit the ground I felt the hot pinpoint of pain in my calf. I reached down and brought back a bloody hand. The bone seemed all right. I got back to my feet and could walk, but every step felt as if a hot poker were being stuck into my lower leg.