Getting Away Is Deadly (7 page)

I
paced down the hospital corridor, profoundly grateful that I wasn’t a patient. There wasn’t anything disconcerting about the hospital. Everything was shiny and the pathway to the patient rooms was well marked, but that hygienic smell lingered in the air and there were those oversized doors leading to departments with scary names like oncology. Debbie was going to owe me big time for this. I hadn’t bargained on having to visit a hospital. There were about a thousand other places I’d rather be. Even the Metro. Actually, riding the Metro over had been easier than I thought. No screaming, no pushing or shoving. It was a little crowded, but I could deal with that. Hospitals were a different matter. I decided it was the stringently clean chemical smell that bothered me the most. I pulled the bouquet of fresh flowers closer to my nose.

At MacInally’s room, I tapped on the door and recognized the raspy voice that called out, “Come in.”

I paused for a second, steeling myself. I didn’t want to react to MacInally’s appearance at all. I pushed open the door and walked in. I swallowed hard, but managed to keep my smile on my face. “Hi, Mr. MacInally, I’m Ellie, Debbie’s cousin,” I said and extended the flowers. He hadn’t exaggerated about his face. He was pretty beat up. Almost every exposed area of skin was either covered with gauze and tape or had protruding tubes taped to it. Bandages swathed his forehead, right eye, and right ear. His left eye was uncovered and the swollen skin around it bloomed with multicolored bruises. He had some sort of bandage on his nose, too.

“Jay. Call me Jay,” he said as he took the flowers gingerly. Even the palms of his hands had bandages. I remembered what Mansfield had said about how MacInally had dragged himself along a gravel walking path.

“Thanks.” He gave a little laugh. “Who would’a thought I’d be getting flowers? Now, there’s a laugh,” he said as he pulled the rolling tray over and stuck the flowers in his water pitcher. “Nurses’ll love that.”

I smiled. It seemed Jay MacInally might be physically beat up, but his humor was excellent.

He gestured with his bandaged and IV-taped hand. “Have a seat.” I sat in a chair that was already drawn up to the bedside. A purple sweater draped over the back of it. I bet his sister wasn’t far away and might pop in any minute, so I decided I’d better get to the point quickly, but first I had to say something about his injuries.

“I was so sorry to hear about your…” What to call it? Attack? Mugging? I settled for “accident.”

“Wasn’t anything accidental about it.” MacInally wasn’t nearly as delicate as I was. “I guarantee you that”—he glanced at me and amended what he was about to say—“thug didn’t expect me to be sitting up, talking to you. I don’t remember much of what happened. The dinner I had the night before, I remember that pretty good. Lena was there. And the commuter lot. I got that, too, but the ride in the car…” He shook his head. “Not much. They say that’s normal, but I know it wasn’t an accident. He didn’t realize what a tough old bird I am.” MacInally flashed a smile at me, then ran his bandaged hand over the tuft of black hair tinged with gray that stuck out above his forehead bandage. “Reminded me of Korea. I guess you don’t forget those survival skills, even if you did learn them forty-odd years ago. Course, you don’t expect something like that to happen on your way to work.” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Sorry. Had a tube down my throat until this morning.”

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, hoping to get him off the subject of the attack. It seemed to rile him up.

“Consulting. Best job in the world, if you can get it. Charge an arm and a leg and set your own hours. After I retired from the Army, I opened a consulting firm. I help military bases and the surrounding communities stay off base closure lists.”

“You’re never short of clients, then.” Base closure lists came out every couple of years as the military reassessed its needs and adjusted to changes, closing some locations and shifting personnel around. It was like a high-stakes poker game for the communities involved and they fought tooth and nail to stay off the lists. The income and jobs military instillations brought to communities boosted those economies and every community wanted their base to stay open.

“But that’s not what you’re here to talk about. Your cousin wanted to know about Korea.” He paused and his laid-back manner left him. He said quietly, “It’s not something I wanted to tell her about on the phone. It wouldn’t be right. That’s why I wanted to talk to her face to face.” He settled into the pillow a bit deeper. “I’m not used to talking about it. They call it the forgotten war, you know.”

I nodded and felt a bit guilty. We’d toured the World War II Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial, but had skipped right over the Korean Memorial.

“I was there from October of ’67 to November of ’68.”

I tilted my head to one side. “The war was over by then?”

“Police action, was the term they used. There was never a surrender, just a cease-fire in 1953. And things heated up again in 1966. When we went in the Army, we were all so sure we’d end up in Vietnam, and then there we were freezing our buts off in Korea.”

I thought I was fairly well read in history, but, obviously, this was something I’d missed. “Heated up? Do you mean combat?” I’d grown up hearing that Debbie’s dad died in Korea, but since it was in the late 1960s, I’d assumed it was an accident.

“Hell, yes, there was combat. Vietnam got all the attention, but we went through the same thing they did. I think the North Koreans were coordinating with the Soviet Union and the North Vietnamese.” He leaned forward and his bandage flexed as he gripped the handrail on the bed. “The North Koreans seized one of our Navy ships, the
Pueblo
, and held its crew prisoner for something like a year. The North Koreans raided the South, tried to attack the presidential palace in South Korea and assassinate the South Korean president. Combat patrols were ambushed. There were barracks bombings, firefights, and psy ops. It was the real deal.”

“I had no idea,” I said, feeling like an ignoramus.

“Ah, it’s not your fault that you don’t know this stuff.” He relaxed back into the pillows and waved his hand, dismissing my ignorance. “It was way before you were born. And we all know they don’t teach history in school these days. You want to hear about Noel, not get a history lesson.” MacInally cleared his throat again, ran his hand over the top of the tray, and then shifted the water pitcher to the far end of the tray. Finally, he said, “Noel Corder was a short-timer when I got there. That meant he only had a few more weeks to go before he went back home. We called him “Pops” because he was one of the oldest guys around. He had a wife and a baby daughter. He was so proud of her, of Debbie. Every picture he got, he passed it around, showing her off.

“Looking back now, I realize he was probably about twenty. But that seemed old to us. Combat does that to you—ages you—messes with time.

“Most of the time we were up north at our compounds, but once Pops, I mean Noel, and I both had passes and we went down to a USO show. It was a morale thing, you know one of those programs. Bob Hope. Now, there was an entertainer who knew how to support the troops. Noel kidded me the whole time that I wouldn’t have any fun on leave since I was with him, an old married man.

“Anyway, Noel. He was a great guy, easy to get along with. And funny, kind of a clown. He could make us laugh when things looked bad, but we looked up to him. He had the most experience on patrol and we respected that.”

The words stopped and he brushed his hand down the tray again. “Look, there’s no easy way to say this. He died during a firefight while we were on patrol. He shot me and another guy from our patrol.”

I couldn’t speak for a moment. I finally managed to say, “It was a friendly fire incident?”

MacInally just shook his head and went back to his story. It seemed he needed to tell this his way, so I tried to turn off the questions that were running through my mind.

His scratchy voice went on in that same measured pace. “There were five of us. We’d moved into our primary ambush location and were in our positions, waiting, getting eaten alive by the mosquitoes. This was during the summer. Korea had the biggest temperature swings you can imagine. Cold like I’d never felt in the winter and then, in the summer, the heat came and it was sticky and muggy. The mosquitoes were terrible. When we were on patrol we couldn’t swat them away either. Only wipe them away with our hand. Makes me itch right now, thinking about it. Maybe it was the mosquitoes that did it, I don’t know. It was our last day out. We’d been on patrol for two days and I know Noel was close to heading back to the real world. Maybe he just couldn’t handle it anymore.

“We had our claymores out. Those were mines we could detonate. I’m not clear on everything that happened that day, but I do remember a couple of rocks landing around us. The North Koreans used to do that, toss rocks, to see if they could get us to fire and give away our location. Anyway, I remember a couple of rocks thudding to the ground. You’re so tense. You don’t know if they
are
rocks. They could be grenades, but you have to wait.

“After a couple of minutes with nothing, there was a movement to the front left that triggered the claymores. I don’t remember anything after that. They told me I was hit during a couple of minutes of rifle fire. It was Noel.” MacInally shrugged helplessly. “He just lost it. We had marked out our lines of fire and everything, but he lost it and was shooting at anything. I was hit and I don’t remember what happened. They told me later, another guy in our patrol, Stretch, had to shoot him to keep him from hurting anyone else. They radioed for support. Another patrol came in, put down cover, and got us out of there.”

I closed my eyes. I felt sick to my stomach. How was I going to tell Debbie this? She’d be devastated.

I opened my eyes and realized MacInally was rubbing the bandage across his forehead. His voice was almost gone. “That was the way it happened.”

“I’m tiring you out. I shouldn’t stay much longer,” I said.

“No. I’m all right.” He dropped his hand back to the sheet and his face cleared. “Sorry. It’s horrific—to know your own guy shot at you. It’s unbelievable. They said Clark died from a mortar fired by the North Koreans. Noel shot me and Shipley. He probably died instantly. I was in a coma for a couple of weeks.”

I couldn’t say anything now. I simply shook my head.

MacInally said, “Look, what happened with Noel. It was shell shock. Now they’d call it post-traumatic stress. He snapped. There’s no blame in it. I don’t blame him. It was war. You can’t live like that day after day, on edge all the time, and not have it change you.”

I sniffed and swallowed because my throat felt prickly. “I see why you didn’t want to tell Debbie this over the phone. I don’t know how I’ll be able to tell her.” I realized a tear was trembling on my lashes and I wiped it away with a finger. “She wants the hero story. She wants to hear that her dad was great.”

MacInally swallowed and nodded his head. He couldn’t talk for a few seconds; then he said, “We all want the hero story, but it doesn’t usually happen in real life. I’ll leave it up to you. I won’t call her back or reply to her e-mails. You know her better than I do. You decide if she can handle this. If you think it would be better, you can just say I never showed up.” He cracked a small smile. “And it would be true, too.”

“I’ll have to think about it.” I stood up. “Thanks for talking to me today. I appreciate it.”

The door opened and a woman sailed into the room, but she stopped abruptly when she saw me.

“Ah, here’s my sister,” MacInally said and I could hear a smile in his voice. “Lena, this is Ellie Avery.” Her lips pursed in disapproval, but MacInally continued. “Don’t get upset. I called her and asked her to come over.”

She didn’t lose the pinch at her mouth, even when she said hello. There was something about the way she carried herself with smooth movements and an unhurried step that made me wonder if she’d been a dancer or an actress. It was almost as if she willed you to look at her, notice her. She was certainly beautiful enough to be an actress with her high cheekbones, glossy dark brown hair with auburn highlights, and curvy body.

The lines that fanned out from the corners of her eyes and around her pursed mouth hinted that she was probably older than she seemed at first glance and I upped my initial guess from late forties to late fifties.

As I moved to the door, she pushed past me to reclaim the chair with her sweater draped on the back. She sure was possessive for a sister. I guess having someone beat up so badly might make you a little overprotective.

I left the hospital and walked past a conglomeration of business offices. I decided I wouldn’t call Debbie right away. She didn’t know MacInally had contacted me. She thought he’d been a no-show, so I could take time to decide what to tell her. And I definitely needed time to think about this.
Should I even tell her?
She’d always built her dad up to mythic proportions. How would she handle the truth that was so far from the fantasy she’d created about her dad?

I could sort of understand why Debbie’s mom hadn’t talked about it. It was very painful, but to hide it from her daughter? Didn’t Debbie deserve to know the truth? I thought she was strong enough to handle it, but it would mean dismantling all those fake endings she’d dreamed about. The cold, hard reality of Noel Corder’s story was that he’d killed a man and wounded another. Why had he snapped? Other people went through the same thing he did, but didn’t snap.

I shook my head in frustration. Why was I the one to make this decision?
Because you can’t say no
, whispered a little voice in my head. True. I hated to disappoint anyone, but I had no idea I’d be in this position. I’d hoped for a few incidents I could take back to Debbie. Like that about him being funny. Debbie would like that.

I rotated my shoulders to relax them. I realized I’d passed my Metro stop. I turned and retraced my steps to the area of high-rise offices. I saw Irene’s familiar tote bag with the words
Military spouse—toughest job you’ll ever love
on the side and stepped toward her, but then stopped.
It was Irene, wasn’t it?