There Will Be Killing (14 page)

Gregg nodded. “Good thing he doesn't know about Peck messing with Nikki or that might have pushed him over the edge. You don't think. . .”

“What?” Izzy prompted when Gregg kept shaking his head.

“I can't believe even Peck would do something so—so unbelievably sick, but. . .I'm just going to say it. Surely he wouldn't have shot the elephants as pay-back for me introducing Nikki to Rick. I mean, Peck wasn't even there to know—”

“Margie said Nikki met up with him later that night. Maybe that's what he meant by taking something. You think?”

Gregg cringed. What in god's name was Nikki thinking? As for himself, he couldn't bear the thought that his own good intentions could have resulted in something so deplorably wrong. Maybe it was to avoid a sense of guilt himself, but Gregg wanted to give Peck a pass on deliberately using the elephants to punish them. Nonetheless, “I used to think even the worst people in the world had at least one redeeming quality. Now I'm not so sure. Peck kind of fucked with that philosophy. Really bums me out.”

As much as Gregg hated to admit it, even J.D. had at least one redeeming quality: the ability to scare the shit out of Peck.

“Margie told me he goes to church twice a week,” Izzy offered.

“Glory be,” said J.D.

“And she mentioned he does some volunteer ESL work at the big Catholic cathedral downtown to help teach the local kids some English—though it could have something to do with him getting credit towards a promotion.”

“I'm telling ya, the guy's a saint.” J.D. signed the cross.

“Let's see. . .oh yes, and I did see him give some money to some little girls who were begging in the street.” Izzy opened his palms to Gregg as if offering the closest thing he had to a bottle of Jack. “Maybe he's not a hundred percent bad, Gregg. Just ninety-nine point five.”

“Not even that if there were strings attached to his volunteer time or money.” J.D. paused, as if considering a thought.

“Are you suggesting he's a child molester?” Gregg asked.

J.D. shrugged. “You guys are the shrinks, what do you think?”

Gregg and Izzy exchanged looks. “Gregg's known him longer than me. Gregg?”

Gregg gave the possibility a little thought, but just a little because even if Peck was an obnoxious, arrogant, self-serving major league asshole that needed a personality transplant, he did not readily fit the psychological profile of the disorder under discussion.

“No one offers more candy to a kid than a pedophile, it's one of the ways they lure them in, but. . .” Gregg shook his head. “Peck has major flaws, but he just doesn't give off that kind of vibe.”

“And what kind of vibe would that be?” J.D. probed.

“Creepy.” Gregg got into the jeep Rick had left them with; back seat, he'd let Izzy sit up front with J.D. “I could be wrong, but while Peck may definitely be bad news on women, I don't think he preys on kids.”

“Don't forget elephants,” Izzy added, and looked down.

Gregg knew where he was looking. He kept trying not to look at his own boots.

J.D. actually patted Izzy's shoulder and Gregg tried not to liken it to a bowl of soup extended to a starving POW—worse, a guard at the concentration camps giving him a bar of soap and telling him not to worry. Gregg hated the thought that J.D. was using Izzy's vulnerability somehow in this stinking house of horrors war, hated what that said about how his own mind was working to think a small show of compassion was so suspect it was sick. But think it Gregg did as J.D. said almost kindly:

“The elephant thing, that was bad. Unfortunately, this next thing is going to be worse.”

Gregg looked out at the jungle as the jeep bumped along and JD and Izzy chattered away in the front seats. He had never felt this fucked up. Usually, the one thing that he prided himself on was that his mind was strong and steady with a world view of the proverbial glass half full or more. Right now that glass was running on empty. Not too surprising really. He had been in-country a long time. He was completely out of the regular routine he had established to psychically survive here with a balance of work, play, surfing, and friends.

The work was long and difficult and stressful as hell but he had been doing fine until J.D. arrived. Since then Top had been murdered in front of his eyes by Derek, Derek had been blown away, Kate had arrived, and promptly gone from the greatest thing to happen here to the worst with her involvement with Captain Hook, who had just promised the most awful thing yet was waiting at a morgue after they'd watched the bloody slaughter of a baby elephant and her mother, not to mention the snakes.

Gregg could feel his body quivering; a clear signal that he was on overload, but the recent shift in his thinking process is what bothered him the most. He could hear his own thoughts going dark side. Like when J.D. was—
or was he not?—
being kind to Izzy and his mind went to places it made him feel ill to go.
What was the matter with him?
Was he getting paranoid, turning everything J.D. did or said to double think? What was real, what was a manipulation, was anything sincere or was it all just a set up?

Gregg knew that J.D. had tried to be nice to him despite stepping over the line with Kate. But was that more soap and soup, or just an act to appease her and sucker him in? Gregg just didn't know what to think anymore, didn't trust his own judgment, or even his own thoughts that seemed to go round and round, and the more stressed he got the darker and more twisted those thoughts seemed to become. It was like having snakes in his head.
Fuck it.
He needed to get back to the ocean and some waves after they got out of here, after they found out that this was all a big load of bullshit. Then J.D. would go away and he'd be a two digit midget and on his way back home, Kate in tow with a broken heart that he would be there to mend.

God I hate the Nam. This place is so fucking my head.

No sooner had his brain produced that last bit of venom than they were pulling into the camp. The one Rick had said they were calling “Fort Apache.” Specialists like Rick were great at setting up and creating these “camps” somehow overnight in the middle of nowhere. Because Special Ops apparently got whatever they wanted or needed right when they wanted it, they could go right to where it was hot and set up and operate. Pretty much like J.D. Maybe that was one reason he and Rick had hit it off so well.

“Hey, the shrinks are here!” As if it had been a week since he'd last seen them, Rick slapped J.D. some skin, then lightly slapped Gregg on the shoulder, almost knocking him over as usual. It was like the guy was made of some sort of heavy metal. Gregg had noticed the few times he played in pickup basketball games with professional athletes that their bodies were made of something far denser and harder than normal and Rick and his Special Ops guys were made out of the same material.

“Glad you could make it,” Rick convivially went on, “See our little piece of paradise before we pack up again.”

“Where are you headed next?” J.D. asked casually.

“That's classified but I'll fill you in anyway later. First I want you to meet a few of my men. The best of the best of the bad ass best.”

Gregg knew that Rick wasn't boasting, simply stating a fact. As with the medical field there was a hierarchy of expertise and who got the most respect for their positions on the ladder. The way the totem pole worked on this end of things put Rick and his men pretty much at the top. The best of the LRRP guys who survived the training to become Rangers had a shot at the Special Forces, like the Green Berets, then the Special Ops groups operated at another elite level. They were a breed unto themselves often going out in the boonies for weeks doing recon and getting intel on the enemy. Some of them had been drawn from the Green Berets and others were darker with fuzzy affiliations to various branches of the military but most of all to the highly classified SOG. Gregg wasn't sure exactly how Rick had come up in the ranks, but in addition to leading Special Ops Groups, he trained new ones.

It really was an honor to have someone of Rick's stature usher them around, but more than anything, Gregg just wanted to go home, even if it was the villa for now. Every bone, nerve ending, and muscle in his body told him that he did not belong here. Every instinct vibrated with the knowledge that outside the perimeter here was death.

“Okay, kids,” Rick said jovially, “Now that the Buckingham Palace tour is over and you've met the guard, let's get this party on the road. Oh, and before I forget—” He handed Gregg an envelope with “Nikki” printed on the front. “If you don't mind?”

“Not at all, Rick. I'll personally deliver it to her tomorrow.” Gregg fleetingly wondered if the elephants had already atoned for his delivery. Then he consigned that idea with all the others that belonged in the snake pit of his brain.

Minutes later they were bouncing around in the jeep again and heading back in the direction of Ban Me Thuot, then Rick took a detour to an area Gregg had never seen before.

While Rick's Special Ops guys were fit and sharp and looked like a pretty happy bunch of mean mother fuckers, and while their Fort Apache was tidy in a roughhewn kind of way, where Rick parked the jeep and they got out, Gregg could only liken to a deeper level of Hell. One look and you knew how naïve it was to think that living in Nha Trang and working at the 99KO was really the war. They were living and working in some Disneyland Army Town, USA compared to this.

This being a vast, blasted, stinking mud hole filled with temporary fragile shells of metal and shallow holes in the ground, which were in turn filled and covered with sandbags. US GIs were actually living in this mud hole where Gregg could smell the smoke from burning cans of shit from the latrines wafting across the wasteland. The new guys in dark green jungle fatigues appeared nearly as shocked as he was to be here. The old soldiers in faded out fatigues were themselves somehow faded out, nearly spectral. Many were gaunt and wasted from stress with lesions on their skin that looked infected and inflamed. The soldiers he looked at directly just stared blankly back at him. He was a visitor. A being from another place that could come and go from the living hell they had been consigned to.

“Where
are we?” Izzy posed his question in the kind of wheeze that suggested he was trying not to breathe the putrid air beyond the amount it took to keep breathing.

“We're at the firebase, Doc,” Rick explained, as if that explained anything. “These poor grunts here just finished getting the shit shelled and rocketed at them for about two weeks, which we happily missed, and as you can see this place is such a goddamn puking mess all the more reason me and my guys are moving out of here two days max. We'll be setting up about twenty-five clicks north, for reasons I'm sure you'll understand.”

Rick paused and his expression shifted as darkly as his demeanor. “Listen, I got the message from on high that we are after the same fucker—or fuckers—that took down some more of our guys. I was instructed to let you shrinks see the bodies first, before they got taken to the regular morgue, so we set up a temporary right here.”

Rick stopped outside a battered steel Quonset surrounded by green sandbags. Gregg had a terrible premonition J.D. had not exaggerated about the “worse.” His nod confirmed as much just before Rick opened the door.

The odor that whooshed out had Gregg bending over, as Izzy managed to gag out, “Oh, god, the smell.”

“Yeah, well, it's a morgue,” Rick said. “Come on in, and thanks for puking outside by the way, Gregg. Most people would have done it in here.”

The dread crawling up Gregg's spine was one long creeping vicious tropical centipede waiting to snap its burning jaws into his brain as he forced his feet into this awful place with bright lights illuminating what looked like a storage room.

It was filled with body bags.

There was something odd here, though. The body bags were separated, with a special group of the bags laid out on several long folding tables.

These were the bags they approached.

Gregg knew he was moving in the direction Rick was going and J.D. was quickly following, but he couldn't feel his feet and there was a buzzing sound in his ears that blended with the white lights and shadows and his twisting thoughts, the black bags and stench. Like rolling drums in the background, his grinding dread escalated with each step closer, closer, to whatever was about to come.

They all gathered around one of the long tables. Gregg looked across at Izzy, silently asking if he was going to make it. Izzy nodded and Gregg could see he was holding himself together with that sort of disassociated professionalism they all had to learn to survive, while inside his guts were clenched tight.

“Now regarding that fucker—or, fuckers,” Rick said. “The Ghost Soldier stories that really brought you docs here to help. . .I don't know, analyze, I guess?”

“Yeah, the Boogeyman, or whatever. Gregg thinks it's bullshit, and until Izzy and I see something to convince us otherwise, we're inclined to agree.” J.D. shrugged like they just couldn't buy something baked up around a campfire, even if it had come from one that smelled more like the burning shit outside than roasted marshmallows. “One look out there and it's easy to understand how crazy stories like that get started.”

“Maybe.” Rick reached for the first bag and opened it. He pulled out a head, as cleanly severed as the monocled cobra's, except this one was human. It had also been scalped and the eyes were gone. “Then again, maybe not.”