Olongapo Earp (Tequila Vikings Book 2)

by J. E. Park

  “You shouldn’t use the word ‘neh,’” Yukiko told me. “It makes you sound like a girl in Japanese. But yeah, we are not coming from work. My friends and I were out for the night. How has Japan been treating you so far?”

  I nodded. “Not bad. It’s a bit expensive, though. I’m finding that I can’t afford to be an alcoholic here, so I’m struggling to find cheaper things to do than drink.”

  “That’s not too hard,” Yukiko told me. “There are lots of parks in Sasebo. If you like hiking, there are paths through the mountains.”

  “You hike?” I asked, mildly surprised. “You don’t strike me as a great outdoors type of girl.”

  Yukiko laughed. “I’m not. I drive into the mountains a lot, though. I like to see the monkeys.”

  “There’re monkeys here?” I asked, betraying my excitement. I had a thing for lesser primates and had always fantasized about having one as a pet when I was younger. I had never seen one in the wild.

  Yukiko laughed and pointed due east. “Yes, you can’t see it from here, but there’s a mountain over that way that has three groups of them. One of the groups contains something like seven hundred animals. It’s really neat.”

  “That’s awesome! How do you get there from here? Can you take a bus?”

  Yukiko thought for a moment. “I don’t know how you get there without a car. I go all the time. I can take you.” She then pointed her index finger at me. “If you behave yourself, okay?”

  I held my hands up in surrender. “I will behave to see monkeys. If you’re taking me, you do have to let me buy you dinner, though. It’s the least I can do.”

  Yukiko pointed at me again. “As friends, though!”

  “As friends.”

  One of Yukiko’s companions turned to her and said something in Japanese too fast for me to pick up. When she finished, Yukiko said, “You have to excuse us for a minute. We need to use the washroom.”

  “No problem,” I said. “We’ll wait here. It’s slow, and we’ve got nothing better to do.”

  As the girls turned off the footpath and headed for the restrooms, we heard a commotion rising in the general area they were heading. There was the faint sound of some sort of crash, followed by cheering and singing. It sounded like a couple of sailors were getting rowdy. Since another team of SPs had that quadrant, I assumed that they would handle the situation. They were slow to respond, though, and I saw Yukiko looking back at me with apprehension.

  Seeing an opportunity to show off, I puffed out my chest, turned to my partners, and said, “Let’s go check it out. Tell them to pipe down. They’re intimidating the locals.”

  “That’s not our patrol area,” Gibson protested.

  “If we can see or hear something going on, it’s our patrol area. Besides, I don’t see the other team anywhere. I want to make sure they’re not sleeping or goofing off.”

  Once the girls spotted us heading their way, they continued on. When we got a little closer, I saw the other group of SPs appear, having heard the same things we had. Since they were closer and led by someone who outranked me, I decided to let them handle it. “Okay. Let’s get back to the river,” I told my men.

  No sooner had we turned our backs when all hell broke loose. The singing stopped, only to be replaced by a lot of yelling and the unmistakable racket of an all-out brawl. “Shit!” I exclaimed as the three of us turned and sprinted toward the bathrooms. The other shore patrol team was from the Dubuque. I initially feared that they got jumped by some Belleau Wood men in retaliation for what happened the night before at the EM Club. I hoped that we were not going to have to crack the heads of our own guys. There were only a few days left before we set sail for the Philippines. Somebody would be missing out on some epic liberty if they mixed it up with Shore Patrol right before we pulled anchor.

  We overtook Yukiko’s group and arrived at the restrooms in time to see two men breaking away from a pair of the Dubuque’s SPs in the distance. They took off north into the trees while the other team went after them. The three of us followed as well, but stopped when we heard one of the girls scream behind us. We did a quick about-face and rushed back to see what was going on.

  One of Yukiko’s friends was being held by the other. Yukiko herself stood near them with her arms crossed, tears streaming down her cheeks. She was shaking. “You need to help them, Doyle,” she told me, pointing toward the men’s room.

  Stepping into the water closet, to my left, was a bank of three stalls that blocked the view of the urinals from the door. Someone was lying on the deck beneath them, his legs twitching in an almost insect-like manner. A large puddle of blood rolled out from beneath the door of the furthest stall. The third member of the other Shore Patrol team was on his knees next to the injured sailor, whimpering, “Oh, man! Oh, man! Oh, man…” He knew he needed to do something to help but had no idea where to begin.

  My first emotion was frustration. We needed to act, and the Dubuque puke seemed paralyzed by indecision. Once I rushed up and saw what kind of shape the victim was in, though, I understood. I tossed my radio to Sorenson and screamed at him to call in a man down. I then tried to figure out where all the blood was coming from so I could stop it. Judging by how big the pool was that the guy was lying in, he did not have much more to lose.

  I checked the victim’s extremities and torso, shocked to find that everything seemed broken. And I mean everything. He did not look like someone on the losing end of a fight. He looked like the victim of a high-speed car accident. There was blood for sure, but I could not find a wound bad enough to produce such a large puddle.

  Eventually, I checked the victim’s head, something I was reluctant to do because it was so misshapen. I had to force myself to touch it. After some probing, I found that his skull had ruptured in the back. That was where all the blood was spilling from. I also felt something else, something gelatinous and much more distressing protruding from under his hair. It felt like his brains. I looked at the sailor from the Dubuque and felt myself starting to panic too. “We’ve got to move him,” I said.

  “Are you nuts?!” he screamed at me in response. “If we move him, he’s going to fucking die!”

  “If we leave him here, he’s going to die!” I shouted back. “The ambulance can’t get back this far! We’ve got to get him to the other side of the Albuquerque Bridge, where the street is!” I knew then that it was already too late, but we could not just stand there and watch the man pass. By now, the other two shore patrolmen had returned, both of them out of breath.

  “Did you get them?” Danny asked, lacking the attention span to stay focused on the more critical task at hand.

  One of the men, a first-class boatswain’s mate, shook his head. “No. Motherfuckers got away.”

  I leapt up and ran to a stall to wrap my mitts with all the toilet paper I could. It did not seem right to try to hold someone’s brains inside of their skull with one’s bare hands. “I have his head. Danny, BM1, you’re both big guys. Grab his mid-section, one on either side. Sorenson, and you, SM3, take an arm.” Turning to the guy who was with the victim when I arrived, I asked, “Can you get his legs?” He nodded and moved into position.

  We counted to three and lifted the victim. Suddenly, it was like we were pouring out a human pitcher as blood started streaming out of the poor guy’s head. I had to have the men try to lift his torso enough to get it flowing the other way, but it was difficult. The guy was so broken that he just did not move as a normal human should. In fact, the arm that Sorenson was holding was shattered so completely that we could not use it to lift the victim’s weight. We feared we would tear it right off.

  When we came out of the bathroom, Yukiko’s friends screamed again. I was so focused on keeping our man’s head together, though, that I did not even see them as we passed. Despite our awkward positions, we sprinted through the park and heard things coming together before us. There were sirens quickly approaching, and once the bridge came into sight, I saw Chief Ramirez running down with
his team to help. The Japanese police showed up just as we were starting to cross the river. We were disoriented. The flashing lights, the foreign sirens, and the orders screamed at us in a language we could not understand proved more than we could process.

  Once we hit the sidewalk at Sasebogawa Street, we laid the victim down as gently as we could. The other men backed away to let the paramedics do their thing. I stayed in place, trying to keep our man’s head together. The toilet paper had disintegrated, so I ended up holding his brains in with my bare hands anyway.

  I forced myself to look at the victim’s face and knew for sure that he was not going to make it. Shuddering, I wondered how his family was going to recognize him at his funeral. What happened to this kid was so much more than a fight. This young man had bones broken all over his body. His head had been crushed like a grape, his ribs had splintered, and his chest had caved in. Both his arms and his legs were twisted in directions that they should not have been able to turn. I was beside myself, wondering what kind of animal could do something like this.

  One of the Japanese paramedics pointed at my hands and said. “Dozo. Dozo.” Please. Please. Thinking he needed to look, I let go of the kid’s head and stepped away. The paramedic did not bother to check anything, though. There was no need to. The guy was gone. The paramedics stepped back, and the police stepped in. As I backed up, I stole one last look at the body and felt a lump of dread rise up in my throat. I recognized the lizard tattoo on the man’s left forearm.

  I knew him. He worked next door to me but on the opposite side of the shop that Ben Gott and Marty Pruitt worked. He was a radioman. I did not know him well, but I saw him around enough to remember the tattoo. Months before, he discovered Warren Macklemore lying still beneath a bank of radio transmitters. Unsure whether Mack had dozed off while working or if he had electrocuted himself, he was the one who reported it to me.

  His name was RM3 David Miller.

  *****

  “Miller?!?” YN3 Sorenson exclaimed. “That’s fucking Miller?!? You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  Curt looked at his blood-covered hands, but much in the way that a condemned man would stare at a guillotine, knowing it was about to take his head. You could see his eyes begin to dart around in all different directions as panic set in, as if he were searching for something that could save him. Hysteria eventually took hold. Sorenson began shaking his arms, trying to get the blood off his hands with a renewed sense of urgency. That did not have the effect he was looking for, so he tried wiping them on his soaked uniform. That added more gore than it removed. “Oh, no! Oh, no!” he cried. “We need to get this shit off of us! We gotta get this shit off of us NOW!”

  Right there in the street, Sorenson started pulling off his uniform top and sweater. Seeing that his undershirt was soaked through as well, he ripped it off too. Chief Ramirez and I both ordered him to stop undressing, but Curt ignored us. When he saw the bloodstains on his bare chest, he came completely unglued. “Get this off of me! GET THIS SHIT OFF OF ME!”

  “Sorenson!” Chief Ramirez yelled. “What the hell’s the matter with you! Get your clothes back on!”

  “We’re gonna get AIDS! We’re gonna fuckin' get AIDS!” Curt started ranting. He was inconsolable.

  “What are you talking about?” Looking down at my hands, I noticed that I was still holding a few pieces of Miller’s gray matter between my fingers. Disgusted, I tried to shake them off.

  “He’s a fucking faggot, Doyle!”

  “What?” Chief Ramirez asked.

  “He’s a homo! Didn’t you go to the last captain’s mast? He’s a fag! He got busted for broadcasting it to the entire Pacific Fleet to support that Clinton guy who’s running for president!”

  “Seriously?” The gears in my head started to churn, and things began to fall into place. Though I was not as close to hysteria as Sorenson was, I felt a strong desire to clean myself up. I got doused with Miller’s blood worse than any of us, but because I was wearing my pea coat, I was not as soaked as Curt was. I grabbed the attention of one of the paramedics. Through a combination of simple Japanese and some universal hand gestures, I got across the point that we needed to clean up. The paramedics were eager to help.

  “Jesus Christ!” Sorenson was quaking, as much from fear as from the cold. It got worse after the paramedics started spraying him down with disinfectant. “I just processed his travel paperwork this morning. He was being discharged. He was going home tomorrow!” By now, Sorenson was breaking down into sobs.

  A thought occurred to me. “Curt…you said Miller got busted. Was he reduced in rank?”

  “Yeah!” Sorenson answered, shaking even worse.

  I remembered Marty Pruitt talking about how he would kill HM1 Bateman if he ever touched him because he was sure the corpsman was gay. I remembered how he reacted when we joked about Bateman having dreamy eyes. I remembered Pruitt waving at me as I was talking to Yukiko. I recalled him walking into the park toward the direction of the restrooms.

  If Miller had been busted to E-3, he would no longer have outranked Pruitt. If Marty beat up Miller now, it would no longer be an assault on a senior petty officer. It would have just been a fight.

  My heart sank. I turned to the BM1, the boatswain’s mate from the Dubuque. “Hey Boats, the guys you were chasing…was one of them a big guy, a little taller than me?”

  “Everything happened pretty fast, but yeah, one was pretty tall.”

  “Real athletic build?”

  The boatswain’s mate shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “I do,” the guy who I first saw with Miller answered. “Fucker punched me in the gut so hard I damn near shit myself. Yeah, the guy’s strong as an ox.”

  “The other guy shorter? A ginger?”

  “A redhead, you mean?” asked the BM1. “Yeah.”

  I turned to Chief Ramirez, shaking my head. “It was one of the AGs that did this. Call it in. Martin Pruitt. The other guy was Vincent Decker.”

  Ben grabbed his radio. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “I'm pretty sure. Pruitt’s got very little tolerance when it comes to homosexuality, and he loves to fight when he’s out drinking. Decker’s kind of a stooge of Pruitt’s. I saw them both cross the bridge right before this all went down, walking in the direction of the restroom.”

  The Dubuque’s BM1 was shaking his head. “When we walked in there, the big guy took a running start to jump up and stomp on that kid’s head. It was the sickest thing I’ve ever seen. My God, what the fuck was going on in that son-of-a-bitch’s mind?”

  “What about the other one?” I asked.

  “The ginger?”

  “Yeah.”

  The boatswain’s mate shrugged. “He looked a little sick, like he knew shit had gotten out of control. Once he saw us, though, he bolted first, so he knew they both fucked up.”

  I saw Yukiko and her friends getting escorted across the bridge by the Japanese police. I moved to get closer to her, and she reached out to me as she passed, grabbing the hand I held out for her. Her face was black with running mascara. “Are you OK?” I asked.

  Yukiko looked over and caught a glimpse of Miller’s lifeless body. She closed her eyes as tight as she could, sobbing as tears once again began streaming down her cheeks. “No! I’m not! This isn’t happening! It can’t be!” Her grip tightened around my hand even as the policewoman told her that she needed to let go and keep moving. “Come see me tomorrow? Here?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to!” I said, walking with her to keep up as the police herded Yukiko and her friends toward the squad cars. Thanks to my experience with Randy Green, I knew what my immediate future held. “I’m going to be tied up with investigators for the next couple of days! Then we leave for the Philippines! Can you meet me here when we get back?”

  Yukiko nodded her head. “Yes! I will!” Her face then twisted up, and before she burst into sobs again, she added, “We’ll go see the monkeys!” It was a stupid thing to say at that momen
t, and she realized it as soon as it left her mouth. She then let go of my hand and bawled as the police led her and her friends across Sasebogawa Street.

  We spent the next couple of hours bounced between Japanese police officers with poor English skills and one of the base’s duty master-at-arms, a junior petty officer who was way out of his depth. While we were being interrogated, every other man on Shore Patrol was directed to Nimitz Park to search for Decker and Pruitt. Word of what happened spread through the bars and a crowd was beginning to form around us. Some were there because of morbid curiosity, but most were stuck because there was no way to get back to base besides walking over the closed Albuquerque Bridge.

  *****

  As the shore patrol teams gathered to get their new assignments, a call came over the radio. Decker had been taken into custody while trying to scale the fence to get back on post. He was hoping to gain an alibi, claiming he was already on base when the murder happened. Within an hour, Marty was in custody as well, but Pruitt being Pruitt, he resisted arrest. Japanese police do not have the same restrictions against using force that American police do. Pruitt ended up having to go to the hospital before being locked up.

  There was a brief discussion about who had jurisdiction. Technically, it occurred on Japanese territory, so they could have pressed the issue and kept custody of our airman. Since both the victim and the perpetrators of the crime were American, though, they were happy to wash their hands of the affair. They let us deal with it under the Status of Forces Agreement.

  Since the six of us who tried to help Miller were deemed walking bio-hazards, we were dismissed. They loaded us into vans and returned us to our ships to be checked out by medical. When I arrived at sickbay, I got HM1 Bateman again, who tried to lighten the mood the best he could. “How're your nuts doing?” he asked me.