by Peter Colt
“Dead fucking chinks, smelling of shit and piss and blood and chink smell. One night it got so cold that our weapons froze. The only thing that worked were our fucking. 45s. We threw hand grenades at them and every third one would go off; those froze, too. We had .45s and E-tools and dead chinks everywhere. How the fuck was I supposed to come home and play house after that? Raise a kid. Go work in an office. I tried. Then one night we were talking about going out for dinner, and she wanted to go to a Chinese restaurant. I knew right then. I told her I had to get a pack of smokes, and that was it. No packing, no planning, no goodbye. I just drove the car until I got to LA and sold it for cash.”
“You want me to tell your daughter you split because you didn’t want to go out for Chinese food?”
“Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t she really want to know why I left?”
“There are still a lot of years in between that she is curious about.”
“Let me ask you something?” I nodded in agreement. My head felt like it was made of cement, so I nodded slowly so as not to tip over. “When you came home from Nam, were you fucked up?” Hippie Ed was staring at my face, not Charlie Hammond and his dead chinks.
“Yeah, I was fucked up. Couldn’t fit in, be like everyone else. Some days I couldn’t go outside. I was afraid I’d kill some asshole for looking at me the wrong way or beeping their fucking car horn. I felt like I knew some sort of secret about how the world really was, and they didn’t. Like I had the decoder ring to the secret code. I tried college, and that was worse. I didn’t want to be in a fucking fraternity and didn’t have any goals. I was just happy to be alive.
“I also missed Nam. Watching the fall of Saigon on TV, I cried. I fucking wept, not because I cared about their fucking government, but it meant there was no way I could go back to the only thing that I had been good at. It was the only place where everything made sense, had a reason, and where I had people I could trust. It was the only time in my life when I had brothers. It was the only place I belonged.
“I left college and tried the cops. It helped. It was like methadone instead of heroin. I couldn’t make it in the cops, because they were sloppy and fucked up. It was like they were trying to get themselves killed. Carrying a .38 Smith and Wesson and telling people to stop beating their wives, or to stop partying, or to not drive like an asshole. By then, I was able to go out on my own. That is just what I did.” I had thought about it a lot, but had never put it into words. I had never been able to say it to another human being before.
“You went to see the elephant.”
“Yep.”
He reached his hand across the table, and we shook. Then he got up and came back with more weed and whiskey.
“Does she have to know where I was and what I did?”
“Yeah, man, she does. I have to ask because she paid me, and I gave her my word.”
“And you aren’t the type of guy to walk away or tell her you didn’t find me?”
“No. Would you be?”
“No, I guess not. Guess we got nothing better to do than drink more and smoke the peace pipe.” That seemed all right to me. The wind was whipping outside, and the rain was lashing the windows. It was not a night to be outdoors. Not for me, Charlie Hammond, or W. C. Fields. Sitting at a table telling war stories and drinking and smoking seemed just fine.
“Tell me the rest. Tell me about how Charlie Hammond became Ed Harriet.”
“How did you find me?”
“I followed the VA checks. I figured if you were to be found in LA, San Francisco, or Las Vegas, Pinkerton would have found you. But there were three checks that came to Hyannis, to Ruth Silvia’s mailbox, in 1968. Ruth wouldn’t tell me anything, but her land records led me here.”
“But you left.”
“You must have gotten comfortable. Complacent. I had an old flyer from an art gallery. In the middle was a picture of you handing over some of Ruth’s paintings. Then I knew.”
“And you came back.”
“And I came back.”
“Do you know she’s dead?”
“I read it in the Globe.”
“Did you do it?” He was looking at me with cold, hard eyes.
“No, Globe said it was an accident.”
“No. Is that why you were in Hyannis?”
“Yeah, I wanted to see for myself. It looked hinky. I had to go see it. Did you shoot at me at the farm?” I was mildly curious, with my giant, heavy head and heavy hands.
“No, I am a marine. If I shot at you, do you think you would be here?” I nodded my head, which felt like a seesaw.
“No, it wasn’t an accident. Someone killed her and burned her farm to the ground.”
“Why? Why kill her? Did you kill her?”
“Naw, not me. Ruth worked with a lot of dealers over the years. She fucked over most of them at one time or another. If it wasn’t that it was almost certainly someone cutting in on her turf. She was getting old.
“Let me tell you about after I left. I kicked around LA and sometimes San Francisco. I was drinking and flopping and trying to lay low. I hung out with beatniks and writers. That sort of crowd. When I needed money, I could make it as muscle for some guys I had known from the Corps. I had no problem hurting people, and I was good with a gun. After Korea, it didn’t matter—right, wrong, hurting people—it was all academic. It was weird, my normal life was with the beatniks, and then I would slip away and do work. I was around people taking bennies and smoking grass. Cocaine was rare but not that rare, and I just stayed away from H. Back then H was forbidden by the guys I knew. H meant long prison sentences, and the old guys felt it wasn’t worth the risk.
“I spent the better part of the fifties and early sixties between LA and San Francisco. My friends decided that H was okay. It was profitable and they were willing to do it, but they couldn’t be connected to it officially. Along the way, I learned how to cook H and eventually, when it became big, LSD. It was an accident, really. No one went out of their way to teach me, I just picked it up. Then I started to make some of my own stuff, and I would move it on the side. I wasn’t greedy or stupid. I made and sold just enough to put some money aside. I only worked with people I could trust.
“With the people I worked for, you couldn’t skim money. You couldn’t skim finished product. That would be a quick way to get killed. But if you were smart, you could skim just a little bit of the raw ingredients. It took a lot of discipline to do. Just a little bit at a time. It took more to sit on the money, to move it and hide it. I wasn’t looking to get rich, just to have a little to retire on.”
“How did you?”
“I would go to Vegas with a small stake. Nothing that would be out of the ordinary for a guy like me. I would play, lose a little, and cash out. Then I would go back to LA or San Francisco and put the cash in a safe deposit box. Or I would buy gold, silver, or diamonds. More safe deposit boxes. I had an AWOL bag that I kept cash in and a gun. Just in case I had to run quick.
“In the late sixties, my old friends asked me to work for them in Las Vegas. I was muscle, but my record didn’t exist. I had stopped being Charlie Hammond and was now using another name. The problem with Las Vegas is that there are people watching everyone and everything, and they are everywhere. I knew it was a matter of time before I would get caught. I started to build an escape plan. That was going to cost even more.
“I found some shmuck from back East who was cleaned out. He thought he was saved. He was single and my age. He drank himself to death, and I buried him out in the desert. His identification and life became mine. I slowly built it up. Ed Harriet lived in Reno. He was a laborer. He had a car and rented a house. Ed Harriet paid bills and never broke any laws. Ed Harriet was a cutout that I stepped into one day.”
“What happened?”
“It started to feel weird. Guys who I worked with were just a little standoffish. People were starting to look at me out of the corners of their eyes. It was only a matter of time before someone I thought was a fri
end would put a bullet in my head. In 1972, I was escorting this East Coast mob guy. I took him to a cat house, shot him up with dope, and took the money that he was carrying. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I found out later the money was from a big mob family back East. It was part of their stake in a casino.
“By then I had enough of it and just wanted a clean break. A new start. I took a Greyhound to Reno and left all of my papers in a trash can at the depot. Then Ed Harriet got in his nondescript Ford, drove to Lake Tahoe, and headed East.”
“What were you doing here in 1968?”
“I knew even then that I needed a way out.”
“You were setting this up?”
“Yep, Aunt Ruth loved it. She liked the acid I made for her and liked the money I sent her way when she cashed out gold for me. She liked selling the acid I made to her hippie friends.”
“She was your partner?”
“Yeah, Aunt Ruth always said I was her favorite. Plus, it paid for the commune and shitty Georgia O’Keeffe ripoffs. Which led you to me.”
I don’t know how long we had been talking. His weed was strong, and we’d smoked and drank a lot. The rain had stopped and, for that matter, night had stopped. The kitchen windows showed the gray light of a foggy dawn. My head and limbs were heavy, but it had nothing to do with being tired. I looked up at him.
“Yep, you’re fucked up. It is a special blend of mine. I call it: The Shit that Killed Elvis.”
“What now?”
“Now we go for a walk on the bogs.”
“A walk?”
“Yup, you are fucked. My old friends still want me dead. I don’t want to be dead, and I don’t want to run. You, on the other hand, are just the sort of guy that no one will miss. You also admit that you aren’t the type to walk away. I know there is no point offering you money. I’ve seen your type before. Like some asshole captain who says to hold the line but doesn’t know why or care about the cost. It isn’t personal, man. I just don’t want to die.” He stood up and picked up the shotgun.
“How come you aren’t as fucked up as me?” In my eagerness to prove myself right, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be dangerous. Small mistakes get you killed.
“I have been smoking my own shit for years.”
“Ahh.”
“Come, soldier boy, time to go for a walk.” He pointed the sawed-off howitzer at me and motioned toward the door. It took what felt like an hour to stand up, and each foot weighed a ton—hard to lift, easy to put down. My arms hung at my sides, and I couldn’t open the kitchen door. Hammond had to do it. He had no fear of turning his back on me. When I tried to hit him, he was already outside by the time I raised my hand. He never knew or cared. I saw my Colt sticking out of the back pocket of his faded, bell-bottom jeans. He turned and pointed the Ithaca at me.
“Come on, gumshoe, you solved the case. You got your guy. Now it is time to go.” His smile wasn’t pleasant. I stepped slowly through the door into the yard. He was going to do what the NVA had tried very, very hard to do and failed. I had made it easy for him.
The ground under me was squishy. It had stopped raining sometime in the night, and it got cold. Not just chilly, but the raw cold of November in New England. The temperature wasn’t much above freezing, and the damp air made it seem colder. My Bean’s parka was still in Harriet’s kitchen, and I was wearing an empty shoulder holster over my sweater. My damp skin underneath it made me shiver.
When the rain had stopped and the cloud cover had lifted, it had gotten colder. The ground was damp and comparatively warm. The result was a very thick fog that made it hard to see more than a few feet. My stoned brain tried very hard to tell me where I had seen fog like this before, but I was having a hard time concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.
Hammond jabbed me in the back with the Ithaca howitzer. Idly, my mind cataloged that there was no finer close combat weapon than a sawed-off Ithaca. His first pull of the trigger would send nine .36 caliber pellets into me. Then he could pump it, emptying it in about a second and a half. My mind recalled that it held four in the tube and one in the breach. I hadn’t heard him pump it, so I had to assume it was five rounds. Forty-five .36 caliber pellets in under two seconds. If you couldn’t have a Claymore antipersonnel mine, a sawed-off Ithaca was the next best thing.
“Come, soldier boy—” another shove with the barrel—“time to crack the case.” He was pushing me toward a break in the hedge that turned out to be a path. I stopped short when I heard gunfire in the distance. The low boom of a shotgun. “Easy, soldier boy, just a deer that didn’t know enough to stay off the island, like you.” It was the first day of hunting season on Nantucket, where people came from all over for the deer. Pretty soon it would sound like some sort of World War I battle.
Hammond pushed me again with the shotgun. That would hurt if I wasn’t so stoned, I thought. We went farther down the trail. The hedgerows melted away; then we were on top of a paddy dike, falling away to water on both sides. It wasn’t a paddy dike. It didn’t smell like shit, and I wasn’t in Nam. The mist here was coming off of the water. I must have been looking around.
“That’s right, man. You will live on every Thanksgiving when people have cranberry sauce from a can or some kid has cranberry juice, a little bit of you will be a part of it.” He was going to kill me and push me into the bog—even wicked stoned, I could figure that out.
“That doesn’t actually give me a lot of comfort.”
“Can’t take the risk of someone telling someone and getting found. My old friends are probably still mad. They are like the church, they don’t like transgression or desertion. They don’t like it when you leave and take a lot of their money with them. The guys from the East Coast mob definitely won’t forgive me for stealing from them.” There were more shotgun blasts in the distance. There were other sounds, too.
Charlie Hammond was no jungle soldier, and he certainly would never have made it on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At first, it was faint, but through the pot-induced haze and the fog, I picked out footsteps. They were parallel to us and moving fast. Charlie Hammond’s life had depended on bugle calls and weapons that wouldn’t freeze. Mine depended on not getting caught by NVA trail watchers and elite hunter units. Somewhere up ahead would be an intersecting dike. That was what they were trying to get to. That is where we were going to get ambushed. Whoever they were, they were more than happy that Charlie Hammond was talkative.
There were other noises, too. Flights of birds that suddenly didn’t like the cranberry bogs. Clumsy, seemingly half-drunk hunters calling out to each other in the fog. The deep call of the foghorn on some other part of the island. The metallic sound of a bolt being locked back. Some people don’t trust the safeties on open bolt submachine guns. They were the type where the bolt is held back and slams forward when the trigger is pulled. Not the type of thing a lot of guys want to run around with, so they wait to cock it.
Little mistakes will kill you. Someone else making a little mistake will save you. I dove for the water. It seemed to me that I was falling forever, minutes at least. I bounced off the side of the dike and fell into the ice-cold water that was standing in the bog. It hit me like an electric shock. I heard a horde of angry bees buzzing above me, the tubercular coughing of a silenced submachine gun, and the tinkling of brass landing on the dike. I heard the Ithaca go off and knew I wasn’t hit.
I doubt Charlie Hammond heard any of it. When I half crawled, half floated back to his corpse, he had been stitched from crotch to head. His head had smashed open like a watermelon dropped on the pavement. The Ithaca hand howitzer was nowhere to be found. But when I rolled Charlie over, I found the Colt 1903 still in his back pocket.
I grabbed it and pushed the safety down with my thumb. I crouched and eased up on the dike. I followed the sounds of someone fumbling in pockets and then ramming home a magazine. The thick snout of the silencer on the .45 caliber Ingram poked through the fog. I saw a dim outline of a face and then emptied t
he Colt into it as fast as I could pull the trigger.
I fumbled my own reload, thankful for the magazine release on the heel of the gun. I wouldn’t have to look for my magazine. Lying in front of me on the dike was a man dressed like a hunter. His face had half a dozen .32 caliber holes in it. I would never know where the other two rounds ended up. The ones that hit were neatly clustered around his cheekbone. His left eye was gone, and his nose would never look the same. He looked like he took some shotgun pellets to the face.
His weapon was an Ingram M10, a vicious .45 caliber submachine gun that could empty a thirty-round magazine with a touch of the trigger. It was compact until you screwed the bulbous, foot-long silencer on the front of it. It was a brutal, ugly, effective weapon for up-close work. Hollywood loved them. He didn’t have a wallet, no ID. Just a couple extra magazines. He had my picture and a picture of young Charlie Hammond. He had been a professional.
It took me a few minutes to find the shell casings that didn’t land in the bog. I found the Ithaca hand howitzer and ejected the spent shell onto the dike. The Ithaca went into the water. I rolled Charlie Hammond into the bog and pushed him under the cranberry vines. The Ingram and spare magazines followed.
I made my way back to the house. His dog greeted me familiarly. I was, by now, an old friend. I took the shot glass that I drank from and the pipe and put them in a brown paper shopping bag. I searched Harriet’s house as thoroughly as I could. I found a couple of old pictures of Charlie Hammond’s brief days as a father and family man. I found a leather key wallet with numbered safe deposit boxes on them. Next to it was an envelope with sheets of paper detailing the bank locations. There was an old Walther P38 9mm, spare magazine, and box of shells. I took that. Who knew who else was looking for Hammond? I wiped down any surface I touched in the house.
My Bean’s parka went into the paper bag with everything I took from Harriet’s house. I took his leather hat and a coat of his, which I put on. I took his car keys and cajoled his dog to go for a ride with me. I turned off the lights and closed the door, and I drove off in his distinctive truck with his dog. In the receding fog, it would look like Ed Harriet went into town.