by Scott Blade
More lightning cracked and I saw the flash over the water. The flicker echoed and bounced off the underbelly of the storm clouds.
I scooped up the rented surfboard and headed back to the surf shop to return the board.
CHAPTER 6
I GOT BACK my two hundred bucks. The kid behind the counter said it would go back onto my card.
I thanked him and asked about local army bases.
He said that there were several Army Reserve Stations in the region.
The closest wasn’t an Army base or a reserve station. It was a Florida National Guard base, but I wanted an Army base. The kid said there was one farther north.
After I left the surf shop, I waited out under a canopy at the entrance and watched the rain turn from a steady drizzle into a hard thrashing.
I sat on a bench next to a covered wastebasket with a plastic ashtray insert on top. The tray was full of ashes. I was surprised to see it. Surfers, and people around Cocoa Beach in general, struck me as the healthy type. I hadn’t seen anyone smoking since I got there. And I had been in town for about a week. It was the start of summer and I liked the beach. Where else would I be?
This area was a big surfing community. Some of the most famous American surfers in the world took refuge here.
I had seen plenty of surfers smoking on the beach at night, but they were smoking cigarettes rolled with something other than pure tobacco. That I knew for sure.
There’s a big difference in smell between traditional tobacco and marijuana.
I had been around enough sailors and Navy ships to know the smell of both.
I didn’t smoke either, but I only had prejudices against the former. Everyone knew for a fact that modern cigarettes caused cancer. No one had any evidence that marijuana caused anything but laziness.
Still, my drug of choice was the caffeinated Colombian kind.
The rain continued to fall.
I stayed out in front of the shop under the canopy until I started to get both cold and impatient.
I decided to go back into the shop and buy some new clothes. I kept the pants because they were getting closer to dry by this point. I guessed that technically they were damp, but I had grown oddly comfortable in them.
I bought a long-sleeved surfer shirt. It was white with a logo of a surfer brand that I wasn’t familiar with. That didn’t mean that it was not a popular brand. I just was never much up on my fashion.
Of course, I had heard of the old brands like Polo or Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein. But I didn’t know which brands were in style and which were not. I had zero idea what the current trends were in almost anything. Especially fashion.
I also bought a black hooded windbreaker made out of nylon and claiming to be water resistant on the tag. It was expensive, but then again I was at the mercy of the shop and the local prices.
Cocoa Beach wasn’t the kind of town to go price comparing in. Almost everyone who shopped on the beach was going to be a tourist. And even the locals were used to paying high prices.
I imagined that most of South Florida was the same.
I hadn’t been to Miami in nearly a decade. Or at least the last time that I remember being there had been that long ago. Recently, I stopped there. South Beach hadn’t changed much. But other parts of the city had been built up dramatically.
Ten years ago, the downtown part was cheap and drab. Now, it was all built up. There were dozens of high rises. Back then, the downtown part was overrun with slum buildings and the homeless. Now it was overrun with overpriced condos and international banks.
I also grabbed a pair of tennis shoes. Like the windbreaker, they weren’t cheap, but they were the cheapest pair that had my shoe size.
I tossed the flip-flops into the trashcan, which made the store clerk look at me cockeyed. But he said nothing about it. I went back outside under the canopy and sat on the bench. I slipped the shoes on. No socks. And I took out the shirt and the windbreaker and stuffed the store’s bag into the wastebasket with the ashtray.
I put everything on and zipped up the windbreaker. I pulled the hood up over my head and started to walk north.
I HEADED NORTH because it was to my left and also because of my mother. Way back when I was a little kid, she had taught me to always look left and then right before crossing the street. And left had been the first direction I looked when I stepped out of the surf shop parking lot.
I was not trying to walk to the nearest Army Reserve Station. I was looking for coffee.
I found a diner chain that was serving breakfast. This particular location looked old and in need of renovations, but the coffee was good and the place was clean.
The coffee was good and black and caffeinated.
Since the rain looked like it wasn’t going to let up anytime soon, I decided to order two eggs, scrambled, and toast and bacon.
It all came out twenty minutes later, which was a long wait, but I didn’t complain because I never saw the bottom of my mug. The waitress was on top of her game.
She was a real pro.
I ate everything on my plate and paid the check and tipped the waitress a dollar extra. Which seemed to confuse her, like maybe the rest of her customers had been tipping her less due to the slow food delivery times.
Before I left she gave me directions to the nearest Army Reserve Station, which was within driving distance.
She must’ve known that I was from out of town because she suggested that I Uber there.
I knew what Uber was. And it did sound like a great service, but I didn’t have a cellphone and therefore I didn’t have the app required to request an Uber.
I hated taxis. Always had.
All over the world, taking a taxi was a fifty-fifty prospect when it came to prices and customer service. The thing about Uber, that I had heard people brag about, was that the service was always top-notch and the prices were low or at least competitive when compared to taxi rides.
After she told me about Uber, I asked her if there was a bus station nearby. She pointed me in the direction of a local bus stop.
Most military installations are usually built somewhere near a bus route. And often military bases were stops on bus routes.
Most of the United States’ military personnel started out in the low-income bracket. Many new recruits didn’t have personal vehicles. Therefore, they used buses.
I thanked her and left and walked to the bus stop.
I was headed to an Army Reserve Station called Graham.
CHAPTER 7
GRAHAM WAS ABOUT TWENTY KLICKS north of the bus stop. Which led me to change buses twice. The last one was one of those old trolleys.
A guy in the seat next to me had called it a “Beach Comber” while he was trying to explain to me how he had to go out of his way every day to catch it in order to get to work as a custodian at a local elementary school, because his car was in the shop every other month.
According to him, the “Beach Comber” was more of a pain in the ass than his car because half the time it was late.
He seemed happy that this hadn’t been one of those occasions.
The guy asked me what my line of work was, but I didn’t have to answer since we were at my stop.
I told him to take it easy and I disembarked.
By that point, the rain had slowed and died down to a borderline drizzle.
Graham wasn’t much of an installation.
I was familiar with Army installations as much as I had been with sites for any other branch of the military that I hadn’t been in.
I had seen other branch’s installations and bases. And I had passed through many of them for various reasons and various coordination procedures in co-managed operations.
It had a fence and a gate and a guard hut. There were low buildings. All green. All without character or taste or anything unique to them.
The Army always did take the uniform idea all the way.
They would have their soldiers all think the same thoughts if they co
uld.
I couldn’t tell how many acres made up the base, but it was a lot. It wasn’t enough to qualify it as a major base and it was far from looking important. But it wasn’t a small installation either. I had seen much smaller. This one probably had a base commander who was ranked higher than coronel, but far from a one-star.
I could see that beyond the guard hut there was a moderate amount of street and foot traffic. Men and women in uniform walking and talking. Some going here. Others headed there.
Some carried briefcases. Others carried papers.
Some of them looked hurried and others looked casual.
It was all habitual military work.
The rain stopped, but the dark clouds hung around like they had no place else to go.
I approached the base.
The guard behind the traffic barriers saw me coming. He called back to the guard hut and two more soldiers stepped out of the hut and walked down to the tip of the station. They stopped and stood in a practiced guard stance. I had seen similar ones before and I had probably seen this positioning before. But I had no idea what it was called.
It was an army thing, not a Navy or Marine thing. They had their own training and their own strategies. But like all corporations, nothing was unique when it came to tactics.
Live long enough and you’ll come across the same bullshit that you’ve seen before.
A gravy-colored Buick was waiting to clear the hut and drive onto the base. One guard remained with it, while the other two stepped away from the station and approached me.
I figured that they were waiting to see my intent before confronting me.
I might have been just passing around the base, which made no sense to me because it looked like the road around the base led to nothing but trees.
They stopped well ahead of me, as if they knew the borders of their jurisdiction and that was the edge of it.
I walked closer and stopped.
They all wore the same woodland pattern camos. They wore black flak vests with multiple Velcro pockets and inserts, stuffed with flashlights and road flares and extendable batons. They probably had extra bullets hidden away in there somewhere.
They wore black berets with insignias patched on the front.
Holstered on their right sides were Beretta M9s, the standard pistol for the Army Military Police Corps.
One MP was a woman. She was shorter than the other two. But she looked like she packed quite the punch.
The male MP had walked out in front of her and stopped at the crescent of a patch of grass, just beyond the curb. Which put him about four inches shorter than me.
He said, “Sir, can I help you?”
Casually, I looked him up and down. He had the military police patch south of his left shoulder, just above his bicep. Above that was an armband that had the letters, “MP,” sewn on.
His nametape read: Hamilton. Like the president.
I said, “I need to speak to your CO.”
“Who are you?”
I didn’t want to diddle-daddle around with a long back-and-forth pissing contest. So, I used the old double-dealing trick of flattery.
I said, “Captain Hamilton, my name is Jack Widow. I have a matter to discuss with your CO. It’s not an emergency or anything. Nothing to get all riled up about. I simply want to report a possible crime.”
Hamilton cocked his head and said, “Mr. Widow, I appreciate the promotion, but I’m not a captain. I’m a second lieutenant.”
He veered off for a brief pause and looked past me, like he was going to say that he wished he was a captain. And then I sensed that maybe he was supposed to have been one already. Like it had been in his plans for himself, but not in the cards for him.
A hint of envy sparkled in his eyes.
Then he said, “What crime are you wanting to report?”
“I didn’t say it was a crime. I said ‘possible’ crime. Like maybe. Like I’m not sure what it is.”
“Any threat of a crime is taken seriously here, sir.”
I stayed quiet.
Hamilton said, “Are you here to threaten a crime? On military property?”
“I said I want to report something. I didn’t threaten a crime.”
Hamilton paused, looked me up and down, like he was showing me that he was assessing me.
I said, “You guys guard this base like you’ve got something important here to protect.”
“Sir, we’re MPs in the United States Army. We are doing our duty.”
“Relax, Lieutenant. I’m familiar with military cops.”
“Are you a disgruntled former soldier?”
I didn’t answer that. Instead, I said, “Lieutenant, are you going to show me to your chief or not?”
He paused another brief second and then he said, “We don’t have a chief here.”
“You got a station commander?”
“We do.”
“Then he’ll do just fine.”
Hamilton stayed still and looked at me again, like he was deciding whether or not to bother the station commander or to shoot me in the kneecaps and then introduce me to the station commander.
I noticed that his BDUs were a little sun bleached like he had just gotten back from deployment in the desert. Then again, the sun will do that in South Florida too.
He said, “Stay here, please sir.”
I didn’t have to speak to his CO to report the dog tags, but I didn’t know the circumstances of them.
Graham was the nearest Army installation to town and I had figured that there was just as much chance that the tags were stolen or lost, and that someone other than the wearer could’ve vandalized them.
If the owner had lost them, that could be embarrassing. If he had mutilated them himself, then that could be a criminal offense. Either way, I thought it safer to keep the bubble of people who knew about it small.
Hamilton stepped back and away from the crescent and left the female MP to watch me.
I watched him pass the other guard and he stopped and whispered to him.
The other guard finished inspecting the car that was attempting entry and waived the driver in. Then he nodded to the lieutenant and walked over to join me and the female MP.
They were my guards, standing post and keeping me out of trouble.
I stayed standing and looked over the base. Again, I saw nothing particularly special about it. Nothing that was cause for such an uproar over a civilian standing at the gate. I understood that times were different ever since 9/11.
Military bases and military police all over the world were far more high-strung than they had been in previous years. It used to be that suicide bombers were a thing of fiction. And then they were a real occurrence, but it only happened “over there.”
Now, everything was different and it wasn’t going back to what it was in the old days anytime soon.
So far, there had never been a suicide bombing on US soil related to today’s Islamic terrorists that resulted in innocent deaths. The only thing close was a suicide bombing at a university in Oklahoma back in 2005. The only person killed in that one was the bomber himself.
I said, “You guys take your job here pretty seriously?”
“Sir?” the female MP asked.
The male said, “Keep quiet, Maxine.”
I looked at him for indication of rank, but the Army MP BDU doesn’t show rank. So, I had no idea if he outranked her or not.
I settled on looking at his nametape. His name was Coresca I glanced left over at her nametape. The nametape on the female MP read: Maxine.
It wasn’t her first name. It was her last. I had never heard Maxine as a last name before. But then again, I had never heard of Coresca either.
I said, “Do you outrank her, soldier?”
Coresca looked at me and said, “Sir, it’s not your business to know military affairs.”
“Wrong.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re wrong, Coresca?”
“How’
s that, sir?”
“I’m a civilian. I’m a taxpayer. Therefore, my taxes built this base. They maintain this base. Your uniform was bought with taxpayer money. Your cot was bought with taxpayer money.”
He paused a beat and then he said, “I don’t sleep on a cot.”
“Then the bed in your house was bought with taxpayer money. Whatever.”
“I bought my bed with my own money.”
I said, “From your government salary. Which I provided.”
He said nothing.
I said, “If you think about it. Even the toilet you sit on, I bought.”
Silence.
“Your ass literally belongs to the civilians of this country.”
He stayed quiet.
Maxine smirked and let out a giggle.
Coresca shot her a quick glance. And she suppressed her giggle, said nothing.
I said, “So your business actually is my business.”
He switched gears and said, “Sir, are you being hostile to a United States military officer?”
“Are you an officer?” I asked.
“Sir, yes, I’m an officer.”
“You seem more like a grunt to me.”
“Sir, now you are openly being hostile to a United States Military Policeman on Army property.”
“Calm down, Private. I’m just talking. I made no open threats to you.”
Just then, Coresca looked like he wanted to say something more. But he was interrupted because Hamilton came back out of the guard hut.
He called out to me and waved me forward.
Coresca sneered at me and I smiled at him. I made a point of passing him by, without looking at him. To me it was a friendly rivalry. Soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors have expressed rivalry since the beginning of time.
I thought nothing more about it. And I didn’t care if Coresca did or not.
Hamilton stood out in front of the front gate and waited for me to reach him.
I stopped in front and felt Coresca and Maxine walk up behind me.
He said, “You two, back to work.”
Coresca moved back to tending to the cars that drove up and Maxine moved over to the exit side.
Hamilton said, “I just got off the phone with my SC. He isn’t here right now, but he said that you can report to me whatever the crime is that you have to report.”