Murder Key

by H. Terrell Griffin

  When we had gone about ten miles, the bus turned left onto a dirt road heading west. Jock kept driving for about a mile and then turned around on the shoulder. We parked and sat, trying to decide what to do next.

  Jock said, “When in doubt, just knock on the front door.”

  “We could try that. At least we’ll get a look at the place.”

  “Of course, this might not be the right place. There are probably lots of labor camps around here. Lots of farming.”

  “True,” I said, “But since we’re here, we might as well take a look.”

  * * * * *

  The dirt road ran for about three miles. The groves petered out, and we were driving between plowed fields that had not been planted. In the distance we could see buildings.

  As we got closer, the camp came into sharper focus. The place looked like an aging army bivouac, set in the middle of a dusty field. Five long barracks constructed of wood, sat on short brick pilings. The buildings were whitewashed, but patches grime and mildew showed through. A lone electric line ran from the poles along the road to the end of each building. No grass grew in this desolate place.

  A chain link fence standing ten feet high and topped with barbed wire, angled inward, enclosed the sorry dwellings. This was a fence to keep people in, not out.

  A few shoeless children played on the bare ground, laughing in their ignorance of how harsh their lives were.

  We drove up the road to the gate, manned by a large white man in a khaki uniform. A small guardhouse shielded him from the elements, and a sturdy gate blocked our way.

  “Can I help you?” asked the man as we came to a stop next to the little building.

  Jock rolled down the driver’s side window. “We’re just here for a visit.”

  “No visitors,” said the guard, his cracker accent forming around the wad of tobacco lodged in his cheek.

  “Juan Anasco invited us,” said Jock.

  The guard shrugged. “It don’t matter who invited you. Ain’t no visitors allowed. You just need to back up and turn around and be on your way.”

  We did as we were told.

  Jock rolled up his window as we left the gate. “Seems more like a prison than a labor camp.”

  “Maybe it is,” I said.

  We turned off the dirt road onto the paved county road, heading south. Jock was driving at the posted speed limit, looking in the rear view mirror every few minutes. There was no other traffic.

  Then, “Uh oh,” he said. “I think we’ve got company.”

  I turned in my seat. A police cruiser had turned off one of the dirt roads stretching into the groves, and was now behind us, his blue lights rotating. The driver tapped the siren, and Jock pulled over onto the shoulder.

  The cruiser pulled in behind us. Jock rolled down his window and sat rigid, both hands on the steering wheel. “Don’t make any sudden moves,” he said. “The cop has his gun out.”

  A deputy sheriff came to the driver’s side. He leaned down and said, “You, driver, come out of the car real slow-like. Keep your hands up.”

  He looked at me. “Stay where you are until I tell you to get out.”

  Jock eased his way out of the car, the deputy standing back, pointing his gun at him. “Lean against the trunk and spread your legs.”

  I could see the deputy in the rear view mirror. He patted Jock down and pulled the pistol out of its holster, dropping it to the ground. Then, taking Jock’s arms one at a time, the deputy cuffed them behind his back.

  “I’m going to walk around to the other side of the car,” he said, looking at Jock. “You try anything, I’ll shoot you.”

  The deputy came around to my side of the car, still pointing his pistol at Jock. “You,” he said, glaring at me. “Out.”

  I got out. “I’ve got a gun,” I said. “Left side of my waist. I’ve got a permit, too.”

  “Put your hands on the car and lean over. Spread your legs,” he ordered.

  I complied. He patted me down, took my weapon, and cuffed me. “Get over there by your buddy.

  Jock and I were standing next to each other on the grass shoulder of the road. No cars had come by since we were stopped. It was a lonely place.

  The deputy stood in front of us, a scowl on his face. He was not a big man, maybe five-feet-eight, but he appeared fit. His green uniform shirt was tight across a barrel chest. He wore a badge, but no name-tag. I could see the little holes where it had been pinned to his breast pocket. I didn’t think that his removing his identification was a good sign.

  He smiled, showing yellow teeth, with the right eyetooth missing. “Now, who are you and what are you doing in my county with guns?”

  I spoke up. “I’m Matt Royal and this is John Algren. We’ve both got permits for the guns. Why are you arresting us?”

  “I ain’t arrested you.”

  “Then why are we in cuffs?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say I’ve detained you boys. You gotta learn not to be messing around in other people’s business.”

  I smiled. “So, you’re Deputy Caldwell.”

  He unconsciously reached for the place where his name-tag had been removed, stopping his hand in mid-air. “How did you know my name?” he asked, menace in his hard voice.

  Jock spit, the glob of saliva landing near the deputy’s boot. “We heard that the dumbest fuck in the county was named Caldwell,” he said, “and we just put it together.”

  Caldwell began to pull the billy club from his equipment belt.

  A low raspy voice, menacing and confident, escaped from Jock. “If you’re planning to use that on us, you’d better do some re-thinking,” he said. “You’ll be dead before you can hit me. If you get lucky and connect, I’ll come for you another day.”

  A look of rage danced across Caldwell’s face. “I’ll kill you, you smug son-of-a-bitch.”

  Jock’s voice grew quieter, more menacing. “And if that happens, some very bad men will come and kill everybody in your family out to second cousins. You’ll be the last to go.”

  The deputy hesitated, then grinned. He had decided not to believe Jock’s threat. After what had happened in Mexico, I pretty much believed it.

  The billy came out. Caldwell swung it one-handed back over his shoulder like a tennis racquet wielded by a poor player, and then started his swing toward Jock’s head. Jock pivoted on the ball of his right foot, turning inside the billy’s swing radius and ended up with his back to the deputy, close in, as the club swung around harmlessly.

  As Jock started his pivot, I whirled to my left, turning three-hundred-sixty degrees, and slammed my right foot into the side of Caldwell’s left knee. I heard the ligaments snap under the impact, and at the same time, was aware that Jock had butted the back of his head into Caldwell’s face. Blood flew from the battered man’s shattered nose, and a hoarse scream erupted from his throat.

  The deputy went down on his back, with Jock on top of him. Caldwell was holding his broken nose with both hands, moaning softly, not even aware of his ruined knee.

  I sat on the ground next to the deputy, my back to him. I reached for the deputy’s key ring with my cuffed hands. I wanted the key to the handcuffs.

  Jock saw what I was trying to do. “No, we’ll leave the cuffs on,” he said. “I want the man in charge to see that we’re harmless. Take his gun, though.”

  Jock walked over to the cruiser and sat in the driver’s seat. “Let’s get the law out here,” he said.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?’

  Jock was quiet for a moment, his brow wrinkled in thought. “Maybe not,” he said, “but we can’t just leave this like it is. See if you can get dipshit’s keys and unlock my cuffs. I’ll hold my pistol behind my back while you show whoever comes that you’re cuffed. If there’s a problem, I’ll take care of it.”

  That sounded like a plan. We walked back to the wounded deputy and retrieved his keys. I unlocked Jock’s cuffs, and he retrieved his pistol.

  Jock went back to the crui
ser and picked up the radio microphone. “We’ve got an emergency on county road 496 A, about two miles south of the turn-off to the labor camp,” he said. “Get somebody out here right now.”

  The radio crackled with static. “What kind of emergency? Who are you?”

  Jock looked at me and grinned. “Ignore that. Somebody will be on the way in a very short time”.

  The radio crackled again as we got out of the car. We walked over to the deputy who was writhing on the ground, aware now of the pain in his knee. We leaned against the cruiser, waiting.

  Within minutes we heard sirens. Two sheriff’s vehicles, one an SUV, screamed to a stop behind Caldwell’s car. A young deputy got out of the first one, his gun drawn, pointing at us. He walked over to Caldwell, still on the ground, moaning, blood seeping from his nose, his knee at an odd angle.

  A tall man with brown hair and a round face climbed out of the SUV and came toward us, gun drawn. He appeared to be in his late thirties and was wearing chinos and a green golf shirt with a gold sheriff’s badge embroidered on the left breast pocket.

  “Who is it, Bobby?” he asked over his shoulder.

  The young deputy was upset. “It’s Casey Caldwell, Sheriff. He’s hurt bad.”

  “Call an ambulance. I’ll take care of these two.”

  I said, “We’re handcuffed, Sheriff. We can’t give you any trouble.” I turned slightly to show the man my bound hands. Jock stood still, his hands behind him.

  I said, “Deputy Caldwell cuffed us and then tried to take us out with his billy club. We resisted. He had no reason to try to rough us up, other than sheer meanness. He never told us why we were stopped.”

  “Who else was involved?” the sheriff said.

  “Just us, Sheriff,” I said.

  The sheriff looked skeptical. “You did all this damage while you were in handcuffs?”

  Jock spoke up “We’ve had some training.”

  The sheriff looked at Jock. “What’re your names?”

  “I’m John Algren and this is Matthew Royal, a lawyer.”

  Jock could have left that last part out. I didn’t think this sheriff was going to be intimidated by the fact that I was an attorney, and sometimes cops make it tougher on lawyers, just because they can.

  “I’m Sheriff Kyle Merryman. Tell me what happened.”

  I related the events since arriving at the labor camp. I didn’t want to get into any detail about why we were there.

  I added, “Once we were stopped, the deputy seemed to go berserk. Told us he was going to teach us not to mess around in other people’s business. That’s when he took a swing with the billy club.”

  “Why didn’t you get Caldwell’s keys and uncuff yourselves?” the sheriff asked.

  Jock said, “We didn’t want anybody to think we were dangerous. In an officer-down situation, trigger fingers some-times get a little twitchy.”

  The sheriff nodded and turned to look south as the distant wail of a siren pierced the air. “You two stay put,” he said, and turned to walk to where Casey Caldwell lay on the ground moaning softly.

  I could hear a whispered conversation between the sheriff and the young deputy as they stood over Caldwell, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then, the sheriff squatted on his haunches next to the injured cop, and they had a discussion.

  Merryman rose and walked slowly toward us, a look of determination on his face. The siren had gotten louder, and the ambulance appeared in the distance, coming toward us at high speed.

  The sheriff planted himself in front of Jock and me. “My deputy says you attacked him first. I suspect he’s lying. Did you attack first?”

  I said, “No, Sheriff, he had a gun and we’d been disarmed.”

  The sheriff looked at me quizzically. “Mr. Royal, where are you from?”

  “Longboat Key, now, Sheriff. But I practiced law in Orlando for a long time.”

  The ambulance pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, its siren abruptly dying. The young deputy waved the medics over to Caldwell. Merryman ignored them.

  The sheriff took a deep breath, exhaled. A brief expression crossed his face, disappearing too quickly for me to read. He breathed again and slapped at a small insect crawling up his neck.

  I could hear the rattle of the leaves on the citrus trees as they were disturbed by a light wind blowing out of the west. The hum of insects living in the brush beside the road gently assaulted my ears.

  The sheriff was staring at me, not moving. Everyone else was still. Even Caldwell’s moans had ceased. It was as if time had stopped and we were actors in a tableau vivant staged in a bizarre setting.

  Probably no more than a second had elapsed, but in retrospect it seemed longer. The sheriff shifted his weight to his left leg, and looking directly at me, asked, “Do you know Jimbo Merryman?”

  37

  Murder Key

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Did I know Jimbo Merryman?

  A long time ago, in a faraway place called Vietnam, a team of U. S. Army Special Forces troops, the toughest fighting men on the planet, eased its way single-file along a jungle path. It was December, 1972, and the Americans were withdrawing, tasting the bitter fruit of defeat. Apparently, nobody had bothered to tell the North Vietnamese troops we were leaving, because they were still trying to kill us.

  A nineteen year old soldier was at the head of the column, alert, scared, waiting for whatever was going to happen. That was me. A kid with a rifle. I’d been in-country for several months, and I had been in battle. The firefights always started without warning, rifles going off, men grabbing the ground, sighting on the enemy, pulling triggers, killing and wounding each other.

  And that’s the way it happened that hot day in December.

  * * * * *

  I’d joined the Army the day after I graduated from high school, and during the summer of 1971, I had enjoyed the Army’s hospitality in basic training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. I was offered a slot in Officer Candidate School if I could pass the entrance exams, and after I finished my advanced infantry training, I was sent to Ft. Benning, Georgia, to the Infantry OCS to learn how to be a leader and a gentleman. Six months later, some Colonel pinned gold bars on the epaulets of my dress khaki uniform, and I started Ranger school. From there I went to Special Forces training at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.

  The boys in green berets taught me how to eat lizards, navigate in a jungle, climb up or down mountains, kill with rifle, pistol, machine gun, mortar, knife and bare hands. They had a ceremony and put a green beret on my head and assured me that I was one mean son-of-a-bitch.

  They put me on a big jet airplane with 150 other kids and took me off at a place called Thon Son Nhut airport in the city of Saigon, in that showpiece of democracy, the Republic of South Vietnam. They herded several of us onto a helicopter and dropped us off in a pigsty called Base Camp O'Conner in the mountains that traipse across the waist of the Indochinese peninsula.

  I was introduced to a ragged group of boys and a man about forty years old. This was my A team. Together, we were supposed to kill all the little yellow men we could.

  There were eleven of them. With the exception of the older man, the sergeant, their age averaged mine. They were good at their job. The lieutenant I replaced had been mailed home in a box.

  The sergeant was on his second tour and was a wise man indeed. Back in OCS, a sergeant-instructor had told us that we should never let those little bars go to our heads; that we should cozy up to a sergeant and learn everything we could from him. It might just keep us alive. I took that advice and learned a lot from Master Sergeant Jimbo Merryman. That knowledge saved my life more than once.

  We scurried about in the jungle for eight months, killing a few sad looking little fellows, and then getting shot at by the ones that replaced them. America was fighting a limited war, but the enemy wasn’t. We'd blow up an ammunition dump and get choppered back to Base Camp O'Conner. After a few days of boredom, we'd get choppered back to blow up th
e same dump again and kill a few more of the same guys we'd killed the week before.

  We’d been in the boonies for about four days on some long- forgotten and unimportant mission when what seemed like the whole North Vietnamese Army jumped us. We were snaking down a trail in jungle so thick we couldn’t see four feet on either side. The overhanging branches, like an inverted sea of shaggy green with cerulean highlights and scudding whitecaps, gave us an occasional peek at the sky. By then, we were so attuned to the jungle that we were like the animals that lived there. We could walk for miles in the stifling heat without making a sound.

  We had become immune to the insects that took their daily meals out of our hides. We didn’t even bother the animals any-more, and the buzzing and crackling in the bush became just background noise to us, like that droning music in elevators that you are subliminally aware of, but don't hear.

  Suddenly, there was a shot, and Myers, the point man, fell. He was about ten yards ahead of me, and I could tell he’d never get up again. He dropped with a looseness of the body that only the dead achieve.

  I hit the ground and rolled into the brush beside the trail. There was a lot of gunfire, all of it the distinctive bark of the Chinese-made AK-47 automatic rifle. I saw two more of the good guys fall. One was completely quiet, but Abernathy, a big blonde kid from Arkansas, was screaming and rolling on the trail holding his gut. All the firing was coming from ahead of us, near the clearing we had been making for. I knew that three were hit, but I couldn’t see the other eight. They had been spread out at ten yard intervals when the shooting started. I hollered for Jimbo.

  “I'm hit, Lieutenant,” he called back.

  “How bad?”

  “In the shoulder. I can make it.”

  “How about the others?”

  “Smitty and Kines are down. I think they're dead. Cate is with me. I can't see the others.”

  “Sing out!” I said, hoping that most of them would answer.