[Conduct Unbecoming 01.0] Conduct Unbecoming

by LA Witt

  I laughed. I remembered those days very well. With a pang of sadness, it occurred to me that I’d have given almost anything to be sleep-deprived and running on diaper-changing autopilot again. Beat the hell out of being this far from my kids. But I kept that to myself.

  “I feel your pain,” I said. “I think mine were working together when they were that age.”

  He grimaced. “I don’t know how you handled two.”

  “Coffee. Lots and lots and lots of coffee.”

  Mays laughed. “I don’t doubt that for a second. Even Noriko’s had to break down and have an espresso now and again.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “I can’t really complain, though,” he said, and his smile canceled out the dark circles under his eyes. “I could always go for more sleep, but I wouldn’t give up that little girl for the world.”

  “Aww, aren’t you adorable?” Gonzales said.

  Mays’s cheeks colored. “Shut up.”

  I laughed, but she was right. Mays was so obviously in love with his daughter. Tired as he was, he was probably counting down the minutes before he could drive Gonzales and me back to our apartments and get himself home to be with his baby.

  Gonzales elbowed me. “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah, of course. Why?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. You just seem really out of it today. More so than lately, I mean.”

  “I’m fine.” I forced a smile. “Just, you know, tired.”

  Her eyebrow rose as she munched a tortilla chip, and I resisted the urge to draw back from her scrutiny. She was one of those people who could read almost anyone like a damned book. If I looked away from her, she’d see right through me. If I held eye contact, she’d see right through me too.

  She washed the chip down with a swallow of beer. Setting her glass down with an emphatic thunk, she said, “So what’s her name?”

  Mays stopped chewing in midbite, and his eyes darted toward me.

  I cleared my throat. “I…um… I beg your pardon?”

  “Uh-uh, don’t even try to deny it.” She inclined her head and raised her eyebrows. “I know you better than that, Connelly. Now fess up. What’s her name?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Her name is A Figment of Your Imagination.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Think what you want,” I said with a flippant shrug. “That’s all you’re getting out of me.”

  She narrowed her eyes and stabbed a finger at my chest. “Oh, I’ll get it out of you eventually. I want a chance to warn the poor girl about what she’s getting into.”

  “Go right ahead,” I said, grinning.

  “I will. Mark my words.”

  We exchanged good-natured glares. Then we both laughed.

  She pushed herself away from the railing with her hip. “Well, I’m going to get another drink. Anyone want anything?”

  “Nope, I’m good,” I said.

  “Same here,” Mays said. After she’d gone, he eyed me, and I knew that look.

  “Don’t ask,” I said.

  “I won’t.” He shifted his gaze away and picked up his soda, and I almost didn’t hear him mutter, “Not here, anyway.”

  “Much appreciated,” I said.

  It was especially appreciated when, seconds later, the pungent smell of too much booze preceded a heavy arm on my shoulders.

  “You guys are awfully quiet down here,” Morris said, half leaning on me. Well, at least he was a happy drunk tonight. “Come on. Join us over there.” He gestured clumsily toward the other side of the bar.

  “We’re good, Morris,” Mays said flatly, and he looked even more exhausted now than he had a few minutes ago. “Don’t mind us.”

  “Aww, come on.” Morris clapped Mays’s shoulder. “You’re here to drink and hang out. Come drink and hang out!”

  “We are.” Mays glared at him.

  Morris shrugged and took his arm off me. “Suit yourselves, fuckers.”

  As he staggered back toward our other unfortunate coworkers, Mays growled, “I’m going to kill that man one of these days.”

  I laughed. “Just tell me when you’re going to.”

  “Why?” He chuckled. “Want to watch?”

  “Nope. Don’t wanna be a witness.”

  “Chickenshit.”

  “Yeah, well.” I gestured with my beer. “I’d like to be Captain Chickenshit someday, so…”

  Mays threw his head back and laughed. “I am so going to call you that. Just so you know.”

  Gonzales dropped onto her barstool. “All right, what did I miss? What’s so funny?”

  “Oh,” Mays said, “Connelly here was just telling me how when he makes captain, he wants us all to call him Captain Chickenshit.”

  She eyed me, then shrugged and set her fresh beer on the bar. “I can get on board with that.”

  “You what?” I said. “Fuck you both.”

  “No, thank you,” they said in unison.

  After a couple more beers, the three of us went out to Mays’s car. Gonzales lived closer to Kadena, so her place was the first stop. We said our good-byes and watched Gonzales go into her apartment.

  When the glass door had closed behind her, Mays pulled out of the parking space, and as he started toward the main road again, he said, “Okay, so. Further to her question back at the bar, what’s his name?”

  There wasn’t much point in denying it to him. Lowering my gaze and voice, I said, “Eric.”

  Mays laughed and clapped my shoulder. “So that’s why you’ve been out of it lately. I’ll have to buy this guy a beer just for distracting you enough to keep you from decking Morris.”

  I gave a quiet, unenthusiastic laugh.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “No, no.” I paused. “Not really.”

  “Not really?” He glanced at me. “What’s the deal, man? This guy a minor or something?”

  “Hey, fuck you.” We both laughed, but my humor didn’t last long. “No, he’s not a minor.”

  “What’s the problem, then?” He gave a one-shouldered shrug, resting his hand on the wheel as he followed the road toward my place. “With DADT out of the way, who cares if someone finds out?”

  “Besides the fact that I’m not out, and I don’t want to be?”

  He glanced at me again, and suspicion pushed up one eyebrow. “Is that the only problem?”

  “Um, well…” If there was anyone in my command I could trust, it was Mays. Still, I hesitated.

  “Fuck, dude,” Mays said, completely serious now. “What’s going on?”

  I dropped my gaze. “It’s an issue with…rank.”

  “You doing an admiral or something?” he asked. “I mean, you know that’s not why they call him a rear admiral, right?”

  Snorting with laughter, I shook my head. “God, no.”

  “Then…?” He threw me a glance before focusing on the road.

  “I…outrank him.” I coughed. “By a lot.”

  His head snapped toward me. “Dude, you’re not…” Then he thumped the wheel with his hand and exhaled hard. “He’s enlisted, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He is.”

  “Fucking Christ.” He looked at me with an exasperated expression. “Connelly, for fuck’s sake, are you stupid?”

  “Apparently so.”

  He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “I’m not even going to waste my breath trying to talk you out of it, but…” He paused for a moment. “Man, the skipper finds out, you are in a world of hurt.”

  “No kidding.”

  “You do know the admiral is cracking down on any kind of conduct unbecoming, right?”

  Pursing my lips, I nodded.

  “Which means the skipper’s sitting on go to fuck up Morris once he finally gets out of line, and he’ll take down anyone else if he has to.”

  “Yes, I know. But as long as no one knows…”

  He scowled. “Well, I won’t say a word to anyone, but shit like this has a tendency to ma
ke itself known.”

  I nodded but said nothing. Of course I knew he was right. I’d known from the beginning that Eric and I were playing with fire. The more I saw him, though, the more I caught myself just not giving a fuck. Was it reckless? Gambling with a career to which I’d devoted almost seventeen years of my life? Absolutely.

  But more and more, I couldn’t bring myself to believe there was anywhere in the world I belonged except with Eric.

  Even if that was also the last place I belonged.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eric

  Friday and Saturday nights were never quiet. There was plenty of alcohol and stupid throughout the week, but these were the nights when the alcohol really flowed and the stupid got, well, stupid. Combine those two things with a bunch of bored military guys, and security forces stayed busy as hell.

  On Friday night, Colburn and I responded to a call at the hospital on Camp Lester. The Provost Marshal’s Office handled most calls on that base, but the person in question was a Sailor, not a Marine, so PMO turned it over to us. They probably had their hands full with their own guys.

  Getting called to a hospital was never a good sign. I’d responded to dozens of those calls over the years, and I’d seen it all. Sometimes it meant getting statements about hit-and-run accidents, taking drunk idiots into custody or trying to get a statement out of a shaken domestic-violence victim. I’d arrested parents. I’d turned children over to Protective Services. More times than I could count, I’d arrested service members for alcohol-related incidents after they’d recovered from accidents or alcohol poisoning.

  As MA2 Colburn drove us on to Camp Lester and headed toward the hospital, I had no idea what to expect. All we knew so far was that an individual had come in with injuries that didn’t match his story, and the corpsman who’d treated him suspected something was wrong enough to warrant calling us in.

  We parked outside the Emergency Room entrance and walked inside. As we took off our covers, I turned to the triage nurse and gestured at the badge on my blouse.

  “I’m MA1 Randall, CFAO Security, White Beach,” I said. “We got a call about one of our guys?”

  He nodded. “I’ll have HM3 Hiatt come get you. Just a second.”

  A moment later, a corpsman in a ponytail and blue scrubs came into the waiting area. “MA1?”

  I extended my hand. “MA1 Randall. This is MA2 Colburn.”

  “HM3 Hiatt.” She shook my hand firmly, and as she shook Colburn’s, she said, “He’s in one of the exam rooms. Come with me.”

  As we followed her into the back, she said, “His name is Ensign Aiden Lange. I can’t give medical details without his consent, but…something about his story just didn’t check out.”

  “Is he lucid?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Doesn’t appear to be disoriented or under the influence of anything. Totally with it, as near as I can tell. He’s just really rattled.”

  This could get interesting.

  She led us to the exam room and tapped on the door. Then she pushed it open. “Ensign Lange? This is MA1 Randall and MA2 Colburn. They’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  The ensign was just a kid in civvies sitting on the edge of the exam table with a welt on his cheekbone, a bandage above his eye and another mark above his collar. He took one look at us—and most likely the badges on our blouses—and paled.

  “I understand you’ve had a rough night,” I said.

  He set his jaw and looked anywhere but at me or Colburn. “I don’t need the police.”

  “Understood.” I took a seat in the chair beside the door. “And you’re not obligated to give a statement. When there’s a scuffle or someone comes in looking like they’ve been in a fight, this sort of thing is standard operating procedure, so we’re just doing things by the book.” Okay, so that wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t want to agitate him any further or encourage him to lash out at the corpsman.

  Hiatt shifted her weight beside me. “Should I stay?”

  “No, HM3.” I smiled at her. “We’re fine. Thank you.”

  She left, and when the door had closed behind her, Ensign Lange gulped. He gripped the edges of the exam table, probably oblivious to the fact that he’d drawn my attention to the scrape on his arm, not to mention his bloody knuckles.

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. “Tell us what happened.”

  Lange eyed us both suspiciously. Then, gripping the edges of the table, he stared at the floor and took a deep breath. “I was at a club on Gate Two Street. Decided I didn’t want to stay, so I went to leave, and some drunk guys started fighting right as I was heading out the door.” He laughed, but the sound was less humorous and closer to the hysterical sound of someone trying to fake being relaxed. “Fucking Marines, right?”

  “So the Marines started fighting,” I said. “And what happened next?”

  His fake humor instantly vanished, and he once again focused on the floor. “Okay, so I was on my way out. They started pushing and shoving, and I just kind of got caught in the shuffle.”

  I glanced at his knuckles. “You throw any punches?”

  “What?” His head snapped up, and he stared at me incredulously. “Man, I’m not going to fuck up my career—”

  “Did you throw any punches?” I asked.

  He exhaled. “No. I got shoved around a bit, I lost my balance, and I hit the wall.” He gestured at his face. “Split my eyebrow open, so I had a cab bring me here.”

  Colburn and I exchanged glances. From the furrow of his brow, I guessed he wasn’t buying it any more than I was.

  To Ensign Lange, I said, “What was the name of the club?”

  He stiffened, and his gaze darted even farther away from either of us.

  “Ensign?” I asked.

  He swallowed. “I don’t remember. It was… um…it was Japanese. Sign was written in kanji.”

  “The clubs on Gate Two Street all have English names,” Colburn said. “Can you describe the place?”

  “Is that necessary?” Lange snapped, glaring at Colburn.

  “We’re just trying to get an idea.” Colburn showed his palms and kept his voice even. “In case we need to send our guys or have Eighteenth Security check it out.”

  Lange clenched his jaw. Then he shifted his gaze away, and the slightest drop in his shoulders turned my blood cold. “They all look alike to me after a while. I honestly don’t remember which club I was at.”

  Colburn shifted. “Do you—”

  “You said I don’t have to give a statement,” Lange said sharply. “I’d rather not.”

  I said nothing for a moment. My gaze flicked from his torn-up knuckles to the mark on his wrist to the scrape on his elbow. From there to the mark on his neck. Up to his darkening cheekbone and his bandaged eyebrow. As pieces fell together in my head, icicles formed along my spine. I curled my fingers around the edge of my notepad. Staying emotionally detached was part of this job, but there were times I couldn’t detach myself as much as I should. If this was going where I had a feeling it was going, detachment wasn’t an option.

  “What happened to your neck, Ensign?” I asked quietly.

  “My…” His hand went right to the mark I was referring to. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s an unusual mark.” I injected more calm into my voice. “Especially for someone who just got shoved into a wall.”

  He chewed his lip and dropped his gaze. “I said I don’t want to give a statement.”

  I turned to Colburn. “MA2, would you mind if I talk to Ensign Lange alone for a few minutes?”

  Colburn eyed me. I raised my eyebrows in an unspoken “please,” and he nodded.

  “I’ll meet you out in the waiting room,” he said and left.

  “I’m not giving a statement,” Lange growled.

  “I know.” I leaned down and set my pen and pad on the floor. Then I sat up and rested my elbows on my knees, clasping my hands loosely between them. “It’s just you and me, Ensign. This is compl
etely off the record.”

  He drew back from me, folding his arms across his chest.

  “I need you to tell me what really happened,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and gentle. “As long as that’s on the floor”—I gestured at my pen and pad—“nothing you say leaves this room.”

  “You’re a cop,” he said unsteadily. “If I talk to you…”

  “What’s your first name, Ensign?”

  He gulped. “Aiden.”

  I extended my hand. “Aiden, I’m Eric. And right now, we’re just talking man-to-man. All right?”

  He looked at my hand like it was a habu, and not a dead one coiled at the bottom of a jar of Habu sake “Why are you doing this?”

  I held his gaze. “Because I think something happened that you don’t want your chain of command to know about.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he snarled with sudden, shaking rage.

  “I didn’t say you did,” I said quietly, still holding out my hand. “But sometimes things happen, and we’re scared of someone finding out because it might tell them more about us than we want them to know.”

  The ensign damn near came unglued. He didn’t say a word, but he squirmed, drawing away from me and making an almost inaudible, choked sound. He’d been nervous since I walked in the door, but he was shaking now, chewing his lip like he was a breath away from tears.

  Goddammit, I hated being right sometimes.

  “Aiden,” I said softly, “I think we have a lot more in common than either of us is letting on, and I think I know why you’re scared to say anything about what happened.”

  He didn’t relax. My hand still hovered between us. My shoulder ached, but I didn’t pull my arm back.

  “I want to help,” I said. “I just need you to trust me and tell me what really happened.”

  He still didn’t move.

  My heart pounded. Though it meant tipping my hand to a complete stranger, showing cards I also kept close to my vest, I said, “Aiden, tell me what he did to you.”

  The ensign straightened, his lips parting as he pulled in a sharp breath. “What?”