White Ghost Ridge

by Carol Coffey

  “Yes, he did.”

  Locklear nodded. “I did my own time too,” he said.

  Mendoza listened to Locklear’s attempts to soften Lewis up.

  “Your dad must be proud that you followed in his footsteps,” she said.

  “Some, I guess. I only did it for him,” Lewis responded, quieter now.

  “I was saying, Albert was your friend?” Mendoza said.

  “I only saw Albert twice since I got back from Iraq, both times to visit him in the hospital. I phoned him at his sister’s house once or twice after that but that was years ago. Heard nothing from him since.”

  Lewis turned the key in his cash register and flipped the main light switch leaving the room in a gloomy, washy security light.

  “There was a witness said he was thrown over that bridge in Richmond,” Mendoza said.

  Lewis looked Mendoza up and down and then focused his eyes on Locklear.

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “We know,” Locklear said. “We want to know what happened in Iraq.”

  Lewis thought for a moment. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “We’re not here to cause you any,” Locklear replied.

  “I told the army police all of this years ago.”

  “Well, now we’d like to hear it.”

  Lewis sighed and moved roughly past them, locking the shutter from the inside.

  “Come into the back.”

  Mendoza, unsure if it was safe, looked at Locklear who remained rooted to the spot.

  “We can talk here,” Locklear said.

  “Ain’t going to do nothing to you. Just want to sit down.”

  Lewis pulled his trouser leg up to reveal a prosthetic leg from just above the knee.

  “This time of day it gets sore.”

  “That happen in Iraq?” Locklear asked.

  Lewis nodded. “Blew straight off in a land mine. I never felt any pain at the time. Only reason I knew I’d been hit bad was the look on my buddy’s face.”

  “Was that Torres?” Mendoza asked.

  Lewis nodded. “Torres lost an eye in that blast and some of her hearing but still she helped me, leaned on my leg for close to a half hour trying to stop the blood until help arrived. We’d both passed out by then. Woke up in the hospital.”

  “We want to talk to Torres. We heard she’s originally from this town. Is she around?”

  “Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend that. In fact, I’m asking you not to. Torres has been through a lot. She never recovered from Iraq. Torres lived for the army. It’s all she ever wanted to do. Her family has a long military history. Discharge cut her up pretty bad. She still goes around in fatigues. Last I heard, she was homeless and was sleeping on her friends’ couches. She used to sleep in there sometimes.” He gestured, pointing to the back room.

  Mendoza leaned past him and looked inside while Locklear remained where he was. The room was furnished with a filing cabinet, small desk and chair and a worn couch that looked like it had been purchased in a charity store. An old-fashioned TV, covered in a film of fine white dust, sat on top of the filing cabinet and was switched off. The small room had only one window, set high on the western wall through which the evening sun threw strands of golden rays across the otherwise dismal room. A narrow door located at the back of the room was closed.

  “What’s in there?” Mendoza asked, pointing.

  “Just a toilet, small kitchen and my storeroom. That’s all.”

  Locklear stepped forward and gestured to the man to go inside first.

  They followed him in.

  Lewis lowered himself heavily into the low-set couch and sighed while Mendoza sat at its other end. Locklear took the chair at the desk and waited.

  “I was really sorry to hear about Mills,” Lewis said. “He was a good buddy.”

  “Tell us what happened in Iraq? About when he was shot.”

  “What’s the point in dragging all of this up? We told the army police then and nothing happened. Mills is dead. What will talking about this shit achieve?”

  “It might prove why he was murdered.”

  “I don’t think one thing had anything to do with the other. From what his sister said, Albert got mixed up with some Indian movement and met people who got him to do all sorts of crazy shit. Almost landed him in jail. Seems like he pissed off the wrong people.”

  “He found out that Iraqi artefacts were being stolen during the war. Seems like the man had a conscience and wanted to expose the same thing happening to artefacts belonging to his own people,” Mendoza said.

  “Albert never even spoke about being Native when I knew him. I mean, I could see he was, but he never mentioned it. America has moved on. This shit shouldn’t matter anymore. I never spoke to him about my people being brought to the US as slaves – and Torres, I guess her people were Spanish or something. We were just all Americans together. Just buddies. Ain’t that what the United States is supposed to be about?”

  “Doesn’t always work like that,” Locklear replied.

  Lewis shifted on the couch and rubbed his thigh. “Yeah, well, it should.”

  “Torres is single?” Mendoza asked. She wanted to know if Lewis and Torres had ever been in a relationship.

  “Widowed.”

  “How old is she?” Mendoza asked.

  Lewis shrugged. “We were in high school together. I left early. I hated school. She was in the same year. Guess she’s about thirty-four, thirty-five.”

  “Pretty young to be widowed,” Mendoza said.

  Lewis looked from Locklear to Mendoza and bit down on his lower lip. “Her husband was with us in Iraq. He went missing.”

  He fell silent. He closed his eyes for a moment as though he was reliving some terror. Mendoza watched as he swallowed. His opened his eyes again but fixed them on the wall.

  “Look, I got nothing else to say. Please, just leave me alone. I don’t like remembering this stuff.”

  Locklear lifted an invoice from the desk and scanned it. “This fishing stuff is expensive – must have cost a lot to set this store up.”

  Lewis continued to stare at the wall.

  Locklear looked down at Lewis’s leg and back to his face.

  “How much did the army pay you for your leg?”

  Lewis did not reply.

  “Come on. I can see you didn’t come from a rich family who set you up here and you said yourself that you didn’t even finish high school. So the money the army paid out in compensation for your leg helped you set up this store. Gave you a way of making a living. Why not? You deserve it. But my guess is they paid more than the odds for a leg. I saw your car out there. Pretty classy. Not every fishing-tackle store-owner owns a brand-new pick-up. You probably don’t even need to come here. I’d say you could even afford to have someone run this place for you.”

  Lewis dropped his gaze and fixed his eyes on the ground.

  “Could it be the settlement required a certain ... silence on your part?”

  “Could be,” Lewis said without looking up.

  “Things didn’t go so well for Albert, Lewis,” Locklear said. “He didn’t get any big settlement. The army found all sorts of ways to tie him up in knots until he got so mad they had him diagnosed with a mental illness. Maybe what he saw in Iraq did make him crazy. We’ll never know. But maybe you’d do him the honour of speaking up and telling us what you know. Maybe you’d do that for him?”

  Mendoza stood, walked to where Locklear sat and leaned against the desk.

  Both she and her boss stared at Lewis in his low seat.

  “OK. But I never talked to you? To either of you?”

  Locklear and Mendoza nodded in unison.

  “It started with Torres’ husband, Nick Hughes. He was a good guy but he was highly strung. Always on edge. Didn’t trust anyone – big into conspiracy theories. Pretty much no-one wanted to be put on patrol with him cos he’d bring you down. Make you regret being in the army, make you not too proud to be an Ame
rican. He started telling a few of the company that he heard that stuff from a bombed museum was being sent to the US on army aircraft in munition crates. We all laughed. At first anyway. It wasn’t us who blew up the museum and he wanted us to believe the army went in then under fire to take a few fucking vases and paintings?”

  Lewis laughed. It was the short, hysterical laugh of a man who had seen things he wished he hadn’t. Things that altered the course of his life for ever.

  “Few days after that, another museum was hit. It was in a busy area, in the centre of the city. Lots of casualties. We did what we could. It was ... hard to forget. Women, children, dead, just lying in the street. We were trying to look for survivors, our own and civilians. Going through the streets, checking bodies, moving on if there was nothing we could do and always looking up into the buildings for snipers. It was hell. I was near the back door of the museum trying to help a little boy whose chest was full of shrapnel. Kid dies in my arms. I can still remember his mother’s screams. I put him in her arms and I walked off. Nothing I could do. Next thing I see is my commander bringing a few men into the back entrance with crates. I followed them in. I actually thought, Jesus, they’re going to blow up this beautiful building. That’s how dumb I was. That’s what a fucking naive idiot I was.”

  He fell silent.

  “Then you saw it for yourself?” Mendoza urged him.

  “It took me a few minutes to get across the rubble but when I got inside there was nobody there. I could hear voices underneath me like there was a basement or something. Someone called out, asked who was there. I knew something wrong was happening and it’d be smart to get myself out of there. I got back across the street and waited in a building that wasn’t much more than rubble. I could still hear my unit shouting around the street so I knew I’d be safe for a few minutes anyway. After a while everything went quiet and I figured I’d left it too late to get out. I couldn’t hear my unit. Then I saw Torres. She’d come looking for me. She came under fire so I shot back, trying to cover her till she got to me. We hid in the building till the firing stopped. Next thing a truck pulled up behind the museum. We were looking right into the fucking door from across the street and we saw a few privates carry three crates out under heavy guard. Torres and I kept out of sight. The crates looked a lot heavier being carried out than they were going in. We didn’t see where they went but three days later Albert, Hughes and I were among a small group asked to drive to the airstrip and help load a transport flying back to the States. There were five crates in all and lots of the usual stuff going back. When we were carrying them on, Hughes asked the staff sergeant – Bissett was his name – what’s in the crates? I mean, they’re for storing ammunition and they were heavy. Why would we fly munition back in the middle of a war?”

  “So what happened?” Locklear asked.

  “Staff sergeant tells Hughes not to ask questions and just follow orders. We load the plane and another truck arrives with more shit for loading. We start loading that too and then the sergeant gets a call, walks away. We’re inside the transport at the time and Hughes has the bright idea to open one of the crates. Albert says it’s a good idea. Hughes picks up a crowbar and starts at it. Albert helps him but I just stand there pleading with them to leave it alone. I say I want nothing to do with it but they won’t stop, so I walk off but before I jump down I hear Hughes cussing like he’s seen something big. I turn and in his hand he has some weird stone tablet thing. Looks ancient. I go back. Like a fool. I should have walked away.”

  Lewis’s chin quivered and Mendoza and Locklear gave the man a moment to compose himself.

  “Crate was full of those artefacts. Stolen goods. All heading for the US.” Lewis shook his head and inhaled deeply. “Hughes put the thing back in the crate and pushed down the lid again. Couple minutes later we jumped down off the transport together and saw the sergeant there looking at us. Probably the guilty looks on our faces told him we knew what was going on. There were four, maybe five privates guarding the airstrip so I think he knew he couldn’t do anything to us there and then.’

  “And after that Whitefeather got shot?” Mendoza asked.

  “When we got back to base, Albert and Hughes went directly to our corporal and told him what they saw. I told them not to, but they wouldn’t listen. Corporal was a guy named Drabek. Real ambitious guy. Drabek came to me and asked what I had seen.”

  Lewis hung his head and thought for a moment. He looked up again and locked his eyes into Mendoza’s deep brown pools.

  “I told him I didn’t see nothing.”

  He swallowed. Guilt washed over his face. His chin quivered again.

  “So you sold them out?” Locklear said.

  “I did the smart thing. I did the only thing I could to get out of that godforsaken country in one piece.”

  “But you didn’t,” Mendoza said.

  Lewis eyed Mendoza questioningly.

  “You didn’t get out in one piece, did you?” she clarified as she glanced at Lewis’s metal leg.

  “What happened?” Locklear asked.

  “Day after we looked into those crates, Nick Hughes came to Torres and told her he was being sent to another base on an errand – with just a driver. Torres never heard from him again. Army records said they had no record of Hughes being asked to leave the base and recorded his status as AWOL. Neither he nor the driver ever made it to the other base. Same day, about twenty of us were sent on a mission. Albert was in the frontline, Torres and I were second. It was a routine walk. Next thing we hear firing. I looked up, searching buildings in front of us. Nothing behind us except sand. No buildings. Nowhere for anyone to hide. Then I see Albert lying on the ground, bullet in his back. I shouted for Torres and we start dragging him backwards. We start coming under fire from buildings to the front. Whole time corporal’s shouting at us to leave him, shouting that Mills is dead but we could hear him groaning so we kept pulling him back with us. Two more privates ran to us and we carried Albert to safety. All this time Drabek is screaming at us. He tells me and Torres to go back towards the buildings but we’re under heavy fire. Rest of the troop all looking at each other, wondering what the fuck is going on with Drabek and he backs down. Mills is taken to hospital and they take the bullet out. After he recovers he starts to tell anyone who would listen that someone in his own unit shot him in the back. When the bullet came back as one of our own, Drabek said what happened to Albert was an accident. Army believed him. Soon as Albert was strong enough, he got flown out to where Drabek couldn’t get to him.”

  “So Drabek already got Hughes out of the way and he obviously thought Albert would be killed,” Mendoza said. “Seems like his plan was to get rid of all three of you on that walk-out. You must have known he’d find another way to get you. What did you do next?”

  “Torres had a big idea to go to a sergeant by the name of Walsh. Torres had served under her before. She trusted Walsh.

  “Susan Walsh? From New Jersey?” Locklear asked quickly.

  “Yeah. That’s her.”

  Mendoza watched Locklear’s reaction to the name. She couldn’t decide if he seemed pleased or upset.

  “You know her?” she asked.

  Locklear nodded. “We had a mutual acquaintance. Long time ago. What happened then?”

  “Walsh heard us out. Took statements. She interviewed Drabek and Bissett but both denied the accusations. That night, another staff sergeant, this nerdy guy by the name of Braff, orders me and Torres to go on a night walk out past the perimeter of the base. He was a real piece of work. Not one of the guys. Well educated, thought he was better than the rest of us.”

  “A night walk? That makes no sense,” Locklear said.

  “Yes, that’s what I said too.”

  “So, you went?”

  “Had no fucking choice. Orders. Torres and I gunned up. Went walking.”

  “Until you stepped on a landmine.”

  Lewis nodded. “It was an AP mine. Buried about twenty feet outside the ca
mp. Right where we swept the area each and every day before we went out on walks. There was no landmine there that morning. Someone buried it on the exact path they knew Torres and I would have to take.”

  “‘Someone’ meaning the US Army?” Mendoza asked.

  “There’s no way insurgents could get that close to the camp without being noticed. 24-hour guard, lights, everything. Army planted that mine there itself. Couldn’t shoot us, right? Not with what happened to Mills. Drabek didn’t need any more heat than what was already on him. He had to think of another way to get rid of us.”

  “How did he explain what happened to you?”

  “When Torres and I woke up in hospital, we found ourselves under military guard – not that I was in a position to run anywhere.” Lewis glanced down at his prosthetic leg. “Seems we were found with priceless Iraqi artefacts in backpacks and enough clothes and supplies to escape with. Someone worked hard to make it look like we’d meant to go AWOL.”

  “But to where?” Locklear asked.

  “Exactly. The story Drabek made up made us look like thieves and it also made us look stupid. Drabek also said there was no order for us to go on a night walk. Braff said he never spoke to either Torres or me. We both knew we were beat.”

  “What about Walsh’s investigation?’

  “Now that Torres and I were caught with the artefacts, looked to Walsh like we were trying to cover our tracks. Drabek told her he had suspected us of stealing and was watching us, added in that we must have figured this out and tried to blame it on him. Walsh dropped the whole thing. Heard later that Drabek and Braff were promoted. Bissett was sent home and was later decorated.”

  “So that left only one thing for the army to do?”

  Lewis nodded. “Both Torres and I were dishonourably discharged. Flown home first chance army got to get rid of us.”

  Locklear looked around the room and then at Lewis’s expensive clothes.

  “Something must have changed their minds,” Locklear said.

  Lewis blew out. “I was home a few months. Had to move back in with my folks. Army had me on minimal pension. I was depressed. I couldn’t afford the rehab I needed. Medical bills were piling up. Spent all my time fighting them for what I was due. Life was hell.”