The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday

by David Corbett

  “Which should be evident, given the involvement of your old friend.”

  Here it comes, she thought. At last. “Yes, wasn’t that curious.”

  “You read what he says under oath. Under penalty of perjury.”

  “As I said, here and there.”

  “It’s nothing but lies, front to back, the cat crawling out of his bag.”

  “Speaking of lies,” she said, “I thought you found those letters, how did you put it, with me in mind. A gift. But that’s not even close—”

  “This is all an elaborate scam, planned and put into motion by Old Loverboy. Now why do you think he did that, Meredith? Why did he have that idiot lawyer contact me, of all people? Or think I was so damn thick I wouldn’t figure it out.”

  She’d considered that possibility, ever since seeing Tuck’s name in the pleadings, reading his words, wondering if maybe, possibly…

  Her silence seemed to confirm something for him—he straightened back up, shook his head in disbelief. “After all I’ve done, tried to do.”

  “Oh, Gideon, don’t be tiresome.”

  It was his turn, now, to pitch the documents against a wall. The staple broke, pages scattered everywhere. She refused to look.

  After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry. Was that tiresome?”

  “Getting back to the children. I already spoke to them, to prepare them. Get them ready for any questions they might have to face about their illustrious father.”

  “They won’t believe any of that. Or you. They know better than anyone who you are.”

  She tried to hide the sting of that. “I wanted them ready.”

  “You wanted them poisoned. Against me. Because you know how they really feel about their mopey weakling of a mother.”

  “Like they can’t see for themselves who you—”

  “Woe is Mommy with her endless spells. Still pining for her rodeo bum—the cripple, the fraud. You think they don’t know?”

  “You’re a great one to talk about—”

  “All those years I defended you to them, stood up for you, explained away your little act. Because, for all your flaws, all the pain you caused—”

  “Oh don’t even start with—”

  “But they knew, they’re not stupid. You wanted them ready? Maybe you’re the one who needs to brace yourself. Because whatever that bull did to Loverboy way back when is nothing compared to what he’s got coming now.”

  She rose from her chair and took a step toward him, forcing him to meet her clouded eyes. “And you had the gall to ask—this morning, remember? Ask if I could think of you, our life together, as anything but a pathetic mistake.”

  His smile turned into a soft, chesty laugh. For the slightest moment, something like surrender softened his eyes.

  He glanced right and left, spotted a canister near the door holding umbrellas and walking sticks. Selecting one of the latter, a sturdy one made of polished oak, he said, “This should do.”

  He suddenly hurried back through her rooms toward the hallway lined with Tuck’s paintings. Before she could catch up he started swinging the cane like a madman with an ax—ripping the paintings off the walls, smashing them in godlike fury, gouging the canvases with hammering blows, tearing them to shreds, stomping the frames till they snapped and splintered.

  Fearing, if she tried to stop him, he’d just turn his wrath on her—beat her unconscious, beat her to death, it was long overdue—she stayed just outside the doorway to her room, watching him perfect his massacre.

  Finally, chest heaving from the effort, shoulders slack, he reached the far end of the hall and turned to survey the ruin. In the sudden stillness, the mania slowly drained from his face. He looked spent.

  She said, “And you call me a weakling.”

  He tossed the cane on top of the wreckage. “I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. Which fake was your favorite?”

  ***

  In the kitchen, Littmann poured himself a tumbler of ice water and drank it in halting sips, hoping to regain his calm. The track lights hummed faintly overhead. The dark granite countertops reflected the glow, soft pools of radiance.

  He mopped his brow with a dishtowel, standing at the sink as his breathing slowed. I would kill that woman, he thought, strangle her with my own bare hands…

  Perhaps it’s the phony blindness that makes her immune to her own beauty. Makes her unaware of its effect, even after all these years. Especially after all these years, more of them behind than ahead.

  What else but beauty can stand up to death?

  His cell phone throbbed in his pocket, breaking the spell. It was Rankin. Littmann picked up. “Have you heard from Bobby?”

  “Just a message,” Rankin said. “He sounded kinda off his mark, to be honest.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “Something about a waitress in Bullhead City, says she’s pregnant. He’s gonna be gone a couple days.”

  Littmann took a second to consider the news. “You believe him?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you think he’s telling the truth or did he just decide to run?”

  It was Rankin’s turn to reflect for a moment. “Christ, I don’t know. Run?”

  “Don’t act so shocked. I’ve never shared your high opinion of him. Besides, he’s the one who actually put his hands on the girl.”

  “Yeah.” Rankin drew out the vowel, as though dubious.

  “Pack a bag and come pick me up. I’ll book two rooms at the Miraval. We’ll spend the night in Tucson, have a nice supper, prepare our response, get a decent night’s sleep.”

  “Sure. Give me an hour.”

  “Has anyone from the media been in touch?”

  “Some woman from KGUN, the ABC—”

  “I know what it is. What did you say?”

  “I denied each and every allegation, what do you think?”

  “Call her back. Call the other network outlets, too.”

  “What—why?”

  “Tell them all to have a camera crew on the courthouse steps tomorrow morning. We’ll have a full statement, put matters in perspective. Let them know who the out-of-towners really are.”

  “Nice.” Rankin chuckled. “You want to bring the letters? Little show-and-tell?”

  “No. Too easy for the judge to order we just hand them back right there in court.”

  “Good point.”

  “I’ll have Logan and a couple of his men come along as well. Speaking of show-and-tell. Like we’re the ones that need protection.”

  “Put ’em in suits. Faces bright and shiny. Very professional.”

  “Exactly.”

  Littmann leaned back against the counter, letting the logic click into place. “We’re going to let the world know just who Tuck Mercer is, cheating honest people, stealing their money, mocking their pride. We’re going to wrap him tight around his little dago lawyer’s neck and let them hang together.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Following Tuck’s directions, the Merry Band, as they’d called themselves ever since serving together in Afghanistan, headed for the Dragoons from the east along Ironwood Road.

  In the day’s last light, Rags got a glimpse of the granite formations near Cochise Stronghold—like a giant had stacked boulders to form a labyrinth of hideaways crowned by towering jigsaw columns, feathered with cypresses—before Wander turned north on the forest road, away from where they might be seen by campers, hikers.

  After a little more than a mile, they turned again onto an unpaved track and started the slow, jerky climb up the barren mountainside.

  Working by flashlight in the back, the beam sailing around as the van pitched into culverts and climbed over rocks, Chalky pulled coordinates from their map of the area, pinpointing various trails and landmarks they could use for navigation, then entered them as waypoints in his handheld GPS.

  Not that the gizmo would spare them much grief. They’d still be hiking over an unknown mountain across rough terrain in all but total
darkness, given moonrise wasn’t scheduled till one a.m. Still, it might make it easier to find their way back.

  The road leveled off after a while and Wander, pointing ahead through the windshield, said, “This must be the water tower he told us about.”

  It was an old, small structure—rusted metal, warped wood. Rags supposed it was intended, once upon a time, to serve livestock that had wandered far off the range, or been driven all the way up here for protection from monsoon flooding on the valley floor.

  Wander pulled to the edge of the clearing, lodged the van in park, and killed the engine.

  Silence enveloped them instantly, nothing but the rustling of sage and mesquite in the wind.

  Rags cleared his throat. “Listen up.”

  He checked behind, to make sure Chalky and BBK had heard, then nodded to acknowledge Wander’s attention.

  “This has already taken kind of a wicked turn, given what happened to Fatso.”

  Subtle nods of affirmation from Chalky and BBK. From the driver’s seat: “And the wicked shall be silent in darkness.”

  “Wander? Hear me out, okay? Don’t interrupt.”

  “Yeah, sure. Sorry.”

  “I’m grateful for the fact you all answered the call. Stepped up. You know what I mean. Counts for a lot. Hard for me to say just how much. But we greased a civilian back there. Not saying he didn’t deserve what he got.”

  “Let me repeat—”

  “Wander, I asked once.”

  “Oops. Gotcha. Wilco.”

  “What I’m trying to say…” Rags looked out at the darkening mountainside, etched with steep ravines chocked with impenetrable scrub. “None of you owes me more. I’ve put you in a serious bind already. Seems like it could get way worse. This was just supposed to be about getting those letters back, do right by Rayella, but…” He took in a long, heavy breath, felt it slip from his lungs like lost heat. “I can handle it from here.”

  A sudden gust of wind raked the side of the van and the emptiness outside, giving everyone a moment to think. And what Rags thought about was a story his granddad, a Nam vet with the 7th Cav, once told him.

  There was this guy named Keller, entire platoon got wiped out in the Cheu Pong Hills. He re-upped with the special forces and, once again, another ambush, everyone but him in his team wiped out. He hid in muddy grass beneath the body of another Green Beret as the VC came around with knives to make sure the kills were good, laughing as they stripped the bodies of weapons, boots, the prized green beenies. Having survived that, there was nowhere for Keller to go but the Lurps—Long Range Recon Patrol.

  And that was the point—the man couldn’t hack it at home, like the war had become a kind of second-rate angel, calling him back. Sometimes, during his short stays stateside, he’d sit on the roof of his apartment building with a six-pack and a hunting rifle, leading the cars and trucks that sped by on the freeway. Looking into his eyes, Grandad said, was like gazing into a badger hole.

  Rags couldn’t help but wonder, Is that us? Is that what we’ve become?

  Finally, Chalky broke the silence. “You want us to wait here,” he said, “while you hump in alone?”

  “I’m asking you to stay behind, yeah. Here, down the mountain, wherever.”

  Chalky looked at Wander who glanced toward BBK. “Wouldn’t bet on that happening,” Chalky said. “Sweet Jesus, you serious?”

  “Look—”

  “You know why we’re here.” Chalky leaned forward, asserting himself as spokesman now. “Who got us out of the shit when we were pinned down with the askars outside Heroin Haji’s compound?”

  He was referring to a Taliban drug lord whose hilltop mansion—in the sense it was the biggest house in Marja—served as a guard post for his poppy plantation. Askar was their word for an Afghan soldier.

  “There were seven wounded. BBK here had shrapnel in his hip. Wander had a pass-through in his hand. They had us outnumbered, bulletproof cover, sun at their backs. You coulda phoned in a Medevac with air support—”

  “I did call it in. Called in smoke, too.”

  “But you knew the chopper wouldn’t get there in time.”

  Rags shook his head. “I just—”

  “You jumped in the Humvee, nobody in the turret to man the Mark Nineteen, give you some cover.”

  “That was my mistake, I shouldn’t have sent you—”

  “No. No. You did right, sent me ahead with the squad. So totally solo you plowed uphill through a shit-show of PK and RPG fire to get to us, pull those askars out, get everybody out—not once, not twice. You did that five times. Faced down the heat and charged on. Semper fi. Shoulda earned you a goddamn Silver Star. Instead…”

  Chalky nodded toward the disfigured flesh on Rags’s face. In his final trip up the rutted, rock-strewn lane carving its path through the poppy-field hillside, he’d stopped and jumped out amid nonstop gunfire to heft a gut-shot marine into the Humvee. That accomplished, he’d scrambled back to retake the wheel, only to have a Talib RPG whiz right past. The missile missed him by inches. But not the tail flame. Half his face scalded, all but blinded in one eye, he nonetheless somehow found it in himself to climb back into the driver’s seat, finish the mission, get that last marine to safety.

  “And you think,” Chalky said, “we’re gonna hang to the rear while you head in alone to deal with…Christ, I dunno, you tell me. No offense, brother, but screw that.”

  “I second that emotion.” Wander, raising his hand, the one still bearing the scar from his wound, as though to testify. “One for all, all for whatnot.”

  Once again Rags stared out the windshield at the darkening sky, like God had wiped his hands on the clouds, leaving behind smears of violet, crimson, gold.

  “Assume,” he said, “sake of argument, all that is true. Let’s say I saved your lives. Why then would I want you to throw them away on a snipe hunt?”

  “We’re answering the goddamn call of justice,” Wander said.

  “It doesn’t really concern you,” Rags replied.

  Chalky said, “That’s a hell of a thing to say to us.”

  Rags said, “Know what Captain Mayhew told me right before that mission you’re talking about, the one where I was supposedly so damn heroic? Told me, ‘You do anything stupid and get a marine killed today, I will personally cave in your skull.’ I tried to live up to that at Heroin Haji’s, I’m trying to live up to it now. I owe it to you not to do something stupid.”

  Finally, it was BBK’s turn to speak. He did so, as always, without words.

  Unsnapping one of the duffels, he dug out a rucksack and filled it with boxes of cartridges and extra magazines, his pistol—a matte black .45 Combat Commander—his knife, some rope, duct tape, NVG goggles, an extra pair of socks, leather gloves, and his boonie hat.

  From the second duffel, he took out a machete in a leather scabbard and the fully auto Belgian FAL with mounted scope he’d bought off a deserter from the Mexican special forces. He slammed in a magazine, chambered a round, then slid open the van’s side door, and stepped out into the windblown scrub.

  He stood there, mute as a rock, waiting for someone to follow.

  Chalky said, “In revenge there is life.”

  It was something the Taliban judges used to say right before an execution.

  CHAPTER 31

  Armed and equipped, the four ex-marines passed around the Adderall tabs, the better to focus, then started walking west, following the rubbled track uphill, figuring that was the best way to avoid rattler burrows and abandoned mineshafts.

  After an altitude gain of a thousand feet, the road first began to bend, then turned into a series of zigzagging switchbacks, littered with fist-sized rocks, and they followed that trail to the main ridge.

  By then, without any more road to follow, darkness prevented further advance without the NVGs. They slipped them on, and the world transformed into a murky, spectral green.

  The going from there went slow. The first major hilltop crested at 6,720
feet, where they angled south, dropping into a saddle walled with rock. They humped up and over the slope, then kept climbing, hilltop to hilltop, the going brushy and steep.

  At about 7,000 feet, the scrub and mesquite and ironwood closed in, even more thick and nested, and BBK had to take the lead, hacking with the machete. Even then, paths that seemed promising became anything but, and they had to backtrack over and over, searching for another way up.

  The last 400 vertical feet became a brutal bushwhack, and at times they had to drop to all fours, crawling through the overgrowth like sappers cutting a path through concertina wire.

  About 100 feet below the top, they encountered another cliff band, this one rimmed with evergreen. Gratefully, the climb was short, and the bracing scent of pine encouraged them.

  One option, veering right, looked like a hopeless scramble through overgrowth, but nothing else looked viable. They took a moment to wipe away sweat, then ascended to the top, walking a ridgeline with the mountain’s jagged crest to the north.

  As the trail began to flatten out and they continued east, Rags thought about the debt he would owe the other three men once this was over, measuring it against the debt that had launched the whole endeavor, the one he owed to Rayella.

  ***

  When his face got wasted, and he was shipped to Landstuhl—treatment, rehab, waiting for his decom orders—he felt that peculiarly unrewarding form of luck that comes when you realize, as bad as your disfigurement is, it could be worse.

  He befriended grunts who would never walk again, never grip another man’s hand. Met men whose faces or whole bodies looked like badly molded plastic.

  Yes, they could do skin grafts, and surgery of that sort might well lie in his future, but the laws of decency and triage dictated that he surrender his number to someone who needed it more.

  Back in the States, he found himself avoiding mirrors or even shiny surfaces, anything that could hold a reflection. What woman would want to wake up in the morning and face a face like that?

  Turned out, Rayella did. Not only did she find him not repellant, she loved him, said so, openly and often. She had no problems walking on his arm, holding him close, even kissing him in public. My God, imagine it. And every time he blushed, turning the scalded redness an even brighter hue, she smiled up at him and told him just how happy he made her feel.