“Came here in good shape.”
“Farm boy?”
“Lived in the country, but I don't think they farmed.” Aimes liked boys who grew up on the land and knew its ways.
“What kind of name is that, Pike? English? Irish?”
“Dunno. He don't talk about his people. He don't talk much at all.”
Aimes nodded. Nothing wrong with that. “Maybe he's got nothing to say.”
Now Horse was looking a little nervous, like they had come upon something in the road that didn't sit well with him and that maybe he was hoping that they wouldn't come upon. “Yeah, well, just so you know, he don't say much. I don't think he's stupid.”
Aimes glanced sharply at his friend. “You know better than to waste my time with an idiot.” He glanced back at the running Marine. “Boy ain't stupid who scores as high on his tests as this one.” This boy had tested higher than most of the college boys who came through, and he stood first in every class he was required to take.
“Well, some of the DIs find him a little odd, and some of the platoon do, too. Keeps to himself, mostly, and reads. Doesn't grabass during free time, none of that. Don't think I ever seen the boy smile once since he come to me.”
That concerned Aimes. “You can tell a lot by a man's laugh.”
“Yeah, well.”
They watched him come closer, and finally Aimes sighed. “Got no use for a man ain't a team player.”
Horse spit. “We wouldn't be standing here if he wasn't. Got a lot of fast twitch in that boy, but out on the course, he'll throttle back to help his mates. Did it without having to be told, either.”
Aimes nodded, liking that one just fine. “Then what's all this business about being odd? You say he's the best young man in your training platoon, you show me a file on this boy saying he stands top of his class, then you bring me out here and we both get snaked by a boy seventeen years old same as he had three years as a Scout/Sniper.”
Horse made a little shrug. “Just wanted you to know, is all. He ain't your standard recruit.”
“Force Recon isn't interested in standard recruits, and you and I both know that better'n anyone. I want moral young men I can turn into professional killers. End of story.”
Horse raised his hands. “Just wanted you to know.”
“Well, all right.” Aimes chomped on the nasty cigar and watched the young Marine. “What is it he reads?”
“Just reads, is all. Anything he can get his hands on. Novels, history. Caught him with some Nietzsche once. Found some Basho in his locker.”
“Do tell.”
“Knew you'd like that, too.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, I do.”
Leon Aimes pondered the private with renewed interest, as he believed that all the best warriors were poets. Those old Japanese Samurai proved that, and Aimes had his own theory as to why. Aimes knew that you could fill a young man's head with all the notions of duty, honor, and country you wanted, but when the shit hit the fan and the bullets started flying, even your bravest young man didn't stand there and die for little Sally back home or even for the Stars and Stripes. If he stood at all, he stood for his buddies beside him. His love for them, and his fear of shame in their eyes, is what kept him fighting even after his sphincter let loose, and even when his world turned to hell. It took a special man to stand there all alone, without the weight of his buddies to anchor him in place, and Aimes was looking for young warriors that he could train to move and fight and win alone. Die alone, too, if that's what it took, and not just any man was up to that. But poets were different. You could take a poet and fill his heart with the notions of duty and honor, and sometimes, if you were very lucky, that was enough. Aimes had learned long ago, perhaps even in an earlier life, that a poet would die for a rose.
Horse gestured with the cigar as the private came pounding up and fell in at attention before them, the monstrous ghillie suit making the boy look like a tall, skinny haystack.
Horse said, “Belay that ghillie suit and stand at ease, Private. This here is Gunnery Sergeant Aimes, who is just about the best Marine in this man's Corps outside of Chesty Puller and myself. You will listen up to him. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” the young Marine shouted.
Private Pike peeled out of the ghillie suit, stowed it in the back of the jeep, and returned to his position. Neither Aimes nor Horse spoke while he was doing this, and, after he was done, Aimes let him stand there a minute, thinking about things. Aimes recalled from the file he had read that the young man's name was Pike, Joseph, no middle initial. He was tall, maybe about six one, all lean and corded and burned tan by the Southern California sun. His face and hands were covered in cammie greasepaint, but he had the damnedest blue eyes Aimes had ever seen, real white-boy ice-people eyes, like maybe his people came from Norway or Sweden or some damn place, which was also okay by Aimes. He had enormous respect for Vikings, and considered them almost as fine a group of warriors as his African ancestors. Aimes looked into the blue eyes and thought that they were calm, holding neither guile nor remorse. Aimes said, “How old are you, son?” Aimes, of course, knew how old the private was, but he wanted to question the boy, get a sense of him.
“Seventeen, Gunnery Sergeant!”
Aimes crossed his arms, and the large muscles there pulled the fabric of his black Marine Corps tee shirt tight. “Your mother sign the papers to get you in early, or you fake'm yourself?”
The boy did not answer. Beads of sweat dripped down from his scalp and etched tracks along his gaunt face. Nothing else about the boy moved.
“I didn't hear you, Marine.”
The boy floated there with no response, and Horse drifted around behind his back so the boy couldn't see him smile.
Gunnery Sergeant Leon Aimes stepped very close to the private and whispered into his ear. “I don't like talking to myself, young man. I suggest you answer me.”
The young Marine answered. “Don't know it's any of your business, Gunnery Sergeant.”
Horse jumped into the young Marine's face faster than an M16 chambering a fresh round, screaming so loud that his face turned purple. “Everything in this world is the sergeant's business, Marine! Are you stupid enough to embarrass me in front of a Marine I know to be a hero in two wars, and who is a finer man than you could ever hope to be on your very best day?”
Aimes waited. The boy didn't look scared, which was good, and he didn't look arrogant, which was also good. He looked thoughtful.
Then the boy said, “My father.”
“You in some kinda trouble, that why your old man put you in my Corps? You a car thief or a troublemaker or something like that?”
“No, Gunnery Sergeant.” The blue eyes met Leon Aimes. “I told him that if he didn't sign the papers I would murder him.” There was no humor in the boy when he said it. None of that smart-ass attitude Aimes hated so much. The young Marine said it as simply as you say anything, but in that moment Aimes knew it to be true. And Aimes wondered about that, but it did not put him off. Violent young men often came into the Corps, and the Corps taught them how to channel that violence, else it got rid of them. So far, this young man was more than making the grade.
Gunnery Sergeant Aimes said, “You know what Force Recon is, son?”
“Small-unit reconnaissance, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“That's right. Small units of men who go into the Valley of Death all by their lonesome little asses to gather up intelligence and/or hunt down and kill the enemy. I myself am a Force Recon warrior, which is the loftiest species of human life yet devised by God, none finer.”
Horse said, “Fuckin'-A, bubba. None finer.”
“Recon takes a special man, and it ain't for everybody. Force Recon warriors are the finest warriors on this earth, and I don't give a rat's ass what those squid SEALs and green beanies over in the Army's Special Forces got to say about it.”
The private simply stood there, maybe seeing Aimes, maybe not, and Aimes was disappointed. U
sually the spiel he just pitched got a smile out of them, but this one just stood there.
“Force Recon training is the hardest training in this man's Corps, or any other. We run twenty miles a day in full packs. We do more push-ups than Hercules. We learn how to see in the dark like a buncha muthuh-fuckin' ninjas and how to kill the enemy with the power of our minds alone and I wanna know how come you ain't smilin', Private, 'cause this is the funniest shit anybody ever laid on your ass!”
Still no reaction.
Horse was behind the private, shaking his head and grinning again. Told you so, the grin was saying.
Aimes sighed, then uncrossed his big arms and stepped behind Pike so that he could roll his eyes. Horse was damn near busting a gut back there, trying not to laugh. “All right, young man. I may not be Flip fuckin'Wilson, but Gunnery Sergeant Horse, who is as fine a warrior as I know, none finer, thinks you just might have what it takes to be one of my young men, and I think he might be right.” Aimes came around the other side of Pike and stopped in front of him, only now Aimes had taken anything even remotely humorous from his eyes and carefully folded it away. “The gunnery sergeant says you're good at hand-to-hand.”
Nothing again, and Aimes wondered why this boy said so little. Maybe he just came from people who didn't say much.
Aimes unsnapped his fighting knife from its Alice sheath. He held it out handle first to the boy. “You know what this is?”
The blue eyes never even went to the knife. “It isn't a K-Bar.”
Aimes considered his knife. “The standard Corps issue K-Bar fighting knife is a fine weapon, none finer, but not to a warrior such as myself.” He twirled the knife across the backs of his fingers. “This is a handmade fighting dagger, custom-made to my specifications by a master blade maker. This edge is so goddamned sharp that if you cut yourself the asshole standing next to you starts to bleed.”
Horse nodded, pursing his lips knowingly as if truer words had never been spoken.
Aimes flipped the knife, caught its tip, then handed it to the boy, who held it in his right hand.
Aimes spread his hands. “Try to put it in my chest.”
Pike moved without the moment's hesitation that Aimes expected, and he moved so damned blurringly fast that Aimes didn't even have time to think before he trapped the boy's arm, rolled the wrist back, and heard the awful crack as the wrist gave and the boy went down on his back.
The boy did not grimace, and he did not say a word.
Aimes and Horse both made a big deal, helping the kid to his feet, Aimes feeling just horrible, feeling like a real horses-hit donut for pulling a bush stunt like that when the private put those blue eyes on him and said, “What did you do?” Not to accuse or blame, but because he wanted to know the fact of it.
Aimes helped the young Marine into the back of the jeep, telling him, “That was an arm trap. It's something they do in a fighting art called Wing Chun. A Chinese woman invented it eight hundred years ago.”
“Woman.” The boy almost seemed to nod, not quite but almost, thinking it through. He didn't seem bothered at all that Aimes had just broken his wrist. He said, “You used me against me. A woman, smaller, would have to do that.”
Aimes blinked at him. “That's right. You were driving forward. I trapped that energy and used your own momentum to roll your hand over and toward you.”
The boy looked down at his hand as if seeing it now for the first time, and cradled it.
Aimes said, “Christ, you're fast, boy. You're so damned fast it got a little away from me. I'm sorry.”
The boy looked back up at Aimes. “You teach stuff like that in Recon training?”
“It's not part of our normal syllabus, but I teach it to some of the men. Mostly we learn ground navigation, escape and evasion tactics, ambush techniques. The art of war.”
“Will you teach it to me?”
Aimes glanced at Horse, and Horse nodded, his job now done. He got behind the jeep's wheel and waited.
Aimes said, “Yes, Marine. You come over and become one of my young men, I'll make you the most dangerous man alive.”
The young Marine didn't speak again until they were at the infirmary, where, in filling out the accident report, Aimes took full and complete responsibility for the injury. What the boy said to him then was, “It's okay you hurt me.”
That evening, still feeling nauseated from guilt, Aimes and Horse practiced the art of unarmed war in the Pendleton gym with an ugly ferocity that left both men bloody as they desperately tried to burn away their shame. Later, they drank, and later still Leon Aimes confessed all to his wife, as he always did whenever one of his young men was injured and he felt responsible, and she held him until the very small hours of the dawn.
As a warrior and a man, Leon Aimes was above reproach, none finer.
Eight days later, PFC Pike, Joseph, no middle initial, completed Advanced Infantry Training even with the broken wrist, graduated with his class, and was reassigned to the Force Recon Company for additional schooling. He was rotated to the Republic of Vietnam in the waning years of the United States'involvement in that war. Leon Aimes followed the young Marine's progress, as he did with all of his young men, and noted with pride that Private Pike served with distinction.
There were none finer, just as Leon Aimes always said.
15
• • •
Pike phoned to tell me that Frank would see us at three that afternoon. I passed the word to Dolan, who said, “I'm impressed, World's Greatest. I guess you're kinda useful.”
“Are you going to call me that, Dolan?”
“Beats some other things that come to mind.”
These cops think they're such a riot.
When I arrived, Frank Garcia's home was as still as a sleeping pit bull and just as inviting. No cop brass now, no city councilman; just a mourning old man and his housekeeper. I wondered if Frank would see the lie in my eyes, and thought that maybe I should borrow Pike's sunglasses.
I parked in the shade cast by one of the big maples to wait for Pike and Dolan. The tree and the neighborhood were so silent that if one of the fat green leaves fell you would hear it hit the street. The devil wind was gone, but I could not escape the feeling that it was only resting, hiding in the dry, hard canyons to the north to gather its strength before clawing back through the city from a surprising and unexpected direction.
Pike arrived a few minutes later, and got into my car. “I saw Dersh.”
Anyone else would be joking, but Pike doesn't joke. “You saw Dersh. You spoke with him?”
“No. I just saw him.”
“You went over there just to look at him.”
“Mm.”
“Why on earth did you go see him?”
“Needed to.”
“Well, that explains it.”
You see what I have to deal with?
Dolan parked her Beemer across the street. She was smoking, and dropped her butt on the street after she got out of her car. We climbed out to meet her.
“What does he know?”
“He knows what I know.” He. Like Pike wasn't there.
Dolan considered Joe for a moment, then wet her lips. “Can you keep your mouth shut?”
Joe didn't respond.
Dolan frowned. “Well?”
I said, “You got your answer, Dolan.”
Dolan grinned at Pike. “Yeah. I heard you don't say much. Keep it that way.”
Dolan walked on ahead of us toward the house. Pike and I looked at each other.
“She's on the tough side.”
Pike said, “Mm.”
The housekeeper let us in, and led us to the living room. She glanced nervously at Dolan as we went, almost as if she could sense that Dolan was a cop and that there might be trouble.
In the living room, Frank was staring out the French doors at the pool and the fruit trees where the stone lions prowled. It had been only three days since I'd seen him, but his skin was pasty with a drunk's sweat, his hai
r was greasy, and the air was sharp with BO. A short glass, now empty, rested in his lap. Maybe it had to be that way when you lost your only child.
Pike said, “Frank.”
Frank gazed at Dolan without comprehension, then looked at Joe. “Is Karen all right?”
“How much have you had to drink?”
“Don't you start that with me, Joe. Don't you start that.”
Joe went over and took the glass. “This is Detective Dolan, the one I told you about. She needs to ask questions.”
“Hello, Mr. Garcia. I'm sorry for your loss.” Dolan held up her gold detective's shield.
Frank squinted at the badge, then considered Dolan almost as if he was afraid to ask the thing he most wanted to know. “Who killed my daughter?”
“That's why I'm here, sir. We're trying to find out.”
“You people been on this for a week. Don't you have any idea who did this?”
It couldn't have been more pointed than that.
Dolan smiled gently, telling him that she understood his pain, and perhaps even shared it. “I need to ask you about some people that you or Karen might've known.”
Frank Garcia shook his head, but when he spoke we could barely hear him. “Who?”
“Did Karen know somebody named Julio Munoz?”
“Is that the bastard who killed her?”
“No, sir. We're contacting everyone in Karen's Rolodex, but four names have outdated numbers. We want to ask about their last contact with Karen, what she might've said, things like that.” Dolan was good. She told her lie smoothly and without hesitation as if it were an absolute fact.
Frank seemed annoyed that this small reason was all there was to it. “I don't know any Julio Munoz.”
“How about Walter Semple or Vivian Trainor or Davis Keech? Karen might've known them in school, or maybe they worked for you.”
“No.” You could see he was trying to remember, and was disappointed that he couldn't.
“Karen never mentioned them to you?”
“No.”
Dolan said, “Mr. Garcia, when I moved out of my parents' house, I left boxes of things behind. Old school things. Old pictures. If Karen left anything like that here, could I look at them?”