The MP’s head turned slowly, almost mechanically, and his gaze over his shoulder at me oozed barely controlled impatience.
“Mister,” he said with the world-weariness only a guy in his twenties can muster, “you got it easy in there. It could go lots harder for you. You prefer the stockade to the guesthouse, I can make that arrangement.”
“Can I at least get something to eat?”
“You’ll get breakfast in the morning.”
The MP half-turned to reach out for the knob again, to slam the door, but instead I slammed the Coke bottle into the side of his head, just under the helmet, across his ear; it didn’t knock him out, but sure as shit stunned him, and I yanked him by that arm and flung him like a shot put across the room, where he slammed into the davenport, which slammed into the wall, knocking that framed print off its nail, dropping with a clunk behind.
Now I shut the door.
The MP, who’d somehow lost his helmet on the trip across the room, was sneering at me as he came up off the davenport, blood running from his ear vivid against his black cheek. He moved slowly, with easy, pantherlike grace, crouching low, though even crouching he was taller than I was, and I was six foot, for Christ’s sake! It looked like he planned to tackle me, but he was smarter than that: he simply unfastened his holster and got out his sidearm and was raising it, probably not to shoot me, just to cover me and make me listen to reason, but I was past reason, and I swung fast and hard with the Coke bottle and knocked the gun out of his hand, but the bottle slipped out, too, smacking against the plaster wall, taking out a chunk, not breaking. You ever try to break a Coke bottle?
Now he did tackle me, driving me back into my easy chair, but we both went backward, chair and all, ass over teakettle, and he was off-balance enough for me to shove up under him and toss him to one side, where he went crashing into the standing lamp, knocking it down, pulling its plug, sending the room into near darkness.
The MP was getting back on his feet again, but before he could get all the way up, I snatched his helmet off the floor and swung it around and clanged the damn thing off his skull. That dazed him, dropped him to a knee, but my swing had been awkward, the helmet slipping from my fingers and flying someplace. A massive fist arced around and caught me in the side, staggering but not dropping me, and as he was picking himself up, I was picking up that coffee table, magazines spilling, ashtray tumbling, and whammed it into him. The thing didn’t shatter, like a chair in a John Wayne saloon fight-the damn thing was maple, and it hurt the big man, sent him onto both knees, this time. So I hit him with it again, across his hunched-over shoulders, and he flopped onto his face, not unconscious, just hurting, with things inside him broken, ribs mostly, I’d wager.
Catching my wind, I found his gun on the floor and, as he was rousing, trained it on him.
“I don’t want to kill you,” I said, “particularly.”
“Shooting an MP is a federal offense.” Despite the size of him, despite that commanding Old Man River voice, this fucker was scared.
“So is kidnapping a citizen. Take your clothes off.”
His eyes and nostrils flared. “What?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re not my type. Take ’em off. Try not to get any blood on ’em.”
Grumbling, he got out of his MP uniform and soon we were just two guys in their boxer shorts, with a pile of clothes between us. He had the more impressive musculature by far, but I had the gun. Keeping the .38 trained on him, I crouched to sort through his things, fishing out his gunbelt; his handcuffs were looped on them.
“Turn around,” I said, standing, his gun in my right hand, his handcuffs dangling in the left.
He spat on the floor. “Fuck you.”
“I can cuff you or shoot you. Pick one.”
Doing a commendable job retaining some dignity under humiliating conditions, the MP drew in a deep breath; the blood was glistening on his ear. He was a tough man: most guys wouldn’t have to weigh the choice I’d given him. Slowly, he let out the breath; just as slowly, he turned his back to me, and I cuffed his hands behind him.
I left him in the bathtub, his ankles and knees bound with electrical cords I’d liberated from lamps, sticking one of his socks in his yap, shutting him in with the vent fan going (in case he managed to spit the sock out and start in yelling), leaving a chair propped under the knob of the closed bathroom door.
His clothes were too big for me, and I only had one sock, but he was only a half a shoe size or so bigger and the helmet fit fine, not to mention the .38 revolver, which was a perfect fit for my palm, though for decorum’s sake I snapped it in its holster before setting out into the world that was Walker Air Force Base.
Bathed in more moonlight and streetlamp illumination than I cared to be, in my oversize one-sock uniform, helmet tipped forward like Bogart’s fedora, I walked down the sidewalks with an MP’s crisp confidence; at every intersection of blacktops, signs guided me. Up ahead, two noncoms exited a two-story office building, chatting, smoking, heading in my direction; they nodded to me, as they passed, and I nodded curtly back. Up ahead, a pair of MPs stepped out of a barracks, and I cut quickly to the right, moving off the sidewalk onto the grass, hugging bushes, hoping they didn’t see me.
Apparently they didn’t, as I was able to slip through a row of trees and onto another sidewalk, with hangars up ahead, the landing lights of a plane coming in, streaking through a wire fence in long white fingers, tickling me all over, and revealing another MP, patrolling along that perimeter. Heart pounding, I cut between two barracks, slipping within the safe haven of a row of shrubbery-surrounded trees planted between them, keeping low, almost tripping over two people on the ground.
Backing up, I was unsnapping the holstered sidearm, as somebody was saying, “Shit!”
Not me.
Down on the grass, an enlisted man-actually kid-had been embracing another enlisted man, both with their trousers around their ankles and a hand on each other’s, well, gun (as the DI back at boot camp used to say, “This is your rifle, this is your gun, this is for Japs, and this is for fun”). They looked up at me in wide-eyed horror, probably not unlike the expression I was showing them.
“Oh God, oh God,” one of the kids was saying. “Please don’t turn us in! We weren’t doing anything- honest!”
The other kid didn’t say a word-he was too busy bawling.
Resnapping the holster, I raised a finger to my lips in shush fashion, whispered, “As you were,” and moved on.
Thank God for those signs at intersections, because soon I was headed in the right direction. A black staff car rolled by, slowed momentarily, and I suddenly felt absurd in my baggy uniform, and even as my hand drifted over the holstered revolver, I wondered if I really had it in me to start shooting it out with the Air Force.
Then the car turned left, onto the adjacent blacktop artery, and slipped away into the night. Three minutes and no further incidents later, faithfully following the intersection signs, I found the building I was looking for: off by itself, with driveways flowing in and around for easy access, the long, low, unpretentious white clapboard structure with USAF HOSPITAL over its folksy screened-in porch.
I now had a wristwatch-a Bulova, courtesy of that colored sergeant-and it was shortly before ten o’clock p.m., which could be a piece of luck, as ten was when Air Force nurse Maria Selff’s shift ended. I needed one more piece of luck: for Maria’s powder-blue coupe to be unlocked. There were perhaps twenty-five cars parked in the front lot, but the sleek Studebaker, with its short hood and long trunk, was easy to spot.
The driver’s-side door was locked; but the rider’s-side wasn’t, and with a quick look around the rather brightly lit lot, to make sure I was unseen, I opened the door and slipped into the snug backseat, shut myself in, sitting low, below the wraparound rear windows. My timing was good, because within a minute, cars began rolling in as new personnel arrived for shift change. The lot was alive with slamming car doors and coworker chatter. I kept low and waited.
Not long: within five minutes, she exited the building with two other nurses, chit-chatting as they each withdrew keys from purses, the other two women separating off to the left and their own cars, while Maria headed right, toward me, as I spied her through the side window, from my backseat slouch. Clip-clopping in her white nurse’s heels, she came across the parking lot, the generous curves on the small frame packed into her khaki dress, overseas cap jauntily cocked, lustrous black hair pinned up.
I ducked down onto the floor just before she got in, the dome light briefly blinding me before she shut herself in with me. Before she had started the engine, I sat up-not way up-and said softly, “Maria, stay calm, it’s me.”
Startled, she turned, eyes wide, mouth open, and I said, “Just talk to me in the rearview mirror-I don’t want to attract attention.”
