good measure. He politely nudged himself aside and yelled at the top of his voice, “Okay, I’ve given you my best medical advice. You’re leaving here of your own volition. Die of an infection and I’m legally absolved.”
As I passed him, he actually winked. A man after my own heart.
CHAPTER 28
Here’s what intrigued me the most. What made that Korean cop commit seppuku? For those who don’t know, seppuku’s the Japanese version of suicide.
One scenario was the South Koreans were telling the truth – the cop saw one of the protesters pop off a round and lost his cool. He opened up, and then, once he saw me running up at him, he dropped his weapon and fled. The act of changing magazines gave him a moment to cogitate and realize that shooting wildly into a crowd was a very bad thing. During the time it took me to catch up with him he did some further thinking and realized he’d done not only a bad thing, but a stupid thing – he’d killed a slew of innocent people, he’d overreacted, and he was going to be in very big trouble. There was going to be an investigation that would bring great shame on himself, his badge, and his family. Then he found himself cornered and had no idea what an awful shot I am, so he figured he couldn’t get away and suicide was preferable to capture and everlasting shame.
Some Asians can be that way. The rite of suicide is an act of honor to purge some horribly disgraceful thing. Like killing a bunch of unarmed, innocent people – that would qualify.
Okay, that’s one scenario. Here’s another: The two shooters were a team. They weren’t firing in self-defense. They weren’t firing in the heat of the moment. They weren’t firing randomly. They were cold-bloodedly murdering as many Americans as they could, as swiftly as they could. They wanted to manufacture an atrocity. They wanted to get people’s attention.
But here’s the rub. Who’d do such a thing? The same people who tossed Melborne in front of a car? Or were the incidents unrelated?
Since I never much believed in random theories, I was assuming, just for the sake of argument, that both acts were done by the same people, which was why I was in my wheelchair on the road just outside the front gate of the Yongsan Garrison, with Imelda pushing me around as I pointed this way and that. I looked like a cranky old man with an even crankier nurse.
The road was closed and the massacre scene was fenced off with yellow tape. Korean and American military cops were climbing all over searching for clues. There were chalk-haloed silhouettes where yesterday real bodies had lain seeping their life’s fluids onto the tarmac. Their bloodstains were still visible in the concrete, and crushed and abandoned protest signs were strewn about, discarded in the moments of bald terror when two men with weapons were pumping round after round into the densely packed crowd.
I sat in my wheelchair and tried to recapture the stream of events that led up to the slaughter. In my head, there was a mass of protesters holding up signs, holding one another’s arms, breathlessly awaiting the confrontation. There was a platoon of riot policemen standing off to the left, the first group, the ones provided by the city to safeguard our “welcoming party.” Six buses were idling in front of us and police cars with flashing lights were arriving every few seconds. The line of riot police was clumping toward us – two steps forward, pause; two steps forward, pause; two steps forward – then only five feet away, a complete halt.
We were eye-to-eye: protesters and riot policemen totally, inexorably, fatefully fixated only on one another. Everybody – journalists, television cameramen, bystanders – had their eyes glued on the point of the confrontation. Everybody was staring anxiously at the narrow, tense fault line between the two sides. Nobody was paying attention to a shooter at the rear of the crowd or to two Korean cops who were choosing their killing roosts on opposite sides of the road. Hundreds of possible witnesses were blind to anything but the confrontation about to occur.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the first shot, a dull crack behind me. Far behind me. Too far to have come from the mass of protesters, I was nearly certain. It was possible one of the protesters hadn’t been in the crowd, but had hung back behind it. But whoever it was should’ve stood out like a sore thumb. Presumably the police were rushing in cars to block off the road at the rear of the protest, just like they were at the front, so surely there were plenty of Korean cops back there.
Wouldn’t one of them have seen a protester as he or she lifted up a pistol or rifle and fired a round? Surely it would’ve been observed. A shooter can’t be inconspicuous.
I opened my eyes and looked up, because two men were walking toward me. One Korean and one American.
Michael Bales had his all-American, what-a-great-guy, just-everybody’s-pal look pasted on his face. It no longer looked friendly to me. It looked phony, contrived, the mask of a malevolent beast.
“Jesus, Major, I’m really glad you’re okay,” he announced, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Look what that bastard did to you.”
And Choi immediately chimed in, “That was very bad man we locked you up with. We make poor judgment. He no get away with this, though. We bring charges. He get punished. You see.”
For this particular episode of South Korean Masterpiece Theater, he had reverted to pidgin English, and his face was a portrait of pretend sympathy.
Then Bales said, “Thank God your lawyer brought over that film when she did. If she’d waited till the next morning, we wouldn’t have looked in on you till then. That brute in your cell would probably have killed you.”
They were good. Give them credit for that. They were telling me in their own inimitable way that they had already fabricated an alibi. They’d probably lined up a platoon of cops to attest I was pulverized to hamburger by my nonexistent cellmate.
I glanced up at Imelda, who had her hands gripped on the handles of my wheelchair. She’d picked up on the sarcastic undertone and was snorting with anger.
I wanted to get out of this chair and kick them in the nuts, but before I could say anything, Bales said, “Now, I hate to be pushy here, sir, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to please leave the crime scene. This is a quarantined area. We’re involved in an intensive police investigation. We can’t have bystanders contaminating the site, can we? You’re a lawyer. I’m sure you understand.”
He’d reverted to his courteous, I’m-just-a-humble-cop-trying-to-do-his-humble-job masquerade, and I had an almost irresistible urge to tell him where he could put his head.
But before I could say anything, Imelda deftly wheeled me around and began heading for the yellow tape that surrounded the investigation site.
Bales called out, “Hey, have a nice day.”
And Choi echoed, “Yes, have a nice day.”
When we were on the other side of the tape and back through the gate, Imelda coolly asked, “Them the two that ripped you up?”
“Uh-huh,” I furiously mumbled.
She said nothing more, as though it were just a passing question.
When we got back to the hair parlor, Allie the amazon was all over me. She literally tripped over herself to help Imelda wheel me in. She planted me beside a desk and fetched me some coffee, then stood there like a worried hen studying an egg with an ugly crack in it. I’d been transformed in her eyes. I’d become worthy. I’d shed blood for the cause.
I told her how sorry I was about Maria and she glumly nodded and sniffled once or twice. She was shrouded entirely in black, for mourning no doubt. The sight of Allie, all skinny, six feet three inches of her, draped in black leotards and a long black shift, combined with her spiky hair, nearly took my breath away.
I was touched, anyway. I truly was. Maybe some of it was pity, but I actually felt a wave of deep affection for her.
I also decided that having a couple of women busting a gut to take care of my every whim wasn’t too bad, so I hunched over in my wheelchair, occasionally coughing, or moaning, or working up a pained look. For half an hour the two of them sprinted around getting me more coffee and cups of water, and pencils and paper, until Imelda got suspicious and whispered in my ear, “Cut that shit out or I’ll give you a reason to moan.”
So I did. I perked up in my wheelchair and told her and Allie they’d accomplished a medical miracle, that I felt
