Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 04/01/11 Read online

  Pete paused, took a long drink after he said that. Not one to quench a thirst, but a drink of necessity.

  “I was eighteen. What did I know? Now I’m out, and I jump whenever somebody slams a car door.”

  I drank, trying for casual. My light Sunday feature was losing its luster.

  “The bitch of it all is that I’m still a shooter, Timmy. That’s all I know how to do. Wait, point, and . . .” He dropped his thumb onto his forefinger again. I didn’t like him pointing at me when he did that. “I can say this: I never miss. It’s all I’ve done for the past fifteen years.”

  I was the only guy in the place wearing a tie. The front door opened and an icy gust hit my back. The bartender was a blonde, maybe twenty-three, wearing tight jeans and a tighter T-shirt.

  “Think she’s into ex-military?” Pete asked, motioning at her.

  She was at least ten years younger than he. I hadn’t been in a bar in close to a year, hadn’t tried to pick anyone up in one in nearly a decade.

  “Got any job leads?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Can’t concentrate long enough to make it through a damned interview.”

  We’d hunted together every fall until we graduated high school. I’d taught him to shoot a rifle. I’d been a sophomore at UConn studying journalism when Pete had come home with a Class-A “sniper” tab on his uniform, a receding hairline, and a look of seriousness I’d not seen in my world of feature articles, hangovers, and afternoon classes. In the years since, I’d gotten married, had Maggie, and worked my way up at the Courant. Pete had done two stints in Iraq.

  “Seem to be doing pretty well for yourself,” he said. “House, wife, kid, job.”

  I shrugged.

  “I had eighteen confirmed kills in Iraq.”

  I’d been about to drink but put my glass down.

  “It’s not like shooting a deer,” he said. “Nothing at all like that. I can’t get it out of my head.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I managed only, “If you ever need anyone to talk to . . .”

  “I got a lady at the VA. But it’s not working.”

  “It’ll get better,” I said. “Keep talking to her. You’ll work through it.”

  He shook his head. “Not that easy,” he said and finished his drink. “There’s only one thing that’ll clear my head.”

  That night I lay in bed thinking of Pete’s ice twirling in his glass, his pale blue eyes focused on the cubes. And I remembered how things had been when we were kids. Darlington was different then, and so were we. My old man was the school district’s business manager; Pete’s father was a mechanic at O’Malley’s Used Cars.

  One cool November afternoon we were in the woods about a mile west of town garbed in orange hunting vests. Sixteen years old, hunting together. I had a Winchester .30-30; Pete had a .30-06 with a scope. We’d flushed a buck, then tracked it three miles from the road. Dusk was nearing. I was in front and stepped over a fallen tree, when the lace of my right boot caught a limb. I fell and my .30-30 went off, a blast followed by the hollow thudding of the round entering the forest’s dirt floor. I didn’t feel the pain at first. Pete screamed and pointed at my foot. It took him forty-five minutes, but he carried me out of the woods that day.

  The wound healed, but the memory never left me. I could have bled to death that afternoon. Dehydrated and exhausted, Pete missed two days of school afterward.

  Moonlight streamed in through the curtains. The old radiator in our bedroom hissed, drowning out Annie’s quiet, steady breaths. I watched her sleep, remembering what Pete had said. I did have it pretty good: a wife who loved me; a five-year-old daughter who adored me; and the Sunday editor’s job. Middle class never looked better.

  Pete had joined the service right after high school because he had few other options. An all-conference middle linebacker is not an all-state one, and no scholarship offers came. He’d applied to the State Police Academy, but at eighteen he’d been neither ready nor qualified. The mill had closed its doors and taken its jobs to North Carolina by then. It was the few, the proud, or the unemployment line for Pete.

  Now he was back and struggling badly.

  “What time did you get home?” Annie asked the next morning when I yawned after my second coffee.

  I told her.

  “How’s Pete?” she said. “I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “Probably wouldn’t recognize him. He’s lost weight, and his hair is graying.”

  “Where’s he staying?”

  “Motel on the east side. He’s looking for an apartment. He’s not doing too well.” I looked carefully at Maggie. She was eating, lost in her own thoughts.

  Annie looked at me, poured milk into Maggie’s cereal, and raised one brow.

  “He’s living with a lot of guilt,” I said. “I think it’s eating him from the inside out.”

  “How can something eat a person?” Maggie asked.

  “It can’t,” I said. “I was telling Mommy a joke.”

  “You grew up with him.” Annie drank her coffee and stared into the mug. I always knew when she was contemplating something. Her eyes narrowed; crow’s-feet lined the corners. We’d met at UConn. Now she was the counselor/behaviorist in Maggie’s school district. “Can you do anything to help him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you should try,” she said.

  That day, I called Pete from work and said I’d buy him dinner at Jumpers at five thirty. When I showed on the dot, he was already there. Three empty shot glasses stood before him. Alone at the far end of the bar, he was unshaven and glassy-eyed.

  “What time did you get here?” I slid in next to him.

  “Four.”

  “Two thirty.” This, from the bartender. Not the blonde twenty-something. This guy was balding, in his forties, with a shaved head and barbed-wire tattoos on bulging biceps. “Says he’s running a tab. Better be good for it.”

  “I told you,” Pete was indignant. “I’m good for it. I got a friggin’ military pension.”

  “Oh, well,” the bartender said, “I know all about those. Why do you think I’m serving drinks to guys like you?”

  Pete just looked at him.

  “Look, no more hard stuff,” the bartender said. “Just draft beer from now on.”

  “You my mother?” Pete said, but his voice had lost its bite. His eyes were still on the bartender. His head was tilted, thinking about the pension.

  The bartender asked what I wanted. I said a draft.

  Jumpers was nearly empty. SportsCenter was on the TV over the bar. BREAKING NEWS flashed across the screen, and the picture went to a football injury update.

  “We’re fighting a war in Afghanistan,” Pete said, “and that’s considered breaking news? Want to see breaking news, should’ve followed my ass the last three years.”

  The bartender set a Heineken coaster in front of me and put my glass of Bud Light on it.

  “Tell me about the last three years,” I said.

  Pete shrugged.

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I killed people.” His eyes were set on the empty shot glass in front of him. “Eighteen people.”

  “You’re a national hero,” I said, wondering if he heard the doubt in my voice.

  “No. Not a hero. More like a coward.”

  The bartender brought Pete a draft. “This is on the house. Just get out?”

  Pete nodded.

  “How many years in?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Iraq?”

  “Two years. Afghanistan for three.”

  I was an outsider watching and listening.

  “Now what?” the bartender said.

  Pete shrugged.

  The bartended nodded. “Been there, man.” He walked away.

  “What did you mean by ‘coward’?” I said.

  “I should have stood up to McIllroy. I only questioned him once. Shou
ld’ve stood up to him.” He looked away then and stared at the TV. I knew he’d go no farther.

  At the door, Pete said, “Thanks for dinner. I owe you one.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing,” I said. “In fact, I still owe you for carrying me out of the woods.”

  “No.” He turned toward his car and said over his shoulder, “And thanks for listening.”

  That night, after dinner and after Maggie was in bed, I went back to the paper and spoke to the night editor, Mick Rowe. I enjoyed being at the paper at night. Like most newspapermen, I’d started out manning night desk, the three-to-eleven shift.

  At ten fifteen P.M., deadline had come and gone. Most of the newsroom desks were vacant, desktop screens black, thin white reporter notebooks closed. Then like a sleeping giant awakening, the presses began to rumble with the morning edition. The scent of hot ink wafted in through the back door.

  Mick Rowe was in his early forties. He’d been a war correspondent for the Boston Globe before coming home to Darlington to care for his sick mother. I carried him a large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and sat in a straight-backed chair next to his desk.

  “This a bribe?” he asked, taking the coffee.

  “Sure is.”

  “Good start. What do you want?”

  I told him.

  Mick’s phone call came at 1:17 A.M.

  “This isn’t good,” he said.

  I got out of bed without waking Annie and took the cordless downstairs to the kitchen.

  “Ever hear of the Karbala incident in Iraq?”

  “No.” The overhead light reflected off the Formica countertop.

  “I covered it for the Globe,” he said. “The liberal papers called it ‘the Karbala Massacre.’ A group of Army infantrymen retaliated against Iraqi noncombatant civilians for an IED attack that killed one of their fellow soldiers.”

  “IED?”

  “Improvised explosive device. The infantrymen were at a roadblock, a checkpoint on the outskirts of Karbala. The IED killed one soldier. Allegedly, a group of eight others went to town and shot fifteen people, mostly women and children, to get even. Everybody involved was investigated, but nobody went to jail. Charges were dropped for most. Murder one was changed to involuntary manslaughter for the triggerman.”

  When he said “triggerman” something moved in the pit of my stomach. “No one’s in jail?”

  “None of the Iraqis would come to the U.S. to testify. Tim, the name you gave me is front and center of this thing. The triggerman was First Sergeant Pete Peters. He’s named in the report I had my buddy fax to me. I left it on your desk. Peters was dishonorably discharged. I think his superior is still pushing for a court-martial or a civil suit.”

  I wondered if additional punishment could be pursued after a soldier was discharged.

  “I thought he got a Medal of Honor,” I said.

  “Would have. He saved a guy’s life over there. I don’t know how or what he did. But then the Karbala thing went down. Major Sonny McIllroy was the officer who filed charges two weeks after the shootings. He was the unit’s commanding officer. They were his men, but he wasn’t with them when they did it. Retired a decorated officer six months ago.”

  The next morning, I told Annie all about it.

  “You looking into this as a reporter, or as a friend?” she asked.

  I drank some coffee and redid the knot in my tie. I usually went to work tieless and wore a sports jacket. Jeans and loafers rounded out my repertoire.

  “Not sure,” I said. “This story was supposed to be different—Darlington resident returns home with Medal of Honor. That would’ve been a great Sunday feature, but the story’s different now.”

  “Much,” she said and went back to her appointment book to see which students she’d see and when. She paused every now and then to write something on a legal pad.

  I poured a bowl of cereal for Maggie, put it on the breakfast counter, looked at the white milk container, and thought about Pete Peters shooting children.

  The fax was on my desk as Mick Rowe had promised. I closed my door and read it immediately, all seventeen pages. I didn’t read as a journalist, which perhaps gave me an answer to Annie’s question. I wasn’t reading for facts. I was looking for something to disprove what Mick said the previous night.

  There was nothing in the report to make a rational person question the charges brought against Pete.

  In fact, my mind now ran to what Pete had said, Not a hero. More like a coward.

  Why?

  I needed an answer, not as a journalist, but as a guy who—at least once—had known Pete and had still wanted to call him a friend.

  He was asleep on the bar when I arrived. The floor was sticky, and the whole place had the sweet smell of schnapps.

  The blonde was there again. She wore gray sweatpants with the waistband folded over and leather moccasins.

  “He got here at eleven. Started right in,” she said. “Had four shots of whiskey, maybe six beers. I told him to slow down, but he didn’t want to.”

  “You overserved him.”

  “Hey, don’t try to pin this on me,” she said. “He’s your friend.” She moved down the bar.

  It took me twenty minutes, but I finally roused Pete. I ordered burgers for both of us and plenty of coffee.

  “You started drinking at eleven?”

  He shrugged.

  “Tell me what happened in Karbala.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  My turn to shrug.

  He sipped his coffee. “Let’s make these Irish coffees.”

  I shook my head. “Pete, I’ve known you a long time.” I put the fax on the bar.

  “How’d you get that? It’s got the seal on it.”

  “Is it true?”

  “You shouldn’t have that.”

  “Is it true, Pete?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Told you about McIllroy already,” Pete said.

  He’d spent the last fifteen minutes throat clearing. It was six P.M. Burgers had come and gone. He was on his third coffee.

  “McIllroy took me with him. And when he fell, he made sure I did too.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “He picked me. Made me, so to speak, into a sniper. I was a good shot. You know about that.” He smiled then. It was the first hint I’d seen of the old Pete. There was pride in his eyes. “Got my first deer at twelve. Got one every year after that.”

  “I’ve seen you shoot one from a hundred and fifty yards, in the wind. We were sixteen.”

  “I remember,” he said. “That was a good day. I was a Marine for fifteen years—I guess I still am. I don’t know if you ever stop being one. Well, McIllroy brought me with him, basically wherever he went. And I got promoted. It seemed pretty good.”

  The after-work crowd started arriving, and conversation swirled around us. Mostly construction workers, although two suits sat near the door, drinking soda.

  “When Iraq started,” Pete continued, “no one was enlisting, so we all knew we were going over there. Wasn’t too bad at first. At least we knew what to expect because McIllroy was our commanding officer and we trusted him. Or we thought we knew what to expect. Then something happened over there . . .”

  I’d interviewed enough people to know to give him space. I sipped my coffee casually. Pete turned away and wiped his eyes. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes were wet.

  “There’s one little girl I think about every night. I don’t sleep, Timmy. Can’t. I’m scared to. When I do, I see her face. No older than Maggie.”

  My five-year-old’s freckles and blue eyes flashed before me.

  “I see her just as I pulled the trigger,” he said.

  At that moment, I hated him.

  “The therapist calls it post-traumatic stress. She can call it whatever she wants. I’m losing it, man. I know I am.”

  The blonde walked over with the coffee pot. “Feeling better?”
>
  “Go to hell,” Pete said.

  “Pete,” I said, “relax.”

  The young waitress moved off, looking at him over her shoulder.

  “Nobody knows what it’s like. Not you. Not her.”

  “Why’d you do it? That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “Me either,” he said.

  “McIllroy gave the order?”

  “Of course not. He’s not that dumb.”

  “You just did it? Went in and . . .”

  “No. You got no idea what it’s like over there. I can’t understand about ninety percent of what the Iraqis are saying. A woman opened the door. Somebody yelled ‘gun.’ I was the point man. I fired. She went down and there was a little girl standing there. I don’t know what happened, Tim. I can’t forgive myself, so I don’t expect anyone else to forgive me. But I kept shooting. At first, people said the gun jammed, but it didn’t. I just couldn’t stop. I was scared, so I just fired.”

  Women and children. Maggie.

  “The charge was involuntary manslaughter,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t have even been that,” he said. “We shouldn’t have ever gone in there.”

  “Why’d you go?”

  “That’s where it gets gray. Someone said they knew where the IED had come from. So we all went in, but I was the one who fired.”

  We were quiet. The Celtics pre-game was on the TV above the bar.

  “Therapy isn’t working,” he said after a while. He stared into the mirror before us, his eyes set hard on himself. “I’m already disgraced. Got nothing to lose.” Then he looked at me. “You still Catholic, Timmy?”

  “I guess. Don’t go to church much.”

  “I’m not,” he said.

  He looked away.

  Annie kissed Pete on the cheek when we entered the house. I said Pete would be spending the night with us. She knew something was up and said she’d make up the foldout couch downstairs. Pete thanked her.

  “There are leftovers in the fridge,” Annie said, and went downstairs.

  We turned in early. In bed I told her what Pete said in Jumpers.