Mortal Allies (37 page)

Like I didn’t know that already.

Then she said, “It was a really wonderful thing you did, by the way. We’re very proud of you.”

And I said the perfunctory, “Yeah, well.”

That out of the way, she pulled out a tape recorder, pushed a button, and laid it on the bed.

In an officious tone, she said, “Major Sean Drummond, the United States Army officer who was present at the massacre. The date/time is 10:15 A.M., May 23. The location is the Eighteenth Military Evacuation Hospital.”

She got a very businesslike frown on her face. “Major Drummond, could you please describe what you saw at the massacre site yesterday morning outside the main gate into Yongsan Compound?”

Now she and I, both trained lawyers, were speaking our own phlegmatic language, so I proceeded to detail everything that occurred as factually as I could recall it, from the moment the protesters arrived at the gate right through the multiple beatings I’d received at the hands of the South Korean police. And the kick from Michael Bales, don’t let me forget that point. In fact, I dwelled on Bales and Choi for quite a while, although she didn’t seem interested, even though I wanted it all on the record, real clear. In fact, what I really wanted was Michael Bales’s scalp hanging off the end of my bed for the rest of my life, where I could wake up every morning, gaze fondly at it, and say, “Take that, you prick.”

In case I haven’t mentioned it before, vengeance is one of my strong suits. Or weak suits. Whatever.

When I finally finished, after nearly thirty minutes, Carol Kim picked up her recorder, withdrew the tape, and inserted a fresh cartridge. She went through the introductory motions again, then set the recorder down and studied my eyes. Or should I say, she studied my one eye, because the other one was still swollen shut.

She said, “You stated you heard a single shot behind you before the automatic fire began. Where did that shot come from?”

“I don’t know. It was just a quick pop. But it was from somewhere in the rear of the protesters . . . or maybe behind the protesters. It didn’t sound too close.”

“Was it a pistol or a rifle?”

“I couldn’t tell. Why, what’s the point?”

“Please Major, answer my questions. I’ll explain later.”

“Okay, fine.”

“Are you sure the Korean police officer you chased was shooting into the crowd?”

“He had an M16 aimed in our direction, the weapon was bucking, and people were getting hit and falling over. Yeah, I’m sure.”

“But he stopped shooting when he saw you coming? Why?”

“At the moment he saw me, he had just emptied a magazine. I saw him reaching into his vest for a fresh mag, then I guess he made a quick assessment and decided he wouldn’t get it inserted before I got to him.”

“How long does it take to change magazines?”

“A highly trained soldier can accomplish it in maybe ten seconds. Someone less familiar with the weapon might take twenty, thirty seconds. You need to push a button to get the old mag out, then ram in the new mag, then pull back the charging handle to chamber a round.”

“The film we’ve viewed shows you were still twenty to thirty yards from him when he dropped the weapon and ran. Why do you think he ran?”

I thought that was a stupid question and responded accordingly. “How about because he was killing people and didn’t want to get caught.”

“Major, please, this is important. The camera shots we got from the news organization are blurry. The cameraman was under fire and swinging the camera around, so the focus wasn’t good. You had a good look at the shooter. Tell me what you think went through his head.”

“What I think was that he wasn’t going to take any risk of getting caught. I had a riot baton in my hand. I was running fast. He was thirty or so yards away and he was a very fast sprinter. He made a split-second choice and it was the wrong one. He should’ve jammed in that magazine and blown me away. Alternatively, maybe he just figured he’d murdered enough people already.”

She cocked her head. “Jump forward to the point where you had him cornered in the shop in the dead-end alley. He fired some shots, and you went down with a shard of glass in your leg. That’s what you said earlier, right?”

“Right.”

“You went in and his corpse was behind the counter?”

“Correct.”

“You rolled him over and the pistol was in his mouth?”

“Correct. At first I thought I’d hit him with a lucky shot, because he was lying on his stomach and there was a big hole in the back of his head. Then I rolled him over and saw his own pistol stuck inside his mouth.”

“So you believe he committed suicide?”

“Unless someone helped him stuff his pistol inside his mouth, I think that’s a fairly safe conclusion.”

“But you saw no one else inside the shop?”

“No. Nobody. And I checked for a rear entrance, because I wondered why he hadn’t simply fled. There wasn’t one.”

“Why would he have killed himself?”

“I don’t know. However, I’d like to go on record as saying I’m damn glad he did. It’s probably the only reason I’m alive.”

She was starting to reach down and shut off the recorder when I reached over and grabbed her hand.

“There’s another thing,” I said. “He was wearing gloves. A pair of white cloth gloves, like you see taxi drivers over here wear. They were soaked with blood.”

“Gloves?”

“Yeah, white ones. I mean, it’s May, so it’s damned hot, and I thought that was odd. What I think is, he was wearing the gloves so there wouldn’t be any fingerprints on the M16. Maybe he and the other shooter planned all along to just drop their weapons and run.”

“You’re sure about the gloves?”

“Of course I’m sure. Check with the Korean police.”

“We’ve talked with the Korean police. They haven’t mentioned anything about it.”

“Well, he was,” I insisted. I mean, it wasn’t a big point, and it certainly wasn’t conclusive, except it implied a degree of premeditation on the shooter’s part.

She shut off the recorder.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s this about?”

A big gush of air came out of her lungs, like someone who’s under a great strain.

“While you’ve been in this hospital a very ugly dispute has erupted between our government and the Republic of Korea. The slaughter, it’s all that’s been on the news. The problem is nobody knows what happened, or why. There’s a war of finger-pointing going back and forth.”

I sat up. “Finger-pointing over what?”

“The protest, or demonstration, was approved by the city of Seoul and was under South Korean civil protection. That much is indisputable. The South Koreans, of course, don’t want to be blamed for the massacre of fourteen American citizens and the wounding of seventeen others. They’re claiming an American protester fired the first shot, then one or two ROK policemen returned fire in self-defense. You yourself admit you heard the first shot fired somewhere behind you. Other eyewitnesses corroborated the same thing.”

I thought about this. It met with the facts. It made sense out of a chaotic event. But it didn’t make complete sense.

“Then why did my shooter run? If he was simply returning fire, why’d he flee? And what about the other one, the second shooter?”

“Nobody’s sure. It’s believed the second shooter was an ROK police officer as well. He was wearing a police uniform and he dropped his weapon and ran. It was an M16 with all the serial numbers filed off. Nobody has any idea who he was.”

“He was an ROK police officer? And they don’t know who he was? How can that be?”

“That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it? There was a lot of confusion at the massacre site. A number of ROK police cars were dispatched to the scene, but nobody was taking a roll call as they arrived. He made his getaway in a police car. That proved to be a very clever move, because the ROK police dispatchers immediately put out a net call for every unit to look for a ROK police car and . . . well, you can imagine how chaotic that became.”

“And you believe they honestly don’t know who he was?”

“Who can tell? Maybe they’re just covering up. Or maybe they really don’t know. It’s terribly convenient for their side of the story not to have him around for questioning . . . but it’s also inconvenient, isn’t it?”

“And the shooter I chased, he’s dead, so there’s nobody to say why they opened fire.”

She stood up and straightened her dress. “That’s the gist of it.”

“And it’s their country.”

“Basically, yes,” she replied, picking up the recorder and placing it in her purse. “I’ve got to hurry and get this transcribed and sent back to Washington. For obvious reasons, your testimony is considered crucial.”

Before she could walk out on me, I said, “Hold on. What’s my position in this thing? I mean, if the two police officers were merely responding in self-defense, where do I stand? And what about the fact that the guy I was chasing popped a South Korean in the head?”

“That’s all under continuing investigation. The ROKs admit that you were very brave for chasing him off that hillside. It saved lives. They also think it’s possible he committed suicide. They’re doing an autopsy on his body now. But you’re still being charged with assaulting a police officer, and for stealing his weapon. As for the other body that was found in the alley, there’s still questions about who popped him in the head, as you put it. The bullet that killed him passed through his cranium and hasn’t been found. The poor guy was a mentally handicapped adult.”

Her eyes suddenly narrowed. “I don’t mean to imply that you murdered him in cold blood, but you were involved in a gunfight. You were tense and under great strain, probably on a hair trigger. You didn’t shoot him, did you, Drummond?”

Which I guess was a fairly good indication of what she thought of me.

My response was fairly short of being politically correct. But then, I’m a lawyer. If she tried to slap me with one of those gender crime suits, well, I was drugged and delirious with pain, and therefore wasn’t responsible for my filthy tongue.

I
melda and Katherine showed up two hours later. Make that two hours after I started frantically calling them. I wasn’t happy about it, either.

But after one look at Katherine’s face, I softened my mood. There were deep, dark circles under her eyes. They were puffy and swollen and bloodshot, the way eyes get when somebody’s been crying a lot. She’d obviously gotten no sleep since the massacre.

Imelda, I noticed, was being very custodial toward Katherine. She was holding the door for her, getting her a chair, hovering over her shoulder like an anxious aide-de-camp.

Imelda looked down at me, studied my face, blew some air out of her lips, then returned her attention to Katherine. Imelda Pepperfield, after all, was a woman. In the female Hierarchy of Miseries, physical beatings are a few notches down from afflictions of the soul.

Katherine sniffled. “You look like hell.”

“Yeah, well, I feel like hell. Thanks, though, for getting me out of that rathole. I couldn’t have taken another beating. One more and I was ready to confess I’m your co-counsel.”

She smiled and acted like she got the joke, but you could tell from her eyes she’d lost her sense of humor. Actually, she’d never had much of a sense of humor. At least none I’d ever been able to tap into.

“What you did, Sean . . . it was incredibly brave. The cameraman called me as soon as he was able to review his tape. He wanted to know who you were. He said he had this film of a complete wildman running through the crowd, people dropping over dead all around him, rushing the assassin.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, blushing beneath my bruises. “So how you doing?”

“It’s been the worst day of my life.”

“Yeah, mine wasn’t so hot, either,” I complained, because I just couldn’t let her score higher on the misery index.

Then Katherine and Imelda exchanged some kind of private look, and Katherine looked even more tortured.

She made a very obvious effort to exert control over her emotions. “Uh . . . Maria got shot.”

“Maria? Maria the grum — uh, our Maria?”

Katherine looked down at the floor and nodded.

I felt a small knot in my stomach. “How is she?”

Katherine never took her eyes off the floor. “Dead.”

I had to take a moment to consider that. It’s not like I knew Maria real well. We’d shared some room space, but we’d barely said ten words to each other. Except for a few odd smiles, the sum of our communication had been to either exchange frowns or vaguely ignore each other.

I said, “I’m sorry,” which is an entirely inadequate thing to say, but because it’s so commonly muttered in situations like this, it’s a passable sentiment.

Katherine nodded.

“How’s Allie?”

“Not well. They’ve lived together for ten years. They . . . uh, they were very much in love.”

I nodded because again I was at an embarrassing loss for words. I sort of liked Allie, partly because she was so wildly eccentric you either liked her or hated her, and I had no reason to hate her, which I guess left me sort of liking her. And partly because she was so damned tough and I just naturally admire that quality, even in a six-foot-three lesbian with a face like a South American parrot.

Anyway, Katherine spared me the need to mutter more empty sentiments. She stood up and started pacing. “I knew these people. They were my friends. I’m angry and I’m frustrated. The South Koreans are trying to cover it up. They murdered my friends and now they’re trumping up some horseshit about how the first shot came from us. Like we started it.”

“The first shot did come from our side of the fracas. I heard it and so did you. Is it possible one of the protesters had a gun?”

She angrily shook her head. “Come on. They all took civilian flights over here. They passed through metal detectors and customs.”

“So what? It’s possible to smuggle plastic guns through metal detectors. It’s possible to smuggle disassembled weapons in your luggage. Hell, it’s possible to acquire a weapon here. American servicemen are even allowed their own private weapons, as long as they register them with the MPs. No offense, but some of your friends are angry social misfits. Maybe one of them decided to make a bold point.”