Макс Коллинз - Hush Money

Carl got up and out of the cart and began walking away.

“Carl!”

Without toning, Carl said, “Thank you for an interesting afternoon, Mr. DiPreta.”

“Carl, today you were offered money. Tomorrow it could be... something else. Something unpleasant.”

Carl kept walking.

Joey hopped out of the cart and said, almost shouting, “You know that term you used, Carl — hush money? That’s a good term, hush money. I like that. There’s two different kinds of hush money, you know — the kind you pay to a guy so he’ll keep quiet and the kind you pay to have a guy made quiet. Permanently quiet.”

Carl felt the heat rising to his face. Unable to contain his anger any longer, he whirled around, ready to deliver one final verbal burst, pointing his finger at Joey DiPreta like a gun.

And Joey DiPreta doubled over, as if shot, as if somehow a metaphysical bullet had been fired from the finger Carl was pointing; or at least that was Carl’s immediate impression.

Within a split second the sound of the high-power rifle fire caught up with the .460 Magnum missile that had passed through Joey DiPreta like a cheap Mexican dinner, tossing him in the air and knocking him off the mound and out of sight before Carl really understood what he’d just witnessed; before he really understood that he’d just seen a high-power bullet bore through a man and cut him literally in two and lift him up and send him tumbling lifelessly off the hillock.

Carl drew back the pointing finger and hit the deck, finally, rolled off the hill himself, to get out of the line of any further fire.

But there was none.

The assassin had hit his mark and fled, satisfied with his score for the afternoon, and why not? As one of Des Moines’ finest would later caustically point out, it isn’t every day somebody shoots a hole in one.

His name was Steven Bruce McCracken, but nobody called him any of those names. His friends called him Mac. His sister called him Stevie. His mother, when she was alive, called him Steve. His father, when he was alive, called him Butch. His crew had called him Sarge. The VC had called him a lot of things.

His reputation, it was said, was considerable among the Vietcong. That was what he’d heard from ARVN personnel, who themselves seemed a little in awe of him. To his own way of thinking, he’d never done anything so out of the ordinary; he was just one of many gunners, just another crew chief doing his job. As crew chief one of his responsibilities was to provide cover fire as men (usually wounded, since the bulk of his missions were Medivacs) were hustled aboard the helicopter. He would stand in the doorway, or outside of it, firing his contraband Thompson submachine gun (which he’d latched onto early in the game, picking it off a Cong corpse) and shouting obscenities in three languages at the usually unseen enemy, unflinching as return fire was sent his way, as if daring those gooks to hit him. Personally, he didn’t see how any of that could build him any special reputation among the enemy or anyone else. He always suspected those damn ARVN were putting him on about it — he had trouble understanding them half the time anyway, his Vietnamese lingo consisting mostly of bar talk and their English being no better — but later G-2 had confirmed that he did indeed have a name in Charlie’s camp. He supposed his appearance must’ve had something to do with whatever reputation he may have had. He stood out among the Americans, who, to the gooks, all looked alike, and he made a bigger target than most, which must’ve been frustrating as hell to the little bastards, missing a target so big. He was six-two and powerfully built — his body strung with holstered handguns and belts of ammunition and hand grenades — his white-blond hair and white-blond mustache (a slight, military-trim mustache that still managed a gunfighter’s droop on either side), showing up vividly against his deeply tanned skin.

His appearance today, a month out of service, was little different, even if he wasn’t wearing guns and ammo and grenades. True, the hair was already longer than the Marines would have liked, but other than that he looked much the same. His physical condition was outstanding; even his limp had lessened, seemed almost to have disappeared. A chunk of flesh along the inside of his right thigh had been blown away in the helicopter crash, just some fat and some not particularly valuable meat, leaving a hole six inches long by three inches wide, a purplish canyon that at its greatest depth was two inches. There was still some shrapnel in that hole, and pieces worked their way out now and then; he could feel them moving. Nothing to be worried about, really. He’d never look good in a bathing suit again, but what the hell? He was lucky. A few inches higher and he could’ve spent the rest of his life pissing through a tube and trying to remember what sex was like.

He’d been sole survivor of the crash. They’d been coming down into a clearing for a Medivac, and some fucking brush-hugging gook shot the hydraulic system out of the plane (they never called it a helicopter, always a plane) and made their landing premature and murderous. Coming down, they caught another shell, a big one, and at hover level the plane blew up and killed most of the men they’d been coming to save. He himself had been the only one on the scene who got off with relatively light injuries. The pilot lasted an hour, died just minutes before another plane came in to pick up survivors, which was him and two badly wounded ARVNs, one of them a lieutenant who died on the way back.

He had learned at the beginning not to form too close a friendship with any of his fellow crew members, because he’d had a whole goddamn crew shot from under him the first goddamn month. The damn mortality rate was just too fucking high for friendship.

But sometimes you can’t avoid it.

The pilot had been a friend. A friend he’d talked with and laughed with. A friend he’d gone on R and R with in Bangkok. A friend he’d shared smokes and booze and women with. A friend he’d held in his arms while a sucking chest wound took care of the future.

His own wound, the wound in his thigh, was nothing. Nothing compared to the wound left by the loss of his friend. Trauma, it’s called. At the hospital the powers that be decided he needed some visits with the staff psychiatrist, and by the time he was patched up again, mentally and physically, he was told that because of the trauma of losing the pilot and rest of the crew, because of that and his shot up leg, he was being sent home.

That had been fine with him at the time, but soon the trauma had faded, as far as he was concerned, and the leg felt better, and he demanded to be sent back; he’d re-upped specifically because he liked combat. But barely into his first tour of his reenlistment, he was stuck state-side. He was told he would not be sent back to Vietnam, because no one was being sent back: the gradual withdrawal of troops was under way, with the Marines among the first in line to leave.

He had no regrets about Vietnam, other than not getting his fill of it. He would’ve liked to have had another crack at the gooks; losing another crew had only made him more eager to wade in and fight. But now, finally, he was glad to be out of the Corps. His last two years and some months had been spent at glorious Quantico, Virginia, which was the sort of base that made Vietnam seem like a pleasant memory. State-side duty bored the ass off him; he preferred the war: that was where a soldier was meant to be, goddamn it, and besides, the pay was better. Sometimes he wished he had signed on as a mercenary, with Air America, instead of reenlisting in the Marines. As a mercenary he could’ve picked up a minimum of twelve thousand a year and be more than a damn toy soldier, playing damn war-games in the backwoods of Virginny.