Another Man's Moccasins

I could hear Baranski’s voice over my shoulder. “Look, it’s just a question of time before you get shipped off to the Long Bin stockade if you keep...” He caught up and pushed me a little to the side with a shove to my shoulder, and I stopped and squared up to him. “Whoa, whoa . . . We’re not going to do that again.” He held his hands up at me. “Just stop for a second, all right?” I waited. “It’s one thing if you wanna brace the Slopes or the wing wipers, but you go over to the flight line and start leaning on air force personnel, they will send you back to Chu Lai if they have to do it in a rickshaw.”

I stood there in the dirt street and felt the heat waves in my lungs. I was tired, hungover, and pissed, but even with my limited experience in law enforcement, I knew he was right.

Baranski smiled a white and wicked grin, and Mendoza came around to stand next to him, but I noticed they both stayed a good arm’s reach away. “You follow us, but you don’t do anything and you don’t say anything. Got it?”

I followed them back to security headquarters, where we commandeered one of the jeeps. We set out with the two of them in the front and me in the back.

We drove along the flight line on the tarmac where the Imperata grass scrapped the undercarriage and the mud puddles splashed khaki on the jeep’s flanks—past the debris and broken fuselages of damaged aircraft. We went by large Quonset hangars, which reminded me of surplus ones that were used by ranchers back in Wyoming. The sight made me homesick and started me thinking about blondes, but I could feel other things overtaking my passions and my hands stilled.

At the flight barracks, I got a clearer view of how the other half lived. On an air force base, pilots are royalty, and fighter pilots are kings.

“He leaves the base all the time.” The duty sergeant didn’t know where Brian Teaberry was and didn’t even look up when we came in. “He’s not scheduled for duty until 0800 tomorrow morning.”

Baranski leaned on the counter and looked at the top of the sergeant’s head. He was an embattled Korean War veteran and was not likely to be overly impressed with our homicide investigation. “This concerns a homicide investigation.”

The overworked man finally looked up from the forms he was stapling. “So?” I came around and rested an arm on the corner of the counter as he put the stapler down. “Look, big man, I don’t know where he is.”

I stapled his right earlobe to his neck.

“Damn it!”

I stapled his left earlobe to his neck.

“Damn it, God...Wait a minute! Christ, get him off me!”

The duty sergeant said that Teaberry was over at passenger service awaiting the arrival of his new fiancée, who was an administrative assistant coming up from Saigon for a visit, and that he was probably playing cards.

There were dark blue buses lined up out front, waiting for passengers from flights in, along with a great number of air force personnel, who were sitting on the ground waiting for both flights in and flights out. I read the two-language sign at the entrance, CLEAR WEAPONS BEFORE ENTERING.

“Stay in the jeep, man.”

I looked up and Mendoza motioned to me, like you would a dog. Stay.

They were inside for only a few minutes, then returned, fired up the utility vehicle, and pulled us around back to where there was an officers’ waiting area on the other side of a wire and lath fence. They got out of the jeep, and the Texican motioned to me again to stay put.

I sat there and watched as they went through a gate to our left and crossed the yard to where three captains and a first lieutenant were playing cards under a makeshift awning. A few C-123s were warming up on the tarmac only a couple of hundred feet away, the racket from their engines literally shaking the ground.

Baranski and Mendoza ambled up to the card players, and I watched above the noise as they introduced themselves and made some small talk to the seated men. A sizable fellow with sandy hair and a vulpine-looking mustache said something to Mendoza.

Teaberry.

Mendoza said something back. Teaberry said something to both Mendoza and Baranski. Baranski said something to Teaberry who said something again, at which the other men at the table laughed. Mendoza nodded, said something, and then gestured toward me. Come.

I stood up.

Teaberry glanced at me and then said something else to the other card players, who laughed. Mendoza smiled and gestured again. Sic ’em.

I got out of the jeep.

Teaberry started to stand, but Mendoza pushed him back in his metal folding chair.

I tore the gate off the fence as I entered.

The other two captains and the first lieutenant threw their cards down and disappeared into the passenger service building. Teaberry yanked away from Mendoza and ran to the far side of the yard.

I caught Teaberry at the fence.