Hush Money Read Free Page B

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.
    But now that he was a civilian again—on the surface, anyway—he was glad he hadn’t gone the Air America route. He might have been killed as a mercenary, which was a risk he wouldn’t have minded taking before, and still didn’t, but not for money. The money a mercenary could make, which had once