The Murder Option 2

  Dear Reader,

  This is the second Murder Option in the box set series. These stories are not meant to inspire action, merely contemplation

  To Elmore Leonard who taught us all.

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  * * * * *

  Killing Superman | Killing Senator Grey | Killing Colonel Mayer

  KILLING COLONEL MAYER

  _______________________

  1

  Morning broke through the curtains like a nasty intruder, like an insult, carrying the harsh realization to Jesse Wells that she was still alive, still didn’t have the courage to put an end to it all.

  Why? She wondered. Why?

  She turned from the harsh light that cut through the sides and top of the window curtain. She made a sick, groaning sound. But the turn put her on her gun, which pressed uncomfortable under her thigh. She moved.

  Jesus Christ, she thought, what is wrong with me? I can’t do this day after day.

  But then, in her gloom, a funny moment forced a thin smile as she remembered something that had happed in a therapy session a few months back, when the doc suggested everyone read Deepak Chopra and practice some meditation.

  Jesse had said, “If Chopra had gone through what most of us have, he’d have blown his brains out in the middle of a meditation session.”

  Everyone, including the doc, laughed. He didn’t bring it up again. Deepak might be a fine guy, and a guru for regular folks. But they were far from what mediation, diet, love, peace, and granola could help.

  Once a former soldier, once a happy human being, Jesse Wells was neither now. She opened her eyes and glanced at yet another day.

  No more, she thought. Girl, you need to deal with this. Fuck the benzos, Propranolol, lithium, weed. To hell with the bullshit therapy. This has to stop. I’m done with all that, she thought with bitter resolution. I’m not better, I’m worse.

  Suicide was the avenue so many other soldiers had taken, but she wasn’t ready for that giant step off into the great void.

  Not yet, she thought. Not yet. The abyss can wait. It wasn’t going anywhere, and she knew then and there she had something that had to be done. One more mission.

  That’s why I’m still alive, she told herself as she awakened to a clearer mind. One more mission.

  The colonel was due to testify at the ongoing hearings on abuse of servicewomen, advocating a new set of military regulations, and at the same time telling the world the problems of women in the service, great as they might be, were vastly exaggerated.

  They need to hear from me, she thought. I have something they need to hear, something the colonel won’t tell them.

  Jesse Wells, now getting deep into her twenties, but feeling like she’d been on this earth a very long time, didn’t know peace. There was almost no time in any day when she felt whole, when the tiger of fury wasn’t clawing at her, and the memory of the horror of what had happened to her didn’t lurk to jump out and ruin every decent moment of every damn day and night. All the time, 24/7, it was there.

  Nothing took it away. Not tears, not alcohol, not drugs or therapy. The vicious rapes where she had no chance to fight back, and then, even worse, much worse, the lack of resolution, of justice, of even acknowledgement. That consumed her day and night.

  But on this morning, as Jesse lay spread-eagle, frozen, as she stared up out of a chaotic nightmare into the dull morning light, staring at the visual cacophony of recurring terrors in her mind, she knew it had to end and she knew how it would end. She’d asked herself a simple question the night before.

  And so, in the sunny California morning, where others worshipped the sunlight of a new day, enjoyed the ocean breezes, the lapping waves, Jesse Wells thought of shooting Colonel Mayer in the head. And in doing so, making a statement. It was simple and very definitive.

  Suicide is not for this chick, she thought. I’m not taking it out on myself. To hell with that. Too many had taken that route. Instead, Colonel Mayer, the world’s great hypocrite, was going to get a goodbye bullet.

  The colonel is not going to go before that committee and lie, she decided. They need to hear from me, and if it takes a bullet to get their attention, so be it.

  After that … who cares? she thought. You do what you have to do, and then the devil does what the devil must do.

  The decision eased her mind, focused it. Having made it, she felt a little better. In the world of Jesse Wells, feeling a little better was a big thing. When those from whom you want respect humiliate you and you’re helpless, and the ones who could right the wrongs do nothing, what are you? What’s left?

  2

  Jesse’s apartment wall was covered with news stories about military sexual abuse and the hearings in Washington that had been going on forever. One of those pictures showed the colonel shaking hands with the president.

  On the desk beside her laptop were the pages of a book Jesse figured she was never going to finish. She thought of Hillary’s famous response about Benghazi: What difference does it make!

  There’s only one thing that will make a difference, Jesse thought.

  Sometimes, when she was writing, or blogging her anger, she would get very paranoid and didn’t know how to fight that. Maybe they were watching her because of things she’d said when high with friends at the bar and on blogs. Maybe the fucking NSA was eavesdropping and reading her manuscript!

  She knew on some level that couldn’t be true. Those fools were way too busy tracking girls and wives. Besides, what was the point? Nobody would care about her revelations about the things that had happened to her. No proof. No justice. Even if you had proof, they wouldn’t do anything. Nothing short of a bullet would bring justice to her and the other women who’d gone through under the command of Colonel Mayer.

  I’m done playing their games with their rules, she thought. It’s a new game now and it’s going to be by my rules.

  For three days after that morning revelation, and the final decision to take action, Jesse backed off her usual crutches: pills, alcohol, meaningless sex. No more. She went back into training. Back into her own version of boot camp. Runs on the beach. Weights. Heavy bag work. She went at everything with a vengeance.

  There had been times over the past year when some stud she’d picked up at a bar would be getting his rocks off and she’d think of just grabbing the gun from the nightstand and shooting him. Bringing guys back to her apartment was like punishing herself over and over by trying to repeat the past and deal with it. That was over. No more games.

  Over the days of preparation, Jesse thought at times as she struggled to cleanse herself, get straight, that she would die from the process itself. That’s how sick she got. But what kept her on track was the mission. All the sleeplessness, the vomiting, the tears, the crazy thoughts were now just her new boot camp.

  But those first days were hard. She craved. She desperately wanted at times to surrender. Get back on her medicines. But she held on, kept running, kept lifting. Her purpose took over the pain. That came from her soldier father: Know the mission, understand what it requires, and let nothing get in the way.

  She knew her mission.

  Finally, she began to feel a little more alive. She jogged along the beach near Encinitas, saw normal girls in their bikinis, the boys out on their surfboards. Life for the lucky people.

  Once upon a time, she’d been one of those girls, lying in the sun, her body at its peak, feeling that wonderful fullness of innocence, that excitement about life’s prospects. Love, kids, and career were all lying there waiting for Jesse and her ambitions and talents.

  For Jesse, that innocence lay ruined in a dusty back room of a
building far, far away. Savagely stolen, not by the enemy, but by her own comrades.

  And then, adding monumental insult to injury, when she sought military justice, a door was slammed in her face. And in its way, that proved far worse than the assault itself. It destroyed her faith in the integrity of the military justice system and turned her innocence into dark cynicism.

  Now, four terrible years later, she worked out in her mind the new reality. Her war’s final mission.

  When a close friend texted her, she wrote back that she’d be gone for a couple weeks. A family situation. Most of her friends were, like her, fellow prisoners trapped in their own traumas. Several she’d met in therapy. They all worried about one another, provided the comfort and support in the way people in Alcoholics Anonymous do. Still, two girls she knew had gone to the darkness and peace.

  Late in the afternoon of Day Five of the decision, Jesse found herself on the rock promontory stuck out into the ocean, watching the pelicans fly if perfect formations over the coastline of the Pacific Ocean.

  I’d rather be one of them in the next life, she thought. They were so perfect riding the thermals—long beaks, spear-shaped heads—as they flew in V formations like small fighter jets. They looked so in control of their lives. They rode air currents above all the madness below before they gathered on rocks in La Jolla to the south to rest, mate, do whatever they do.

  Such a simple, natural, good life, she thought. The opposite of her life. Just seeing the difference brought up that raw, bitter rage she’d been living with all these years. Nothing had worked to take it away.

  “You have to learn to adapt tactics to deal with it,” one of her doctors had said. Something her father might have said when he was alive.

  “Well, now I’m going to,” she told the ocean, the sand, the pelicans, the doctor, her father, her life that lay wounded behind her. She had the answer.

  She’d seen the colonel—now a big deal in Washington, an advisor to generals and politicians—on TV at some big event in the nation’s capital two weeks ago. That had triggered a rage followed by a depression and a need to scream to the world that they didn’t know the truth about this person.

  The only questions left were tactical for former Specialist First Class Jesse Wells. Her resolution only became more certain, more unwavering. She didn’t care about the men who’d abused her. Two of them had gotten killed in plane crash; another suffered a severe IED blast and was himself undergoing major therapy. They got what they had coming, but it was her commanding officer who had to be dealt with.

  No memory was as powerful and clear as that day when she went to her CO to report what had happened to her outside of Kandahar. She’d been warned by other female soldiers it would be a waste of time, but she couldn’t believe that.

  They were right, and she was proved very wrong.

  “Soldier,” Colonel Mayer told her, “we’re in the middle of a war, in case you haven’t noticed. Unless you walk in here with absolute proof, with witnesses, you are wasting my time. I would suggest, for your sake, the sake of your unit, your country, that you take responsibility. It does no good to throw around unsubstantiated accusations for which you have no corroboration. Sometimes in life we have to soldier-up and get on with the job at hand. You’re a driver of up-armored LMTV and that is a critical job. Get back to it, soldier, and learn how to deal. And don’t party. This is the military, not summer camp.”

  And for a time, desperate, guilty that she’d put herself in a vulnerable position with those men, she’d attacked her duties with an almost insane dedication and determination, and a willingness to go anywhere under any conditions to prove her worthiness. Jesse soldiered-up. She tried to bury the incident by volunteering for any mission, especially those considered the most hazardous.

  And when she’d performed in a firefight and was commended, one of the men who’d raped her showed up and suggested she come to a celebratory “coming out” party. It was so grotesquely demeaning and disgusting, she could only reply that he had about five seconds to get out of her sight or she’d blow his motherfucking head off.

  He shrugged. As he turned, a couple of other soldiers came by, glanced over at them, and she said, plenty loud enough for them to hear, “If you had a dick the size of your ambition, asshole, you might be of some interest. But you don’t. So get the fuck out of here and go find yourself a boyfriend.”

  Sure, it was high school stuff, but it felt good at the moment to get those laughs at that bastard’s expense. But that kind of moment didn’t have legs. In time, it did nothing. When she left the service, it was downhill. All her efforts to regain her self-respect, her view of life, her needs for some kind of respect for who and what she was as a female, as a human being, fell apart, and she couldn’t put the parts back together.

  Years of therapy and drugs did nothing. The anger of the colonel’s slamming the door in the face of her situation, of forcing her to live in complete humiliation in front of the men who’d done that to her, to live in fear of it being repeated, had left her scarred, bitter, and without any sense of closure. It didn’t matter what happened to the men who’d raped and abused her. It was that there was no justice. No repercussions. No recognition of her humanity.

  A friend of Jesse’s found her sitting out on the end of a rock promontory. “Jesse, where were you last night? We were all meeting at Jake’s.”

  She looked at her friend, nodded, and said, “Sorry, I completely forgot.”

  “You okay?” Steffi, a competitive triathlete, lean and strong, settled on a nearby flat-topped stone. The joke was, nobody had ever seen her walk. Jogging through her ruined life, doing pull-ups, pushups, lifting, biking, swimming, but never walking. She had been through something like Jesse and that was her way of dealing.

  “I’ll be gone for awhile,” Jesse said.

  “That’s what Carol told me. Some sort of family situation?”

  “Yeah. You know how that is.”

  “Jesse, seriously, you okay?”

  “Actually, I’m fine. In fact, I haven’t felt this good in awhile.”

  Her friend was silent for a moment. “You need anything, anything … you know we’re here for you.”

  Jesse nodded. “I know. I love you guys for that. Just something I have to do. I can’t talk about it right now. Actually, I kinda need to be alone. Some things I need to work out, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure. Don’t forget us.” They hugged.

  “I won’t.”

  She watched her friend make her way over the rocks and back to the beach to resume her run.

  We’re all a lot crazy, she thought. It was time to get uncrazy, and maybe there was only one way.

  The target was now becoming part of the Washington establishment, a member of an advisory team on women in the military. It was such a disgusting, repulsive hypocrisy and insult, it was just hard to stomach.

  Jesse Wells began planning. For the biggest impact, she wanted to do it right before the next hearings on sexual abuse in the military. Timing, as they say, is everything.

  3

  Jesse had been tracking the colonel ever since the special hearings began. Her best source actually turned out to be a featured article she’d taken out of a magazine several months ago. It was about the colonel’s postwar lifestyle since moving to a tony condo in the historical heart of Georgetown and joining a military advisory team.

  Jesse knew that, not being a senator or congressman, or all that high up on the food chain, the government wouldn’t be providing personal security unless there was a credible threat.

  There is now, Jesse thought, just not one they know about.

  Jesse had a methodical focus when she went about anything and that had always been strength of hers. It felt good now that it came down to a specific act, to a specific target, and that target wasn’t so much a person as it was a system, a corruption in that system, where power and authority and obedience to superiors trumped any risk taking on behalf of justice.

>   No more watching TV. No more reading or writing blogs or tweets. All that was behind her. Having decided to assassinate the colonel, she became completely absorbed in the work of how, when, where. In the days before she left for Georgetown, she had put together maps of all the areas the article had mentioned, including some known jogging trail that the colonel used on daily runs. From her Internet searches, which brought up dozens of other articles about the colonel’s activities, Jesse worked, planned, and thought everything through. She had a visual map of Georgetown burned into her brain long before she left California.

  Jesse didn’t hide her digital tracks. She didn’t care that, after the fact, she could be herself tracked down by her searches. That just didn’t matter to her. She was too absorbed in the endgame, too dedicated to her cause to worry about the aftermath.

  “Preparation isn’t half the deal,” her veteran father used to say, “it’s the whole deal.”

  His death at an early age had devastated her, one of the reasons she went into the service. But now, much of what she’s learned from him went into her tactical thinking.

  Except for a few equally scarred friends, she was totally alone. Her mother had been taken when she was very young by cancer, so she really had no one now and, except for her friends, didn’t want anyone. What made that aloneness a bit easier at times was being a military brat. She identified with soldiers and the military, but that was why the betrayal had hit her to the very core of her existence and wouldn’t let go.

  Not that she didn’t have moments of real doubt. Serious questions:

  — Am I sane?

  — Is this the thinking of some deranged, bitter, angry person moving to the edge of madness?

  And try as she could to see the truth, it always came out the same. Sure, I’m a little nuts, she thought. But for damn good reasons. A truly mad person, a true sociopath, doesn’t really grasp the reality of their crisis and its origins.

  Those moments of doubt came and went and, finally, didn’t return.