Tequila vikings, p.1
Tequila Vikings, page 1
Tequila
Vikings
J.E. Park
Copyright © 2020 J.E. Park
Tequila Vikings
By J.E. Park
All rights reserved.
Book 1 of the Tequila Vikings series
This is a work of fiction. names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Mailing List Sign Up for Newsletter and New Release Info: https://jeparkbooks.com/
Follow me on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/JE-Park-100409961692113
Twitter handle: @JEPark94519501
Email at: jeparkauthor@gmail.com
Cover design by DAMONZA.COM
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
Acknowledgments
Appendix I Slang and Abbreviations
Appendix II Rates and Rank
About the Tequila Vikings Series
PROLOGUE
R andy Green did not look like a monster. He was short, barely five and a half feet tall, and skinny, struggling to tip the scale even a hair beyond one hundred and ten pounds. With his red hair, freckles, and “aw-shucks” Kentucky demeanor, he seemed to be some harmless hillbilly Howdy-Doody. Once he got home and into his bourbon, however, he tended to go after his wife and her son as if he were a miniature Mike Tyson.
There was a time when I sympathized with the man. We were in the same duty section aboard the USS Belleau Wood and Randy often sat with us in the radar repair shop, voicing his regrets over marrying a Filipina bar girl. The man would drive himself crazy, wondering what his wife was up to when he was not there.
When Rafaela started wearing black eyes like poorly applied mascara, and Manny suddenly became an exceptionally accident-prone five-year-old boy, my empathy for Randy evaporated, replaced by intense loathing. Raised by a man just like him, I was fully conscious of what that bastard was capable of. I knew what he would eventually do to that family, even if they had yet to develop a clue themselves.
I tried to warn him. When I first suspected what was going on in the Green household, I made it a point to describe to Randy in very graphic detail how my father murdered my family. I also let him know what I would do to anyone that I suspected was a danger to his own. Having heard about the things I occasionally did for my master chief deep in the bowels of the ship, Randy had to have known that it was no idle threat.
Still, he did it anyway. I was not surprised. I learned from experience that people like my father and Randy Green couldn’t help themselves. They would never stop until someone eventually stopped them.
When I heard Randy Green broke his stepson’s arm so that the boy’s mother would unlock the door that she was hiding behind, I was oddly relieved. Rafaela and Manny were alive, and I was sure that the courts would finally deal with that son-of-a-bitch. After I learned that Randy’s wife concocted a story that got his charges dropped, though, I was furious. Not at her, as I knew the methods that fiends like Randy used to keep their women in line. My fury was targeted squarely upon the shoulders of Petty Officer Green, right where it belonged.
I did not wait for Master Chief Darrow to come to me this time. I went to him. Finding him alone in the Electronic Materials Office, the EMO, I took a seat in LT Howe’s chair and told him I thought Randy Green was about to have an accident.
Darrow grinned and leaned back in his seat, putting two heavily tattooed arms behind his head while a burning cigarette dangled from his lips. “Yeah, you’d be surprised how many people have come talking to me about that clumsy little fucker.”
A few days later, the master chief was standing before the division at roll call, announcing an upcoming zone inspection by the captain. He demanded that all of the division’s spaces sparkle, the Nixie Winch Room in particular since that was what got us gigged last time.
The Nixie, or officially the SLQ-25, was the ship’s protection against a submarine attack. Located at the Belleau Wood’s stern, a Nixie “fish” looked like a miniature torpedo that was hooked up to a long transmissible cable and towed a couple of hundred feet behind the vessel. When energized, the device duplicated the ship's electromagnetic signature to fool incoming torpedoes into hitting it instead of us.
The winch room, which housed the equipment used to deploy and retrieve the fish, was a challenging space to maintain. Located in a remote area with a deck made of metal grates, it was impossible to sweep. We needed to sponge down virtually every square inch of it, a task as labor-intensive as it was time-consuming. “Do you need any assistance down there, Petty Officer Murphy?”
I grinned, knowing what the master chief was really asking me. “It’s a big job. We could always use help.”
With a nod, Darrow said, “No problem. Petty Officer Green! You’re helping out the radar guys in the Nixie room today. Understand?”
Randy’s voice cracked as he answered, “Yes, Master Chief.” He knew what was in store for him. Judging by the way the rest of our division fell silent, they did too.
*****
Despite his reservations, Petty Officer Green showed up right on time, looking every bit the part of a condemned man. He was sweating, trembling, and stuttering over his responses to my questions, acting like a twitchy Chihuahua trying to suppress the symptoms of a methamphetamine overdose. I was as friendly as possible, smiling when I spoke to him and cracking jokes as I loaded his arms full of cleaning supplies. I even offered him a cigarette. That made him even more uneasy, considering I had not given him the time of day for months. Finally, when there was nothing left to make him carry, I opened the door and let him lead the way below.
We descended the first three flights of stairs in silence. Hitting the fourth, Green turned to me and whimpered, “You know Doyle, I’m not the kind of man your father was.”
Oh, but you are. You even have the same podunk accent. You’re a loser. A coward. A weakling. The world is going to beat you down, and you’ll take your frustrations out on your family. Then, one day, you’ll snap. You’ll grab that shotgun just like my old man did and start with her. Then you’ll go after the little boy and…
Images of my family flashed through my mind, making me wince. They were always so vivid, even though I never actually saw the bodies. Had I been there, my father would undoubtedly have killed me too. My imagination spared no detail when playing the carnage back for me. I saw every piece of gore, smelled the blood and spent gunpowder, and heard the screams. I could even feel my mother’s grief as she watched her children blown to pieces before her, powerless to stop it.
I never hid what happened to my family. I wore it like armor to show people how tough I was, and it never bothered me when the subject came up. Until now. Listening to Randy Green attempting to separate himself from my old man was infuriating. He was trying to minimize what he did to his family by comparing it to what happened to mine. Sensing that was not working, Green switched tactics and started blaming his wife.
“…I wasn’t myself, Doyle. I thought she’d been hanging around the Trophy Lounge with her friends. No, I knew she was! She’s picking up other men, bringing them into our house…into our fucking bed for Christ’s sake!” It sounded like Green was trying to convince himself of his wife’s infidelities far more than he was me.
Although Randy was never more than an arm’s length from my ears, he started to sound far away, almost as if he were underwater. My heart started racing, and I could feel my sweat pores opening up. All were surefire symptoms that one of my episodes was coming on. Usually, I would hide in my radar dome until it passed. This time, though, I couldn’t. I would lose the opportunity to ensure that Green got what was coming to him.
Randy kept droning on, unaware of what was happening to me. “…she made me this way! If only she’d not go out when I was on duty! If only she looked at me as something more than a ticket to the United States! I know! I know! Some of it’s my fault! I should’ve never married a whore but…”
From behind, Green even started to look like Liam Murphy. He grew a few inches. He started limping a little on that left leg. The blue dungaree shirt he wore transformed into a grease-stained denim jacket, and his shoulders slumped forward. Randy was starting to cry, though, and that was something I never saw my father do.
“…I didn’t mean to break Manny’s arm, Doyle, but she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom! I was only trying to make him scream, so she’d open the door, you know? But it snapped like a twig! He was so fragile. I never thought it would break like that! I swear…”
As we approached the winch room, I reached for my keys before remembering that Kevin Dixon and Claude Metaire, two of my radar techs, went there ahead of us. The entrance was already open, inviting us into that dark and lonely space.
Up until he stepped through that hatch, it seemed as if Green had resigned himself to his punishment. Once he caught sight of Dixie and Metaire, though, he lost his nerve. Randy dropped everything he was carrying and turned to run, only to find me blocking his escape route.
Unable to flee, Green’s survival instincts incited him to fight. Trying to knock me out of his way, he cranked his right arm back and threw his fist against my jaw with everything he had. It would have been a debilitating blow had I been a ninety-pound Filipina woman, but that was something I most decidedly was not.
My composure, which was little more than the thinnest of façades at that point, completely melted away, and I let my episode take over. Usually, there was nothing I could do during my flashbacks but despair. This time, however, I had something tangible that I could fight back against other than macabre hallucinations. I had a surrogate for my father. Instead of being paralyzed by grief, I exploded with rage.
When I finished with him, Randy spent the rest of his life suffering for what he did to that little boy. I nearly did too. When Metaire and Dixie finally pulled me off of Petty Officer Green, there were only a few almost imperceptible heartbeats keeping me from spending decades behind bars.
Up until then, my life in the United States Navy had been somewhat charmed. Our days may have been full of tedium and monotony, but once we were pumped full of liquor and set loose on liberty, we morphed into the maritime marauders of old. We were Tequila Vikings, seeking glory through sexual conquest, tavern combat, and other forms of mayhem and misadventure. We even had it tattooed on our arms.
I did not join the Navy to spend six years bar brawling my way through life with a blood alcohol level spectacularly exceeding my IQ, but I was pretty happy with the way things turned out. At least I was up to the point where I nearly beat Randy Green to death. That was when I discovered how effective being investigated for attempted murder could be in persuading a man to reassess his lifestyle choices.
*****
CHAPTER 1
“H OLE-leeee SHEEEE-it!” For a cautionary tale of what happens when wealth has more to do with earning a commission in the US Navy than fitness to lead, one needed to look no further than Ensign Whitaker. Officers needed to be even-keeled and cool under pressure. Whitaker was neither. He was a high energy, low aptitude Texan lacking tact, a verbal filter, and other critical social graces.
“Hey!” Whitaker yelled while looking over the side. “Murphy! Check out this guy coming up the pier! He looks like one of your dance partners!”
A couple of months before, I took quiet pride in my role as one of Master Chief Darrow’s bruisers. When under an active investigation, however, a reputation as a hooligan becomes far more of a liability than it ever was an asset. The last thing I needed was some moron like Whitaker reminding everyone within earshot of what I was capable of.
I joined the Officer of the Deck more to get him to shut up than out of any genuine curiosity. Still, I was impressed by what he pointed out to me.
The closer our mangled seaman got, the worse he looked. His left arm was in a sling across his chest, bound in enough gauze to make it twice its usual size. The medics wrapped his broken ribs, but there was little covering the man’s face, which was bruised and swollen to macabre proportions. Angry red patches of bare skin covered his scalp, where it appeared his hair had been ripped right out of his skull. It was gruesome. Shaking my head, I returned to my podium.
“Hey, where ya goin’?” Whitaker asked. “You suddenly squeamish over the sight of a little blood?”
“I’m calling medical,” I told the OOD as I reached for the IC line. “We need to get a corpsman up here for this kid.”
As I was dialing, the seaman’s Master-at-Arms escorts helped him up the three flights of steps to the top of the gangplank. After crossing over to the quarterdeck, he presented his ID and requested permission to come aboard. Whitaker granted it before stepping closer to get a better look at his injuries. “What’s your story, son?”
I always found it amusing when ensigns called young enlisted men “son.” Whitaker was twenty-two, the same age as me. According to his ID card, Seaman Corey Baker was twenty-four. He was older than both of us. “You get beat up?” the OOD inquired when the seaman did not answer fast enough. Whitaker was never one to pass up an opportunity to ask a stupid question.
“I got attacked in Tijuana, sir,” Baker mumbled through puffy lips. “By the cops.”
“For what?”
“For nothin’. They got pissed because some guys they were chasing got away, so they grabbed some random squids off the street to take their frustrations out on. I didn’t do a goddamn thing.”
After ending my conversation with the duty corpsman, I turned to the seaman and asked, “Who got you? The local dicks or the federales?”
“How the hell should I know? Whoever that fucker Hulagu belongs to.”
“Hulagu?” Whitaker asked. “What kind of name is Hulagu? That doesn’t sound like a spic name to me.”
Ensign Whitaker’s parents bought him an expensive education, a future of privilege, and an insufferable sense of superiority, not to mention a vast array of prejudices to go along with all of it. He was a silver spoon on a paper plate.
“Hulagu isn’t a Spanish name, sir,” I told him. “It’s Mongolian.”
“Mongolian? Why the hell is Mexico hiring Mongolian cops?”
I sometimes wondered how Whitaker kept from drooling on himself. “It’s a nickname, sir. Hulagu was the grandson of Genghis Khan. He razed Baghdad and killed a half million people. Legend has it that Tijuana’s Hulagu has that same sunny disposition. Hence the moniker.”
I turned back to our battered shipmate. “I thought Hulagu was an urban legend. You always hear about him through a friend of a friend. Nobody ever runs into the guy on their own. You saying you saw the man in person?”
“I saw way more of him than I wanted to,” Seaman Baker told me.
“Yeah? What’s he look like?”
“He’s tall and fat. Big bushy mustache. Brutal right hook.”
That was a new description, but then again, they all were. I came to believe that Tijuana cops were randomly calling themselves Hulagu just to raise the fear factor when roughing up gringos.
It did not take long for the duty corpsman, HM1 Bateman, to emerge from the passageway that led to the mess deck. Prancing is not how one would typically describe any service member's gait, but Bateman was one of the most effeminate men I had ever met. He practically danced when he walked.
In 1992, being gay was one of the quickest ways to get tossed out of the Navy. Despite that, Bateman put little effort into concealing his inclinations, causing many of us to wonder how his career survived so long. Getting decorated for bravery while serving as a medic with the Marines probably helped. You did not question a combat veteran's man card, no matter how prissy he was acting.
Bateman’s medical knowledge was so dependable that Belleau Wood sailors often trusted his diagnosis over the ship’s doctor and routinely sought him out for an unofficial second opinion. Even as hostilely homophobic as the military was then, we went to Bateman if we wanted something done. Except for maybe prostate exams. For that, the men always hoped for HM2 Lippincott, a notorious womanizer, despite his reputation for having ridiculously fat fingers.
“Well, well, well,” the corpsman said as he reached the quarterdeck, making Whitaker cringe. “What’ve we got here?”
“A victim of federale hospitality.” I passed the corpsman the report that the Master-at-Arms dropped off with the patient.
“Can you walk, or do you want me to get you a stretcher?” the medic asked Baker, ignoring me. Bateman was the man who saved Randy Green’s life, so he was not my biggest fan. I didn’t blame him for it.
“I can walk,” Baker answered, recoiling as the corpsman grabbed his arm to lead him away. Looking back towards Whitaker and me, the expression on the seaman’s face suggested the young sailor was afraid of becoming Bateman’s date instead of his patient.
