Sailors Take Warning by Malcolm Torres, CHAPTER FIVE - DAY 1

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Sailors Take Warning by Malcolm Torres
 
CHAPTER FIVE - DAY 1
 
 
During Mr. Keef’s illustrious career as a naval investigator, he chased down bar room brawlers, drug smugglers, thieves, sodomites and bigamists.

He was tall, had a remarkably large forehead and a great abdomen atop spindly, preposterously long, skinny legs.  A discoloration, something between freckles and liver spots, speckled his skin.

Any time a superior officer pressed him to explain the particulars of a case, which happened frequently in his line of work, he exhibited a ponderousness that rendered him unconvincing.  In the back of his mind, he had ideas, but when asked pointed questions, his lips parted to reveal straight rows of unusually large, white teeth between thick, mottled jowls, and his eyes opened so wide his forehead corrugated.  This facial distortion happened while thoughts traveled from his brain, through a low-bandwidth bundle of nerves to the back of his mouth where they converted into words that he slowly enunciated in a folksy Texas twang.

 

*   *   *

 

Mr. Keef had come aboard the Nimitz to investigate the disappearance of Donna Grogan’s body.  After the initial investigation came up clueless, Keef received orders to continue looking into the mystery of the missing dead girl covered in imitation maple syrup.

Keef reported directly to Captain Brandt.

During the past three miserable months, he scrutinized every serious crime.  He searched hundreds of lockers, and interrogated everyone sentenced to brig time.  Fancying himself a hard-boiled detective, he’d lock a suspect in a dimly lit compartment and leave them to stew for half an hour before bursting in, turning on a bright overhead light and assaulting the individual with a barrage of questions.  When the interrogations got him nowhere, he turned to eavesdropping in the galley, in living quarters, in passageways.  He caught thieves in the supply division.  He stumbled upon fire control technicians brewing ale in a rocket launcher.  In his evidence locker, he had a confession written by black supremacists, a moldy box of hash-cookies and numerous vials of suspicious looking pills.  He took credit for busting a marijuana sales ring working out of the ship’s laundry.  He was closing in on the ringleader of a ship-wide cigarette and chewing tobacco distribution network.  And yet, Keef remained painfully aware that his investigation into the disappearance of Donna Grogan’s syrup-covered corpse remained clueless.  To make matters worse, Larry Burns had gone missing shortly after Keef came aboard, and he had no clues in that investigation either.

After countless hours poring over dates and times of the disappearances, physical characteristics and causes of death, Keef developed a tentative criminal profile.  His suspect was crazy enough to snatch a corpse from the morgue and calculating enough to pull it off more than once.  Accusations of occult activity, cannibalism or morbid fetishes were likely correct, but years of investigating sailors’ most abhorrent predilections taught Keef not to speculate on motives until he’d discovered some clues, and to his severe disadvantage in this case, there simply were no clues.

While tracking leads for three months, Keef fell into a routine where he woke up around 0930, ate breakfast until 1100 and stopped in at the Master at Arms (MAA) office to check the activity blotter before lunch.

 

*   *   *

 

Keef’s brow furrowed as his thoughts made their way down from his brain to his mouth.

Brandt stood behind his desk, cutting Keef to bits with his razor tongue and burning holes in him with his icy stare.  “I'm tired of hearing you don’t have any evidence—”

“Well, I reckon this case,” Keef interrupted, “it’s a one-of-a-kind situation, requires more than a single individual investigator.”  Keef inhaled and his eyes closed under the strain of speaking and thinking in tandem.  “If I had someone to run leads, pull surveillance and like that, I reckon—”

“A necrophiliac or a cult of devil worshippers is loose aboard my ship!”  Exhaled smoke punctuated Brandt’s speech.  “If you were competent you’d have caught this freak and I’d have ‘em locked in the brig.”

“I reckon that’s accurate, sir,” Keef said.

“Keep your ears open because this monster will be talking backwards,” Brandt blustered.

“I remain ever vigilant, sir.”

“And you’re watching for anyone with a dead body slung over their shoulder, right?”

“Absolutely.”  Keef detected a bit of the criminal element in the old man.  “Sir, I’m fixin’ to get back to work about now.  Beg your pardon, but may I be dismissed?”

“Not so fast.”  Brandt dropped a coil-bound report on his desk.  “This says someone is sabotaging engines in the Stinger squadron.”

“Sabotage?”  Keef was ignorant on jet engines, but a sabotage allegation got his attention.

“Yes,” Brandt said gloomily.  “Somebody’s tossing bits of steel down the aircraft intake ducts, tearing up jet engines.”

“A little bitty piece of steel wrecks a jet engine?”  Keef couldn’t believe it.

“Yes, it does.”  Brandt pinched the bridge of his nose.

“But a jet can fly through a flock of birds and spit out feathers,” Keef said.

“Birds are soft,” Brandt speculated, “but a nut or bolt is hard—it ruins the whole engine, costs the Navy millions of damn dollars.”  A headache pulsed across Brandt’s forehead.  “Just read the damn report!”

“I reckon if they put a screen over them intake ducts it would solve this here problem,” Keef said.

“I’m not asking you to redesign military aircraft,” Brandt said.  “First, read this report and then go see Commander Aronson, the Stinger commanding officer.  Tell him I sent you.”

“What am I gonna do for him?” Keef asked.

“With your investigation into the medical department going nowhere it’s time you earned your keep around here.”

A dreadful funk came over Keef and left him feeling an acute need to solve the missing-body mystery, get off this ship and away from Brandt.  “Sir,” he said, “my assignment is to investigate the medical department, not—”

“You work for me,” Brandt snapped.

“But, sir, I’ve been—”

“You help the Stinger squadron figure out who’s sabotaging their airplanes.”

“But, sir, as I—”

“I don’t care what you—”  Brandt pinched the bridge of his nose and pointed to the door.  “Get out, Keef,” he said.  “Just, get the fuck out.”

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