Four Blind Mice

Chapter Five

Sampson and I were on 1-95 by eleven o'clock that morning, our car wedged between caravans of speeding, gear-grinding, smoke-spewing tractor-trailers. The ride was a good excuse for us to catch up, though. We'd both been busy for a month or so, but we always got back together for long talks. It had been that way since we were kids growing up in DC. Actually, the only time we'd been separated was when Sampson served two tours in Southeast Asia and I was at Georgetown, then Johns Hopkins.

“Tell me about this Army friend of yours,” I said. I was driving and Sampson had the passenger seat as far back as it would go. His knees were up, touching the dash. He almost looked comfortable somehow.

“Cooper was already a sergeant back when I met him, and I think he knew he always would be. He was all right with it, liked the Army. He and I were both at Bragg together. Cooper was a drill sergeant at the time. Once he kept me on post for four straight weekends.”

I snorted out a laugh. “Is that when the two of you got close? Weekends together in the barracks?”

“I hated his guts back then. Thought he was picking on me. You know, singling me out because of my size. Then we hooked up again in ”Nam."

“He loosened up some? Once you met him again in ”Nam?"

“No, Cooper is Cooper. He's no bullshit, a real straight arrow, but if you follow the rules, he's fair. That's what he liked about the Army. It was mostly orderly, consistent, and if you did the right thing then you usually did all right. Maybe not as well as you thought you should, but not too bad. He told me it's smart for a black man to find a meritocracy like the Army.”

“Or the police department,” I said.

“Up to a point,” Sampson nodded. “I remember a time,” he continued. “Vietnam. We had replaced a unit that killed maybe two hundred people in a five-month period. These weren't exactly soldiers that got killed, Alex, though they were supposed to beVC.”

I listened as I drove. Sampson's voice became far away and distant.

This kind of military operation was called “mopping up”. This one time, we came into a small village, but another unit was already there. An infantry officer was “interrogating” a prisoner in front of these women and children. He was cutting skin off the man's stomach.

“Sergeant Cooper went up to the officer and pressed his gun to the man's skull. He said if the officer didn't stop what he was doing, he was a dead man. He meant it, too. Cooper didn't care about the consequences. He didn't kill those women in North Carolina, Alex. Ellis Cooper is no killer.”