Payback

27

The day after they returned from Santa Barbara, Murdock sat in the office with Lieutenant Ed DeWitt and both were grinning.

“I told Milly and she kissed me for about ten minutes. We celebrated in the bedroom for the next two hours and had our cold dinner about ten o’clock. Oh, yeah, Milly is just damn glad that I’m getting rid of Third Platoon duties.”

“I’m glad, but I’m pissed off too,” Murdock said. “You’re going to be impossible to replace, so I’ll have to find a clone of you that I can train up to your level of skill and technique and judgment in the field. Gonna be one tough mother to find that kind of a man.”

“Yeah, I bet. You must have the master chief lining up a dozen candidates right now.”

“Fact is, I haven’t. I just put the paperwork through yesterday afternoon. We don’t even know if the Old Man will buy you for that vacancy. I’m betting he will, but you can never second-guess the commander.”

“In the meantime the fight goes on,” DeWitt said. “What’s on deck for training today?”

“Haven’t even thought about it. We do need a new man for your squad. That’s going to take some doing. Be pleased if you’d sit in on the selection even though you’re for sure a lame duck of a squad leader.”

“Hey, I like the sound of that. I want to get the best man I can to replace Franklin. Never realize how many good things a man does until he’s not doing them anymore. I’ll check with the master chief. He’s probably got a list of young gung-ho candidates for our platoon who are just itching to get shot at.”

“Work on that first. We’ll do that jogging and O course work we were going to do yesterday.”

Jaybird stuck his nose in the door. “Hey, Skipper, no day off after a mission?”

“You call that walk in the park yesterday a mission, Jaybird? Damn but you’re getting soft and touchy in your old age. What are you, twenty-five now?”

“Getting close, Skipper. Don’t worry about us troops out there in the hot sun. Hell, this is what we signed on to do, right? To get shot at. My bet is we hit the O course today.”

“Jaybird, get your ass out of here, we’re busy.”

Jaybird gave an exaggerated salute, a snappy about-face, and hurried out the door.

The phone rang and Murdock picked it up. “Team Seven, Third Platoon, Murdock here.”

There was a slight pause. Then the voice came soft and totally feminine. “You always sound so brusque and tough when you say that. You going to be home for lunch?”

“How did the interview go yesterday? I got back so late last night I didn’t want to wake you.”

“Interview? Interview? I had an interview yesterday? Oh, yes, that old thing. It went fine. We’ll talk about it over lunch. I have some shrimp I need to do something with. See what I can whip up.”

“See you at twelve-ten.”

“See you too. Bye.”

DeWitt looked up from the training schedule. “Interview? For Ardith? Whoa, you mean she might move out here?”

“She went to a job-offer meeting yesterday, and I was so bummed out when I got back I didn’t wake her and ask her about it. This morning I got in early. Yeah, she had a talk with some guys here who chased her down in D.C. and want her brain out here.”

“That scare you a little, old buddy? The ball and chain, and all that sort of stuff. Maybe even the center aisle. Get your scare machine wound up a bit? Hey, it isn’t so bad. Believe me.”

“Yeah, you’re an old married man of what, eight months or so? You’re the expert.”

They both laughed.

“Hell, there aren’t any experts on women or on marriage,” DeWitt said. “Just have to take the woman one day at a time, and the marriage one second at a time. And that’s my expert opinion.”

DeWitt chuckled as he headed for the Quarter Deck to talk with the master chief about a replacement for Franklin. Murdock looked at his roster, then at the officers in the other platoons on Team Seven. He didn’t see any one man who stood out over the rest. He’d have to look for a JG. He didn’t even know some of the men. Others he had come up through the officer ranks with.

He pushed it aside. He would talk with the master chief if and when Masciareli gave him the go-ahead for a transfer of DeWitt to his own platoon. He looked at the in basket on his small desk and decided it was time to bite the bullet and get some of it cleaned up.

Noon came before he was ready. He drove home quickly and ran up the steps to his second-floor apartment. Ardith met him at the door with a huge hug. She wouldn’t let him go.

When he carried her into the kitchen, she at last relaxed her grip on him and lifted her head off his shoulder. Her soft blue eyes were so excited she didn’t have to say a thing. But it was her day. He waited.

“Did the interview yesterday go well?”

“Yes.” Her grin made her look ten years younger, like a high school kid who’d just found out she’d made the cheerleader squad.

“Went well, extremely well. They liked me. I liked what I saw, and I was taken by the people. Casual, relaxed, yet sharp, inventive, and constructive. They showed me through the routine of a job, a client, their problem, how it was worked on until a solution came, and then a unique way to solve the problem with software that we designed.”

She led him to the kitchen table and held the chair for him. Murdock sat down feeling strange being waited on this way.

“You made up your mind?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. I’m taking the job. It’s going to be glorious. I can let my creativity flow and billow and soar.” She watched him closely. Murdock jumped up, knocked the chair over backward, grabbed Ardith, and lifted her off the floor and twirled her around in the small kitchen.

“Great! Just great. I’m as happy as you are that it worked out so well. When do you start?”

“They wanted me to start tomorrow. I told them I had to give two weeks notice and then pack up and move, and I thought maybe we could find a bigger place, more than one bedroom. You never can tell what might happen. And I can use the second bedroom as a home office, and maybe not go in every day, and all of that, and then you might want a den or…” She watched him again intently.

He grinned and sat her down at the table. “Hey, don’t worry about it. If you want a bigger place, we get a bigger place. We could even think about buying a house, maybe a used one, the new ones cost so damn much, a half million dollars and up.”

Ardith shivered. “So much?”

“We’ll work it out. For now we’ll store most of your stuff and you move in here and then we start looking. Going to be a big change for both of us.”

She reached across the table and grabbed his hands. “You are pleased then?”

“If you’re this happy, how can I not be happy too? Happy never fills a stomach. What’s for lunch?”

“It seems to me I said this once before. But, well, since you didn’t have almost anything in the house to eat, I ate the shrimp before you came. So, well. Hey, your lunch is me.” Ardith jumped up from the table and ran into the bedroom. She beat Murdock there by only half a step.