Semper Fi!

And the more I thought about it, she could have fucked some other guy, and just said that the last guy she remembered was Marshall, so that, after the baby was born a DNA test would exonerate him, and she could have been roofied and raped, with no suspect fingered. Traci wasn't stupid; that was something she could have thought of herself.

One thing about fucking Iraq: it makes you suspicious, suspicious of everything.

Traci wasn't happy about it, but I insisted that we go down to the district attorney's office on Monday and see what we could do. We got a junior prosecutor, maybe two years out of law school, but he wasn't encouraging. Without Traci being sure it was Marshall, there was no way to charge him with anything, and with it having happened so long ago, there was no way to prove that Traci had been drugged.

"And let me be blunt, Mr and Mrs Coelho: Quintin Marshall is the biggest man in town. You go accusing his son of rape, and you'd better have an ironclad case. The DA won't go for anything less, and if his son wins, you can count on your mom and sisters losing their jobs and getting run out of town. You might have a civil case for child support, if DNA testing proves the baby is his. You could get a court order for that, but, in the meantime the same stuff happens to your family."

We were about to walk out the door, when the light went on. I turned around, and just said, "Hair."

"I'm sorry, Mr Coelho, what was that?"

"The Army and some companies test people's hair for illegal drug use, because the evidence remains in your hair. Does that work on date rape drugs?"

"I don't know, let me look it up."

With that, he went to his computer, and then Yahoo's search engine. "Yup, it looks like they can tell from a hair test, and Mrs Coelho's hair is certainly long enough that five months ago is still there, but I don't know if the test is good enough to determine when she was drugged, only if she was drugged."

"Can you order that?" I asked.

"Whew! Mr Coelho, considering who you're accusing, I'm going to have to go up to the DA for approval on that one. I'll have to get back to you. But I've got to warn you here: if I take this out of this room, to the district attorney, there's no way this stays confidential. The DA and Quintin Marshall are friends and golfing buddies and their wives are friends. You think your wife was drugged, but you don't know that, and you think it might have been Larry Marshall, but you don't know that either, and you think someone raped your wife, but while she suspects young Larry, she doesn't know it. I will take it up to the DA, if you really want me to, because I don't give a rat's ass about the Marshalls, but I've got to warn you: your chances of getting justice here aren't good, not this way. Do you want me to proceed?"

I knew that answer was bullshit; Quintin Marshall rules this town. But now I knew that there was a way to prove that Traci was telling the truth. The bad part about all of this is that, if we demand a DNA test, and it comes back being asshole Marshall, unless he's convicted of rape, which ain't likely, not in this town, sure, we could get child support from him, but he'd have fucking visitation rights with the child.

I told that wimpy assistant DA to just sit on it for now, that we wanted to explore our options. Traci wasn't going to get an abortion, that was for sure. If she was, she'd have done it while I was still in Iraq, and I'd never have known about this shit.

As far as I was concerned, the simplest solution was just to kill Marshall. But while I might have managed to get away with it before we talked to the DA's office, if I did it now, that wimp would immediately suspect that it was me. Yeah, as long as there was no reason to suspect me, maybe I could get away with it, because I'm a pretty good shot, and I could pick up a decent hunting rifle across the border in West Virginia at a gun show or just off, one that'd never be traced back to me. Blow him away, then bury the weapon out somewhere that it'll never be found, and I'd be in the clear.

But with that DA knowing I've got a gripe, they'd check on me, and with all of that modern shit they've got today, that'd never work. Besides, if I just blow him away, he'll never know who got revenge against his ass. I want him to die, but I want him to die knowing who killed him.

Worst of all, Traci could see it in my eyes, and she was scared, scared shitless. What would it do to our son, what would it do to us if I was locked up for the rest of my life. And I was smart enough to know that Traci'd be concerned about the unborn kid. Yeah, she'd been roofied and raped, but she sure wasn't the type not to worry about the kid. And she was expecting me to play daddy to it!

Well, evening and night follow day, regardless of our personal problems on earth, and I could see it in her eyes: Traci desperately wanted me to make love to her. Oh, it wasn't the hornies, not in the slightest. She was dreading the night, and whether I'd ever touch her again, with the rage in my sould and, let's face it, at least some lingering doubt that she'd told me the complete truth, and that maybe she'd willingly fucked some other guy while I was in Iraq.

It was subtle, a lot more subtle than she'd been before. She wasn't initiating anything, not tonight, but giving me that doe-eyed look girls can manage -- and how the heck does a blue-eyed girl managed a brown-eyes look? -- the look that says c'mon big boy, make your move, I'm ready for you.

Really, my heart wasn't in it . . . at least, not in the beginning. But, like I've said before, I'm young and dumb and full of cum, so my body was, and that dragged my heart along with it. We had the lights low, but not off, so yes, I could see Traci's body once she was naked, and yes, I could see that she was pregnant, but really, since she'd been six months along when I left for Iraq, it wasn't that different. Once I initiated, her demeanor went from welcoming and wanting to happy and urgent; once I started things, once I crossed that line, Traci became the tigress she had been before.

I suppose that I'm supposed to say that we went all night long, but that'd be a lie. I hadn't gotten laid in a year, and if some of that time had been passed taking my sex life in my hands, that still ain't the same. At least I wasn't too quick on the trigger, because Traci was really, really horny.

And she wasn't even self-conscious about being pregnant. Thinking about it later, I'd have figured that she'd have used positions like reverse cowgirl to hide her expanded belly, but she didn't. She wanted to look at me, she wanted to see my face, and have me see hers, and I'll tell you what: her eyes can just draw in your soul.

But if sex was special, even greater was the afterglow, with Traci's head on my shoulder, softly whispering her I love yous to me, her fingertips dancing across my chest, lightly playing with the hair. This was the Traci I had left behind a year ago, and it was the Traci I had so desperately wanted to come home to.

Still, we were both overthinking this. The Traci of a year ago would have awakened me with a blow job if her eyes opened first, but not the next morning. In my imagination, she was worried that doing so would have seemed to wanton, maybe painting her as a slut, and worried about what I would have thought. Truthfully, though I was 97.625% certain that the story she had told me was the truth, there was than nasty 2.375% doubt in my mind, wondering if she could have lied, could have had a willing affair, could have cheated on me.

After all, Marines talk, and we all knew guys whose wives and girlfriends sent them Dear John letters, and guys who bitched that some asshole was fucking their women back home, and there was nothing they could fucking do about it, stuck in the sandbox. We all saw the flashes of anger, when guys stormed around that they were going to kill the cheating bitch, and sometimes the bastard who fucked her, and I once even saw a big, 6'7" tall macho Marine broken down in tears when he found out that his girlfriend back home had cheated. The suspicious of everything attitude that fighting in Iraq generated crossed over into things other than combat, crossed over into worry that the women back home were finding the time to do more than just miss us. So yeah, my suspicious mind was still at least a bit worried.

It took a couple of days for my anger to simmer down, but once I could start thinking in coldly rational terms -- but still determined to fuck over Larry Marshall but good, and kill him if I could -- actually rational plans started to unfold in my mind. They were hardly complete, but they'd start at my next duty station, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Married Marines could take their wives to Lejeune, and I'd applied for family housing there even before I got back from Iraq, having already received my orders following leave.

Lejeune is a major base, and I knew that there'd be a JAG office there. If the wimp assistant DA wasn't willing to get that hair test done without the Marshalls being informed, a Navy or Marine Corps lawyer wouldn't be intimidated by their wealth in the slightest, and if Marines hated guys who fucked Marine wives while we were deployed, no one was hated more than someone who hurt a Marine's wife.

Just Traci's story was enough to begin evidence gathering, and the hair sampling was done within the first week we were there. It would take about a week before we got the results, and I was warned: a false negative was always a possibility. Traci was worried sick.

She needn't have been: the test came back noting that she had metabolized the date rape drug Rohypnol. That 2.375% doubt I had still harbored? That was gone now!

Unfortunately, the test wasn't good enough to tell us when she had ingested the drug. As a general thing, it was in the range of time in which Traci said she was assaulted, but the range was a month and a half wide. The JAG lawyer, who sure as shit didn't look like Catherine Bell, told us that the "suspected assailant" could easily claim that Traci had willingly committed adultery and then taken the drug herself, to manufacture evidence against him. With Marshall's money, a street dealer could easily be found who'd testify that he'd sold Traci a roofie, cop a plea that put the dealer in jail for a year, and then walk out a quarter million wealthier.

He said/she said was pretty difficult to build a beyond a reasonable doubt case, and any case would be tried in Frostburg.

Once the baby was born, DNA testing could be started, but as we were worried before, that could start the Marshalls claiming that they wanted custody of the child. That was something Traci was adamantly against, and I couldn't blame her.

Camp Lejeune is in the South, on the North Carolina coast, but February in Carolina can still be damned cold, and it seemed as though the wind was non-stop. It was basically a miserable place, and even though Marine families are openly welcoming of other Marine families, happy-go-lucky new friendship meetings are a bit more difficult when everyone is bundled up, trying to stay warm. For Traci being naturally skinny, this second pregnancy in two years was physically rough on her. There are a lot of Marine wives who want jobs of their own around the area, and Traci was too far along in her pregnancy to really want to work, even if she could have found a job. This led to a lot of alone time for her.

It was April 22nd, a couple of weeks late, actually, when our new son -- yes, I said our new son -- fought his way into the world. He was a big boy, 9 lb 6 oz, who already had a full head of hair when he was born. I'll admit it: I looked closely to see if he looked like that asshole Marshall, but thank God, he looked so much like Traci it was scary.

I had already resolved, a couple of months ago, that Traci's son was going to be my son as well. Really, it was the only thing I could do, not unless I was willing to leave her for her having done nothing wrong, and a real man doesn't do that. While an ultrasound had let us know in advance that she was carrying a boy, it couldn't tell us what he really looked like, and I was, we both were, though it was never spoken, just deathly afraid that he'd look like Larry Marshall, and be a continual reminder to us, every day, of what happened.

Still, my plans for revenge weren't moving forward at all.

It was a week later, when my good fortune happened. Another Larry, this time Larry Marsallis, and another Marine whose wife had been abused -- albeit willingly on her part -- by a fucking civilian while he was in Iraq, was being discharged and heading home to his family in Massachusetts. He had dumped his wife after she cheated, and she went home to her family in South Carolina, where the guy she'd fucked also lived. Sgt Marsallis and I made a pact: since he'd be near Boston, and Harvard, he'd track down Marshall and fuck him up bad, and I'd make my way down to where his ex was, and take care of the bastard.

It took some doing on my part. I had to have enough cash to make the trip without having to refuel or buy food with a credit card. I had to obtain an untraceable civilian rifle, one completely scrubbed, and then be able to get rid of it. And I had to let Marsallis know, without us making any email or telephone communication, when the 'operation' would happen; since it was known that Marsallis' wife had cheated on him, he needed to be seen in his hometown at the time, to provide an alibi.

The communication was simple enough. We picked a political website called the Liberal Avenger, one that allowed reader comments, a website that had a decent following even though the writers there were bone stupid, and we were going to leave a simple comment, "Fvck Boosh with Saddam's dick," one that would make the idiots who went to that site laugh so it wouldn't get deleted, and sign it Iraq Vet.

I left that comment on one of the site's usual hate Bush stories, as I left for Operation Nutblast. Marsallis hadn't wanted the bastard killed; he wanted him castrated.

That made the operation problematic: if I got close enough to castrate him with a blade, he'd get a good look at me, and I could be identified. More, a hand-to-hand situation was the kind that could leave more physical evidence around. Fortunately, Marsallis knew enough about the bastard to give me a good sitrep on him. The mother fucker jogged through a park near the edge of town every morning, and there was plenty of cover. I was able to find good cover, with heavy bushed in a copse of trees.

I had scored a lever action .30-30, a good hunting rifle for deer-sized game. It's a very accurate weapon, but its effective range tops out around 200 yards. I'm a damned good shot, and am rated a Sharpshooter with 215 points out of 250 possible, including targets at 500 yards. But for this shot, I wanted a range of no more than 100 yards, and 50 yards if I could get it.

The asshole's name was Mike McCarthy, and he looked just like his picture tall, lanky and ugly. The running path would bring him as close as 60 yards while facing me, before taking off at an angle that would make blowing off his balls more difficult.

What goes through your mind as you're lining up a shot on a human being? Before Iraq, I never even hunted, because I couldn't bear shooting an innocent animal. But when you see the fucking rebels in Fallujah shooting at your friends, shooting at you, and the bodies of women and children in the streets, you get hard, because you have to get hard. Watching McCarthy jogging toward me, I lay very still, my scope trained on the junction of his legs. Since he was running straight toward me, this was going to be an easy shot.

I knew: I was going to take the shot at 70 yards. Delay any further, and I risked him turning and changing the angle.

A top shooter does not pull the trigger, he squeezes the trigger, slowly, almost lovingly, and that's what I did. The .308 cartridge fired, sending the bullet toward my target, at 2,650 feet per second. At that velocity, it took less than a tenth of a second to reach its target, and my shot had been dead on target, as I say McCarthy's groin explode under the 168 grain bullet. I grabbed my expended cartridge -- I was wearing thin latex gloves -- and took off.

The rifle had to be disposed of, and Marsallis had told me where: about three miles from the park was a farm, with a huge old hollow tree, open to the sky. I wiped the gun down quickly with acetone, to destroy any evidence, emptied the magazine, and left the gun, barrel up, in the tree. The rain would quickly turn the rifle into rust, and it already had all of the serial numbers filed off.

I'll admit it: I was nervous on the trip back, with police sirens filling my imagination. I took the Interstate, and set the cruise control for 69 MPH, a hair over the speed limit but nothing that attracts the attention of the cops. With a full fuel tank, plenty of water bottles and an egg salad sandwich from a convenience store, I'd have no reason to stop unless I needed to piss.

The operation had gone off like clockwork. I wasn't stopped, and heck, I never even saw a state trooper. Two more hours, and I was over the border into North Carolina. I hadn't gotten my own revenge, but I had avenged the wrong done to another Marine. Oorah!

We had our system; I was not to contact Marsallis and let him know how the operation had gone. Fucking NCIS and the civilian cops have too many ways of tracking cell calls and emails. The same website, and the comment "Boosh ate Saddam's cum" was all that I needed to post, and Marsallis would find it. That was the code for mission accomplished; "Saddam licked Boosh asshole" was the code for mission failure.

For me, it was different: I lived on Base, and thus I always had an alibi. I had work five days a week, PT every Saturday, and Chapel every Sunday; I'd be seen, every day. I took no leaves, and was always right where I was supposed to be; no UA for me!

And getting the news about the revenge on Marshall was going to be easy. The Cumberland (MD) Times-News covered the Frostburg area, and anything that happened to the son of Quintin Marshall was going to be in it. I got my mom to get me a mail subscription, and yeah, it arrived a day late that way, but it meant that Marsallis didn't have to communicate with me.

Summer came, and nothing happened. Then I saw the asshole's picture in the paper. No, nothing bad had happened to him, but his father had welcomed him as the newest assistant Vice President of the bank. He was going to work there that summer, then return to Harvard, to finish off his MBA, and then back to the bank for good. Quintin Marshall was making sure that Larry Fucking Marshall was going to be the next owner of Frostburg once the old man retired. With Frostburg State University there, there were 2500 cute coeds, most down to fuck, for the asshole to target.

It seemed like asshole was in the paper every other week or so. The old man was really promoting his son among the social scene in Frostburg, in what was almost a political campaign. I hated reading that shit, but knew that Marsallis couldn't do anything until Marshall got back to Harvard.

It was the beginning of November, and I was wondering if Marsallis was ever going to take his shot. I had risked my freedom and my neck to avenge the wrong done to him, and time was running out.

And then I saw it in the Times-News; Frostburg man killed!

The paper wasn't particularly specific. It seems that Mr Larry Marshall, the eldest son of Quintin Marshall, had been viciously mugged behind his apartment building near Harvard. A severe wound to his abdomen caused him to bleed to death, bleed out quickly. Following an autopsy, Mr Marshall's body would be sent home for burial. As of last reporting, the police had little evidence and no suspects.