There is an old man with a thin white beard asleep in the back of the pick-up truck. He's wearing a terry cloth sweatsuit, brown, dirty, grease smeared, emblazoned with the name of a Spanish soccer team. He looks pretty comfortable, curled up in a semi-fetus position, his shirt hiked up a bit over his little pot belly, just taking a snooze in the warm golden January sunlight, hunkered down beneath the sides of the truck bed in order to avoid the slight chill that is still beneath the afternoon's breeze. The only problem, of course, is that he is not asleep, not really.
He has a small dent on the right of his forehead, and on the back of his head, just visible, is a very large hole, it's edges splayed yellow with a hint of skull matter. Blood, dark red and thickly viscous, has flowed into a long pool that stretches down the entire length of the truck bed. Like all real blood, it looks very different than the gallons of red stuff you see in the movies, and is thus somehow less......real? Is that the word? No, the old dead man is completely real, but it is that fact which would seem incomprehensible back in the World, where teenagers watch maniacs on silver screens slaughter people for fun. In this back alley way, it is irrevocably real, and not fun at all.
I'm standing there with Denny, one of our IPLOs. We are remarking on the dead man to each other, using technical terms to dilute the more unsettling aspects of having to look at executed grandparents lying on a metal floor. "Can't have happened too long ago, the blood hasn't started to coagulate yet...." "Yeah, but lividity is already setting in, look at the purple bruises around his eyes." "Oh, right. What do you think? 9 mil? Entry wound is pretty small, and the exit wound is not too big." "Yeah, if it was an AK, the whole back of his head would be gone...." "Yep, definitely a pistol."
Iraqi cops hang back, behind us, next to the cement wall around their police station. They don't say much, maybe a muttered word to each other in Arabic. They look like a group of reform school boys, waiting to see the principal. There may be a good reason they are so quiet. Perhaps it's because we are fairly damn certain that they are the ones that murdered the poor old boy.
Here's the deal. We were at one of our other IP stations, just a few blocks away. We
got a call on the radio from 'maneuver' that there had been a carjacking in our area. This would be the fourth one this week, all right here, in the mahallahs just north of Sadr City. All of the carjacking have been on Dynacorps trucks--usually car carriers hauling uparmored SUVs to and from the various FOBs around Baghdad.
We finished up our routine business at that police station, and, as planned, came over to this one to check in. As we were pulling in, we noticed Grandpa dead in the police truck. The IPs seemed a little surprised to see us. They never know when we are going to show up, which is a good thing. What happened, we asked. Oh, well, this is the driver of the car carrier that got jacked, they replied. Wow, that was quick, we said.
IPs usually hate picking up dead guys. We've had arguments before with them, usually in side alleyways at 2 a.m., about who was going to have to manhandle the most newly discovered corpse and take them away. These guys must be really on the ball, to jet out to the crime scene and scoop up Mr. Hole in the Head so quickly.
I feel sorry for him in a general sort of way, although that emotion has become pretty scarce lately, since he is the fifth or sixth dead guy I have come across in the last month or so. Still, he is someone's father, I'm sure--someone's grandfather, probably. Somewhere, a family will be wailing with grief this afternoon. I don't know what possible threat this man could have posed to anyone, or why some scumbag felt inclined to blow his brains out of the back of his head on this warm afternoon. I add the muted sorrow I feel for the man, and the undercurrent of resentment at whoever did it, to the quiet dark whispers in the back of my skull.
Recent Comments