Jungle Rules Read Online Free Page A

lanky frame adjusting uncomfortably to the perch.
    “Yeah, Jon,” O’Connor said, tossing his seabag on top of Kirkwood’s duffel in the back floorboard, and then sliding himself comfortably onto the front seat.
    “I think I know about this Major Dickinson,” Kirkwood said. “They call him Dicky Doo and the Don’ts.”
    Staff Sergeant Pride laughed. “That’s him, sir.”
    “Remember that good-looking lawyer we met back on Okinawa, at the Officers’ Club at Kadina?” Kirkwood added.
    “Manley Tufts,” O’Connor said. “Sure, I recall the guy. Very fit. Good-looking. Like six-foot-two and some couple-hundred pounds. He walked with his arms out so he wouldn’t wrinkle the inside creases on his shirtsleeves. From New Orleans, very aristocratic. Strange fellow.”
    “Right,” Kirkwood said as the jeep now dodged between trucks and other traffic, making its way around the flight line and then down a street to a series of Quonset huts and concrete block buildings all painted tan. “His older brother, Stanley, is also a lawyer, both of them Tulane Law graduates. At any rate, Stanley is here as a prosecutor. So that’s how Manley Tufts came to know about Major Dickinson, and his nickname.”
    “Yeah,” O’Connor said, stepping out of the jeep. “I can hardly wait to meet the Mojo now. Dicky Doo, and I can only imagine how the Don’ts fit in.”
    “Gentlemen,” Staff Sergeant Pride said with a smile, walking to the big red Staff Judge Advocate sign in front of the headquarters, “welcome to First MAW Law.”
    Kirkwood looked at the sergeant, flashed him a goofy grin, and began mimicking rocker Jim Morrison, singing a familiar tune by The Doors, “I got my Mojo working! I got my Mojo working!”
     
HAD BRIAN THOMAS Pitts not gone native six months into his tour, he might have gotten to attend his father’s funeral a year ago. By now he would have long since left South Vietnam and have gotten an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, too. Going on his third season in country, the sandy-haired cowboy from Olathe, Kansas, had come to dismiss nearly any chance of ever seeing home again.
    At random times through the year, he used the telephone of an expatriate American building contractor in Da Nang who had a taste for young girls, reefer, and high-stakes poker. In return for laying off some of the man’s always increasing gambling debt, along with giving him an attractive smoker’s discount, and free visitation one night each month for a romp at the ranch with a farm-fresh virgin, the contractor let Pitts use his company telephone to call his Aunt Winnie Russell, the matronly older sister of his late mother, back home in Olathe.
    Aunt Winnie brought him up to date on family news regarding what little of their kin who now remained aboveground. She tearfully told how they had found his poor father sitting there stone dead in a living room chair, the TV still running and a half-full whiskey bottle on the floor. It was a lovely funeral. An amazing array of flowers surrounded the casket. Nearly all the people at the Calvary Baptist Church came, too. They laid Dad to rest next to Mom, who had died of a brain hemorrhage when Brian was only ten years old. That’s when life got hard for the boy.
    His dad, Roy Pitts, drank more and worked less after his beloved wife, Bess, died. Then Brian moved into a room above Aunt Winnie’s garage, which sat behind her house, just off East Cedar Street, near Highway 50, one of the main routes from Olathe into nearby Kansas City, and trouble.
    Within a few years, the sweet little boy from the Calvary Baptist Sunday school in Olathe became a street-savvy cynic after a tough curriculum of life’s hard lessons taught to him in late-night Kansas City pool halls and backroom gaming dens. By age sixteen, Brian Pitts had already learned that a hooker with a heart of gold will always rob a John cold, cut his throat, and leave him for dead if she thought she could get away with it.