A Living Grave by Robert E. Dunn Page A

means?”
    â€œHoney, I’m a hepcat from way back. Besides, I read it online.”
    â€œUh-huh. It’s still a crime.”
    â€œYeah, but there are crimes and there are crimes . This is basically tax evasion.”
    â€œI’m a cop. And we don’t get to pick and choose the laws we follow.”
    â€œDon’t we?” His question was like a hard foot on the brakes. I felt the burn of a flush creeping up my face. Orson knew me and he knew there have been times in my life I had opted for justice over law. He wasn’t throwing it in my face, though. It was my own guilty conscience doing that. “Ever heard of the Whiskey Rebellion? Ever know anyone who didn’t play a little loose with their tax return?”
    â€œI don’t make enough to worry about my taxes.”
    â€œYou should worry more. You know that since the 1950s—America’s most prosperous years, I might add—the tax burden has been methodically shifted from corporations to the individual?”
    I pressed my fingers to my temples and massaged the ache that bloomed there every time he got started on these things.
    â€œUncle Orson, I’m talking about law, not taxes.”
    â€œThere is no way to disentangle the two. But I’ll tell you this: The mark of a good government is how it chooses to apply law.”
    â€œI don’t need a lecture on good government.”
    That stopped him. He let out a big breath of air, deflating slowly. “I know you don’t, sweetheart. I guess we’ve both seen the best and the worst of that.”
    â€œJust tell me about the whiskey.”
    â€œWhat’s to tell? He sells it to me for five dollars ajar and I sell it to fishermen with more money than sense for twenty. No taxes, all profit.”
    â€œIt sounds like good money, but is it worth violence?”
    â€œWhat violence? Those are the old days, tommy guns and speakeasies. Nobody’s fighting over this anymore.”
    â€œMaybe . . . Can I stay in the boat tonight?”
    â€œYou never have to ask.”
    Uncle Orson had a huge houseboat that stayed parked at the dock. For a long time it had been his home. Now it was my home away from everything and I always asked before I took it over. I told him thanks and stood to head to the hard bed that would rock me gently. Before I made it through the door, he said, “Hang on.” Then he reached behind the counter and tossed over a canning jar filled with clear liquid. “For your professional interest.”
    In Uncle Orson’s defense, he didn’t know how deep my relationship with whiskey went. In my defense I resisted. Darkness, a hazy blowing of memory that sucked up all light, was already enveloping me. My body began trembling and my eyes began crying, but those things were happening without me. I was somewhere else.

Chapter 4
    I felt like it was the end of summer. Not that there was a hint of green or the creeping red-oranges of leaves turning. In Iraq, everything was brownish. Not even a good, earthy brown. Instead, everything within my view was a uniform, wasted, dun color. It was easy to imagine the creator ending up here on the seventh day, out of energy and out of ideas after spending his palate in the joy of painting the rest of the world. This spit of earth, the dirty asshole of creation we called the Triangle of Death, didn’t even rate a decent brown.
    I had been in country for eight months. I had been First Lieutenant Katrina Williams, Military Police, attached to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division for a little over a year. Pride and love had brought me here. Proud to be American and just as proud to have come from a military family, I was in love with what the ROTC at Southwest Missouri State University had shown me about my country’s military. I fell in love with the thought of the woman I would become serving my nation. I wanted to echo the men my father and my uncle were and add