Chapter 3 - The Suffocation of Arthur Whitmore
The crack of Natalie’s sudden shout broke the last barrier of restraint in the room.
"Get your hands off my dress, Dad!" Natalie hissed, her voice sharp and ugly. She smoothed the silk with furious, jerky motions. "You have any idea how much this cost? You think I was going to spend my entire twenties and thirties wiping your chin and listening to you choke on your own spit for free?"
The entire ballroom seemed to tilt on its axis.
General Vance, the four-star commander of Army Materiel Command who had been sitting three tables away, rose from his seat. His face was thunderous. He didn't look like a bureaucrat; he looked like a soldier about to order an execution. Behind him, three other general officers stood up, their medals clinking in the furious silence.
"You miserable little monster," someone growled from the front table.
Gloria, seeing the social cliff crumbling beneath their feet, lunged forward. But she didn't grab Natalie to scold her. She grabbed Evan’s arm. "Evan, we’re leaving. Right now. Call the car. We don't have to listen to these fabrications."
"Nobody is leaving," Jack Mercer said.
Two active-duty Master-at-Arms in white dress belts and sidearms stepped out from the entryway, flanking the double mahogany doors. They didn't draw their weapons, but their hands rested firmly on their holsters.
Evan spun around, his chest heaving, trapped like a rat in a corner. His arrogance turned into cornered feral rage. He pointed a trembling, manicured finger at me.
"You did this!" Evan screamed, his voice breaking into a high-pitched shriek. "You set this up! You came here tonight to destroy us! You think you’re better than us because you put on that stupid uniform? You’re nothing! You’re just the ungrateful bitch who ran away! You left me to deal with this broken old bastard! You left us with the bills!"
"One point four million dollars, Evan," I said. My voice was low, vibrating with an ancient, bone-deep anger. I took one step toward him. "I slept on a cot in a berthing compartment with sixty-four other sailors while you took trips to Monaco. I ate pre-packaged rations in combat zones while you bought five-thousand-dollar suits. I bled in the red dirt of Djibouti while you bought sports cars with my hazardous duty pay!"
"It was our money!" Evan screamed back, losing all control. "He was OUR father! You gave up your rights when you walked out that door at eighteen! You abandoned this family!"
"I walked out that door because Mother told me that if I didn't marry Arthur's business partner’s fifty-year-old son to clear the mortgage, I was dead to her!"
The truth exploded into the open air of the Mayflower ballroom.
Gloria flinched as if she had been struck with a bullwhip.
"You... you told her to do what?" Arthur’s voice was suddenly clearer, sharp with a father’s horrifying realization. He gripped the arms of his wheelchair, his knuckles turning white as he dragged his withered torso upright. "Gloria... what did you say to her?"
Gloria couldn't answer. Her jaw worked soundlessly, like a landed fish gasping for water.
"You told me she deserted us," Arthur whispered, tears cutting deep tracks through the dust and age of his wrinkled cheeks. "You told me she hated the military. You told me she joined the Navy just to insult my Army service. You told me... she never called."
"She didn't call!" Gloria shrieked defensively. "She never called this house!"
"Because you changed the number four times and sent every letter I mailed back with 'RETURN TO SENDER: DECEASED' written on the envelope!" I roared.
The sound of my voice shook the crystal pendants on the chandeliers above us.
Twenty-five years of silence. Twenty-five years of standing on the flight deck at 0200 hours, staring out into the pitch-black void of the Pacific Ocean, wondering why my mother hated me, wondering why my father never answered my letters, wondering if I had truly been so vile a child that my own flesh and blood could erase me like a pencil mark on a chart.
And all along, it had been a systematic, cold-blooded execution of my existence—while they milked my veins dry to fund their country-club lifestyle.
Arthur began to sob. It was a terrible, hacking, wet sound. The sound of an old warrior realizing that his entire domestic life had been a cage built by hyenas.
And then, his monitor began to shriek.
The Inogen concentrator, struggling against the sudden spike in his heart rate and blood pressure, emitted a high-pitched, rhythmic alarm: **WARNING: HIGH RESPIRATORY RATE. O2 SATURATION DROPPING.**
Arthur collapsed forward against the safety harness of the wheelchair. His hands clamped onto his throat. His lips were no longer slate-colored; they were turning the dark, bruised purple of plums.
"Dad!" I fell back to my knees beside him.
I grabbed his wrist. His pulse was thready, fluttering at over one hundred and sixty beats per minute. His chest was heaving with terrifying, empty spasms. He wasn't taking in air. His lungs were seizing.
"Call a bus!" I yelled over my shoulder, using the military slang for an ambulance. "Medic! I need an oxygen tank and an airway kit right now!"
"I’m on it, Admiral!" a young Navy lieutenant yelled from the second row, pulling out his radio and sprinting toward the hotel lobby.
I reached for the concentrator’s controls. The screen was flashing an error code: *E-04: SYSTEM INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.*
I whipped the unit around. On the underside of the plastic housing, near the intake filter, a small piece of clear packing tape had been smoothed across the air vents.
It hadn't just been turned down to one liter per minute.
The intake had been deliberately suffocated.
The machine was pulling against a vacuum, overheating its pump, delivering nothing but a fraction of ambient room air.
I looked up.
Natalie was backing toward the side exit, her eyes wide, darting from the dying old man to the double doors. Her pink silk clutch was clutched against her ribs like a football.
"Natalie," I whispered.
She froze.
"You didn't just steal the money," I said, the words falling from my lips like cold lead. "The doctor told you last month that his condition was stabilizing, didn't he? He told you Dad might live another five years if he stayed on the new medication."
Natalie swallowed hard. Her lower lip began to tremble, but there was no remorse in her eyes—only the cold, calculating panic of a parasite whose host was taking too long to die.
"He was supposed to pass in the hospice wing last winter," Natalie whispered, her voice barely audible, but picked up by the lapel microphone still clipped to my uniform. "The trust had an acceleration clause. If Dad died of natural complications before the end of the fiscal year, the remainder of the blind trust principal... all eight hundred thousand left in the offshore reserve... converted directly to me as the sole primary caregiver."
The room inhaled as one.
"You turned down the dial," Jack Mercer said, stepping directly into Natalie’s path, blocking the exit with his massive frame. "You taped the vent. You brought him to a crowded ballroom at seven thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by four hundred people, knowing the ambient oxygen would be low."
"It was time!" Natalie screamed, completely breaking down into hysterics. "He was seventy-six years old! He couldn't even wipe his own ass! Why should he get to linger for five more years while I waste my youth sitting in that smelling old house? I gave him six years! I earned that money! I earned every single dollar Claire sent!"
A loud, violent *CRACK* split the air.
Evan didn't get to run.
Commander Jack Mercer didn't hit him with an open palm. He caught Evan by the silk lapels of his custom tuxedo, lifted the forty-one-year-old man six inches off the parquet floor, and slammed him spine-first against the nearest decorative marble pillar.
The sound of Evan’s breath exploding from his lungs echoed like a gunshot.
"You struck a flag officer," Jack growled, his face inches from Evan’s terrified, tear-streaked face. "Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, you’re civilian trash. But under District of Columbia code, you just committed felony assault on a federal official in uniform."
Jack twisted Evan’s arms behind his back with the practiced, merciless efficiency of a combat operator. A pair of steel cuffs clicked onto Evan’s wrists before the man could even scream.
"And as for you, miss," Jack turned his cold eyes toward Natalie, who was cowering against the wall. "Attempted murder of a retired military officer carries a life sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks or federal penitentiary."
Two uniformed Metro DC police officers, accompanied by the NCIS agents, burst through the side doors.
"Hands behind your back, miss," the lead NCIS agent barked, moving past the stunned veterans with weapons drawn at low-ready. "Do not move. Keep your hands where we can see them!"
I didn't watch them cuff my sister. I didn't watch my mother collapse onto an empty banquet chair, wailing that her life was ruined, that the papers would destroy her reputation, that she was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
I didn't care about their ruined lives.
My father was dying on the floor in front of me.
I ripped the useless, sabotaged plastic mask off his face. I leaned down, tilted his gray head back, pinched his nose, and pressed my mouth to his cold, cracked lips.
May you like
*Breathe, Dad,* I screamed in my heart as I forced my own air into his withered lungs. *Breathe. Don't you dare die in front of these hyenas. You survived three tours in the jungle. You survive tonight.*
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