Now her screams were from pain. She held her arm out before her, the wrist angulated at an unnatural angle. "You broke my fuckin' arm, asshole!" she screamed. "You motherfucker!"
"You were trying to kill me," he said, his anger peaking once again. "You fuckin' deserved that, bitch!"
"Get me to the fuckin' hospital!" she cried. "I can't believe you did this shit!"
He didn't get her to the hospital. He did what any ghetto inhabitant would do under the circumstances and called for the dip-hoes to take her. They showed up fifteen minutes later, accompanied by two Eden police officers. In that time she continued to rant and scream and cry but she did maintain enough sense of propriety to at least put her clothes on.
"So what happened here?" one of the cops asked while the dip-hoes went about the task of putting a splint on her.
"He broke my fuckin' arm!" Belinda screamed. "He twisted it until it popped!"
"Is that true?" the cop asked him.
"She was trying to stab me with a steak knife," Jeff replied. "I grabbed her arm and twisted it until it dropped. Her arm broke while I was doing that."
The two cops looked at each other, and then at Jeff, and then at Belinda, who was still ranting about abusive husbands.
"You just came home from the line?" the first asked.
"Yeah," he said. "17th ACR. I came to tell her I was through with her and she didn't like it very much."
"You fuckin' liar!" Belinda screamed. "He's a fucking cook in the MPG! He was never near the line! And he came home and tried to fuck me after being away for months! When I told him no he broke my fuckin' arm just to hear me scream!"
The cops ignored her. "17th ACR huh?" the second one asked. "You were in the gap?"
He nodded. "Infantry," he said. "I've spent the last eight days in a biosuit in the trenches killing Earthling marines. This is my welfare wife, the one I was programmed to marry before Laura Whiting. I don't want her anymore and I came home to tell her that. She didn't like it much. I didn't mean to break her arm but she was throwin' shit at me — look at my head." He turned so they could see the large goose egg that had formed on his skull.
"That's a nasty bump all right," the first cop said.
"I was trying to fight him off when he started beatin' me!" Belinda yelled.
"She threw a vase at me," Jeff went on, ignoring the interruption. "I pushed her off me a few times and then she picked up the knife and was trying to kill me with it. That's when I broke her arm."
"He's a fuckin' liar!" Belinda yelled. "He came back here looking for some pussy after cooking for the rear echelon motherfuckers and broke my arm when I wouldn't give it up! I wanna press charges against his ass! Take him to fuckin' jail!"
Jeff was angry again. "She's lying, officers," he told them. "But maybe you oughtta take her ass to fuckin' jail instead."
"Are you saying you want to file charges against her?" the first cop asked.
Jeff smiled. "No," he said. "It ain't worth my time. But you know something?"
"What?" the cop asked.
Belinda seemed to realize what he was about to do. "Don't you say shit, asshole!" she screamed. "You do and I know people that will kill your stupid ass!"
He looked at her, triumph in his eyes. "She's hoarding cigarettes, beer, Fruity, and coffee," he told the cops. "She's got a shitload of all of it in this apartment right now. You want me to show you?"
"Hoarding?" the cops said in unison, their eyes widening in anger.
"He's a fucking liar!" Belinda screamed. "That shit is all his! He's been making me buy it and sell it and put it in our fucking bank account!"
One of the cops stayed with Belinda while Jeff led the other into the kitchen and then to the bedroom closet. The cop grew angrier and angrier at each stack of contraband he counted and became particularly incensed by the presence of so much coffee.
"I haven't even had a cup of the welfare coffee in six days and your bitch is sitting on two hundred keys of Costa Rican prime!"
"She ain't my bitch anymore," Jeff told him. "You gonna arrest her, or what?"
"Does a rump ranger like a rimjob?" the cop replied. "She's spouting off about the shit being yours. I trust there's no truth to that?"
"I just got back from combat deployment half an hour ago."
"That's easy enough to check out but she's gonna say that you were running things while you were away, that she was afraid of you."
"So you gonna arrest me too?" he asked.
"Well..." the cop said thoughtfully. "If you were to consent to allow me to examine the communications usage on your PC that might go a long way toward clearing this up."
Jeff shrugged and took out his PC. "Computer, display last two monthly personal communication statements."
"Displaying," the PC replied. Jeff handed it to the cop.
He took it and examined the screen for a few minutes, scrolling from top to bottom. There truthfully wasn't much to look at. "Nothing at all to or from your wife in the past six weeks," he finally said. "It would be kind of hard to run a black market booze, coffee, and cigarette operation from the line without communication, wouldn't it?"
"Fuckin' aye," Jeff agreed.
"And six weeks ago we weren't having the shortages so there really wasn't much of a black market yet."
"True," Jeff said, feeling something like friendliness towards a cop for the first time in his life.
"Okay then," the cop said. "Let me run you through the system and make sure your MPG story checks out. If it does, you're in the clear."
"Sounds like an ass-fuck," Jeff said.
His story checked out, of course. They went back in the living room where Belinda was still drunkenly yelling that she'd been forced to sell all the contraband by Jeff under threat of beatings and even murder.
"She admitted she's selling the shit?" the first cop asked the second. "Not just hoarding it?"
"Oh yeah," the second cop replied. "She even told me how much she charges."
"How much he makes me charge," she corrected.
"Of course," the first cop said. "In any case, you're under arrest for..."
"Me?" she screamed, leaping to her feet. "Haven't you been listening to me? I told you..."
"You are under arrest," he repeated, overriding her. "The charges are hoarding war shortage items and profiteering from war shortage items. We'll investigate to see if any of this shit is stolen and if it is, we'll add a possession of stolen property charge as well."
She began to rant at them. After a minute or so of this, she ran at them, unmindful of the broken wrist. She was wrestled onto the dip-hoes' gurney and her good arm was handcuffed to the side rail. She then tried to strike them with her bad arm and kick them with her feet. They tied her feet down and put another set of handcuffs on the broken arm. The dip-hoes wheeled her away, still screaming, cop number two accompanying them.
When they were gone the first cop looked at Jeff pointedly. "I can't imagine why you would want to divorce that sweet woman."
Jeff smiled wearily, more embarrassed than anything else. "Mars has moved on," he said. "She didn't move on with it."
The cop nodded and then did something that no uniformed police officer had ever done to him before. He held out his hand for a shake and introduced himself. "Zogan Ishiyudo," he said.
Surprised, Jeff shook with him. "Nice to meet you," he said.
"No, it's me who is honored to meet you," Zogan told him. "I'm standing in a city that's still free and unoccupied by WestHem marines because of you and people like you. Let me be the first to thank you sincerely for what you're doing."
Jeff was surprised to find himself near tears for a moment. He choked them back. "I'm just doing what's right," he said, his voice not quite steady. "All of us are."