Chapter 1

Hotel room. $79.

Room service. $135.

Your credit card company calling you telling you that your fiancée's there with another guy...

Priceless.

"Well at least you didn't marry her."

I heard this consolation a lot over the next few years but it provided absolutely no comfort to me at all. We might not yet have stood up in front of the preacher and said "I do" but in my heart I was already tied to her and the breakup was at least as bad for me as a true divorce would have been, but I'm already starting at the wrong place in this story.

It was the early 1980's and I had just returned to 'civilization' after spending nearly two years in Japan with the Air Force and I was now stationed fairly close to home at Kelly AFB in San Antonio, Texas. I was young and enthusiastic about life and was looking forward to finishing up my last military assignment there with as little fuss and bother as possible. I liked my job as an Air Force cop but I had 'plans' for a long and successful post-USAF career which didn't include 'doing twenty', or even more.

I had always wanted to be a cop as a kid but by the time I was out of High School and ready to apply at our local city Police Academy I already knew that my odds of becoming one were pretty long. Our current Mayor was trying to trim (with a huge axe) the city budget, mostly on the backs of the Fire and Police and other service departments, and had cut the number of new cadet classes for each far beyond the bone. New candidates were also now expected to have at least 2 years of College and other outside law enforcement experience before even being possibly considered.

Needless to say they weren't accepting wet behind the ears eighteen year olds this week.

It also goes without saying that within a few years our city now suddenly developed one of the highest crime rates and poorest fire and EMS response times in the nation. The budget never did get fixed (the 'savings' got blown for other pie in the sky projects) and our city services became a national joke. I heard that new Mayors over a decade later were still trying to fix the problems their predecessor had created but that's not really related to my story.

I needed both some college and some 'practical experience'. I had no luck getting on with the local Sherriff's department either so I picked the next best thing. I joined the Air Force and was approved for my first choice LE (Law Enforcement). This certainly beat the alternative of SP (Security Police) that usually meant standing guard duty out on some airplane hanger, runway or bomb storage bunker, usually in the rain and snow.

The job wasn't too bad, but it's never really fun to be a junior enlisted person in any career field. There seemed to always be something urgent happening that would require us to work 12 hour shifts without a day off for a week or two so I didn't get much play time or get to see much of Japan off-base. I did have a very understanding NCOIC (top enlisted boss of my section) who was very pro-education and extremely supportive of young airmen that were more interested in taking night college classes than drinking beer every night at the Airman's Club. He made it clear with my supervisor that I would always be able to take a few hours off to attend my classes even if we were in the middle of a base Alert or working some long extended shift.

Returning to the states for my next assignment, I found that things were a little bit different. Kelly AFB at the time was one of the largest bases we had, but my unit was stationed in a remote annex of the base up on 'Security Hill' out in the middle of nowhere. Shuttle buses to the main part of the base ran irregularly and far between and for all practical purposes, even with a car, if you were stationed there you were pretty much trapped. Even the nearest branch of the local Community College was not close enough to be convenient. Worse, my new work schedule rotated duty shifts every month, which made taking any educational classes virtually impossible.

The new job wasn't bad, but it wasn't nearly as much fun as at my last base. I had been used to duties being rotated about so that everyone got to do a little of everything, disturbance calls to base housing or dorms, traffic control, admin/base ops, some of everything. But here on Security Hill, everything was 100% boring routine, I'd sit at a desk every day and check security badges going in and out of our main building — and dealing with the mountains of paperwork generated by anything else that entering or left the building.

Boring was a vast understatement. Even our enlisted dorm was usually dead quiet with usually nothing interesting ever occurring. My roommate Pat usually went clubbing every weekend but as his tastes ran to country and western music and I preferred 70's Brit Progressive, I didn't often join him at first. Eventually the boredom of either just working or staying in my dorm room gradually changed my mind and on one late weekend evening I joined Pat clubbing and met Beth. As the Beatles song goes, 'and then I saw her standing there'.

She about my age and standing in a corner of the club with a girlfriend, nursing a drink. She seemed rather out of place and not particularly into the music either. Another fellow had asked her to dance earlier and she had accepted, but plainly didn't know how the dance steps went and had to improvise, badly. He spent the remaining dances with her girlfriend instead and she began to look increasing bored and restless.

She wasn't a conventional beauty, but she had something about her that made her stand out from the other, better dressed and dolled up, women in the club. She looked like someone's lost kid sister — the proverbial girl next door who had made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up badly lost in some strange and not entirely friendly new world. Her hair was long and in my favorite auburn brown color but appeared a little lifeless, as did her cheeks. She was apparently wearing very little, if any, makeup and her skin appeared to be a little sallow and blotchy, as if maybe she hadn't been very well lately. She was quite tall and thin, but appeared to hunch her shoulders down a bit as if she were trying to become less conspicuous to hide better into the woodwork.

Still, despite the many surface defects, she had 'something'...

As her girlfriend was now busy dancing on the dance floor, I decided that I at least wanted to talk her.

"Hi, since neither of us seems likely to be dancing anytime soon, I thought I might as well try and help you hold up this part of the wall." Not particularly witty or clever, but it was vaguely original and had the obvious merit of sincerity behind it. She gave me a weak smile but didn't try to escape. We chatted for a bit about what music we 'did' like (definitely not what the C&W club was playing) and compared favorite bands. She liked heavy metal music, especially AC/DC and Ozzie and had never even heard of my favorites, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Yes, and the Grateful Dead. We compromised on our only overlapping band, Led Zeppelin.

An hour later we were having a late dinner/early breakfast at a nearby Denny's, and traded life stories until about 4 in the morning over endless orders of English muffins, which she ate as if she hadn't had a proper meal in days. Actually, she really hadn't. She was staying with some friends sharing an apartment and none of them had the money lately for buying much in the way of groceries. She had a part time job working as a hostess at a local restaurant, but the pay was not very good at all and she didn't get a cut of the tips either.

I saw her again the next Friday night and we had intended to go out to a decent restaurant for dinner and then go see a movie, but we got badly distracted when briefly visiting my dorm room and we never made it out of bed until after 10 p.m. Sleepovers in the dorm by members of the opposite sex were a major 'no-no' and although the odds were very low on getting caught (many guys routinely did it) I didn't feel particularly lucky at the moment so we grudgingly got dressed and had another late night dinner out at Denny's.

The sex had been really good. Neither of us were virgins but we'd both been badly out of circulation for awhile. It had just felt "special" between us and the more we were with each other the harder it became to say 'goodnight'.

We started calling each other nightly and even managed a few quickies during the week until my work schedule did its monthly change and I moved from day shift to swings. Being on swings actually helped our love life. She would get off work about 10 p.m. and take the bus to our favorite Denny's and wait for me to get off of work and get there at about 12:15 a.m. I'd grab a bite to eat and we'd then go to her apartment, make love and I'd crash there most nights and only returning to my dorm room to shower, shave and put on a clean uniform before going into work the next day at 3 p.m.

It only took me about three weeks of this routine to decide that I wanted to marry her and while she was a little reluctant when I asked her, she didn't say no. I pushed for a fairly short engagement and a quick wedding, but she dragged her feet and had numerous minor excuses for why we shouldn't rush.

Her standard fallback excuse was that 'things had been a bit rough for her lately and she was still trying to get her head screwed back on straight.' I should have recognized this for the warning that it was and backed off a bit, slowing things down until she became a little more comfortable. She tended to have a very nervous disposition and she became distracted, frustrated or frazzled very easily with only minor provocation. Her mood began wildly swinging in big up and down cycles. That ought to have given me other warnings.

She also began to alternate between being hyper-affectionate and 'clingy' (which I admit liking sometimes) to being very standoff-ish and even averse to being kissed or touched at all at times. Other times she would be so jittery that she couldn't even sit down. She would talk incessantly and so fast I could hardly understand a word she was saying. In a phase like this, she would go for two to three days seemingly without stopping, let alone sleeping. That should have been yet another warning, of a different kind.

I admit I didn't know very much about women, and could figure out even less why she was suddenly acting so very odd. In the end I just attributed everything to 'engagement nerves' and decided (belatedly) to give her a little bit more space cooling things down enough so that she wouldn't have a complete breakdown before the wedding. The final date, however, remained still much under debate.

I was on my last day of swing shift when I got a strange and fateful phone call at work at about 6:30 p.m. from my Credit Union. One of the few nice things about working up on Security Hill was there was a branch of the local military credit union two buildings down from my dorm building that handled all of my military pay via direct deposit, made low interest car and house loans for military personnel (much better than the national chain banks) and even offered us an ultra-low interest rate VISA card. Since I was now back in the states and needed something for emergency use only I signed up for one, at the time when I set up my other accounts.

As a security measure, I checked the box that said this would be an 'infrequent use' card and give them the right to investigate any and all transactions made on the card and I gave them my duty phone and dorm room phone numbers for immediate contact. In those days before electronic verification and when most places took a carbon imprint of your card, stolen credit card numbers were epidemic (as they still are). At least once a week while in Japan I would have to file a stolen credit card report for other service members that had been victimized and I was determined that it wouldn't happen to me!

But apparently it had. The agent from customer service was asking me if I had just checked into the Marriott Hotel off of I-10 in San Antonio!

Definitely not! I checked my wallet and found that my VISA card was indeed gone. Also the nearly $180 I thought I had in my wallet was now missing.

The gal at Customer Service didn't have any other records of its recent use but most places didn't call or have electronic means of verification of a card, so that didn't exclude the possibility that my card had been already used in other places all over town. I asked for and received a callback number to her and got a fraud case number before hanging up on her to report the situation to the San Antonio Police.