Shockwave (11 page)

“Me,
I
don’t. I never met a man who actually does. But your wife, she’s not confused, is she?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Whatever she ‘thinks’ you can do, it’s because she knows you can. And not from hearing you talk about it.”

“W
hat’s next?”

“Waiting,” I said to Mack. “I’m sorry about this Homer guy, but without seeing what cards they’re actually holding, there’s no way to start. What we really want is the dead guy’s rap sheet. The cops wouldn’t have to investigate to get that—they ID’ed him from his prints, so you know they’re holding
some
kind of paper. You wouldn’t happen to have a friend on the force, would you?”

“No” was all he said.

“Place like this—this town, it’s not sealed.”

“Sealed?”

“Like a prison is sealed. Prison guards find a dead man, them knowing who
couldn’t
have done it narrows it down. Sometimes, way down. Here, people come and go all the time.
Take the tourists out of the mix and what do you have? A little fishing village, right?”

“That’s about it, yeah.”

“Try it this way: take out all the businesses that don’t depend on visitors, what’s left?”

“Okay, I got it,” he said, just enough annoyance in his tone to tell me he’d gotten it the first time.

“I know there’s some wealthy people here. Has to be, to afford some of the houses you see once in a while. But people like that, they don’t have to
buy
local. Maybe wouldn’t even want to.”

“So what you’re saying, we know Homer didn’t do it. Add the runaway kids to that list. And probably throw in the permanents, too. I can’t see some circuit riders stopping off just to kill that particular guy. What’s that leave?”

“One more thing, for starters,” I said.

“What?”

“We’re talking about a killing, not an accident.”

“So?”

“The dead guy, he couldn’t have been out of prison long.”

“You’re thinking a shot-caller from that same joint put out a ticket on him?” Mack said, like he was thinking out loud.

“Maybe. But I don’t know of any big White Power operation anywhere around here.”

“Me, neither. Eugene wouldn’t be such a good place for them, either. But Vancouver—not Canada, in Washington, just the other side of the bridge from Portland—that’s pretty close, only a few hours away. Or, you want to go far enough northeast of here, there’s all kinds of …”

“Okay. But we
still
need to get a look at the dead guy’s prison record. Not just what he went down for, what he got into while he was inside. Those tattoos—they’ll tell us something. At least one thing, for sure.”

“What?”

“Whether they were there before he went in. Or if some were there already but others got added. This isn’t California—race war isn’t on the menu every day.”

“So?”

“So he wouldn’t necessarily need a gang to stay safe while he was locked up. Guy was well put together, not a natural target. And we know ‘hate crime’ means he did something that would carry status with some convicts. But if he was down on the prison books as ‘affiliated,’ he could have been involved in something during his last stretch that’d carry past the walls.”

“Revenge?”

“One kind or another, maybe. There’s almost no blacks around here. Plenty of Mexicans, but I’ve never seen ink on any of them.”

“They’re not migrant laborers. They live here.”

“So?”

“So how many have you seen with their shirts off?” he said, almost defensively.

“Faces and hands, I’ve seen. And plenty of those. No tears on their faces, no numbers on their forearms, no
pachuco
crosses.”

“Okay.” He shrugged. Meaning he didn’t know what I was talking about, but it didn’t matter.

“The dead guy might have told some stories, like I said before. Or maybe he was supposed to pick up a package and turn it into money. Could be he did that, only he kept the money for himself.”

“You think that’s likely around here? Meth is
the
drug—and the local stuff is supposed to be so good, people actually drive down from the north just to buy. But that’s all home-brewed. Heroin is starting to make a little comeback, only not enough for a big sale, not here.”

“Yeah. Any package would be powder, anyway … and that market’s not here. Still, that’d be a reason. Maybe not the best one, but …”

“What?”

“If this guy had been told where a few keys were stashed, and he grabbed it for himself, he’d deny it as long as he could. This isn’t a movie set—they’d have him shrieking in five minutes. Once they checked on his story—found either the powder or the cash—they’d kill him right there. Wherever they’d already taken him to.

“So why walk him out on that cliff? A gunshot would carry like a sonic boom. They couldn’t rely on weather—nobody around here can—so they’d have a whole mess of porous rock to scrub down if they clubbed him to death. If they planned on dumping him in the ocean, they would have known enough to gut him first—a knife would do that, and they’d have one handy for sure.

“Except they
didn’t
open him up. So the only thing we know for sure is that there was more than one man in on it. As for that porous rock, you said it yourself—it rains all the time, like a natural scrub-down. Besides, they wouldn’t worry about the cops collecting anything from the spot where they finished him. Even if they somehow got the idea to check the top of that outcropping, you know how many tourists pass over that same spot every day?”

I could hear “How does this guy know so much about killing?” running thru Mack’s head, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “How do you know there was more than one man in on it?” is all he said.

“Whatever was used to crack through his skull, it wouldn’t be something you could hide under your coat. And who turns his back on someone he thinks might be a threat? Prison alone would have taught him at least that much.”

We were quiet for a couple of seconds. Then my phone rang.

“C
ome home” is all Dolly said.

I could tell from the tone of her voice that this wasn’t some “Help!” thing. And she hadn’t used any of the signals, either. So I told Mack I’d find him later. Meaning, “Drop me off and keep going.”

When I walked in, Dolly pointed toward the basement and raised her eyebrows. She wouldn’t go down there without me, and there wasn’t enough privacy upstairs to show me whatever she wanted transferred from that camera-phone I’d given her.

“That’s the skull,” she said, pointing at the X-ray shot projected against a five-foot square of whiteboard I’d put up in the basement. “See the intrusion line? It was one blow, powerful enough to penetrate all the way to the brain.”

“So he never saw it coming?”

“Probably not. Even the slightest movement—or even a sound like a sharp intake of breath—would have altered those intrusion lines. This looks almost … surgical.”

“Un piton?”
I wondered aloud. Nobody would need one to climb to the top of the promontory I’d explored … but nobody would look twice at one dangling from a man’s belt, not around here.

“A mountain climber’s spike? I guess it could be. But why would a killer use something like … that thing?”

“One shot; one kill.”

“I’m not following you.”

“A sniper only gets one shot—if he misses, or even if he just wounds the target, it’s worse than if he’d never tried. Look,” I said, using the arrow pointer to show her, “there’s that … ‘intrusion line’ you called it … but the skull’s missing a whole wedge, like a triangle was pulled out. Whoever took this guy out, he was good. And he’d done it before, to
get
that good.”

“So they brought him up to that spot on purpose. That’s where they
wanted
to kill him.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“That means it happened
here
, Dell.”

“Happened here? Sure. But that doesn’t mean the dead guy was
living
here. There’s a million ways to explain why whoever killed him took him up on those rocks.”

“Mack wants—”

“I don’t give a damn what Mack wants. You want me to run around, sticking my nose in places, taking chances, just so some crazy man can get turned loose?”

“If you had let me finish, I would have said that Homer isn’t why I have to do this. I don’t care where the dead man was from. He’s gone now. But if the
killers
are here—
live
here, I mean—how long is it going to be before they do the same thing to someone else?”

“Kill more Nazis? Good for them.”

“Will you stop? You know exactly what I’m saying, Dell. Whoever did that … killing, he was good at it—you said so yourself. Someone like that, he didn’t learn without practice. Maybe a lot of practice. You said
that
, too.”

“Dolly, we don’t even know if there are any ‘people like that’ around here anymore. It’s much more likely that they had a job to do, got it done, and moved on.”

“Then it’ll be easy.”

“Easy?”

“Easy for you, Dell. But—damn!—let me show you the slides of the tattoos first.”

W
hy Dolly thought the slides would tell me anything, I don’t know.

There was a lot of ink. All pointing in the same direction, sure—but that direction had been the dead man’s choice. Personal.
Maybe whoever took him out was doing everybody around here a favor.

“Well?” she finally demanded.

“Well, what, baby? I’m no expert on tattoos. So this guy was a Nazi, or a skinhead, or whatever they’re called now. But—”

“He had those tattoos a long time, Dell. For such a young man, I mean.”

“So?”

“So he got them in prison.”

“Maybe,” I said, not convinced. Pain tolerance varies. And motivation can give it one hell of a boost. Maybe he was out on bail, but he knew he was going to prison when his case was over, so he got his whole skin done in just a few sessions.

Dolly read my thoughts. “Look at them
close
, baby. They look pretty amateurish, don’t they?”

“You’re saying he got them the
first
time he went in? And, back then, he might have made a choice he couldn’t walk away from later?”

“Wouldn’t finding out be worth something?”

“I don’t see—”

“Please.”

“Dolly, honey, I could find a tattoo guy easy enough. But I wouldn’t know what questions to ask. And I’m not showing anyone those close-up pictures they took in the morgue—that would put
me
too close.”

I didn’t have to say the rest of it: I’d take risks if I had to, but not for other people. The only “had to” in my life was Dolly.

“I know you can’t ask around here. But you could find someone, Dell. I know you could.”

Damn.

T
he man’s head was shaved, with a long ponytail growing out of the back, Mongol-style.

His face was some kind of Mediterranean mix, so his hair was a style preference, not ancestor homage. But his outfit was all business: a sleeveless red smock over a black jersey shirt that didn’t quite reach his elbows, chinos, and black Mephisto shoes—the kind you could stand in for hours at a time in comfort.

I dialed in closer. His ropy arms were covered in fine-art tattooing, but his hands were unmarked. And as well kept as a dermatologist’s. I could see all that because I’d walked into his shop right behind him.

After watching for a week, I was reasonably sure the pattern never varied. He was the boss, so he opened the place every day, always before eight in the morning. The shop never got any real business before mid-afternoon, but he always used the empty time well: checked every station, inspected the bathroom and the refrigerator, cleaned either or both if they needed it. He turned on a bunch of different kinds of lights, some just for a test, others he left on. I knew he’d put some cash into the till he emptied when he left every night, always past midnight. Then he worked on the books, did some sketching. Even had his lunch delivered, so he never left the place.

He was always the last one out, too.

That’s when I’d call Dolly on a burner cell, say, “Working,” and turn it off. Then I’d smash it and drop the pieces in various spots I’d scouted during the day. If some cop ever found an excuse to run the LUDs on Dolly’s phone, she’d just say the same idiot had called her every night, had some kind of weird accent, said some word she couldn’t quite make out, and hung up.

Finding places to stay—places that took cash and didn’t waste money on security cams—was easy enough if you
weren’t too fussy. I was trained better than that—you get too fussy in the field, you’ve got a good chance of becoming part of the ground.

The boss man looked up as I stepped in. He didn’t move as I walked over to his spot. He was all the way in the back, but the corner-mounted mirrors would let him see everything that was going on.

I sat down in the reclining chair closest to him, but I left my jacket on, so he’d know I wasn’t there for a tattoo. I put five hundred-dollar bills on the armrest, fanning them slightly, so he could see how many there were. When he came over, I started talking.

When I was finished, he said, “You ask a lot of questions, friend.”

“I’m not your friend,” I said, toning my voice to make sure that he understood I was saying it neutral. And that he wouldn’t want me to move off that spot. “I’m looking for someone. All I know is that he’s got a lot of tattoos. It would help me if I knew a way to tell if they were professionally done, like yours were.”

The man shrugged his shoulders. “Charging money doesn’t make you a professional.”

“It makes me one,” I told him, nodding my head toward the money I’d put down.

He nodded, too. But slowly, letting me see he was thinking it over.

“This person you’re looking for, you know he didn’t get the work done here.”

He said it like a statement, but I could feel the question in his voice. So I said: “If I did, I’d already know the work was done by a pro. And I wouldn’t need to ask you any questions to find him, either.”

“Maybe you’re looking for someone who works here.”

“If they worked here, they’d have to leave sometime. And then I—”