Shockwave (18 page)

“So he was moving south, and they must have caught up with him somewhere close to here. Done the job here, anyway. I said it’d take at least two; three would have made it easier.”

“You know what they look like now?”

“Nothing worthwhile. The description we got would fit damn near any of them. Even the guy who inked the side of his head—there’s plenty who do that.”

“They could be anywhere by now,” Mack said. “Probably north or east of here, but even that’s not any sure thing.”

“This is,” I said. “They were chasing the dead guy. And when they found him, they killed him. It doesn’t sound personal.”

“They weren’t bounty hunters,” Mack said. “Not with all that—”

“No, they weren’t working for money. But they did sound like a specialized team.”

“I think so, too,” Dolly added.

“Why?” Mack asked her. I could hear the surprise in his voice—surprise that Dolly would know anything about hunter-killer teams.

“They put in a lot of miles chasing him,” she explained, ticking points off on her fingertips. “A lot of time, too. If they had a car, it was one they could drop off and pick up later. That’s teamwork, right there—because, every time they made an appearance, it was all three of them, okay? But the
way
they killed him, that’s really the key.”

“Bashing his head in?”

“They didn’t bash his head in,” Dolly said, firmly. “It was a single strike. Very precise, and absolutely silent. And they used a weapon that’s not illegal to carry around, so even if they were stopped they couldn’t be held.”

“They could be if one of them had wants or warrants out,” Mack said, like Dolly wouldn’t know that.

“Which means they didn’t,” I said—quickly, before my wife got … the way she can get sometimes, even with people she liked. “And what I said before, about them pretty much looking like a thousand others, that’s a blend-in they’d
need
if they’re really that specialized,” I added.

“So they got the job done and—what?—split up?”

“Or stayed together,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter. What we know they
didn’t
do was stick around. And you can bet your life they all have alibis covering them before, during, and after.”

“Fuck!” Mack muttered.

I didn’t have anything to add to his bleak summary.

“W
e’re not giving up,” Dolly said.

Mack waited until he’d swallowed another bite from the sandwiches Dolly made us eat. She’d taken a fresh baguette, cut off the ends, scooped out the insides, and stuffed them full of this salad she makes out of fresh-caught tuna, leafy greens, and red onions.

“Then … what?” is all he said.

Dolly kind of wheeled in my direction. Meaning I’d better come up with something. Quick.

Thing is, I had. All I did was say it out loud: “Isn’t there a cop, a detective? Lancer, I think his name is.”

“Yes,” my wife said. Meaning: Yes, there was a cop she trusted.

“With Mack’s knowledge—about Homer, knowing him personally, I’m saying—and some reconstruction work, maybe we can convince him that they’re holding the wrong man.”

“You know this place,” Dolly said. “The DA’s already had his little press conference. We’d need more than one cop who—”

“Lancer doesn’t like that piece of weak pastry,” I cut her off. “He’d go on record saying Homer couldn’t have done it. If we really convinced him, that is.”

“He would,” she agreed. “The cops don’t have much use for the DA generally, and they all respect Lancer. But that
still
wouldn’t get Homer out.”

“I don’t think so, either.”

“Then …?” she said, struggling to keep her hands off her hips in front of company.

“If this wasn’t personal, the team hunting the dead guy, somebody had to send them.”

“What, Skinhead Central?” Mack said, just slightly to the side of sarcasm.

“I did some reading,” I said, ignoring his tone. “On the library computer. There was a killing in Portland quite a while
back, maybe twenty-five years ago. Some kind of new-style Nazis beat a black guy to death. For no reason, just to fly their flag. The guy they killed was from Ethiopia, but this was before all this ‘blame the immigrants for everything’ stuff made it over here; the killing was just about his color.

“They all pleaded guilty. Anyway, the man who set them in motion, he wasn’t even in the state when it went down. And when I say ‘man,’ I mean a guy twice their age.”

“Did he go on trial with them?”

“No. They all took pleas. The one who got the longest sentence died in prison. Not the way you might think—some disease he picked up.

“A few years later, one of this older guy’s followers testified that it was him—the older guy, I mean—who had pretty much told them what they had to do. That turned into a different trial. A civil lawsuit. The family of the man who was killed, they sued him. And the jury ruled against him. Couldn’t put him in jail, but they bankrupted him, even took the house he owned.”

“Okay …” Mack said, slowly. “But even if there’s some kind of big boss who sent those three guys out to hunt this guy down, you’re saying we’d have to not only catch those guys, we’d have to prove they did it. We wouldn’t need any lawsuit to—”

“That lawsuit was enough to show the feds somebody was pulling the strings.”

“So what?”

“So it’s something they’d file away and remember. The feds have limits to their jurisdiction—they can only work inside America. Sometimes that helps them. The World Trade Center, they made sure the CIA took the blame for that. Bad intel, they should have seen it coming … whatever.”

“That’s a pile of—”

“What difference? You think the CIA didn’t blame the FBI
for Oklahoma City? But that backfired—they haven’t had so many politicians looking the other way since Hoover. Homegrown terrorists, they scare the hell out of people—people who vote. It’d be a lot easier for the FBI to infiltrate some White Power organization than any Muslim one, so funding for that
alone
has to be way up, and they’d do just about anything to keep that faucet flowing. But they haven’t shown much return on the investment, and they could be getting desperate.”

“Still, so what? It’s not like we could just go to the nearest FBI office and ask them if they heard anything about a murder in some little town. I mean, we could, but no way they’d talk to us.”

“I might know somebody,” I said, feeling my wife’s hands on my shoulders.

W
hen I’d first started getting buy-or-sell instructions on gold futures, whoever was sending the messages had been plugged in everywhere. All he’d ever asked of me—and that was years after getting the financial instructions that made it unnecessary for me to work—was to go back to work. One job only.

Refusal was out of the question. Not because this man was connected to the ID genius who’d made a past life for me and Dolly both. No, in my mind—maybe in my heart—it was as if Luc was calling out to me.

“T
hey’re gone,” I told Dolly, when I sat down in the kitchen. “And they won’t be back.”

“You’re sure?” she asked, the way she held her head telling me she wasn’t expecting Mack to answer the question.

“I am,” I told her. “They were tracking that guy whose body washed up on the beach. I don’t know where he started from, but for sure he passed through Vancouver, heading south. I think he got way past here—maybe even down to California. But then turned around and came back this way. I don’t know if he was trying to shake off his pursuit, or found he wasn’t welcome where he first stopped.”

“So there’s nothing special about it happening here? This is just where they caught up to him?”

“That’s right. So why would they stay around? They could be anyplace by now. Maybe even split up. Depends on whether they’re a working team or just three different men recruited for this one job.”

“So what do we—?”

“Can you get hold of a few skulls?”

“Like … specimens, you mean?”

“No. I know you can just buy those. But if you’re going to try and sell Lancer on a reconstruction, they wouldn’t be any good.”

“How come?”

“The skulls you can buy, they come bleached. That’s okay, but they also come hollow. So if you hit them with that mountain ax …”

“They’d shatter. Okay, I see what you’re saying, but …”

“We’d need a cadaver.”

“Dell,” she said, very softly.

“What?”

“I trust Lancer enough to say he’s an honest cop. One with
a conscience, too. But the key word is still ‘cop.’ And I don’t trust him
that
much.”

“I wasn’t going to bring him a new body, baby.”

“What, then? Go grave-robbing?”

“No. That’s too much risk. But the coroner’s office—”

“Even if you could get in, what if the dead man’s family wanted to bury him? You know, have a ceremony and everything? If the corpse turned up missing …”

“Couldn’t we find out which ones don’t have family? Or the ones supposed to be cremated?”

“Maybe … But that’s almost as big a risk. Just asking around, I mean.”

“No, it’s not,” Mack said. His voice was lower-pitched than Dolly’s, but no louder. “The morgue attendant, the guy who works nights, he’s … bent.”

“You mean he’d take money to—”

“No.” His cut-off was knife-edged. “I mean he … he plays with the bodies.”

“How could you know that?”

“I’m not supposed to. But remember, I’ve got a private practice, too.”

Dolly and I waited, long enough to be sure Mack wasn’t going to add anything. We could take his word or not—and he’d already shown enough to erase the “not.”

I
knew Dolly trusted Mack, or this whole mess never would have started.

But I didn’t know how deep that trust ran, and it was past midnight before I could ask her.

We were in bed. Rascal was in his spot, just outside the door that we never closed. Perfect guard position. I’d like to say I’d trained him to do that, but he’d picked it himself. Even when I
got him a beautiful piece of sheepskin to sleep on and placed it near the bed, he’d just picked it up in his teeth and dragged it over to where
he
wanted it.

That shelter-rescue mutt was the second-most-stubborn thing in our house.

The bedroom was at the end of a long corridor, behind two corners. Its row of long and narrow windows were all above us, on the slanting roof. We could open them by pushing buttons, and they had screens, so we almost always had perfect ventilation.

The windows were too narrow for a man to climb inside, but plenty wide enough to shoot through. And even if someone managed to get past all the other stuff I had in place, the only way to reach the windows would be to get up on the roof from the other side and then move down. No way to do that quietly, or without tripping the sensors. And what looked like cedar-shake shingles just above those slotted windows were slicker than greased Teflon.

The
most
stubborn didn’t make an appearance until I put a couple of baseball grenades on a little shelf next to my side of the bed—the one closer to the door.

“No” was all Dolly said.

“They’re just in case—”

“I know what they’re for, Dell. And I can live with everything else you’ve got stacked around here. But if a whole squad charged down the corridor, and you … used those things, Rascal would get blown to bits, too.”

“He’s a soldier, honey. He’s got to do his job. You see the way he keeps moving back into position, no matter what I do.”

“No.”

I hadn’t wasted my breath trying for the third “no.” Dolly had every kind of animal you could imagine out back—thuggish jays, crow-raven hybrids, chipmunks the size of squirrels, at least one covey of quail every season, a mated pair of white
doves, even a damn woodpecker that kept trying to hammer his way into the wooden beam between the roof and the walls until I built him a few nesting boxes in self-defense. It was like a game preserve out there, everything growing wild.

But this alone wouldn’t have been enough to attract all those different creatures. Dolly and Rascal split that job. Dolly threw buckets of peanuts—what she called “slopping the jays”—kept dozen of feeders full, even planted butterfly bushes and separate clumps of fuchsia so the hummingbirds had enough room to set up their territories without buzz-bombing each other. Dolly hated it when any of the creatures got into fights.

Rascal only had one day-job: keep the place a cat-free zone. Even if he was snoozing in the condo-sized doghouse I’d built for him, the instant he heard the birds screech a certain way, he’d bolt out like a feline-seeking missile.

That mutt was equal-opportunity homicidal. He’d treat a feral cat skulking the same as he would some fancy-breed thing prancing around like royalty—if Rascal nailed it, it was a goner. I couldn’t tell one jay’s screech from another, but Rascal could. Dolly, too, kind of—she’d ignore them when they just wanted more food, but she’d be outside in a second if she heard them going at each other.

The night cats weren’t Rascal’s problem. Around here, you could find any of those, from a lynx to a mountain lion. But Rascal wouldn’t budge when they howled. Maybe he figured the smaller creatures knew how to look out for themselves after dark, but, me, I didn’t think he gave a damn. His job was to protect the birds in daylight, and protect Dolly at night. And no matter what Dolly said, I knew his truth: Rascal was a soldier, and his mission was no less sacred to him than La Légion had demanded of us.

I closed my eyes and tried to put my mind in a place where I could decide if Mack was the same.

“D
ell …” A sweet, soft whisper.

But this time, she didn’t snuggle into me and fall asleep like she’d just been hit with an anesthetic. “What is it?” she asked.

“I’m just thinking, honey.”

“About me?”

“I always do.”

“I mean, right after we …”

“I don’t know what I think about then. I guess I don’t think at all.”