Shockwave (20 page)

“You know a lot about France.”

“Not so much,” I said, confident I had given nothing away—it would be no secret to anyone Dolly trusted that she was fluent in French, or that she’d served with Médecins Sans Frontières. He probably assumed that she’d met me someplace in France.

You can’t rely on much from people, but you’ll most likely be on the safe side if you float a vague story out there and let everyone fill in the blanks for themselves.

For the teenage girls who always seemed to be around the house, I was kind of a … presence. If they thought about me
at all, it would be to wonder why a woman like Dolly would have involved herself with an older man, and let the rhyme of “France” and “Romance” work itself through their heads.

As for the teenage boys, they were an inevitability Dolly didn’t try to sidestep, but she had rules. Hard, clear rules. If you brought in anything she considered negative—including yourself—you weren’t welcome.

The boys usually decided I’d been some kind of soldier. I didn’t look old enough to be a Vietnam vet, but I had enough miles on my odometer and enough visible scar tissue that they probably thought I’d been there.

Funny thing is that I actually was. Long after America officially left. But the need for reliable info hadn’t gone away just because the uniformed military had.

A
s we were driving away in that rolling malfunction he called his car, I thought about how Mack had some of the same field skills I did.

Not as fully developed, but I wouldn’t have expected them to be—his training couldn’t have started as early as mine had.

I remember as if it was yesterday. I’d stepped up to an indifferent man sitting behind a battered wooden desk, politely waited for him to take another drag of his cigarette, and then said, “Is this where I can join?”

He raised droopy eyelids, said,
“Ton âge?”
When I gave him a blank look, he said,
“Dix-huit?,”
making it clear what response he expected. When I nodded, he was all finished with the interview, exactly as Luc had predicted.

Without looking up, the man pulled a bound sheaf of papers from a drawer and tossed them over to me.
“Tu signes là où y a les flèches rouges,”
pointing at the various red arrows and making
the gesture for “writing” as he did. After all, I didn’t speak French—certainly not
native
French—and he wasn’t about to defer to my ignorance.

Thanks to the training I was put through soon after that, I could stay in the same position for many hours, not even my body-smell conflicting with my surroundings. Always waiting, but not always for the same reason. Maybe to satisfy myself it was safe to move. Maybe for the enemy to saunter past, never knowing I was waiting for them, my jungle-length bullpup set to “spray.”

And, sometimes, just waiting for my next move to reveal itself to me. Timing was everything—leaving the spot I’d found too soon could be fatal, and leaving too late certainly would be.

For less than a second, I wondered if many other social workers were like Mack. But I already knew the answer: If a soldier couldn’t learn those skills, he stopped being a soldier pretty quick. Stopped being, period. But if a social worker couldn’t learn them, how would anyone tell? If they never left their offices, how much danger could they ever be facing? And, considering who they worked with, who would give a damn, anyway?

W
e were on the road, because I’d finally convinced Dolly that all the alternatives were ruled out.

“You said the only way you could convince this detective that Homer couldn’t possibly be the killer was to have a cadaver to demonstrate on, yes?”

I just nodded at my wife’s question.

“Can you tell me how you would do that? Convince him, I mean.”

“It’s … mechanics. Or kinetics. I’m not sure what label fits,
but we know this for sure: Homer is much shorter than the man who was killed. And he’s frail as well. For the spike to have penetrated so deeply from a single blow, it would have to be delivered by a man pretty close to the same height as the victim. And to pull it
up
after the strike, by a very powerful man as well. But those are … obstacles that could be overcome, so I don’t think it would work.”

“Why?” she half demanded, as if we already had a cadaver in the freezer, ready for a demonstration.

“An assassin—a trained assassin—could strike from behind a target walking down a flight of stairs. That would both give him the height and also add extra force.”

“Homer’s not a trained assassin,” Dolly said. Stating the obvious, so there had to be another reason for her speaking to me in such a way.

“Homer’s insane. An insane person can leap into the air and strike on his way down.”

“Dell—”

“How is this not true,
mon cœur
? You have seen for yourself the crazy boys running at machine-gun fire because chemicals have made them believe bullets would pass through them as harmlessly as a butterfly through the air.”

“We’re … You’re not there anymore, Dell.”

“Everywhere I’ve been, the more experienced a soldier is, the more he will be afraid of a crazy person. Why? Because a crazy person has no—I’m not sure how to say it—boundary lines, maybe? It’s not what they’re capable of doing; it’s that they’re capable of doing
anything
. Who wants to guess? It’s so much easier to just step to the side when you see them coming.”

“Lancer isn’t a—”

“I say ‘soldier,’ I just mean a man whose life is hunting, or being hunted. In the jungle, there is no law. But in a dark alley, there is no law, either. If a policeman thinks there’s something dangerous in that alley, he might just charge ahead. That would
be very brave or very stupid. But if someone like me is waiting in that darkness, the end result would be the same.”

“You’re saying, no matter what we showed him, Lancer might still think a crazy man
could
have done it?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t have said all that for no reason.”

“I didn’t. Remember when I asked you if Mack was a man of honor?”

“I remember. And I haven’t changed my answer. But you spent all day with him—are you saying you don’t feel the same way?”

“No. He must be an honorable man to take the risks he takes for so little money. And to make it his life’s work. But I think maybe I did not explain what I meant by—”

“Dell, I know what you meant. You were asking, if he faced going to prison for a long time, maybe the rest of his life, would he talk, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I … I don’t know. I think he would not. If the cause was just, yes, I
do
think that. But whatever you don’t want him to tell, why tell it to him at all?”

“Because it is not what he would
know
, it is what he would have to
do
.”

“Tu parles français. Peut-être pas avec mon … allegeance,”
my woman said, a tiny smile starting to coax its way loose. “But I don’t speak … ‘criminal,’ maybe? So why all these riddles? Especially from you?”

“Like we talked about before, Dolly, there’s one sure way to convince Lancer that Homer couldn’t have killed that Nazi. One sure way to convince this whole town. If that happened, the DA couldn’t justify holding Homer, yes?”

“Go against the town? Against public opinion? A man who campaigned like a fiend even when he was the only candidate running? Never. But what could be a sure way?”

“Find another Nazi. Take him to the same spot where we know it must have happened. Kill him, throw him in the ocean, and wait for his body to wash up.”

“Wash up in that same exact spot?”

“Dolly, you know it wouldn’t have to be that precise. Are you really saying, if another man whose body was covered with Nazi tattoos died from the same single-strike blow and washed up thirty miles from here, they’d
still
hold on to Homer?”

She sat down. Twirled one of her auburn curls, the way she does when she’s thinking.

Time passed. I don’t know how much. Dolly looked up at me. “I know you hate them, Dell.”

“I always will hate them. That is my inheritance.”

“But you don’t even—”

“Only one man ever called me ‘son,’ Dolly. Not ‘son’ like I might say to a younger man, especially a less experienced one. ‘Son’ as if he was my father. He saved me, then he showed me how I could continue that work. To save myself. I never saw him again. But his hate for them is inside me as surely as if I had been born with it.”

“And you’ve never—since it’s been us, together, I mean—killed one of them because you hated them all. I shouldn’t have even
thought
that, Dell.”

I deliberately slid around the question my wife had buried inside her sweet words. “It would take two men. We couldn’t lure anyone up to that spot, especially after dark. We’d have to kill him someplace else, wrap him good, and carry the body up to the same spot before we dumped it into the ocean.”

“Dell, truly—there’s no other way?”

“I’ll look for one,” I promised. I was heading for the basement as I spoke, so Dolly knew I wouldn’t be doing that looking outside the house. Not for a while, anyway.

I
opened the line.

If anything was waiting for me, I knew it would be short enough for me to memorize. Not that I’d have a choice—it would self-destruct ten seconds after it showed on the screen.

“GV” was generic “government.” FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, Justice Department … a long list of agencies. The odds against them sharing info with each other were too extreme to express.

The shadow-breeze could probably do a trace-back—in America, no agency ever death-wipes data. That’s why one moron leaving his laptop in his car could compromise a hundred lives. But if it was a paid informant, there might be a quicker way. I used the coding I knew by heart, typed as quickly as I could:

As always, each word I typed vanished as soon as I hit the space bar after it. So now all I could do was go back to waiting, and hope Mack could keep Homer from falling apart while I did.

I
didn’t like myself much for doing it, but it had to be done.

If there was one man around here that any White Power recruiter would consider a prize, it was a behemoth everyone
called “Bluto.” Not to his face—he might get confused enough to break your back.

His real name was Franklin Wayne, and he loved MaryLou McCoy. He was nowhere near the dimwit other high-school kids thought he was, but he was good enough at smashing through offensive lines for some “boosters” to get his father a no-show job and a house to live in, just to get Franklin to transfer to school here.

The thing was, in Franklin’s mind, I’d saved MaryLou from a life sentence. Worse, MaryLou loved Franklin, too—even though she told everyone she was gay. Maybe Mack could unravel that last part. What counted was that MaryLou trusted Franklin. I don’t know what she might have told him about our Plan B in case her trial hadn’t come out the way it had, but I suspected she’d never said a word, protecting him from himself.

Franklin had been a plow mule all his life. Used by everyone for whatever field they needed tilled. Everyone but MaryLou.

And, up to now, me.

He’d done some things to help MaryLou. A lot of things. Things I’d told him to do. But I wasn’t giving him orders—once I told him that those things would help MaryLou, he
wanted
to do them. And I hadn’t tricked him—without Franklin’s help, everything might have come out differently.

I knew I could get Franklin to do some things again. But they wouldn’t be for MaryLou. So he’d have to trust me. Which he would, but I couldn’t exactly sit down with MaryLou and talk it over first. She wasn’t coming “home” on summer vacation. Why would she? Her parents were parasitic filth, her father maybe something even worse. And the baby sister she’d given up her entire future to protect had run off … but not before she shoved her contempt for MaryLou in the sobbing girl’s face, in front of the whole town. In a place this size, anything a jury saw, the whole town would see.

I knew where Danielle would have run to. I could probably find her if I tried. But I didn’t care if she lived or died, and those feelings weren’t split fifty-fifty.

There was just no way to talk to Franklin unless MaryLou was in on it. It would have to be in person—Franklin could blurt out something on a cell phone that could cause problems. But that wasn’t why I’d asked Dolly to find MaryLou for me. If the woman I loved thought I was even considering using a damaged young man like Franklin in something that could get him killed without getting the approval of the girl he loved first, she might start to reconsider her own feelings for me.

There’s some risks I’d never take.

“A
ll Dolly said was that you wanted to talk to me about something,” the tall, rawboned young woman with wide-set pale-blue eyes said.

She’d showered quickly after practice, pulled her long dark hair into a ponytail while it was still wet, and walked over to where I’d been waiting.

“And you knew it had to be something too important to talk about over a telephone line.”

She nodded. “Franklin.”

“Yeah,” I answered what had never been a question. I wasn’t worried about trusting a woman who knew I’d kept a promise I’d made to her once—a promise to kill a man. It had been the only way I could get her to defend herself.

I am always truthful with myself. I knew that I would have promised MaryLou anything to get her back on mission. Not because I cared about her, but because my Dolly did. Fiercely. And I would happily die a thousand times over before I’d let Dolly’s faith that I could “do something” turn out to have been unjustified.

“I tried to get him to come down here himself,” she said, wistfully. Then her tone turned cold. “I know I could get him a total ride here, even without him ever going back on the field. All I’d have to do is do a little thinking out loud about transferring back to some school closer to where I came from … You know, so Franklin and I could be together. They’d have his scholarship papers waiting before I got back to the dorm.