Shockwave, page 10
Why a man would be insane enough to leave his personal mark on the bodies of the enemy was beyond my understanding. Still, the knowledge wasn’t without value—it wouldn’t be my mark the enemy would find. And if the outfit I signed on with promoted men as seriously bent as this one, I knew I’d have to find new work soon.
Now, another thing I knew was that he hadn’t been tracking me on contract. He’d seen me several times, and I’d deliberately wandered into a filthy SRO a couple of days ago, baiting the trap in case someone was paying him for my life.
With a man like him, not many possibilities in play: if he wasn’t being paid to take me out, he was looking for me to lead him to a payday.
So the only thing I had to find out was whether he’d just recognized me by accident, and kept watch to see if there was something in it for him, or if he knew who I was—who I was now—and planned on selling that knowledge.
When the product is knowledge, the seller wants to know its maximum depth and width before wrapping the package. If he saw me as a product, he’d want some idea of value before sale. And if someone had hired Brander, I’d need that name before I sent him over.
Just the thought of my Dolly’s name in his mouth meant he was already dead.
I didn’t know the town, so I couldn’t suggest the kind of bar where people made it their business to mind their own.
And if he knew his way around, any suggestion he made would be a mistake—too many variables. Best not to approach him at all. Find the right spot and wait.
I know how to do that. Both parts of that.
I knew where a man like him would feel most comfortable approaching me, so I just kept on walking until I was outside the city limits.
Less than ten kilometers, judging by my normal full-pack pace, then subtracting the much lighter weight of the duffel I was carrying.
The railway underpass was as good a spot as I’d be likely to find. Hoboes might use it for shelter at night, especially if it was raining. Winos might be there anytime, but it was too exposed for a crackhead to pipe up in—none of them would have the patience to wait, anyway.
Anyone looking to hop a freight would know the train schedule, but the whole area was empty, except for what was left of the man sprawled in a pool of liquid I knew wasn’t water, wine, or blood.
I hunkered down against the wall, lit a distracting cigarette. If Brander was following, he’d be along soon enough.
He wasn’t far behind, so he’d probably kept me in sight all the way.
No real choice about that—he could read trail signs in a jungle, but tracking a man using roads was damn near impossible, even when they were dirt.
I saw him coming. That couldn’t have been a mistake on his part. He wanted to make sure he didn’t spook me into rabbiting. Or shooting.
“Hey,” he said, as he came close enough to speak, hands open and empty. “Remember me?”
“No. Should I?”
He casually dropped into a squat on my left side, as if I’d asked him to take a seat. “Come on, André. It’s me, Brander. We served together in—”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I remember you.”
“I’ve been watching you.”
“Okay.”
“I figure you gotta be here for the same reason I am.”
“Is that right?”
“I’ve been here five fucking weeks,” he said. “Came in after a little stopover in Japan. The whole Triangle, that’s played out now. I heard, if you wanted some action, there’s people hiring here, looking for men with Darkville experience. Only, I can’t find anyone to ask.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need work. I’m not too old for the field,” he said—so defensively that I knew everyone hadn’t shared his opinion—“but what I’d really like is a nice training gig. Heard they got all these ‘militia’ morons out this way—good money, if you can prove you’re the real thing.”
“Okay.”
“And I figure you heard the same thing, am I right?”
“No.”
“Come on, man. We served together. I haven’t found any of these militia guys. Not yet, anyway. But you’ve been here much longer than me, I’m thinking. Not in this stupid little town, in this country. So I’m just out strolling and I spot you, packing some gear. I tell myself, ‘Brander, you just struck gold.’ There’s got to be enough for both of us. Maybe even more, if we partner up. Am I right?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, I’m not looking for work. I’ve already got work. But not here. I wasn’t looking for some ‘militia,’ or whatever you call it—I was looking for a recruiter. And I found one. Shipping out next week.”
“To where?”
I just looked at him.
“It’s like that, huh?”
“Why would it change?”
“Yeah, I know. But, if they’re looking for men, they’d be looking for more than one. And I need the work. I checked the job board, but there’s nothing. I mean, not nothing on the damn board; I mean the board’s gone, man. Like it never existed.”
I didn’t say anything.
“There’s supposed to be work in Honduras, some Spanish guy looking for men. But that’s really low-rent. What they call ‘retail kidnapping.’ Not grabbing some major player for millions, just some local merchant, for, like, twenty-five K. Got to do about two of those a day to make any coin. No planning, just roll up and snatch. Too many ways for that to go wrong. And who’d trust those greasers, anyway?”
He was sweating. Not from the heat—Brander had worked terrain that would make this place seem like springtime in Canada. He was probably only about ten or so years older than me, but he knew he was running out of options.
Maybe he really was worried that this “militia” he was looking for might think he was past it, but that didn’t feel right. How would they know whether any stories he told them were the truth?
No, he probably thought I’d found work but was keeping it to myself. And if there was work, he knew they’d take him on—disposable goods don’t have to be the highest quality.
Maybe he hadn’t put a penny aside. He’d worked long enough to have a bankroll, but any merc his age still looking for a job was more likely to be broke than greedy.
Probably never thought too far ahead, either. Any references he’d give would put his reputation out there, too. My best guess was that the modern forces weren’t signing up just anyone who applied, and none of the tightly organized groups operating today would tolerate his little habits.
I cut my eyes to the side, took a closer look. Everything about him was a shade off—looked less fit than he should be, needed a haircut, and his clothes were a little too grubby, even if he was trying to blend in. His eyes were soft-focused, and his hands didn’t look cared for. I’m not talking about some gangster manicure; I mean they didn’t look … ready.
They weren’t.
I didn’t know why Brander was in that town, only what he’d told me.
But I knew he was desperate, and shrugging him off wasn’t an option. If he’d already made up his mind to learn whatever he could about me, the reason didn’t matter.
I didn’t know what he was still capable of, but one thing for sure—he could attract attention. Dolly’s face filled my mind. Always the death math, I thought, as I slowly got to my feet and checked the terrain as if Brander and me were a team and that was my job. He didn’t move. I stretched my arms high, yawned, and spun my right knee into his forehead in the same motion. The back of his skull seemed to splatter just before a trail of fluids started flowing from his head as it slid down along the wall.
He might still know what to do, I remember thinking, as my right hand came out of my side pocket, holding a push-button tube that snapped a four-inch titanium spike out of the front. I stabbed that into his ear, then used a palm strike to drive it to full-depth penetration.
I yanked out the spike and walked away, wiping it down with an alcohol pad as I moved. Still moving, I gloved up, then squeezed out another pad and set the spike on fire. I switched hands to allow a full burn-off, then kicked it into a pile of rubbish.
If the cops found that spike, they’d know what it was, and the dead body so close by would tell them what it had been used for. But fire doesn’t leave fingerprints, and homeless men kill each other all the time.
Dolly welcomed me back like she always does.
“Tell me!” always comes first.
“He got the tattoos while he was locked up. But I don’t know when he was put away for the first time.”
“The police—”
“They probably could get juvenile records, even from another state. But I don’t think they’d bother to try.”
“You don’t think much of them, do you?”
“Here, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I think the same of the police everywhere. They can’t be trusted. They could even know a lot more than they’re saying. Or be holding back so they could trip up the killer if they ever got to question him.”
“Remember that detective, the one who testified in MaryLou’s case?”
“Sure.”
“You know what he thinks of the DA’s Office. I think he’d try. To get the records, I mean.”
“Maybe. But what would I have to push him with? Wouldn’t the cops already know the age of the tattoos? From the autopsy, I mean.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” Dolly said. “Not really. I mean, tattoos do fade over time, that’s true. They stretch, too. Like, if what was once muscle turns to fat. But this guy wasn’t old enough for any of that. Maybe if they cut again, thin tissue slices, they could see how deep they were. Maybe that would—”
That’s when I told her what I’d found out, putting in just enough detail for her to understand it didn’t matter.
“How far do you want me to go?”
“Homer was functioning. Maybe he wouldn’t ever hold a job, but he wasn’t a danger to anyone. He shouldn’t be locked up. And if they keep him too long, he’ll probably just surrender to the voices.”
“I wasn’t asking you,” I said to Mack.
“Arrêtes-toi!” she snapped in rapid-fire French.
“Stop what, précieuse? It was a reasonable question. A question I asked you.”
“I won’t risk you, Dell. I won’t. But if there’s a threat watching this place …”
“I know.”
“Only if it has to be,” Dolly said, drawing lines.
Our lines—different circles around the same place. A légionnaire is usually outnumbered, so he is trained to place no value on an enemy’s life—and to highly value ambush as a disproportionately deadly tool. A Médecins Sans Frontières nurse would regard all human life as priceless, but not all equally so—Dolly had never forgotten the necessity of triage.
I turned to Mack. “How far are you prepared to go?”
“My job description is kind of vague.”
I translated that easy enough: Mack knew all about triage, too. He wasn’t going to risk all the work he was doing just to spring Homer, so I couldn’t count on him to go past his self-imposed limits … but he had a lot of room inside those limits.
“We need all the information we can get on the dead guy.”
“I already got his record,” he said, putting a few papers on the butcher block.
I scanned them quick. “This is his adult record. But I’m thinking he did time before. As a juvenile, maybe.”
“Those records are sealed.”
“But not erased.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you understand? Or okay, you can get them?”
“I haven’t got a friend on the force here, like I said. But I’m not from here, so …”
It was my turn to say, “Okay.”
Maybe Luc is watching, I thought.
I was Nazi-hunting. Not to kill them, not necessarily. But to find them, yes. And if some met death along the way, que sera sera.
Vancouver had the skinheads Mack had promised. When I asked him how he knew so much about them, he’d just said “Chicago.” So I pressed him harder, trying to push his buttons.
“Nazi scum.” I dismissed them all.
“Not the young ones,” he said, turning his eyes to meet mine. “Those kids, they’re just joining the only club that’ll have them. They’ve got no place to go, nothing to do, no reason to … exist, I guess. So, when someone tells them they’re special, superior, destined to rule, it strikes home. ‘Home,’ that’s not a word that even meant anything to them before.”
“Yeah. Poor kids.”
He ignored the sneer in my voice. “Not all of them. Some come from middle-class families. Even wealthy ones. But they’ve got no identity. No sense of themselves. The only thing they know is, they don’t matter.”
I guess my face told him I wasn’t buying it.
“Look, what’s the difference between the kids in the homeless camps and skinheads? Nobody wants them, so they want each other. But if you’re talking about the bosses, the ones who give the orders and never go near the front lines, that’s a different game. You want scumbags? That’s where you’d look.”
So, once I got to Vancouver, I just strolled around aimlessly until I spotted a little house in a run-down neighborhood. No way to miss it—they weren’t hiding anything from their neighbors. It was decorated with everything their role required, down to a replica of the “88” with the pair of lightning bolts running across it that had been on God’s gift to Homer.
I’d left Dolly’s car in a lot in downtown Portland, and just walked across the bridge to Vancouver. But getting inside that house without being seen could be tricky, and getting out even harder … depending on what I ran into.
One thing for sure. I knew I’d have to leave a lot quicker than I could ever manage on foot.
I wasn’t trained as a car thief. I couldn’t rent a car without a credit card. And even if I used a dummy, whoever handled the rental would be likely to remember my face. I don’t mean some clerk, I mean the cameras all those places have now. They weren’t worried about an armed robbery; the cameras were for ID thieves who used stolen credit cards.
With gangs, it’s always tricky to isolate an individual. But that’s what I’d need to do if I wanted to cross that bridge in a car.
After a couple of days, I was beginning to think there were no black people in Portland.
Plenty of Latinos and Asians. But I couldn’t use a low-rider, or a tricked-out tuner car. So I gave up on using some gang-banger’s bland-sedan drive-by machine—I’d have to settle for a regular guy.
That wouldn’t be as confusing to the cops if anyone grabbed the plate number, but there was an upside, too—the kind of guy I decided to settle on, his plates would convince the law that whoever reported them had written down the wrong number.
If the skinheads themselves could get a plate run—maybe somebody’s girlfriend worked at the DMV—one look at a driver’s-license photo and they’d know it hadn’t been the person who owned that car who’d … done whatever I might end up needing to do.
This time, I left Dolly’s Subaru in the long-term lot at PDX. Then I walked over to the terminal, went inside, and followed the triple-width revolving door right back out again. I had a carry-on bag with me—all I had to do was go down one flight and wait until a cab pulled up to the stand.
“The Governor,” I muttered to the driver. I had checked it out on their Web site before I’d made the trip—a nice hotel, but not a new one. And way downtown. If my outfit—a heavy canvas coat with a high collar, dark jeans over black work boots, and a watch cap—surprised the cabbie, it sure didn’t slow his conversation.
More like a rant, actually. I don’t think I could have gotten a word in if I’d wanted to—he was one of those guys who could breathe and talk at the same time.
The seat next to him was cluttered with all kinds of paperback books, and a few notebooks of his own. I figured him for some kind of older student—probably getting his post-doctoral degree in political science. He was explaining how the last election had been “engineered from the top,” whatever that meant—if it was rigged, where else could it be from?—when he interrupted himself to ask me, “Front or back?”
“Back,” I said. Just a reflex—I didn’t know the place had more than one entrance.
He pulled up on the left side of a wide one-way street. Told me the price. I paid him with five dollars on top, and was out of the car while he was still saying … something.
It was even better than I’d hoped—no doorman at the back entrance. No bellhop trying to snatch your bag, either. I just started walking away, aiming for one of the downtown parking lots. They weren’t walled in, but there was always a roof over the whole structure.
Easy enough to scale, but too many people had nothing better to do than play with their cell-phone cameras. So I climbed the stairs to the top floor, found a pool of shadow, and sat down to wait.
It took less than an hour.
Plenty of people came in to take their cars, but either they weren’t alone or they were the wrong color.
I stayed still until I saw a black man walking confidently toward his car, a dark-red Mercedes sedan. I walked soundlessly behind him, eyes on his back, ears everywhere else.
When he pushed the key fob to unlock his car, I pushed the pistol into the back of his spine.
“I need your car,” I said, softly. “Not for long. I’ll bring it back. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if you make me.”
“Just take it easy,” he said. It wasn’t the words, it was how he spoke them that told me he knew how an amateur might panic and jerk the trigger.
“Good advice,” I told him, holding the door open and gesturing for him to get behind the wheel. As he turned his face back toward me, I hit him with a full shot of the mist. Opening his mouth to scream didn’t help—it only made him take in a lot more.
