Shockwave, page 16
“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:
|>Transmitter connected to open cases?<|
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.
“All 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.
“I’ve already set the school record for strikeouts in one season, and I’m going to have the best ERA in the league this year … again.”
I didn’t miss the difference between “where I came from” and “home.” Or the bitter flavor of her words. Any athlete of her caliber could write her own ticket—what would an extra scholarship cost the school, compared with what it would be getting—actually, keeping—for its money?
So I just told her what I was thinking about. I didn’t gloss it, but I underestimated how she’d react.
“And you’re telling me because—what?—you think Franklin would have to ask my permission? No, that wouldn’t be it—every time he comes down here, sometimes for a whole weekend, it’s always ‘Mr. Dell’ this, and ‘Mr. Dell’ that. He still thinks you’re some kind of magician, the way you saved my life.
“So … Ah, okay! The only way you can be sure Franklin wouldn’t let something slip if the cops came around asking questions is if he thinks he’d be protecting me. How’m I doing so far, ‘Mr. Dell’?” she asked. The bitterness of her tone made it no question at all.
“Bad.”
“Really?” she said, her voice now just short of downright hostile.
“Yeah, really. If all I wanted was to make sure Franklin never talked, I’d just make sure he couldn’t.”
Her blue eyes met mine. Not for the first time. But now she was searching for something else—trying to find my soul.
“You’re a real piece of … dry ice, aren’t you?”
“This isn’t about me. Or what I am. I was good enough for some things, wasn’t I? I trust you with what could put me away forever, and you get all insane because I trust you with something else?”
“When you said you could make sure—”
“Don’t be such a little princess, okay? You’re not stupid. I could have made sure you wouldn’t let something slip, too, right? Did I do that? No. But could I have? Sure.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, holding my eyes, meaning it. That’s when it hit me.
“You really do love him, huh?”
“I … I guess I do.”
“There’s no ‘guess’ on Franklin’s part. That’s why I wanted you to be there when I break it down for him. What he’d have to do, I mean.”
“What would he have to do?”
“Just let some people find him. Find him, and pitch him on joining, the same way the school pitched him on playing football.”
“And?”
“And get them to come to meet with him. Or even just one of them.”
“That’s when you’d—?”
“Yeah.”
“No good.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. They’d never see you coming, I know that. But they’d know Franklin. Know where to find him. Find him again, I mean. You’re going to be his bodyguard?”
“No. It’d be quick. It has to be quick. Whoever comes to Franklin with a recruiting pitch the first time—one man or even a few of them—they wouldn’t be leaving.”
“But what if they, I don’t know, had already put his name on a list? You know, like a scout would write ‘worth a look,’ or something like that?”
“They wouldn’t. If they did, and they couldn’t persuade Franklin to join up, they’d be screwing themselves. At the minimum, they’d lose status. At the worst …”
She went quiet.
I waited.
“I’ve got a better idea,” the young woman said.
“You’re not being straight with me,” I told her after I listened to her better idea. “You just want to put yourself into this. Into it deep enough so that Franklin would know that anything he might tell anybody, ever, could be enough to wreck your life.”
“Uh-uh. That’s not it, not even a little bit of it.”
“I know,” I said and watched a stunned expression cross her face. “The real reason you want to make sure Franklin never says a word is because you still think I might think I have to … protect myself from that possibility.”
She shook that off like a fighter who’d been hit hard, but nowhere near hard enough to put him down. “Let me ask you something. If you thought Franklin letting something slip would get Dolly in trouble, what would you do then, Mr. Dell?”
I nodded. She was right. And she knew it.
“You really want to be in it, MaryLou? In it that deep?”
“Franklin’s been shortchanged enough in his life. I’m going to stand up against that, stand up with him—even if it means standing on the tracks with a train coming.”
Before I filled Dolly in on what had come of my visit to MaryLou, I made a “wait a minute” signal with my hand, and stepped down into my basement.
I read what was waiting for me, then replayed it in my mind over and over, but I still wasn’t sure I understood what the cyber-ghost had told me:
|
Someone inside the same organization that had killed the man Homer took the watch from had his own personal government handler? And this handler wasn’t telling his bosses about the arrangement?
If that was right, maybe this “Welter” guy wasn’t the first one the off-the-books informant had murdered? A man like that being run by a government agent gone rogue, it wouldn’t be the first time. An agent who could pull that off, he could probably name his own salary, too.
Too many questions. And asking them would tell whoever it was on the other end how confused I was by his message. Not a good idea—it could give the cyber-ghost one of his own … like it might be time to disappear.
If that happened, the channel would close, forever. So I tried to show him that I could see the lines clearly, and that I’d always color within them:
|>Current exchange rate?<|
“Crazy, stupid little—”
“You were the one who got it started, ma jeune fille.”
That seemed to calm her down. A little bit, anyway.
“This is all a chain of protection,” Dolly said, grimly. “And that’s on me,” the woman I loved more than my life said, before I could even ask her what she was talking about. “Mack wants to protect Homer. I want to protect Mack—he protects this whole town—so I get you to sign up. You decide the best way to do that is to … kill one of them, so now I have to protect you.
“And if that isn’t enough of a mess, your plan is to lure them out by getting them to recruit Franklin. But you can’t do that without signing MaryLou up, too. You don’t know anything about women. If you did, you’d have known that what she wants is to take Franklin’s place! That chain, it’s turned into a noose around all your necks. And I did that. Me. I did all that.”
“All I did was run it past MaryLou, honey. I haven’t put anything in motion.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we’re only going to have the one chance.”
“Yes? And what is that supposed to mean?” Dolly asked. But at least she was sitting down now, taking a sip from her cup of that bitter tea she likes so much.
“It means you missed one thing—whatever happens from here cuts out the weakest link from our chain.”
“What?”
“Your pal. This Detective Lancer. He’s not inside our circle. Our circle of trust. So there’s not going to be any ‘reenactment’ scene. Sure, it might prove Homer couldn’t have done it, but it would only prove it to him. And I can’t see him going that far out on a limb. He doesn’t like the cowardly little DA we have here—what cop would?—but he’s not going public with any Sherlock Holmes stuff. It’s not his job to dismantle murder cases … especially ones like this, ones where there’s no way for the DA to lose.”
“Oh.”
“Dolly, tell me: you trust Lancer like you do Mack?”
“Don’t be silly.”
