Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  I could never say why this mattered so much to me. I knew there would be no shipment home, no funeral mass held, no tombstone to honor him. Patrice would be buried in the dark earth that surrounded our camp.

  The officers allowed me to dig the grave. It took me all through the night to make it deep enough to keep predators from digging up the body. Hyenas count on vultures to point out fresh kills, but those carrion eaters are pure sight-hunters. I rolled some heavy stones over the spot to discourage the jackals even more.

  I must have passed out at some point. When I awoke, another night was coming on.

  I wished I knew some words, but I was empty.

  How could I say aloud that my true friend’s only dream would never become truth? Patrice had avenged his childhood mate so openly that even his comrades back in Ireland told him he could not hope to return for many years. Any revolutionary who dared take the life of a soldier in the Army of Occupation would be ruthlessly hunted. Or informed on. Patrice had to stay away until…

  I knew there would never be another like him in my life.

  —

  Dolly wasn’t the kind of woman who could content herself with sadness.

  “Widow’s weeds suit some,” Patrice had told me, another life ago. “That’s their role, to mourn. Ah, sure, after a proper period…a year or so…they could find another man. But some of them, they never do. It’s not that they loved their man so deep that no other could measure up. That’s their story, maybe, but a story it is, lad—one they keep on telling, because no one would dare tell them to stop.”

  I don’t know what Dolly would do if I was gone, but I know what she wouldn’t do.

  —

  Like I said, our kitchen wasn’t just a place to cook.

  Dolly had me take down a wall when we first moved in. I’m no expert with tools—not with the kind you use for carpentry, anyway. But I can tell if a wall is load-bearing, and the one that separated the kitchen from the living room wasn’t.

  When I was done, we didn’t have a living room anymore, but the kitchen was big enough for a damn restaurant. It even kind of looked like one, with that long slab of butcher block, the chairs surrounding it, and the “half-bath” I’d built into a corner.

  That’s where Dolly’s mob gathered. Every day, after school, it would be crammed with kids—mostly girls, speaking some foreign language. They used English words, but I couldn’t decode their speech. What was I supposed to make of a bunch of girls gathered around a laptop screen, looking at a boy with blond-streaked red hair holding a pistol in one hand and a microphone in the other?

  “Oh, get you some of that Wonder Bread cred!” one of them cracked.

  Dolly was laughing, too.

  Like I said, I couldn’t understand any of it.

  But I always knew when they had some kind of “project.” The table would accumulate mounds of paper, more would be pushpinned to the cabinets, still more littered around the floor. Maybe they were having fun, but it looked like work to me—they didn’t talk as much, and when they did, it was in short, clipped sentences.

  “You got the plat map?” Dolly asked a girl wearing a camo tank top. That had become their private fashion statement, ever since Dolly had started wearing that same top over cargo pants.

  The girl just nodded.

  “Can you make some room for it, Cue?” I wouldn’t have known how to spell that name. “Queue” would be pronounced the same, or even just “Q.” But that was on a long list of things that were none of my business.

  A very tall girl with long black hair that fell straight down her back, as flat as if she’d ironed it, stood up. She took some piece of paper from the other girl, got up on her toes, extended her arms, and managed to tack it up above some other stuff.

  That was my Dolly. Making the other girls see that being a beanpole had value; it was nothing to snicker about.

  There was no set of written rules, but they all seemed to know them. The little bathroom was always sparkling and fresh-smelling, the stainless-steel twin sinks immaculate: “You use it, you clean it” was as much a part of the climate as the ban on dope and booze. Dolly didn’t care if any of her mob had a pack of cigarettes in her purse, so long as it stayed there.

  Everybody got a second chance. Nobody got a third.

  Rascal was making his rounds, circling the table, scoring treats from every girl. Dolly made sure those treats were healthy stuff, and all of them the same—there was always a big jar in the middle of the table, and the girls were limited to one each. The mutt acknowledged me with a look that said, “I’m on the job.”

  Meaning: his job was to protect Dolly, and he could handle that just fine without me.

  I didn’t know what they were all up to, and I didn’t feel like trying to read in the room Dolly insisted on calling my “den.” Sometimes, kids would wander in there, and I didn’t feel like talking to any of them, either. They always asked questions. Some days, that was okay with me. Not now.

  In my basement, there was no chance of unexpected visitors. The only entrance is down at the end of a hall, and there was no reason for anyone to enter the hallway. Even Rascal knew that.

  The door was heavy steel, coated with a thin veneer of cheap-looking wood. It opened with a keypad. When I closed it behind me, I was in another world.

  —

  “Mercenary” has always been a synonym for “myth.”

  More today than ever, with so many viewing screens that are most people’s only connection to what they think is “real.”

  Books, too, I guess. Some of them would have you believe that there were hundreds of martial artists with magical chi who’d once worked as secret agents before they turned into movie stars.

  If those guys could only find a way to pull off some “death match” over bandwidth, the Internet would be swimming in blood.

  None of that is dangerous, not by itself. But some mercenaries who learn distrust is their truest friend never learn to distrust themselves. That kind, they work jungle long enough, they’re at risk for believing the worst myth of all—the one that says they’ve developed some “sixth sense.” Not hyper-acute hearing or selective sense of smell—you work the field long enough, that comes naturally. No, some kind of special power—a magical alarm system that’s theirs and theirs alone.

  That only ends one of two ways: they let themselves nod off, trusting that “signal” to alert them in time, or that signal never stops beaming its message. If that happens, they start emptying every magazine blindly into the dark. That’s the worst. Exposed and out of ammo at the same time.

  Nobody stays that way for long.

  What does keep you alive is pattern recognition. When that software finally downloads into all your senses, you’ll lock onto any disruption in the patterns you expect.

  I learned this slowly, over a long period of time. Each piece added to what I had before it. The only way to learn all that was by listening. And I was a good listener, always careful to sift. The only thing I knew for sure was that anyone could lie—would lie—if it got him something he wanted.

  Surviving that “training” was…I’m not sure, exactly, but some part of it had to be blind luck. And maybe some part of what Luc had taught me before I ever opened the only door left open to me. The longer I soldiered, the better I got at learning who I should be listening to. Men like Patrice, men like Olaf. I say that as if there were so many. There were not. But each one made me even more cautious about the next.

  Even when I quit—quit forever—I never forgot.

  That’s why I had to be down in my basement that day. Something was wrong. I knew it, even if I couldn’t explain how I knew. Inside me, only this: to distrust that knowledge would be disrespectful of all those who had taught me.

  “You think this is a jungle, lad, you should spend some time in Belfast when Her Royal Majesty’s killers are on the hunt,” Patrice had told me, a lifetime ago. “Some with maps drawn for them by the bloody grasses.”

  Yes. I
f “home” is a piece of surrounded, landlocked ground, you’re out of options. Patrice knew the truth of things.

  In their own way, they all had. All those I trusted enough to listen to, anyway.

  But now, no matter how hard I concentrated, nothing came to me clearly enough to do something with it. Just that sense of disruption, too jagged for any image to emerge.

  Hours passed. I stayed as still within myself as I knew how. Dialing down my heartbeat, slowing myself inside and out.

  It wasn’t until I felt Dolly at the core of my stillness that I knew. It wasn’t me being hunted.

  —

  “It’s me,” I whispered to Rascal as I moved toward our bedroom late that night.

  An unnecessary alert—his evolution to a sensory warning system was superior to anything humans had yet developed.

  The marine fog lights planted all around the house would throw off a clear image of anything approaching and send it right to Dolly’s tablet, making an audible ping! at the same time. We could carry the tablet around and set it up so that sound would wake us if we were asleep. Those weren’t “security” lights, just information—they worked even in daylight.

  After dark, they watched for bad intentions—intruders experienced enough to mask off security cameras, moving with their eyes aimed down, to watch for trip wires or dry twigs. Their eyes would be hit by wheel-spinning high-lumen LEDs, intense enough to induce an epileptic seizure. Unlike the marine lights, these were hidden behind carbon mesh, so the blast would come as a stun-level surprise.

  I didn’t know if the setup would work; there was nobody I could test it on. I’d learned about it from a man I served with. He told me he had the…disease, or whatever it is. He said flashing lights would set it off, but closing his eyes didn’t stop them once they got inside his brain. Years later, Dolly told me that man had a specific form of the disease: “photosensitive epilepsy” is what she called it.

  Still, I turned around and went outside, just to be sure they were all working.

  When I got back, Rascal’s snort had turned to outright sarcasm—his motion detectors never failed.

  I slipped under the sheets without a ripple, but Dolly had her own detectors.

  “What is it, Dell?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. I wasn’t going to try pretending around my woman, even if I’d thought there was one chance in a million I could get away with it.

  “Someone from your…?”

  “No.”

  “From when you and Mack…?”

  “No.”

  “Dell…”

  “It’s you, Dolly. Someone, some people…something, I don’t know. Tomorrow we’ll talk, okay?”

  She put her head against my chest, listening for my heartbeat. My woman knew me as no other—I was too calm inside for her to believe I wasn’t waiting for the enemy to show itself.

  —

  The next morning, I tried to deflect what I knew would be coming.

  Coming from Dolly, I mean. So I said, “Rascal’s getting fat, huh?”

  “What!?” my wife snapped, deeply offended on her dog’s behalf. If I’d said that about her, she would have laughed. I remember hearing her answer one of the bolder girls, a while back. I hadn’t heard the question, but Dolly’s answer—“I don’t know, probably sixty-three, sixty-four kilos”—was enough.

  “Huh!” one of the other girls said, clearly surprised. Either at Dolly weighing somewhere around a hundred and forty pounds, or at her actually answering such a question, I couldn’t tell. Dolly claimed to be five foot five, but that was really stretching it. I wondered how surprised they would have been if she told them she was the same size she’d been for decades, but I opted for silence; if my wife wanted her girls to know something, she’d tell them herself.

  “Well, just look at him, honey,” I said. “He snarfs treats all day long, polishes off his own food in the evening, then gets anything you leave on your plate.”

  “So what? He gets plenty of exercise. Anyway, every time he goes to the vet, they weigh him. Everything goes onto his chart. They store it online, so I can log in anytime I want to check on something, like medications I might want to try. Dr. Jay set it up that way so if Rascal goes to a specialist they’ll have instant access to his whole history.”

  Not his whole history, I thought. They call a dog like Rascal a “rescue.” That word would fit me just as well. Aloud, I said, “So I could just dial up his weight chart, then?”

  “You could,” she said, grinning at me, “if you had the password.”

  I was out the door before she could start asking the questions I knew I’d have to answer sooner or later. If there was going to be a test, I wanted to do as much last-minute cramming as I could.

  Or find a way to cheat.

  —

  Mack was waiting for me at the bottom of the gentle rise our property sits on.

  I’d texted him while Dolly was taking a shower. With me walking out of the house like I had, Dolly would think I was close by, as long as she didn’t hear her battered Subaru or our “licensed for farm use only” Jeep start up. She knew I could get my motorcycle out of its slot behind the wall of the garage without making a sound, but she also knew I only brought it out after dark. And started its engine only when I’d coasted down to near the bottom of the hill.

  “What’s up?” Mack asked, as I closed the door of his rust bucket, a battered compact something so not worth stealing that he’d never replaced a missing rear window. The sheet of heavy plastic duct-taped over it kept the rain out, and any potential thief could see there wasn’t even a radio in the empty slot.

  “I should be asking you that,” I deflected his question. “How come this thing’s so clean inside all of a sudden?”

  “Bridgette and me, we’re married now. So we only need one place to live.”

  That wasn’t news to me. The only question I’d ever heard Dolly ask Mack was “Bridgette, as in Bardot?” And his answer, “That’s kind of the way it’s spelled, but you say it like ‘Bridget.’ She’s Irish…some part of her, anyway.”

  Dolly was especially proud of helping him find their engagement ring, some big chunky thing, with a flat-topped amethyst held in place by gold clasps. The pale-lilac stone was inlaid with what she called a “Rose of Sharon,” gold-leafed, with a tiny dot of diamond in its center. The first time I saw it, I had to take a deep breath. I knew, even if I couldn’t say how I knew, that the woman who had been waiting for Patrice would still be wearing such a ring.

  Dolly had flown out to Chicago for the wedding. I knew she greatly preferred Mack married—no more of his “distracting” her girls every time he came over. And she was crazy about Bridgette. What I didn’t tell Mack: their mortgage bank was Dolly. Bridgette knew, and she handled the money for both of them, so she just transferred money into Dolly’s account every month.

  “You let her drive this thing?”

  “She rides in it sometimes,” he said, almost as defensive about his car as Dolly had been about Rascal’s weight.

  “I get it,” I told him.

  “So—where, then?”

  “Down by the tanks.”

  “Where they’re building that…?”

  “Yeah. But we’re going past that spot, maybe a mile or so. I’ll tell you where to pull over.”

  —

  “Why’d you want me to leave Minnie at home?”

  “She’s a fine dog for your work,” I told Mack. “But, as well trained as she is, she’s still a pit bull, and where we’re going, people let their dogs run free all the time. One of them could get stupid.”

  “So it’s your work, then?”

  “Not like last time,” I told the social worker whose caseload was the “homeless by choice” population the town’s liberal majority tolerated…so long as they didn’t interfere with business. And they were happy to pay Mack to cover the seriously disturbed, who sometimes didn’t know what planet they were on—it was a hell of a lot cheaper than hos
pitalizing them. Plus, he was the one the jail called when a prisoner started talking suicide…or when they’d just finished cutting down a body and it was still breathing.

  Mack’s work was funded by the town—although I knew they got some federal money for the “services” he provided. Probably made a profit off it, too.

  That “last time” ended with a few people dead, and a new client for Mack—a client I never asked about.

  “Just want to take a look around a few spots.”

  “You’re a million times better at…surveillance, or whatever you want to call it, than I’ll ever be,” the social worker asked. “What do you need me for, then?”

  “Camouflage,” I told him.

  —

  “You’re looking for a runaway,” I said, explaining Mack’s role to him.

  “I wouldn’t be called in on a—”

  “Not a kid who ran from home. Or even from custody. This runaway, she’s a girl. Been spotted in one of those homeless camps you already have on your rounds. She’s your client, so you don’t have to answer anyone’s questions, right?”

  “Nobody around here would even ask,” he said. A hard mask dropped over his face, changing his voice from his usual social worker’s neutral-flat to a lifelong outlaw’s “I’ve got nothing to say.” His right hand pulled a chain he wore around his neck. A trio of laminated badges came out, each one with his picture in the corner. I’d seen them before. Even the most suspicious cop could call any of the numbers on them, and the answer would back him off. Far off.

  “You’ll be coming up on a stand of white birch on your left,” I told him. “Turn-in’s about two-tenths past. Do it slow—the road after that’s nothing but packed dirt.”

  “I got it.”

  I didn’t have to tell him to check his rearview mirror, or to turn in sedately. Mack was a man who learned from anything he did, and he’d done enough things with me to understand that people can’t talk about what they don’t know. Oh, they can, and plenty do. But it wouldn’t be the kind of information anyone else could use.