Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  Photos and Videos—with or without sound, but with the same warning.

  Investigation and Issues—for people who wanted the blog itself to look into something. That last one was very clear: you had to send something that was in the public interest, not some private beef you had with a neighbor or anything like that.

  “See the e-mail address for that section?” Dolly said. “It starts with ‘https://,’ not ‘http://,’ like most Web sites. So it goes to a secure server, and you don’t have to keep whatever address you send it from. Just send it, and nuke the address—it’s not like you’d be expecting an answer, anyway. Either they’ll start their own investigation or they won’t.”

  “That’s the one you used?”

  “Uh-huh. And even if they could finger the IP, it wouldn’t compromise us—Tova sent it from the public library in Fargo. I mean, she had her younger brother send it, actually—he’s a senior in high school.”

  “I get it,” I told Dolly.

  And I did. Benton was warning her off, but he’d been too oblique about it. Otherwise, she never would have mentioned it to me. And why pick Dolly? Even if he had someone in City Hall who told him she’d been in there checking records, that info would have been worthless on its own. No way any one clerk could keep an eye on everyone who came in to check for a building variance, or when some LLC went into business, or any of the thousand other reasons people would be using its public-access records.

  And, like Dolly said, all those public records are online. She’d hit that CONFIDENTIAL button anyway, so how could Benton know who’d been asking questions about the land buys?

  Benton was PNW Upstream’s boss. So he’d know that fund already owned TrustUs, LLC, which had been buying all that land…but there was no way he’d think Dolly knew it, too.

  So I was left with this. Undercurrents had a lot going for it. A reputation for “pure” journalism—factual reporting, without bias—and total protection of all its sources. But any leak can reverse its flow, and the most trusted news source could get an infection, one that could turn fatal if it wasn’t treated.

  There’s only one medicine that can stop the virus all traitors carry.

  —

  Undercurrents had always been about investigation, not self-promotion.

  There was no masthead. No “staff roster,” no titles, no…nothing. I went back to my own poking around—asking the cyber-ghost to find out who owned the domain or anything like that would have been insulting the value of his time.

  But the domain wasn’t even a dot-com; it was a dot-org, registered to TPE8YU, Inc. The contact person was Xiaun Constell, with an address somewhere on Nauru, and the phone/fax info was as blatantly phony as everything else. The area code for each was very different…and nonexistent.

  They’d set it up so any attempt at incoming messaging was blocked, but they were very clear about the message their outgoing sent.

  Still, there had to be at least one valid e-mail address to receive incoming. More than one, actually—how else could their editors get any given reporter’s story?

  Maybe they’d never actually gotten together in the same place at the same time. But, “collective” or not, there had to be someone at the helm. Or the hub. No way they’d release anything without double-checking, and there had to be a way for X to send in a story, and Y to open it and decide which Z would be assigned to check it out, without notice to X.

  Sure, X would know the story would be fact-checked, but wouldn’t know who Z was for any given submission. There wasn’t any other way they could protect themselves.

  —

  At some point—maybe past some point—everything you do is an act of faith.

  Olaf had absolute faith in physics—a life spent testing it against all situations and substances had never revealed a single flaw.

  I couldn’t trace my faith in the cyber-ghost back that far. I never knew for sure he’d even be at the other end when I contacted him. But, so far, that connection had held, unbroken, for years and years.

  And he was all I had.

  |>TPE8YU? Info, A&A?<|

  “A&A” was “Any and All.” If the ghost couldn’t get past that first barrier, no point in asking any zoom-in questions.

  Even for the ghost, it wouldn’t be an instant hit-back. So I had time to activate one of our “agency’s” local assets.

  —

  “What?”

  “I need to talk with you. Say where and when.”

  “Hour and fifteen minutes. Last place.”

  When Mack’s car pulled in, his all-white pit bull jumped out of the passenger window and began slowly walking toward me. She would have kept walking, but Mack called out “Minnie! Friend!” and the dog instantly dropped into what most would see as a “sit” position. I saw it for what it was: launch mode.

  When Mack got to his dog, he bent down and whispered something to her, then waved me over.

  I didn’t waste time. Careful to make no sudden movements, I reached inside my jacket and handed over a copy of that newspaper photo of Benton.

  “You might know someone who’s skilled at surveillance photography,” I said. “This is an old picture, probably a posed shot. It was copied from a newspaper, so it’s all grainy. Black-and-white, too. What we—the agency that gives us assignments, I’m saying—what it needs is a few fresh shots. As recent as possible. Color. Reference-scaled.”

  “Why do we need this?” Mack said. He wasn’t asking an actual question; he wanted to know what story to tell the video ninja.

  “We don’t. That’s why the shot has to include other people. No sneaking around this guy’s house, no night work, nothing like that.”

  “He’s not comfortable enough to work daylight. Not yet.”

  “You’re saying, it’s got to be dark?”

  “Yeah,” Mack said, a little on the defensive. “But it doesn’t have to be the…the stuff he used to take pictures of.”

  “Relax,” I told him. “There’s no way I want his assignment to be taking pictures of just one person, anyway. If anything happened to that person, it’d add up pretty quick.”

  “Something’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Benton,” he said, staring down at the photo. “I never heard of—”

  “He threatened Dolly.”

  Mack’s face went stony. His dog made some low-in-the-throat noise, picking up on something, just not sure what.

  When Mack said, “How many shots do we need?” he was dealing himself in. But before I could answer, he made it clear what he wasn’t dealing himself in for: “How many shots of different people, I mean. You know, photo or video?”

  The first time I got Mack into some bad stuff, it was because Dolly wanted me to protect what was so important to him. So now he’s walking right in, to protect something that’s important to me.

  —

  Later:

  ||

  I wasn’t going to insult the ghost by asking “Could you?” questions, so I hit keys quickly:

  |>Local blog |||| Undercurrents |||| When started? Who pickup? How many senders? Arrival/departure date for all?<|

  I knew the ghost would already have some of that info, so I waited.

  ||

  Undercurrents had been around even before Dolly and I moved to this village. So whoever was in charge now might not be the person who started it. That didn’t matter.

  —

  I’d been trained to do many things.

  But that training was all depth, no width. So I knew a great deal of different ways to do the same thing. But outside that narrow band, I was ignorant.

  When I was still a boy in years, but old enough for the recruiter to pass me along, he did almost all the talking. And the first officer to address us
as a group echoed the truth of my life.

  As all the instructors did at the beginning, they would use several languages. I only could understand part of the French, but I knew every word of the English.

  “All of you who stand before me at this moment are ignorant. You know nothing of what you must learn if you are to survive what awaits you. To be ignorant is nothing to be ashamed of. Every man lacks knowledge of some things. No man has knowledge of all things.

  “Here, we will teach all you need to know. But this teaching is all we can do. That is our job. Yours is to learn. And here is your first lesson: The line between ignorance and stupidity has nothing to do with intelligence. Not here. Not where you will be going. The line between ignorance and stupidity is the line between life and death. We cannot teach a stupid man. Why? Because a stupid man is a man who refuses to learn. A stupid man will soon be a dead man.

  “That choice is yours. A choice you will have to make many, many times. So decide now. Pick the one path you will walk. Once you have made your choice, you have no option to change it. You need not tell us what choice you have made. That, you will show us.”

  So I didn’t even know where to start. Or how to do it. Pictures of Benton would be good for one thing, but that one thing only.

  Something connected to that forest land. That had to be what Dolly had sent in to Undercurrents. She was no investigator, either. So why not have those in the business of digging up facts do the work for her?

  That’s when I knew who I had to talk to, and why I needed Mack to come along.

  —

  “It’s Spyros, the old man; he’s the one I have to talk to.”

  “Okay.”

  “So your job is to get Franklin away from wherever I get to do that. I know where they’re going to be working today, but I don’t know how close—how physically close—to each other they’re going to be.”

  It’s not like Spyros is brain and Franklin is muscle. It’s true the old man knows all there is to know about trees and stuff. And it’s true that Franklin can throw boulders around like they’re hollow movie props. But the old man is as strong as hell. And Franklin, he never was stupid. Nobody bothered to try and teach him anything. Except for football stuff.

  “I got it.”

  —

  Mack parked where the road ended, at the bottom of a long slope of trees. Near the top, that’s where they’d be working, I thought.

  We could hear voices while we were still climbing. More than one. The closer we got, the clearer they became. I couldn’t make out the words, but I didn’t like the tone. I motioned Mack to move behind me. I couldn’t see if he signed anything to Minnie, but the white pit bull put herself between us.

  “What d’you say, big man? You’re a cinch to win!”

  A young man’s voice. Not one I recognized.

  Another one: “Come on, stud. I mean, you like eating pie, right?”

  One more: “Hey, maybe he’s never had any. You like the way good pie tastes, Franklin?”

  “I don’t—”

  Just as I stepped out to where they could all see me, Mack cut off whatever Franklin had been about to say with: “How would you know? The only way you’d ever get close to pussy would be at the animal shelter.”

  Mack’s voice was flat and hard, the kind of hostile calm that scares people like them.

  All three whirled. None of them liked the view.

  “Who’re you guys supposed to be?” the first one said.

  “I’m a friend of Franklin’s,” I told him. “A good friend. And this is a friend of mine”—quickly nodding my head toward where Mack was standing. “He wanted to meet Franklin, so I brought him with me. That’s a problem for you, maybe?”

  “We never saw you before.”

  “You don’t want to see us again,” Mack told him, very calm.

  I watched their hands. Twitchy, but not ready to reach for anything.

  Franklin opened his stance, but stayed as rooted as one of the trees he was working on. He wasn’t sure what to do, not yet. But I knew what he’d do if any of the three punks moved toward me, and I didn’t want that.

  “Tough guy, huh?” their spokesman said. “I’m not fighting no pit bull.”

  “Off!” Mack snapped out. Minnie hit the deck. Mack looked at the guy who’d been doing all the talking for the three of them, holding out two empty hands. “Feel better now?” he said, his voice as empty as a hollow-point slug.

  “Look, we were just having some fun,” the spokesman said, turning to me, as if my age would make me more reasonable.

  “Have it somewhere else,” I told him. “We don’t like people having your kind of fun.”

  “We can do whatever—”

  “Whatever isn’t the same as wherever,” I said.

  “You own this property?” another of them whined. Not tough, looking for an excuse to go away.

  “We’re standing on it,” I said.

  “Mr. Dell, they weren’t doing anything,” Franklin finally said. “Really. They were just—”

  “I know,” I assured the giant. Then I dropped my hands to my sides, stepped off to my right, and told the three punks, “We’re all done talking.”

  Minnie was still flat on the ground, but she never took her eyes off them. Mack rotated his head on his neck. The audible crack! was as loud as a gunshot in the still air.

  They all walked off, their leader muttering under his breath. Bullies need to save face, but this lot wasn’t stupid enough to make threats loud enough for us to hear.

  —

  “Gee, Mr. Dell, I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “Actually, I’m looking for Spyros,” I said. “It was Mack who wanted to meet you, so I brought him along.”

  “That’s a pretty little dog,” Franklin said. I didn’t see what gesture Mack made, but the white pit shot toward Franklin, leaping up at his chest. The giant caught her in the air, spun her around, and scratched her behind her right ear. “See, Mack! She likes me.”

  “Of course she does, Franklin. She knows who likes her, too. You and me, you and me and Minnie, we’re going to be pals.”

  “If you’re Mr. Dell’s friend, then you’re my friend, right?”

  “Right,” I said over my shoulder as I was walking off. I didn’t look back, already punching Spyros’s number into my phone as I walked. He couldn’t be far away—I’d seen his truck parked next to Franklin’s before we started to climb.

  —

  He wasn’t.

  “What?” came snarling through the earpiece of my cell.

  “It’s Dell, sir. I wanted to consult you on something, and Dolly said you were working in this area, so…”

  I’d said the magic word. The old man was waiting for me, sitting on a downed tree. His greeting didn’t change, though.

  “What?”

  “You know Sector 27? That chunk of land Dolly and her crew bought to build a dog park? Inside a much bigger one…303.”

  “Do I know it? I was the one who told her it’d be perfect.”

  “Something’s going on there. I don’t know what.”

  “With the land?”

  “Not that land. With the land along the strip, just across the road from it.”

  “What could be going on there? All the trailers are gone, except for that one at the west edge. And that one—it’s a meth lab. Either the cops’ll find it, or it’ll blow up,” the old man said, making it clear that either result would suit him equally well.

  “Some company’s been buying all that land. The strip, I mean.”

  “So?”

  “So Dolly and her girls traced it down. Then they let the paper know—”

  “I didn’t see nothing in the—”

  “Ah, I should have said this Internet thing. Undercurrents.”

  “I don’t bother with that stuff.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told the old man. “Here’s what does: When Dolly sent the info to them, they ran it. And now they’re doing thei
r own investigation. The deal with them is that you can send something in—info, photographs, whatever—and they may run with it or not. But, either way, they’ll never tell anyone where it came from.”

  The old man didn’t say anything; by then, he knew there had to be more.

  “The guy who runs the group who bought all that land, he told Dolly to keep her nose out of it.”

  “He told her?”

  “Not those exact words. He made it sound like a friendly warning. ‘I hope you aren’t running around half cocked,’ something like that.”

  “And you want to show him some land he might be interested in?” the old man asked, as subtle as a crowbar to the head.

  “Me? I wouldn’t do anything like that. But I sure would like to figure out what’s so damn important about that strip.”

  “Look, just because I like your wife doesn’t mean I lost my eyesight. So don’t play me for some brain-dead nursing-home case, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He gave me a long look. Then he just nodded his head, as if we’d agreed on something. “I’m telling you, that strip ain’t good for—”

  “I’m not arguing. But the land Dolly’s crew owns, it’s on the hillside that looks down toward the bay. The only thing it could be looking down at is that strip.”

  The old man dry-washed his hands. Big hands, as dark and gnarled as the ancient trees he loved. “I told Dolly I’d be poking around over that way,” he said. “The only access is pretty rough now, and there’s no place to park. She knows her club would need to buy some more property to make it work.”

  “I’d appreciate that, sir.”

  “You were a soldier, am I right?”

  I just looked at him.

  “That ‘sir’ thing,” he said, “you didn’t learn good manners in no prep school, ‘respect for your elders’ crap. You don’t make noise when you walk. So I figure, you must’ve…”

  I nodded. Let him take it any way he wanted.

  —

  “It’s better if you hold it like this.”

  Franklin’s voice. He was showing Mack the best way to handle the lumberman’s ax he was using to reduce fallen dead-wood to chunks that could be moved away from the live roots they’d been impeding.