“Yes.”
“Not just because he said…?”
“Nothing like that,” I interrupted. Not just to keep Dolly focused on what had been her own idea, but to keep her away from the truth: it was everything like that. “Keep going.”
“You said that one of the reporters for Undercurrents must be feeding stuff to Benton?”
“How else would he know who was responsible for the tip in the first place?”
“So it is—”
“No, honey. It’s a lead, not a connection. We know which reporter because we know she’s been in contact with Benton. And she bought shares in his hedge fund years ago. But all that fund has done is spend money, not make any. So there has to be some huge financial score in this—something worth investing not just money but a lot of time, too.”
“In that strip of land? How could there be? It would take…I don’t know what…to make it worth a dime.”
“I don’t know what, either. But I know the guy’s a fraud.”
“How? Ever since he’s been here, he’s done nothing but—”
“Martin and Johnny told me.”
“When?” she demanded.
“A little while ago.”
“They never said—”
“Neither did I, right? I thought I could get some help from them without bringing you into it, but now there’s no choice.”
“Dell…”
“They’re not gay.”
“Martin and Johnny? Have you lost your mind!?”
“No. Not them. Benton and his supposed ‘partner,’ they’re not.”
“That’s silly. I mean, they’re always in—”
“So you couldn’t tell, either. Any more than I could. But Martin and Johnny, you think they couldn’t?”
“I’m not…I mean, I wouldn’t…”
“This is about money, Dolly. Somewhere inside, that’s what it’s about. And it’s got to be a ton of money. Benton’s playing a long game. He’s already rich, so it might even be for more than just paper money.”
“I still don’t see—”
“Me, either. It was your idea to write down what we knew.”
“But you just said Martin and Johnny told you—”
“Yes. But now that I told you, we know.”
“What else, Dell?”
“Rhonda Jayne Johnson, that’s the name of the informer. She just finished her senior year at State, but she’s probably ten years older than her classmates.”
“You know where she lives, then?”
“And the car she drives. But none of that really helps. If we can’t put together the big score Benton’s been playing for, we can’t do anything.”
“Why do we have to do anything if all he’s after is money? He wouldn’t be the first one who wanted more just for the sake of having it.”
“We have to do something because you’re in his way.”
“Me?”
“You or something you’re connected to. It has to be. Why else give you that friendly advice in the coffee shop?”
“I don’t see it, baby. Maybe he was just—”
“Men like him, they never ‘just’ do anything, Dolly. I don’t know much about a lot of things, but men like him, I do. I’ve known a lot of them. They’re all alike. Not in how they look, or even what they want. But there’s one thing that’s in all of them: they don’t see people; they see things. Like chess pieces, or rocks, or buildings. Doesn’t matter unless what they see is some kind of obstacle to where they want to go. To them, that would be a beaver dam blocking a river. You don’t negotiate with beavers; you don’t buy them off. Not when a few sticks of dynamite…”
“Dell, I’m scared.”
“Me, too.”
“Damn it! I’m not scared of this Benton, and you know it! I’m scared of what you get like when you think I’m in…”
“Why?” I said, trying to keep bitterness out of my voice. “That’s the only time you never have to be scared, isn’t it? When I go back to…what I know how to do. The one thing I’m good at.”
Dolly put her head in her hands. When I touched her shoulder, she whirled and slapped me hard enough to make me…NO! screamed in my head before I could spin with the slap and…I wouldn’t allow myself to even think about what I’d come so close to doing.
“You are not allowed to ever do that,” my wife said, as calmly as she had once removed bullet fragments with only a flashlight to guide her hands. “Do you understand me, Dell?”
“Dolly, I would cut off my—”
“Ah, you stupid man! You think I meant you are not allowed to hit me? I hit you, didn’t I? And you deserved it.” She gently pushed me until I was sitting in one of the chairs. Climbed in my lap. Dropped her voice to a whisper. “Don’t you dare ever think you’re only yourself—your true self—when you’re at war. That’s not you. That was never you. You’re a good man. In your heart, in the way you act. You’re the man I love. If you’re nothing more than a man who earned a living by…by doing what you did, what does that make me, then? Some whore who loves a man only for what he can do for her?”
“I—”
“Sssshhh, my husband. I know what you’re going to say. I always know what you’re going to say before you say it. Not the exact words, but what’s behind them.”
She stood up. Held out her hand. Said, “Come with me, Dell. We’ll finish that list later.”
—
“Are you all right now?” she whispered in the dark.
“As soon as my face heals, I’ll be.”
“Liar! You couldn’t be any better, could you?”
“Don’t be so sensitive,” I said, much more softly than I pinched her.
“Ow!!”
“Who’s the fraud now?”
She kind of laughed deep in her throat, and slid her head onto my shoulder. “First we sleep,” she said.
—
“It has to be the land,” she said a couple of hours later.
“I think it must be that, too. But you and your friends, you bought it for next to nothing.”
“That project started before Benton ever came here. And we’ve still got plenty to do before we can make that dog park we want.”
“Nobody’s ever offered to buy it from you?”
“Not from me. And not from any of the others, either. We made our own 501(c)(3), so there’s no secret about who—”
“That number, what is it?”
“Number? Oh. A 501(c)(3) just means we’re a nonprofit. The idea was to buy that parcel first, and then start raising money for the other things we need.”
“Like an access road?”
“Yes. Physical things. But also stuff like insurance. Everyone swears to Heaven their dog is peaceable, but…”
“So it’s still years away?”
“Well, not that much. Maybe, I don’t know, four or five. Our lawyer—”
“Lawyer? You mean like Swift?”
“It is him. I mean, we know we can trust him. And he said it was simple to incorporate, but we might have to go through the County Attorney’s Office to get permits and things like that.”
“The County Attorney…”
“Oh, he’s nothing like the DA. It won’t be a problem. He wants there to be a dog park. He’s on our side. But he’s the kind of guy who wants all the ‘i’s dotted and the ‘t’s crossed.”
“The reason you know nobody’s tried to buy the land from you, that’s because you’d all have to vote on something like that?”
“That’s right—no single member could sign a transfer deed; it would have to be the corporation itself. Or an ‘authorized agent,’ I think Swift called it, and we haven’t even picked one yet.”
—
First I made sure that MaryLou was going to be around for a few more weeks.
Then I started fabricating a face shield for a motorcycle helmet that would accommodate night-vision goggles.
It was three days before I was sure it would work. My motorcycle is an
old 600cc Honda. It doesn’t look like much of anything, and its battleship-gray paint makes it hard to get a good visual. It never made much noise to start with, less now that I’ve rewrapped the exhaust pipes.
Even if a cop did see me on the road, there wouldn’t be anything to make him suspicious. A helmet and gloves, that’s standard gear. And compared with the way some people ride around here, I’d scan as Good Citizen on all counts.
The bike would cover maybe a hundred and twenty miles before I’d need fuel. Not much range, so I’d need some luck along with the gasoline. The ghost had said the boss of Undercurrents was somewhere within the same range as the school.
First, I had to make sure that Rhonda Jayne Johnson’s school address was still good.
—
“Damn!”
“What’s wrong?” MaryLou asked.
“The address, it’s in that apartment complex.”
“So?”
“So I can’t have you drop me off now and just wait for a phone call to come back and pick me up. There’s no cover close enough. And I can’t go into an apartment as quiet as I could a house.”
“Break into, that’s what you’re saying?”
“Not what you think. If she’s there, I could see that without going inside. And if she’s not, she’d never know I’d been inside.”
“There’s only…maybe eighty apartments in that whole complex,” MaryLou said as she circled the block. “You see what I’m saying? It’s kind of an X-pattern, ten, twelve units a floor, two floors.”
“That only makes it worse.”
“Worse? Why? You could just walk up and look at the building directory. Every apartment will have a name next to a buzzer or something.”
“She could keep her name on an apartment even if she lived somewhere else. As long as she paid the rent, the landlord wouldn’t care.”
“The landlord is the school,” MaryLou said confidently. “We have the same kind of setup where I go. I don’t use it myself. Those’re off-campus housing, and I’m not much for partying. Anyway, there’s an athletes’ dorm. Much nicer. And it’s part of my scholarship.”
“So you’re saying, since she just graduated, she’d have to leave?”
“Didn’t you say she was going for her master’s? That’d be enough to let her keep the place.”
“Okay. But her name on the door wouldn’t tell me anything. Even if it’s there, it doesn’t mean she is. And this whole area, the one we just drove through, it’s no good for what I need. Some places, I could find cover in a bad neighborhood or even in some brush. Or I could just be a homeless guy, sleep on a bench or something. But if they’re not scared, campus cops are worse than regular ones.”
“Yeah,” she said, half to herself, “same as my school. They know they’re not real cops, so they snoop into everything. One of them even made me show ID when I was coming back after the library closed.”
“Just let me out, then. Circle the block a couple of times. If I can find her name in the directory, we won’t know anything. But if I don’t, at least we’ll know where not to look.”
MaryLou nodded, then spun the wheel of her truck with one hand and coasted to the curb.
—
“Her name’s in the directory, all right. Building B, Number 17.”
“Doesn’t help at all, then?” MaryLou asked me.
“Not really. The only good thing is that the complex isn’t new. There’s actual buttons, not some electronic scroll.”
“What does that mean?”
“In some of the new places, there’s a touch screen. You tap the apartment you want, and it goes right to the cell phone of whoever lives there.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Those kind, the person you’re looking for would know someone had been there, even if she wasn’t there herself at the time.”
“Oh. Okay, but what good does that do them? I mean, you touch the screen, it rings someone’s cell phone. They’re not around, but their Caller ID tells them nothing except they had a visitor—someone who tried to visit, anyway.”
“Yeah. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re no better off than—”
“Get behind the wheel,” MaryLou said over her shoulder, as she slid gently to the curb and went out the driver’s door in one smooth motion.
—
“She’s there,” MaryLou said as I was pulling away from the curb.
“How do you know?”
“The apartment’s full of stuff. Nice stuff, too.”
“How could you…?”
“I rang her bell. She buzzed me in. When I got to her door, I could see it had one of those big one-way mirrors, not some little peephole. She looked me over for a little bit, then she just let me in, like she didn’t want to have a conversation through the door.”
“She didn’t act surprised?”
“Not…not really. I mean, she didn’t know me, but I guess the idea of someone who she hadn’t seen before ringing her bell wasn’t anything new.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I apologized for coming over so late, but I was thinking of transferring to her school. To play soccer. And someone in the Student Union told me she was going into the program for coaching, so…”
“She didn’t think that was kind of weird?”
“I don’t know what she thought,” MaryLou said. “She wasn’t nervous or anything. I could see she bought the story—I never have to tell people I’m an athlete. I could play volleyball, tennis…anything I wanted. I never played volleyball in high school, but I still got calls from recruiters. I’m a ‘natural,’ ” she half sneered in contempt for what she must have been told a thousand times.
“Anyway, she was very nice, but she didn’t waste much time before telling me I’d gotten a bum steer. She was interested in coaching, sure. She’d never played herself. She just thought it would be—what did she say?—ah, ‘a different path to upper management.’ Her undergrad work was all in economics, and she’d researched opportunities, so…”
“That’s perfect, MaryLou. Here I was cursing myself for being such a damn dope. When I was on my second pass around the area, I saw the parking area. It’s not a garage, just slots with a roof over the top. And her car was right there, Slot B-17. And the license plate was a match—no chance it belonged to anyone else. But it was too late to call you on your cell, and…”
“What’s next?” is all the big girl said.
—
“I got her!”
Dolly was so excited I thought she’d burst out of her jumpsuit. She gave off that sweaty-sweet natural perfume that only shows up after she’s been working for hours. Working hard. At something that really matters to her. Rascal was even a little charged up, but he stayed on his sheepskin rug, next to where Dolly had been.
I could see that her tablet had something on its screen, but before I could tell her to calm down, she grabbed my hand and hauled me over to the butcher block.
“Look!”
It was a Web page, with a swirling ribbon running across the top. I don’t know what kind of coding it took to make the ribbon change colors as it moved, grow narrower or wider, and have little starbursts of light mixed into it, but I guessed it wouldn’t come cheap.
I watched it for a couple of seconds before I saw the embedded My Magic Can Be Yours.
“Use the wand,” Dolly said, impatiently pointing with a lipstick-red fingernail at a three-dimensional pentagram that took up most of the screen. “See it under the ribbon? Just drag it to any of the points. Don’t click it on, just do a mouse-over.”
“This isn’t really my—”
“Oh, for…,” she muttered, hip-checking me aside and sitting down. “Watch,” she said.
The wand hovered over one of the pentagram’s points. “Harness the Power!” came up.
“If I click that one…”
The screen filled with tiny little thumbnails.
“And I pick any one I want…”
A woman on all fours, facing straight ahead. She was wearing a black blindfold, each wrist separately bound to what looked like an ebony stake. Her lips were parted, the lower one in an invitational pout.
Dolly tapped quickly. The same woman, posed differently in a dozen photos, but always restrained.
“Okay?” Dolly asked. Meaning, was there any point in making me look at the whole menu?
“Okay,” I told her. Meaning, I’d seen enough.
Dolly tapped twice, and the screen went back to the pentagrams.
She touched another point. The mouse-over came up “Spoiled Brat.” The first thumbnail was the same woman, in some kind of expensive-looking lingerie, with an anklet of diamonds impossible to miss.
“More?”
I touched the back of her shoulders.
Dolly kept going:
“Private School.”
“Mistress in Charge.”
“Best Date Ever.”
“Country Club Gala.”
“Voodoo Priestess.”
“All Business.”
“See Thru the Window.”
“How many are there?” I asked Dolly.
“I don’t even know yet,” Dolly answered. “That pentagram is really a bunch of them. They rotate, take turns coming to the front. But there’s at least…four times five, so twenty, minimum.”
“And they’re all her?”
“Every single one. I used the Bertillon method. I know there’s all kinds of science for facial recognition, but, no matter what you do with your face, the distance between the pupils of your eyes, that never changes.”
“Unless you had so much work done—”
“Yes. Some women went so far that their eyes look sideways, like a lizard’s. But not this one. She’s too young, for one thing. Remember when you asked me about a woman who could look fourteen or thirty-four? That was a question about pictures, not people. This one, she uses a different name for each…persona, I guess you’d call it. That’s the ‘magic,’ see? The client makes her into whatever he wants. But when I scanned in that yearbook photo, all I had to do was size it to the right dimensions for each Web site.”
“Huh! How many pages did you look at before you found this?”
“Probably thousands. But I’d be at it for another five years if I hadn’t stuck with the one-woman ones. No ‘escort’ stuff—they usually have dozens on every page, so the customer could get his choice. Or it’s some stupid whore who thinks she can screen clients on Craigslist or Facebook. I used terms like ‘I can be…’ Or ‘One is all…’ Like that. No ‘specialists.’ I knew it had to be a public site or we weren’t going to find it, no matter what we did.”
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