“Relationship?”
“Enough of one for her to tell this guy the identity of some of your confidential sources. Enough of one for her to own ten grand’s worth of shares in his fund.”
“That’s what you meant when you said…‘traitor’?”
“Yes. A traitor to everything Undercurrents stands for.”
“She’d never…”
“Yeah, she would. She already has, like I just told you.”
“And like I just asked you, why would you—whoever you are—why would you care about that?”
“All I want is your word that Rhonda Jayne Johnson gets kicked out. You’ve done that with other people before, although I don’t know the reasons, so you can do it again. Just shut her out. That’s all.”
“No,” she said, slowly getting to her feet. “No, it’s not.”
—
Without another word, she walked past me and out the door.
I followed her. Close enough to stop her if she tried to run, but not so close that she could whirl around and jump at me.
Two doors down, she turned left, hit a wall switch, and lit up what I guessed was the living room. I should have been suspicious of any switch she hit, but there was a kind of honesty to the way she was moving that reached out to me.
She sat down in an armchair that was covered with some brocaded material, gestured toward its mate, placed within a few feet of the one she’d picked. Between the two chairs was a brass stand, with an amber ashtray set into its top.
“You don’t mind…?” she said, taking a pack of cigarettes out of the padded vest she was wearing over a bright-red T-shirt. Then she interrupted herself with a semi-laugh. “That’s cute, huh? I’m being polite to a man who walks into my house pointing a gun at me.”
“I came to bring you something of value,” I answered her, “something I thought you’d want to have. The pistol was just because I didn’t know how many people would be here, and I wanted to be able to deliver my message without any interruptions.”
“And your message was…?”
“What I already told you.”
“Fair enough. And the mask?”
“I’m a confidential source. From what I just told you, from what you know must be true. Because there’d be no other way I could know. The mask is more proof of that—I don’t have any reason to trust that what I told you will stay confidential.”
She lit a cigarette. Crossed her legs. Leaned back as she exhaled the first drag. A symmetrical face made her a good-looking woman by most standards, but there was nothing that stood out especially. I couldn’t guess her age, but she was in good shape. She took another deep drag, pushing her breasts against the fabric of the red T-shirt hard enough so I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra.
Wasn’t being seductive, either. Just centering herself.
I waited.
“Rhonda Jayne Johnson,” she finally said. “What you said wouldn’t be so easy….Well, it wouldn’t be easy at all.”
I waited.
“Finding this place, that wouldn’t be easy, either. So what do you want to know?”
“I didn’t come here to ask questions. I don’t need any answers. I had a message to deliver, and I did that. I’m still here because it feels like you want to tell me something. If I’m wrong about that, I’ll go. If not, I’ll listen.”
“I love her,” the woman said, like she was saying it gets dark at night. “And she loves me.”
“She betrayed you. Doesn’t that change things?”
“Not…I don’t know. I won’t let her do that anymore. But I couldn’t just kick her off the roster. That would hurt her terribly, and I…I don’t know if I could do that.”
“Why?”
“That’s how we met. That was our first real connection. RJ is a journalist in her soul. Like me. If I cut her out of Undercurrents, it would be like punishing her for something she didn’t do.”
“Didn’t do? Isn’t leaking info about a confidential source as unethical as it gets for a journalist? People like you have gone to jail for refusing to do just that. All over the world. Some of them have been tortured. Some killed. I thought keeping anything they were told in confidence was something they were morally bound to do. A sacred oath.”
“It is,” she said. “But…look, what she did was wrong, I’m not arguing about that. She’s never going to get a look at anything that comes in again. And she’ll learn from this. There’s no reason why she can’t dig up stuff on her own. That’s how she got…in with us. In the first place, I mean. The info she brought in, that was checked by people she never met. Never will meet. She worked her way in. Years of work. People make mistakes….”
“You’re making one, right now.”
“Maybe I am. But that’s my decision, not yours. She didn’t ‘betray’ our newspaper; she screwed up.”
“You said you love her?”
“I do,” she said, her eyes steady on mine, cigarette smoke drifting from her hand.
“And she loves you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“If you believe that, then it wasn’t just Undercurrents she betrayed.”
She lit a new smoke with the burning end of her first one, just before she stubbed that one out in the big amber dish. Then she closed her eyes, as if to show me that she’d listen, but she was done talking.
“Undercurrents, that’s your baby. I get that. You’re the boss; you call the shots. You say she didn’t betray what you started, what you stand for, I guess that’s your call. But once you opened that other door—that you love her, I mean—I see how she betrayed you, too. You, the person; not you, the paper.”
“You’re saying she has some kind of…relationship with whoever she disclosed the identity of that source to? Didn’t you say she was making money from that, somehow? The same person who runs the hedge fund that she owns shares in? That doesn’t mean—”
“She’s a whore,” I said, in the same tone I’d say, “The public library is just down the street.”
“You have no right to judge her! You don’t know—”
“I’m not judging her. I’m just telling you the truth. She’s a whore, and she’s been working you like a trick.”
She sat bolt upright, slashes of red flaring across her cheekbones. “That’s talk. Words. You know what I do. So let me ask you. Where’s the proof?”
“You haven’t even wondered how I knew who you were, and where to find you?”
“I did. And it scared me. But that’s not what—”
“Yeah, it is. The people who hired me have some kind of computer department—they tried to explain it to me, but it sounded like they were speaking a foreign language. There’s nothing they can’t trace. Including Rhonda Jayne Johnson.”
“The people who hired you told you…?”
“Next time she drives her little blue Audi over here for a visit, ask her how much money her magic wand makes her.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I think that’s probably true. So I’ll spell it out. She’s a working prostitute. Her game is ‘white witch’ magic. The customer says what he wants, and she turns herself into whatever that might be. Try ‘Harness the Power.’ Or ‘Spoiled Brat.’ Or ‘Private School,’ ” I said—I wasn’t going to give this one a URL she could check out in ten seconds. “The people who hired me, they said there’s dozens of…roles she can play.”
“Men?”
“You’re like a rat in a cement box, aren’t you? You’re going to find a way out even if you have to work your teeth and claws down to bleeding nubs to make an opening you can slip through. But there is no way out of this.
“She’s a whore. She does things for money. I don’t have her little black book; they didn’t give that to me, because all they wanted was to stop her from getting information out of you.”
The cigarette was still burning slowly in her hand—the hand that never went near her mouth.
“You care about her?” I
said, very softly.
“I told you,” she answered, just as softly, but with no tone in her voice. “I love her.”
“It’s only your love that’s keeping her alive.”
“What?!?”
“She’s a blackmailer. And a couple of her regulars talked way too much. That part’s not a problem, but if she found out that the age—” I bit my tongue on that last word, knowing any journalist on her level would auto-complete “agency” on their own. “Look, I was supposed to just turn off the faucet. Kill her,” I added, to take any ambiguity out of the room. “But when they found out she was connected to you, they got…twitchy.”
“I—”
“They couldn’t’ve known about you and her, or they would have told me. But they knew this: If any member of Undercurrents disappeared, you’d never rest until you found out the truth.
“Nobody wants you dead. It’s not you who says she’ll blow the whistle on her…clients. Not what you think. It’s not like she’d tell their wives or something like that. The whistle she’d blow, she’d blow it loud enough for the other side to hear. That can’t happen. They can’t know if she’d really do it, but they aren’t going to take a chance.”
“I don’t—”
“Yeah, you do. In another four, five weeks, the…the people who hired me won’t have anything to worry about. Nothing she knows, nothing she overheard will mean a thing. She could ‘blow the whistle’ all she wanted; it’d be a sour note by then. But those blackmail threats make her look like a honey trap. So if she makes a move now, you’d both have to go. If she waits, neither of you do…if you play it straight.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning this: You keep quiet for, say, a couple of months, just to be safe. Let everything go on as it is now, except don’t let her in on anything any other member of your crew turns up. And don’t let her know what you know. About her, I mean.”
“And then?”
“And then you do what you want. You could confront her with what you know, and kick her out of your life. You could prove that you saved her life, too. And maybe, just maybe, that would be enough for her to see what true love is, I don’t know.”
“You want me to just go on—”
“I don’t care what you do. If you tell her what I told you, she’s dead. Her life, it’s in your hands. Whatever choice you make, we’ll know soon enough.”
Her cigarette had burned down to her fingers all on its own, but if she felt the heat, she didn’t show it.
I backed out of the room, then out of the house.
—
When I was close enough, I popped the flash.
By the time I got to the truck, the netting was off and the driver’s door was standing open. MaryLou and Franklin were outside.
“Get behind the wheel,” MaryLou said. “We’ll push this down the road a little bit, so nobody in that house hears the motor start.”
It would have taken too long to explain why that wasn’t needed. I climbed behind the wheel, shifted into neutral, and keyed the ignition so the power steering would kick in.
The truck started rolling. I knew Franklin was a bull, and MaryLou had real power in her legs, but I almost looked at the speedometer—the damn truck had to be moving as fast as the two of them could run carrying a pillow.
One last shove and the truck was moving on its own. As it finally floated to a stop, MaryLou caught up to my open window.
“Move over,” she said. “All the way over.”
I did that, MaryLou was a half move behind me, and Franklin got behind the wheel. Neither of them was breathing hard. Franklin started the motor and drove without lights to the turnoff; then it was only a few minutes until we were all headed home.
—
“Did you get it done?” MaryLou asked.
She knew I must have had a real good reason for whatever I was up to, even if she didn’t know what it was.
“Better than I hoped for,” I told her. “Franklin really handled the hard work.”
“We both pushed the truck—”
I quickly cut off Franklin’s defense of MaryLou. “I know. I was talking about the tree.”
“Oh.”
“The only doubt I had was about you,” MaryLou said, as sweet as ever.
“Me, too,” I agreed. Then I finished pulling off the whole outfit, changed into the fresh one I had stashed behind the seat, and peeled the fake soles off the boots.
We hadn’t gone ten miles before everything was as normal-looking as any cop could want. The fake soles had been reduced to little shreds of nylon with the tin snips I’d brought along. I kept them balled in my fist. If we got stopped for any reason, I’d just toss them if I could, and hand them to MaryLou if I couldn’t. Once the cops found out who she was, they wouldn’t be surprised to see her carrying a squeeze ball to keep that pitching hand exercised.
But nothing happened. Franklin wheeled into our driveway, and I jumped off, figuring I’d grab a few hours of sleep before Dolly and Rascal showed up.
—
I was awake by the time I picked up Dolly’s car on the monitor.
Nine-thirty in the morning—I guess Mack and Bridgette had stalled Dolly about as much as she was going to stand for. She and Rascal bounded in the back door like a pair of firefighters.
“You had breakfast?” were the first words out of my wife’s mouth.
“Hours ago.”
“Hmmm…,” she kind of hummed to herself, opening the refrigerator to pour herself some juice, then one of the cabinets to pull out a granola bar. I knew she wasn’t hungry, just checking to make sure I’d really had breakfast.
That’s my wife: she’d take my word that I was “working” for weeks at a time without raising an eyebrow, but when it came to things like making sure I kept up my nutrition, she was relentless.
“My girls—some of them—they’ll be here in a half hour or so.”
“Want me to…?”
“Oh, Dell,” she said, chuckling. “You do whatever you want to do. I know they’ll drive you out of here on their own soon enough.”
“They get to where they’re all talking at the same time—it sounds like a wall of noise.”
“To you, sure.”
Meaning, “Not to me,” I thought. But they were already starting to roll in. I didn’t recognize the first three; that is, I’d seen them before, but I didn’t know their names.
“Let’s give the others a few minutes,” Dolly told them, already bustling around, pasting charts back up on the cabinets, firing up her tablet, pointing at the coffeemaker to tell them they were on their own if they wanted any.
I didn’t have anything to do, not yet. But that wasn’t why I stayed in the kitchen. I was just being stubborn, showing Dolly that I was interested in whatever they were up to…and the white noise hadn’t started yet.
There were seven girls inside before Dolly kicked it off.
“If the town accepts the offer of that strip of land,” she said, pointing at the map with the thick pink ribbon standing out boldly, “it’d probably cost more to provide it with services—water, sewage, electricity—than they’d get back in taxes. But I asked around, and that isn’t the game. See, unless the land is used—like, to put houses on it or something—the town doesn’t have to put any of that in.”
“So it’s just a freebie? For real?” a girl with spiky hair and black eyeliner asked, her tone saying she didn’t believe there was any such thing, anywhere.
“No!” Dolly told them. She reached into a net sack that was next to the sinks, took out three of those miniature tangerines—they’re called something, but I didn’t remember what—and started to juggle them. The girls watched, fascinated, as Dolly kept them spinning, as if they were doing the work themselves.
She talked right through the tangerine wheel. “We found out that TrustUs, LLC, is actually owned by PNW Upstream. That hedge fund up in Portland that Benton manages.”
“So?” the little redhead with owl glasse
s asked.
“So the donation itself is worth money. How much money depends on how the town assessor ‘values’ the land.”
“The town says it’s worth a million bucks, they get a milliondollar tax credit for land they bought for—what?—five percent of that?” the beanpole said.
“Yep,” Dolly answered, still spinning the tangerines.
“Where’d you learn to do that, Tontay?” one of the cheerleader girls said.
“In the circus,” Dolly said. “I used to be a high-wire walker.”
“Wow!”
I closed my eyes, thinking of how Dolly had transformed from battlefield nurse to a new persona so perfectly that she never had to lie. If tending to the wounded in Darkville while staying neutral in whatever war was going on at the time wasn’t a high-wire act, I didn’t know what else you could call it.
“Could you teach us?” another cheerleader asked.
“To juggle, sure. But high-wire is another story—it takes years and years to work yourself up to that. Anyway, if you want to see a circus, all you have to do is come to the next council meeting,” Dolly said, deftly catching all three of the baby tangerines in one small hand. “And that’s what we’re going to do.”
—
I hadn’t used the Glock, so disassembly was just a by-the-numbers routine, not a pre-disposal necessity.
All I could do was wait.
How long was up to me. I pulled up Undercurrents. They were continuing their investigation, but all they had to report was the same potential tax break Dolly had been talking about upstairs before. Their incoming letters weren’t about anything close to home.
I realized it was Sunday. It usually doesn’t make any difference to me, but today, it made me feel a little better, because I knew that Franklin would have gone to work even if he hadn’t slept at all the night before.
Sometimes you can’t track the enemy. All you can do is find the best spot to fire from, and wait for them to show up.
—
The headline wasn’t in Undercurrents. It was the kind of big-deal thing that wouldn’t interest them.
MAGNIFICENT GIFT TO PERMANENTLY DISPLAY LOCAL ART
Signwave Page 18