Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  Rhonda Jayne Johnson wasn’t Benton’s creation. She had probably been doing business for years before he found her. Maybe it took him a while to find another use for her than he originally intended.

  Or maybe he didn’t find that other use until she showed it to him. A blackmailer threatens to expose secrets; a traitor sells them. It’s not a long leap—blackmailers and traitors usually have the same motivation. They both gather information—the only difference would be the methods. If Rhonda Jayne Johnson had threatened to expose Benton, she would have investigated him much more deeply before she ever voiced a demand. She wouldn’t have to know her client’s endgame, only that piercing his disguise would ruin it.

  Just wave the wand—that magic, expensive wand—and I can be whatever you want.

  Blackmail is a dangerous game. Some will let you bleed them white, but others will see the end coming and tie a tourniquet into a noose. If suicide seems the only way out, homicide instantly becomes another option.

  Selling information is a much more lucrative occupation. The opposite of extortion—the more you tell, the more valuable you become. That was why I’d let the half-completed “agency” slip out. And why I’d spelled out “honey trap” to make sure the founder of Undercurrents got the message.

  Dolly’s e-mail to Undercurrents had started a tiny little campfire. One that Benton thought he could extinguish by casually spitting on it. He didn’t know Dolly, but he knew Rhonda Jayne Johnson. At least he thought he did.

  —

  I waited for Dolly to take off for one of her meetings.

  I knew that she wouldn’t be going alone, and that her crew would stop for coffee after it was over.

  The time window was an easy three hours. I didn’t need more than a few minutes…provided I could find Mack quick enough.

  I didn’t want to go to his house. Bridgette always contorted herself to stay out of any conversation if she thought it was business. I once told her that nothing I’d want to talk to her husband about would be about his clients, so confidentiality wasn’t an issue.

  “It is for me,” Mack cut into what I was trying to explain. “I’m not putting Bridgette in a position where she’d think she had to do something.”

  I gave him a look, but kept my mouth shut.

  “If you came over and said you wanted me to help you rob a bank, Bridgette would want to drive the getaway car,” he told me, his tone of voice matching his eyes. “Even if I could stop her from coming along, she’d be frightened—frightened for me—while she was waiting. What kind of man puts his woman in fear?”

  So I called his cell.

  “You busy?”

  “Working.”

  “I need a few minutes.”

  “I’m with Khaki,” he said, making it clear he wanted whoever was with him to hear him speak. “We’re just hanging out. By the monument.”

  The monument was the slab standing inside a little hexagonal building, open on all sides. On it was a brass plate with the names of local fishermen who had been lost at sea. Every year, more names were added.

  “Fifteen minutes,” I said.

  —

  Khaki saw me first—no surprise there; he was a scout in that army his mind had created. He was dressed in the trademark outfit that had given him his name.

  “Major!” he said, getting to his feet and snapping a salute.

  “As you were,” I told him, returning the salute.

  “Face was just telling me about the new HQ we’re getting.”

  “At least twice the sleeping space,” Mack added. “More privacy, too.”

  “You give Khaki the scouting assignment yet?”

  Mack shook his head. That wasn’t his role—only the leader of the unit got to call the shots.

  “We need a little slice of land,” I told Khaki. “Maybe an acre. Close to the bayfront, but not in the commercial district. Back off in the hills a bit. We don’t want to rent, so look for a piece of land with ‘For Sale’ signs posted.”

  “Sir!” Khaki said, again getting to his feet. “Catch you later, Face,” he said to Mack. He threw me a salute, then started his patrol.

  —

  “He’s never going to drop that A-Team thing?”

  “Why should he?” Mack said. “Khaki made me ‘Face,’ so you had to be ‘Hannibal’ for it to all fit together. He hasn’t missed a day of his meds. He’s going to stay delusional, but he’s walking-around proof that schizophrenics aren’t all dangerous lunatics.”

  “So he’s like a guy carrying a sandwich board?”

  Mack looked at me carefully, then made his decision. “He is a great ad for the program, sure. But he wouldn’t be if he wasn’t getting better all the time. There’s a ceiling he’ll hit, like I said. I don’t expect Khaki to get a job—although I’m not saying that’s impossible—but he’ll never have to live in some ‘mental hospital’ again. He’s integrating inside himself nicely—you couldn’t find anyone around here who thinks he’s a menace.”

  “Okay,” I said, before Mack could launch into a speech about the whole mental-health system.

  He went quiet, waiting.

  “You have a private client. He’s on a government contract, but not on a payroll. Did an audiovisual capture job for us, a while back,” I said, careful not to mention the name of the video ninja.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We have another job for him.”

  “Not…?”

  “No. Pure surveillance. That work for you?”

  “Lay it out,” Mack said. “Then I’ll know.”

  —

  “You got it all, Conrad?” Mack said, tapping his temple to show the video ninja that covert operatives like us never write anything down.

  The man with a never-leave-the-cellar complexion and an obsession Mack had been working with him to redirect just nodded.

  He respected Mack. He even believed that we worked with a never-to-be-named government agency on special assignments, so we had cover IDs to account for our presence in the area. It made sense to him that this agency would have occasional use for his special skill set, and he’d be well paid for such work. Why not? It had happened before.

  When Mack told me that an occasional “assignment” would go a long way toward moving Conrad into the daylight, I’d given him some cash and told him to pick the targets out of the phone book.

  But the ninja would always be afraid of me, and I didn’t have a cure for that. He could still feel the saw-toothed Tanto against his throat. My assurances that we were friends hadn’t comforted him much, maybe because of the way I had delivered the message. We must be friends, I had reasoned for him—otherwise I would have made him dead.

  “Photo only,” the video ninja said, keeping his voice down even though he was in his own house, proving he didn’t need to write down instructions to memorize them. “As many as I can get. Color, black-and-white. No enhancement.”

  “Yes. And this is very important, Conrad; you have to make sure he doesn’t see you.”

  “Nobody ever sees me,” he said. Not boasting, just stating a fact.

  Maybe that’s what started him off, I thought. I kept that speculation to myself—Mack was the expert, not me. All I knew was that every man I soldiered with seemed to have a different reason to be wherever we were.

  “Perfect,” I told the video ninja. “You’ve got his address. He’ll either be going out at night, or coming home late. Might stay in some nights, no way for us to be sure. So you have to decide: flat rate or per diem. Understand?”

  “I…”

  “Flat rate for this job is two thousand,” I said, deliberately not using his name. “Per diem is five hundred a night.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “On flat rate, you get the photos the first night, you make two thousand for maybe a couple of hours’ work. On per diem, it takes you one night, you lose fifteen hundred. But if it takes you ten tries, you make five thousand.”

  “I understand. But how would you k
now if…?”

  “We’ll know, Conrad,” I said, extra-soft, to make certain he got the message. A message from a man he’d videoed committing murder. A man who knew where he lived.

  He took the flat rate.

  —

  Conrad must have gone right to work—it was less than forty-eight hours later when Mack called.

  “I’ll pick you up” is all he said.

  I’d never understand why Conrad did his watching. He’d earned the “ninja” tag from me because he worked invisibly to his targets, and he was very good at what he did.

  Better than good. Mack had pages and pages of photos, showing the man who called himself Roger—“Or you can call me ‘Rod’; most of my friends do”—Mason from every angle imaginable. Full-face, profile, full-body (complete with reference scale running vertically at the side of the print), close-ups all the way down to a single eyebrow…

  “He took way more than this,” Mack said. “Saved everything to these”—handing over a trio of flash sticks. “They’re all the same, but he converted to Windows, Mac, and Linux, just to be…professional.”

  “Here,” I said, handing over some cash. “Tell him the agency pays a ‘speed bonus.’ Explain how that’s just code for ‘trustworthy.’ That’ll help, right?”

  “A lot,” Mack answered. “Conrad doesn’t need the money. He’d do it for free. But no amount of money can buy the assurance that he’s moving up in status. He’s even shut down that back-channel Internet site where he used to post his…those videos he used to take.”

  —

  He was a good-looking man, this Roger Mason.

  Longish chestnut-colored hair, dark-brown eyes, well put together but not body-spectacular. Thanks to Conrad’s embedded reference scale, I could see he was about six one, maybe one eighty. No crow’s feet, baggy eyes, or even a trace of a double chin. No reason a man in his middle thirties who worked out and ate right would need any kind of facial surgery.

  But I didn’t have time to waste on image-recognition matches. I suspected that, whoever this “partner” of Benton’s was, he wouldn’t have a Facebook page.

  |>Eight images follow. ID not known.<|

  I didn’t wait for a response, but I was confident of one. If those images had appeared anywhere in cyber-space, the ghost could find them. The more governments insist on “clouded” data storage, the more vulnerable they make the data. As if they created this giant balloon, and couldn’t imagine anyone would find it. Someone with a sharp little pin in his hand.

  —

  “You really don’t care, do you, Dell? About any of it?”

  “A dog park? A graft scheme? Crooked politicians?” I said, making the French gesture for “Quelle différence?”

  “So it was just me. Me and my big mouth.”

  “There’s no ‘just’ when it comes to you, Dolly.”

  “I didn’t mean that! I meant…You know what I meant. Benton. If I hadn’t mentioned his little ‘half cocked’ nonsense, you wouldn’t have moved a muscle.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But…now that it’s over, you’re not going to do anything more. Can you promise me that?”

  “Mais oui!” I tried joking her out of the dark mood she’d been in for a few days.

  Playing around didn’t work, so I just lied: “I’m done, baby. Done with all of this.”

  —

  When I snapped the machine together a few hours later, the ghost was waiting.

  ||

  There could be a hundred variations on how they’d met, but the time line worked. By the time Benton had relocated here because he’d fallen in love with the coast life, he’d had years to put it all together. But he must have been passing as gay for quite a while—that was the kind of thing some people around here would check on.

  I spent ten seconds wondering if this Robert T. Fairmount had specialized in victimizing homosexuals. Not likely. It takes years to work yourself into position, to build a cover ID. And if he’d invested that much time, he would have come into prison with a jacket that would make him a target.

  He had to be a smooth worker—two separate felony convictions before he turned thirty, and they hadn’t held him long on either one. He knew how to get paper, too: Roger No-Middle-Initial Mason had a valid Oregon driver’s license, without a mark on it.

  That didn’t surprise me. I figured him for the kind of pro who wouldn’t drink-and-drive, or even smoke weed before he took the wheel. If the cops took him, his prints would fall, and they’d know he wasn’t who his license said he was.

  Probably didn’t take other kinds of risks, either. No playing around on the Internet, no side scams. So how hard could it have been to pose as Benton’s “partner”?

  What I didn’t know was if it was a pose. Was he in for a piece of the score, or was he just getting paid?

  No way Benton was paying him for piecework, I finally decided. It just wasn’t logical. Didn’t add up. Benton didn’t mind paying for some things—Rhonda Jayne Johnson was proof of that. But trusting a professional scam artist wouldn’t match up with anything I knew about him.

  And then Olaf was talking to me. Not saying anything, just making me replay the tapes. The two others who had run off and left Olaf to die and me to…Whatever happened to me, it wouldn’t matter to them.

  So—eight of us went in. Four died on the spot. Olaf dropped, and I stayed with him. The other two ran. Partnerships can dissolve as instantly as the first shot is fired.

  I don’t know what was in my mind when I finally made my own way back. I’m not an informant, and revenge would have made Olaf grimace in disgust.

  As it turned out, there was no need to ponder the choices. Yes, I’d made it back. But I was the only one who had.

  —

  Why Benton’s partner—the man Martin and Johnny had called “Roger”—moved to Oregon, I’d probably never know, but I could make a pretty good guess.

  This state has got it all. The population ranges from fabulously rich to dirt-poor. Politically, it’s as if geography made the decisions—the left side of the state leaned left, the right side leaned so far in the other direction that it left a kind of empty chasm along the dividing line.

  Some people would cross the street to avoid the pollution of a man smoking a cigarette; others would leave a bag of meth as a tip in a bar. Some wanted to ban toy guns; some had arsenals that cost a lot more than their houses.

  I don’t know who makes up those statistics you see in newspapers, but whoever said Oregon had a low crime rate was basing it on reported convictions. That must be so: the sex killers who drive the paved corridor from Washington all the way through Oregon and down into California aren’t out of business just because a few of them have been caught.

  Not by “profilers” or some “multi-state task force.” By informants, or a DNA hit when one of them was arrested on some other charge. Or by bragging on Facebook.

  That kind, as soon as they were locked down for life, they always seemed to confess to a lot more kills. Or just drop heavy hints. They’d say they killed so many they couldn’t remember them all.

  There was no downside to that for them, and the cops treated them very nicely while they were “clearing” cases. The higher the body count, the more status. Celebrity status, I mean. An endless stream of letters, disturbed humans who’d set up a Web site for them, a market for their “art,” TV interviews, marriage proposals…maybe even a book-and-movie deal, if they sold it hard enough.

  Whatever Roger Mason had been looking for, he could find it here. His face was the right color, and he wasn’t outrageously handsome, so he could blend wherever he needed to. Even the name he was working under was a con man’s special: both names were too common to stand out. That Oregon driver’s license meant he must have built a new ID kit before he came here. Probably had anothe
r couple put aside, just in case.

  I was at no-choice roulette. But I couldn’t do anything with guesses—even if a couple might be good enough to bet on, none were a sure thing.

  And there was only one way to get both zeros removed before the croupier spun the wheel.

  —

  Rhonda Jayne Johnson wouldn’t be the first whore to have switched gears when she found love, but that was one mystery that I’d never solve.

  I didn’t need to—whatever use she’d been to Benton was way past its sell-by date, but not her shares in his hedge fund. Even if she didn’t want the money, she wouldn’t do anything that might make it seem she was a danger to him. Leaving her Web site intact wouldn’t mean she was still working. And any hooker who worked off the Net would know all about minimizing risk. Today, pimps are for setting up Web sites.

  Undercurrents got a lot of angry e-mails about the “power play” that had been engineered in our area, but there was nothing to dig into—corruption was no stranger to this part of the world, and no “background check” on Benton would find anything he’d so much as lied about, let alone any crimes he’d committed.

  There were plenty of “comments” in support, too. Some called it an “everybody wins” deal, some said it was “business as usual.” And some were outraged that this was taking public attention away from that disgusting logging road.

  If any of those e-mails had gone into the CONFIDENTIAL bin at Undercurrents, the only thing that would have raised an eyebrow was a challenge to Benton’s homosexual credentials. Around here, that would cause a stir. But he’d never actually said anything, just let people draw their own conclusions. For most, the fact that he’d never been married and lived with another man was enough.

  And, really, so what? Being caught passing for gay in coastal Oregon might get you snubbed in some places, but it wouldn’t bring out a lynch mob.

  —

  “Summer’s over.”

  “So what?” MaryLou said to me.

  “I guess I thought you’d be going back to college.”