Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  He was looking at a man dressed in an expensive suit, but not some mere “driver.” Not with my faint French accent and use of his real name. Before he could process everything, I said: “Please, come with me, sir. I have a car waiting to bring you to Mr. Benton. He said to tell you that a meeting was necessary, because a very large sum had just been introduced by a new player and a…demonstration would be required to close.”

  “What’s that supposed to…?”

  “Sir, I know only what I was told. And I have repeated that to you.”

  “I’ll have to—”

  “Sir, my instructions are to take you to Mr. Benton.”

  “And if I don’t give a damn about your ‘instructions’?”

  “I understand. Mr. Benton said if you did not accompany me without delay, I was to leave without you. I cannot call him, because he specified that no cell phones were permitted—I am to report only in person.”

  I turned as if to go, but his hand was on my shoulder before I could take a single step.

  —

  “George has made some strange moves, but this is…weird, even for him,” the dead man probed.

  I didn’t take the bait. He hadn’t tried to jump out, so he didn’t know his door wouldn’t open. Besides, a true con man always tries to work a mark, not overpower him, and this guy was as true as they come.

  “He did not share any information with me, sir. My job is simply to—”

  “Yeah, I know,” he cut me off, switching to a more condescending tone, inviting me to prove I was no mere hired hand by telling him something—anything—to show I was an insider.

  That one didn’t work, either.

  “This car, it’s not…”

  That bait I took. “Mr. Benton wanted to be certain no attention would be attracted, sir.”

  “Well…how far are we going, anyway?”

  I glanced at the odometer, making sure he saw me do it. “Perhaps another dozen kilometers, sir.”

  He stiffened a little at “kilometers,” but recovered instantly. He wouldn’t get himself mixed up with dope, and he knew Benton wouldn’t, either, and I was some kind of Mediterranean, so…

  We drove in silence for a few minutes. I don’t know what he was thinking, just my own thoughts: He’s no muscleman, but panic does strange things to people. I don’t want to leave any pieces of him in this car, but if he…

  “What the hell is this?” he asked, looking at the long-abandoned Thai restaurant just off a two-lane stretch of asphalt.

  “Everyone is inside, sir. We enter from the back,” I told him, pushing the switch to allow his door to open.

  Once he got out of the car, I walked next to him, on his left. He probably never heard the wraith’s whisper of the black steel baton as it dropped out of my sleeve and whipped behind his head. Sounds carry a long distance outdoors, and a knife won’t stop a man from screaming…or leaving some DNA around, either.

  Fractured skull, unconscious. He was done, but I wasn’t. I planted the spike deep behind his ear, kicked it all the way home, and left it in place while I went back to the car and opened the trunk.

  Wrapping him in the sheets of roofer’s plastic didn’t take long. I carried his body back to the trunk, which was already triple-lined with more of the same stuff.

  Then I drove off to wait for the sun.

  —

  When I rolled up to the job site, Franklin was waiting.

  I didn’t know exactly what job he was working on, but I knew it was on a hill that was wooded on one side and clear on the other.

  I wasn’t halfway out of the Peugeot when he came charging down to where I parked. “Do you need any…?”

  “Just for you to stay in place, Franklin. You’re still using the tree chipper on this job, right?”

  “Yep. We’ve got a big one, a Bandit. They cost a lot, but Mr. Spyros said, for what they charge to rent those things, buying one was going to pay for itself pretty quick. And he was right. It’ll probably take another couple of weeks to finish everything, like I told you.”

  “You’ve been running it every day?”

  “Every day.”

  “Nobody’s complained?”

  “Somebody came by, but he was more curious than anything. When he got out of his truck, Mr. Spyros talked to him.”

  “So he won’t be back?”

  “Mr.…? Oh, you mean the guy in the truck?” Franklin snorted—kind of like a bull does when it’s pawing the ground. “Nah. Not a chance.”

  “Okay, Franklin. We went over this, right?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  I caught his eyes—there was a hint of merriment in them that I’d never seen before. More confident on his home turf? For Franklin, working with Spyros was home. Maybe that was it. But I could almost feel MaryLou standing there. Standing with him.

  “Okay. Now I’m going to drive my car partway up, right into that canopy you made. It’s perfect.”

  “It wasn’t so hard. All I did was—”

  “Not hard for you, maybe. I know I couldn’t do it. Hell, I don’t think a whole crew could do it, not in the time you had.”

  “Well…”

  “You left my chain saw in there?”

  “Sure!”

  “All right. You go back to that tree-chipper thing, fire it up, and start pushing timber through it. When you see me coming, I’ll have something over my shoulder. That’s your cue to turn around and walk back over to the canopy where my car is. You’ve got work to do in that area, too, right?”

  “Oh yeah. And plenty of it. Mr. Spyros left me in—”

  “Great. Now, remember, your job is to keep anyone from walking past you. Nothing else. Don’t look back—I’ll be down here pretty soon.”

  “I’d never tell—”

  “I know that, Franklin. That’s because we’re friends. True friends. You wouldn’t take a chance on getting me in trouble. Well, that goes both ways—you can’t get in trouble over something you never knew anything about, understand?”

  “Yes” is all the big man said. A lot more soberly this time.

  By the time I shoulder-carried the plastic shroud up the hill, Franklin was sitting off to one side of the machine. It really was reducing trees to little chips, but making less of a holy-hell racket than I expected.

  Unrolling the shroud took only one long pull. I put a slab of plywood on another piece of the plastic, then dragged the body over on top of it. The chain saw dismembered Fairmount like he was a thick, dead branch.

  When I ran the saw’s blade all the way through his throat, I had a brief image of those heads on stakes that Dolly and I had planted. After MaryLou’s trial ended the way it had.

  Tossing different pieces of him into the chipper was even easier. The plywood went last, after I flipped it over to make sure nothing had soaked through to the wrapping I’d carried him in. Then I tossed in the trio of five-gallon plastic jugs full of alcohol. The chipper treated them as it did everything else entering its maw.

  I took one last look at the growing pile of chips. Even if there were microscopic pieces of human remains in there, they didn’t worry me—who’d ever look?

  I turned my back on the whole thing, and started down the hill.

  —

  “I’ve got to go put all this someplace,” I told Franklin, holding the rolled-up black plastic in one hand and the chain saw in the other.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Sometimes that chipper leaves kind of a mess. Mr. Spyros says, if that happens, just pour some gasoline over everything on the canvas tarp we use to catch it all. Then trench all around it and set the chips on fire. It’s what we call a ‘controlled burn.’ You think that might be a good idea?”

  “It’s a perfect idea,” I told him. “I wish I’d thought of it.”

  —

  About an hour later, it was finished.

  Everything I needed was in the trunk of my car: A jug that looked like the ones they use to refill water coolers was actually glass, fill
ed with high-concentrate sulfuric acid. And the deep stoneware pot looked like something you’d plant flowers in.

  There was a lot of the black plastic, but once I rolled it all up tightly, it was easy for the chain saw to reduce it to small chunks, almost filling the stoneware pot. Then I put on thick goggles and heavy rubber gloves, and poured in the acid.

  I was patient about it—a little bit at a time, very careful to guard against a splash.

  Once all the plastic pieces were part of the acid, it turned an ugly brownish color for a few minutes, then started to clear as it ate into the pot itself.

  I used the wedge I had kicked under the pot to stick a long pry bar into place, and all my strength to pour it out, a little at a time. I could have used Franklin’s muscles on this part, but I didn’t want him to know what I was fouling the soil with, and I couldn’t let him help without safety gear.

  A sledgehammer cracked the pot into shards. I shoveled those into a hole Franklin had already dug about ten yards away, then refilled it with the mound of dirt he’d left right next to it.

  He never asked why I wanted him to do any of this. Maybe MaryLou had told him what I was capable of, maybe he sensed it—I don’t know. But he knew that I had done some of those things to protect MaryLou once, and that alone would have been enough for Franklin.

  A man who always pays his debts drifted into my head. Olaf had been a genius. Franklin couldn’t come close to Olaf in some ways. But in one way—one critical way—they were brothers.

  —

  Dolly was waiting for me.

  “Took your new car for another test drive, Dell?”

  “That’s about right. I’ll probably need to add some more candlepower up front; those headlights don’t exactly peel paint.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Leave it, Dolly,” I said.

  She gave me a look I couldn’t read, but I was too tired to try and decipher it. All I wanted was to cover myself with alcohol, then shower it off and get some sleep.

  Anyway, that’s all I thought I wanted, until Dolly stepped into the shower, just to be sure I did a good job.

  —

  VANISHED!

  The headline in the local newspaper. George Benton, well-known philanthropist and community activist, hadn’t been seen for weeks. I guess the L.A. cops were still working his laptop for leads, and I’d been told their department wasn’t lenient about leaks. Not anymore, anyway.

  A police “welfare check” of Benton’s house revealed no sign of Roger Mason. Turned out that he hadn’t been seen for a while, either.

  No sign of foul play.

  Nothing in Undercurrents except a lot of e-mails ranging from gay-rights activists to self-appointed “profilers,” all larded with gross speculation. Some said they had demanded that the FBI investigate, but had been rebuffed.

  The local police—all of them, from Village PD to the Sheriff’s Office, to the County Patrol, even the Tribal Police—collaborated on a letter saying that both parties were adults, no one had the authority to report them as “missing,” and their premises had been gone over thoroughly “by the best forensics teams from all departments” without finding so much as a strand of the wrong color hair.

  And, no, a DNA analysis had not been performed, because there was nothing to test. Nothing had been disturbed, nothing stolen. They issued a combined public statement: there was nothing to do unless some “indication of criminality” emerged.

  Either the L.A. detectives had contacted the locals and told them to keep the killing quiet, or maybe they figured small-town cops would only impede their investigation. Equal possibilities—either one served each group’s interests.

  It didn’t stop people on Facebook from “calling for” action—like reporting “sightings” to a page they set up for that. Over a thousand in the first week.

  —

  “Nobody gives a damn,” Dolly told me almost a month later.

  “Everyone’s still getting what they want, even if it might take a little longer. The bond issue passed easily, so they’ll have their precious Sign Wall, and that convention center will be going up when all the land is cleared.

  “And all of us who owned that land where we wanted to build a dog park? We’ll end up with enough money to buy a much better parcel, one already zoned, with a nearby road and everything.”

  I just shrugged my shoulders—none of this had anything to do with me.

  Maybe that fooled Dolly. If it didn’t, I’d never know.

  Rascal yawned.

  —

  There are times when logic can become your enemy.

  I can still remember banishing pain from my thoughts as I slogged through a blood-lusting jungle, one leg useless from the metal fragments implanted by a land mine, its weight on a crutch I had fashioned from a hacked-off tree limb.

  Logic pounded at my mind, demanding entrance. It wanted to tell me how lucky I’d been, how the soldiers moving ahead of me on that tracking trail had not. But it had other messages as well, and any computation of odds would have reduced my will to keep moving.

  If I could just keep moving, I’d find safety. No other thought could enter my mind. My sole focus was on that…dream?…fantasy? No! It was ahead of me, that place of safety.

  For Dolly, our little cottage was that place.

  A place of true peace Dolly had longed for ever since she left Médecins Sans Frontières. Or maybe since she had walked away from whatever was in her past to enter one battle zone after another. As with me, it was down to two choices. Polar opposites, no middle ground.

  Keep moving or die.

  —

  When I’d first learned of Dolly’s dream, it took me full circle.

  All the time I was working to make it come true, I never gave a moment’s thought to the cold logic I had blocked from my mind as I slogged through that jungle so many years ago.

  When I found the place Dolly so desperately longed for, only then did I realize the truth: she would not have shared her dream with me unless she was willing to share its coming true with me as well.

  That knowledge came slowly. As I moved toward the little cottage, all I knew was that it was worth my life to find it for Dolly. Not the cottage, that place of peace.

  When I found it, when Dolly became my Dolly, I’d taken lives to keep it so.

  Within that peaceful zone, Dolly found a way to keep doing her work. Rescuing, that was her work. Her choice.

  Killing, that had been my work.

  Luc had taken on a debt when he called me “son.” I had taken on a debt when I’d put Patrice’s lifeless body on my shoulder and carried him all the way back to base. Had I been allowed, I would have taken him home. But I wouldn’t have known how to find his home, and I couldn’t have answered any of the questions that would have been asked along the way.

  Olaf paid the only debt he still acknowledged in his last moments of life. It cost him some pain, but I would not disrespect his sense of honor by taking that pain away.

  Die for Dolly? I would do that with pride. Kill for her? I had done that. But I was no storybook knight in armor. How much of what I had done, what I was always ready to do, was nothing more than my unwillingness to live without her?

  That I would never know.

  —

  “Can we, Dell? Really?”

  I kissed her forehead.

  It was much too early for Thanksgiving. The holiday, I mean. For what we shared that day, there would never be a date marked on a calendar.

  The kitchen table was just the right size for all of us.

  Martin and Johnny.

  Mack and Bridgette.

  MaryLou and Franklin.

  Dolly and me.

  Rascal even shared his food with Minnie. Probably because the mutt couldn’t possibly eat everything that kept getting tossed into his washtub of a dinner bowl.

  Dolly loved them all. But when Franklin didn’t seem aware of the tears tracking across his cheekbones, she gave Mack a “Stay out of
this!” look. Me, she didn’t even bother—I knew her a lot better than he ever would.

  MaryLou stood up, leaned over, and whispered something about flowers in the giant’s ear. They were outside for quite a while. When they came back in, Franklin handed Dolly a bouquet he had picked from her garden.

  “I hope you—” he had started, when Dolly said, “Oh, they’re perfect!” and pulled his head down to plant a kiss on both cheeks. “That’s exactly what this table is missing.” Then she wheeled on Johnny and Martin, like they should have thought of it themselves.

  They all loved Dolly.

  I don’t guess I loved anyone but her.

  But I could feel Luc and Patrice, hovering. So maybe I really was back to myself. Not what I was turned into. Not what I’d made a living doing. Into what I was meant to be, truly.

  Andrew Vachss is a lawyer who represents children and youths exclusively. His many works include the Burke, Cross, and Aftershock series, numerous stand-alone novels, and three collections of short stories. His works have been translated into twenty languages and have appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, and The New York Times, among other publications.

  The dedicated Web site for Andrew Vachss and his work is www.vachss.com.