Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  One wall is nothing but bookshelves. The others hold my terrain maps. They’re from different places I’ve been, but I never explain that to anyone.

  There’s this big porthole window, so I can see right out into the yard. Some days, I’d be sitting there and Alfred Hitchcock would pace right past that window, like he was making sure everything was okay.

  Every once in a while, a couple of the boys wander back to the den. If the door’s closed, they never knock. But if it’s open, they know they can just walk right in. Sometimes girls come in there, too.

  The boys always want to talk about Vietnam. I don’t know where they got the idea that I’d been there. I guess they figure anyone my age must have—especially with all the liars running around VFW halls bragging about what heroes they’d been.

  A town this size, especially nestled away in a cove of its own, word gets around. Even if the “word” is all wrong. I had been inside Vietnam, all right, but long after the last American soldier had pulled out.

  “Did you ever kill anyone?” That’s their favorite question.

  I always tell them the truth and lie with the same words. “Yes,” I would always tell them, “but that’s what war is. I never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me.”

  That was true for a lot of places I’ve worked. But after La Légion, I never wore a uniform. Dog tags would have been nothing more than extra weight. I wouldn’t have known what to put on them, anyway.

  “Does it make you mad when people say they’re against the war?” they’d want to know. They meant that mess in Iraq—the one that spilled back over from Afghanistan, and was on its way back there now. Some of their relatives had told them stories, about how it hurt them to come home after fighting for their country, only to be hated for doing it.

  “No,” I’d always tell them. “That’s got nothing to do with me.” And that part was the truth.

  “My father says Jane Fonda was a traitor,” one of them said once. I could see he was trying to get me going.

  “I can see where he’d think that,” I answered, calm and mild-voiced.

  “But do you think that?” one of the girls asked. At that age, they’re a lot sharper than boys.

  “It’s not people like me who matter,” I told them. “It’s people like you.”

  “How come?”

  “Because the only way anyone listens to someone like Jane Fonda is when people treat them like they’re important. If someone’s a big enough celebrity, journalists ask them questions about stuff they don’t know anything about, because fans want to know what their … idol, or whatever they’re called … what they think. About anything.

  “Jane Fonda was never a soldier. She wasn’t a political scientist, or a historian. And she sure was no expert on Southeast Asia. But if she calls a press conference, everybody shows up. That’s all that happened.”

  “That’s true!” one of the other girls said, backing me up. A tough-looking little freckle-face with big owl glasses, she looked like she was used to standing her ground. “Once I saw Britney Spears on TV. They were asking her about global warming. I’ll bet her idea of global warming is when the air-conditioning breaks.”

  I’d caught a glimpse of Dolly smiling at me over the girl’s shoulder. I still treasure how that made me feel.

  The morning after the day I found Alfred Hitchcock, I told Dolly I was driving over to the city. There’s always some different things I need for my projects, and she knows I’d never buy anything over the Internet. I asked her if she wanted me to bring back anything for her, and she said what she always does: “A surprise!”

  So I’d stopped at the nursery first, picked up a whole mess of stuff for Dolly. A couple of gay guys own the place, Martin and Johnny. They’re nuts about Dolly. I’m not sure how they feel about me, but that doesn’t matter. Not to them; not to me.

  I never ask for anything in particular; they just load up whatever they think Dolly might like. We’ve got all kinds of lilies growing in big tubs I made out of cut-down barrels. I put some PVC to work as a liner and drilled a few drainage holes—and Dolly did the rest. We’ve got purple and white lilacs, too—what Dolly calls a butterfly bush. The fuchsia is reserved for the hummingbirds. We even have some black bamboo—thin, strange-looking stalks, not the heavier ones I’d been so scared of falling into a long time ago.

  I got Dolly some new orchids, for inside the house. Those were my own idea. I know I should have left the nursery stop for last, to keep everything fresh. But I had to get Dolly’s surprise out of the way, because I wasn’t sure how late I’d be out looking for what I needed. So I misted everything down real good, and covered it all with a dark mesh tarp.

  As it turned out, I had to drive quite a distance until I found the place I wanted. They’ve got a lot of those places in any city, and they all look alike—either the glass in the windows is all blacked out, or there’s no windows at all.

  The guy at the desk didn’t look up when I came in the door. That’s part of what buyers count on—same reason they don’t have security cameras.

  They wouldn’t need cameras for the usual reason, either. Every pro-level stickup man knows all the cash goes straight down a slot into a safe in the basement, and the clerk never knows the combination.

  I found what I was looking for easy enough—there was a big selection.

  I paid for what I bought the same way I paid for Dolly’s plants. I don’t have any credit cards, and I don’t have a checking account.

  Dolly didn’t say a word about how long I’d been gone. And she loved everything I brought for her. I took the other stuff down to my workshop.

  I knew who he was. Just like I knew Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t been his first one.

  I didn’t need his name, because I had his path. His kind, they always move in straight lines. You may not know where they’re going, but you can always track them from where they’ve been.

  The local paper puts the crime reports on a separate page. Not big crimes, like an armed robbery or a murder. Around here, something like that’s so rare it would make headlines. The “Crime Beat” page is just a printout of the entire police blotter. Drunk driving takes up most of it, with some domestic violence sprinkled in. Lately, a lot of minor-league meth busts, too. But you also see things like shoplifting, disorderly conduct, urinating in public … any petty little nonsense you could get arrested for.

  The paper says they were all “found guilty,” but I knew that was just code for “took a plea.” That’s why sentences for real crimes never seemed to match the charges. Who gets probation for sexual assault on a minor? I guess that’s why they call them “bargains.”

  The library has a complete archive, going all the way back. I read three years’ worth. Found seven little notices that qualified: five “animal cruelties”—no details; it wasn’t that kind of newspaper—and two fires they called “arson, under investigation.”

  After I marked the locations of those crimes on my close-terrain map, I used my protractor and saw they were all within a 2.3-mile radius of where Alfred Hitchcock had been tortured to death. You wouldn’t need a car to cover that much ground, no matter where you started from.

  That’s when I started leaving the door of my den open all the time, even when I wasn’t around.

  Under the bookshelves, there’s a cabinet. It has a lock built into it, but I sometimes forget to use it. You can tell that by looking—the key would still be in the lock, sticking out.

  The boys knew I kept magazines in there. All kinds, from Soldier of Fortune to Playboy, staying with the image they had for me. I’d added the stuff I bought on that last visit to the city.

  It only took a couple of weeks for one of those to go missing. Whoever took it would never notice that I had removed the staples and replaced them with a pair of wire-thin transmitters.

  Those transmitters were real short-range, but I was sure I wouldn’t need much. I knew he was somewhere close. And that he would never imagine anyone hunting him.
>
  Dolly was asleep when I slipped out that night. Rascal was awake, but he kept his mouth shut. He gave me a look, so I’d know he wasn’t sleeping on the job.

  When I picked up the signal, I didn’t try to track it to the exact house—I wasn’t dressed for that kind of risk. All I really needed was the general area, anyway. The library had a city directory, and every high school yearbook, going back more years than I’d need.

  The school was closed for the summer. There was no security guard. The alarm system was probably older than me.

  The guidance counselor’s office wasn’t even locked.

  I could tell it was a woman’s office without turning on my shrouded fiber-optic pencil flash. Whoever she was, she kept her file cabinets locked. And the key in her desk.

  Jerrald had a thick file. He’d been evaluated a number of times. I kept seeing stuff like “attachment disorder.” I skipped over the flabby labels and went right to the stone foundation they built those on—the boy had been torturing animals since he was in the second grade, starting with his own puppy.

  The counselors wrote that Jerrald was “acting out.” Or “crying for help.” Some mentioned “conduct disorder.” Some talked about medications.

  To read what they wrote, you’d think they knew what they were talking about. Every one of his “misconducts” always had some explanation.

  But I’d known men who’d once been boys like Jerrald. So I knew what he’d really been doing.

  Practicing.

  The counselors had done all kinds of things for Jerrald. Individual therapy. Group therapy. Pills that he probably never took.

  The most recent report said he had been making real progress. Jerrald had a Facebook page. I knew what that was from those kids Dolly always had around—a kind of diary they write on their computers. Some put up stuff they wanted to show off: paintings, poetry, photography, short stories.

  I read some of Jerrald’s stuff that the counselor had printed out. All torture-rape-murder stories. The counselor said that they were a good outlet for Jerrald—a “safe place for him to vent.”

  Even Jerrald’s English teacher said his writing showed real promise.

  I knew the only promise Jerrald was ever going to keep.

  I left the school the same way I’d left Alfred Hitchcock’s body in the woods—nobody would ever be able to tell I’d visited either place. Two rules: You enter without breaking. And you remember that nobody misses what you don’t take.

  The best way to keep anger out of your blood is to go back to your training. Nothing personal. Always do it by the numbers.

  The anger was all mine, all against myself. I’d thought I’d already done my job by stopping the deer-killers. But keeping them at a safe distance didn’t matter when Dolly was letting even more dangerous people in the door. Just the thought of leaving my Dolly exposed dialed all the blood in my body to subzero. Blood doesn’t have to flow if there’s no heart for it to oxygenate—and if you do it “by the numbers,” like I’d been trained to, there’s no heart involved.

  By mid-May, I’d found out that Jerrald’s parents were going on vacation. To Hawaii. They were taking his little sister with them, but not Jerrald. He was eighteen, more than old enough to leave on his own for a couple of weeks.

  I don’t know whose idea that was. Or, I guess, whose idea they thought it was.

  The newspapers speculated that Jerrald must have been building some kind of bomb in his room. One serious enough to blow out the whole back of his house, where his bedroom had been.

  Anytime a high school kid gets caught with heavy explosives, it’s a big deal, no matter where it is. The cops said the bomb was probably a crude, homemade device. “Very simplistic,” their expert said. “You can get instructions on how to build one on the Internet.”

  They printed parts of Jerrald’s Facebook page in the papers—he had more than nine hundred “friends,” especially fans of his writings. But he was obviously a very disturbed young man, all the experts agreed on that. Probably been bullied, too, they said.

  What they didn’t say out loud was how relieved they all were that he’d never had a chance to bring the bomb to school.

  The town had a big funeral for him. A lot of kids were crying. Dolly went, too; some of those kids really wanted her there.

  I didn’t go. I was out in the deep woods, giving Alfred Hitchcock a proper burial. Simple and dignified, the way he would have wanted it.

  I thought that was the last of it. I’d pulled the perimeter in so tight that I was sure my Dolly was safe, even from another kid like Jerrald. It wasn’t until I followed her upstairs that night that I learned how wrong I was.

  I found Dolly sitting at the huge slab of butcher block she had fixed up like a kitchen table.

  The lights were on.

  Rascal ran over to me, like he’d been waiting days for the little strip of rawhide he always scored whenever I came out of my workshop.

  As I handed over his prize, I checked Dolly’s hands. They were still free enough to use any of the signals I’d taught her; but all she did was pick up a cup of that herbal tea she likes, and take a sip. I sat across from her.

  “I’m sorry, Dell. I’m probably just shook up. From the phone call,” she said, pointing at the cell sitting on the tabletop.

  “Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t doing anything important. Just killing time.”

  She gave me a look. “MaryLou’s in jail,” she said. If you didn’t know Dolly, you’d think she was telling me about some little thing, just making conversation. But I could hear the threads tightening inside the calm of her voice.

  Battlefield calm. Like when she was moving between beds in a field hospital, talking to the wounded men. All professionally sweet and cheerful, even though they’d just gotten a radio signal that “hostiles” were only a few klicks away. And on the move.

  I made my mouth twitch, just enough to tell her that I didn’t know who she was talking about.

  “Oh, Dell! You remember her. The real tall girl with pale-blue eyes. Always wears her hair in a long ponytail. She was going to college in the fall; I don’t remember exactly where. On a softball scholarship. She’s a really good pitcher. That’s why they call her Mighty Mary. Because she throws so hard. She had more strikeouts—”

  I shook my head to cut her off. Whoever this girl was, she hadn’t been one of those who came into my den sometimes. I never look close at those girls, even the ones that stay with Dolly all the time they’re here, but I’d have remembered the one she’d just described. Anyway, I needed Dolly to get to whatever this big trouble was. Was Dolly just being herself, looking after another kid? Or was she in it deeper than that?

  Dolly read my thoughts. Easy enough for her to do, I guess. My walls are thick and high, but Dolly’s always been inside them, wearing them like some other woman would a mink coat.

  “Yesterday was the last day of school. MaryLou was walking down the hall when, all of a sudden, she pulled a pistol out of her backpack and started shooting.”

  “How many?”

  Dolly knew what I was asking. “One dead,” she said. “Two others wounded, neither of them near critical. I guess it’s a good thing she only had six bullets.”

  “Six bullets or six shots?”

  “I don’t know. All Kendra—she’s the girl who called—all Kendra said was that MaryLou shot Cameron Taft. Then she fired a few more times and just threw down her gun.”

  “Did the cops come in shooting?”

  “Why would they do that? Kendra said MaryLou was just sitting on the floor, like she’d finished her homework and was taking a break. She was the only one in the hall. Everyone else was in the classrooms, hiding under the desks or whatever. Kendra said 911 probably got a hundred cell-phone calls.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else. All I know is, the police came and took her away. To jail, I mean.”

  “Straight to jail?”

  “Dell, I don’t understand. Where would
they stop along the way?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “You mean if—? Wait! I already told you, the police didn’t do any shooting.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? What do you mean, ‘okay’? MaryLou killed a boy. And we don’t know why.”

  “I mean: ‘Okay, you’re not involved,’ Dolly. That’s all. You want to get her a lawyer, is that it?”

  “We have to get her a lawyer. Her father’s been on the Double D”—I guess I’d been paying more attention to those kids than I thought, because I knew she meant Drunk Disability—“for years, her mother’s got a job packing groceries, and her little sister, Danielle, she’s only … I mean, she goes to the same school. She’s a sophomore. So what kind of money could that family have?”

  “If they don’t have money, the state has to—”

  “No!”

  “Ssssh, honey. It’s okay. Find out who’s a good lawyer around here, we’ll take care of him, all right? They’re not going to set bail on a murder charge, so you’ve got some time to ask around.”

  “I don’t have to,” she said, the steel back inside the core of her voice. “The best criminal lawyers are all far away from here.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “I don’t know that. What I do know is that the criminal lawyers around here, all they know is how to plead guilty. It’s like a joke with some of the kids. They say the DA is as soft as warm custard. He’s more afraid of trials than the plague. And he’s been in office since forever, so I guess the local lawyers all got used to making deals. Now they’re no good for anything else.”

  “You want me to … ask around?”

  “No. What’s the point? MaryLou did … what they said. There had to be fifty different witnesses, and they found the pistol where she dropped it in the hall. So it’s either going to be a guilty plea or an insanity trial.”

  “Then …?”

  “She’s going to be in court Monday. It’s so terrible. That’s the same day she was supposed to be leaving for summer camp—softball camp, I mean, at college. Now she’s probably never going to play softball again.”