Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  And whatever Dolly wanted, I wanted to get for her. I had learned some new things to be with her; if that’s what it took to stay with her, I could learn some more.

  “How far do you want to go with this?” I asked her late that same night.

  “Far? You mean … what, Dell?”

  “Break her out, that far.”

  “No.”

  I waited. I knew there was more to come; Dolly did this when she wanted to make sure I understood whatever she was going to say.

  “She couldn’t live underground,” Dolly finally said, already accepting that I might be able to break her out. “Not MaryLou. She’s not built for it.”

  “She looks like she is. She’s in jail, and she’s just a kid. But nobody’s even so much as tried her.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Not a mark on her. Not on her face, not on her hands. That means either she rolled over or nobody pushed. And she’s not the kind to roll over.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s not what I meant. Even if she could get around her looks—I know there’s ways to do that—she’d die of loneliness. She needs … people. Friends. Sports. She needs to be connected.”

  “There’s places where she could make new friends.”

  “Overseas, you mean?”

  “Yeah. She couldn’t just disappear. Not in America, but there’s places that’d take her.”

  “No,” Dolly whispered, roadblocking the idea.

  “MaryLou’s not crazy. So she had a reason. But she’s not telling—not so far, anyway. It’s like all we have is this big chunk of granite. So you start boring your way in from one side, and I’ll take the other.”

  “I can do that.”

  “It’s not just boring in, baby. You and me, we have to cut a tunnel. One tunnel, so we meet in the middle, yes? And we have to make sure the stone doesn’t crack while we’re working through it.”

  “So—go slow?”

  “It’s not so much that as making sure we’re headed toward the same light. The one in the middle.”

  “What’s there, Dell? What’s in the middle?”

  “MaryLou,” I said, real soft.

  I held her until she drifted off. Drifted off for real. When Dolly thinks I’m going someplace after she goes to sleep, she stays tense, even asleep.

  “They have to tell you what they’ve got, right?”

  “They’re supposed to,” Swift told me. “There’s a Supreme Court case that says, if they don’t turn over everything that’s exculpatory, any conviction gets thrown out.”

  “Exculpatory?”

  “Anything that might prove her innocence. Or even what might make the case against her look weaker to a jury.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “What about it?”

  “Don’t they have to match the ballistics?”

  “Well … sure. But that’s probably not going to help us. When the police got there, she was just sitting on the floor. The gun was right next to her.”

  “Couldn’t we get the gun itself, too? Not to take away or anything, but to have our own ballistics guy run tests?”

  “I suppose so. You don’t see a lot of expert testimony in cases around here.”

  “Too expensive?”

  “That’s probably part of it. But challenging experts is a tricky business. It could backfire easily enough.”

  What you mean is, you’ve never had your own expert. On any case, ever. Probably never even asked for one, I thought. But all I said out loud was “So who’s their expert? Some cop?”

  “Probably.”

  “And they’re never wrong?”

  “I know, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be, but …”

  “The fee we agreed on? I understand that doesn’t include whatever you’d have to spend on experts, okay?”

  Little clots of red popped up on his round face. Bull’s-eye.

  “And no matter what, they have to tell you everything about the gun they found?”

  “Certainly,” he said, back to where he felt safe. “In fact, that’s one of the motions I’m going to file.”

  “When?”

  “Uh … today, in fact.”

  “And they can’t refuse?”

  “No. Not for something like that.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you later, then.”

  “You could just call, if you want.”

  “I don’t like talking on phones,” I said, “but sometimes speed is more important than safety. So here’s my cell-phone number, in case something comes up.” I handed over the number of the prepaid on the back of an index card.

  The writing for the phone number wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anybody’s. Nobody uses pantographs much anymore, I guess, but they were perfect if you wanted untraceable “handwriting.”

  Since I was already dressed for the part, I went over to the jail. They put MaryLou and me in that same lawyer’s room, so I guessed there weren’t going to be any arguments over that in the future.

  When the guard brought MaryLou in, there was something about the way she handled the job that made me think. I’d have to run it past Dolly.

  MaryLou sat down. I put my finger to my lips. Then I took out a pad and wrote, “Why them?” in soft pencil.

  I pushed the pad over to her side of the table. She looked at what I’d written for a long time. Then she shook her head and pushed the pad back over to me.

  “Not trust me?” I wrote.

  She shook her head again.

  I pointed at my temple, made a gesture as if smacking myself in the head, sighed. It brought a little smile to her face.

  She reached for the pad. Wrote, “I trust Dolly.”

  “But even if she asked you …?”

  “No. This isn’t about trust.”

  “OK,” I wrote. “The cops took the gun. Did they take anything else?”

  “Everything else. I had to strip. They kept it all. Gave me some sweats. People dropped off other clothes for me. I guess they searched those clothes, too. Before they gave them to me.”

  She pushed the pad back to me. I took out a match. She pointed to the big NO SMOKING sign. I held the match to the paper I’d torn from the pad I’d been writing on. It went poof! and disappeared. I blew out the match and pocketed it.

  “Cool!” MaryLou said, sounding like a little kid for a second.

  It was just flash paper. A guy in Marseilles gave me a few pads of it a long time ago. Guess it still worked.

  I wrote, “I’m going to come around and sit next to you, so you can whisper. Cup your hands around your mouth, then open them just a slit. I’ll do the same. Is that OK?”

  She nodded. No stranger to secrets, I thought.

  I got up, crossed around, and whispered into her left ear, “Do you give a damn about what happens next?”

  She nodded her head vigorously.

  “You didn’t expect to get away with it, did you?”

  “You mean, like escape or something?” she whispered back.

  It was my turn to nod.

  And hers to shake her head.

  “Your parents?” I whispered.

  She made a push-away motion with one hand, shook her head.

  “Useless?” I whispered, to be sure.

  “At their best,” she whispered back.

  I sat there for a few minutes. MaryLou tapped the back of my right hand. The crude stitches they’d put in a long time ago had left bluish, lumpy lines. I never even noticed them myself anymore.

  I copied her “useless” gesture.

  She smiled.

  I cupped my hands, said, “MaryLou, I’m blundering around here. Dolly wants me to do … she wants me to do whatever I can. But she also doesn’t want me doing anything you don’t want. So—now’s the time to tell me, understand?”

  “I don’t want to spend my life in prison,” she whispered back. “But don’t ask me any ‘Why did you do it?’ questions. I wouldn’t answer them even if I could walk out of here today.”

  �
��You said ‘life.’ One of the women you’re locked up with told you the DA would never ask for the death penalty.”

  She gave me a puzzled look. Then whispered, “How could you know that?”

  “Same way I can make paper disappear. Be careful of people who act like they’re schooling you.”

  She looked at me a long time. Eye to eye. Then she said, “Whatever I have to do.”

  “I need a close-terrain map.”

  “For right around here?” Dolly asked.

  “No. For the school. All those kids you’re always having over, it sounds like they never stop talking.”

  “Oh.” She kind of giggled. “I guess that’s what it would sound like to you, honey. But I still don’t know what you’re asking for.”

  “I guess I don’t, either. You know I wasn’t born here, so—”

  “I don’t know where you were born, Dell. Neither do you. Why does it matter, all of a sudden?”

  “One thing I do know is that it wasn’t here. And you’re right—it doesn’t matter, not anymore. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t know how school … works here. How it breaks down.”

  “Ah! You mean, like jocks and nerds, stuff like that.”

  “More like a … chain of command, I guess. The pyramids. Who’s on top, who’s on the bottom. For all the clubs and cliques. And the outsiders.”

  “I know what you mean. And I already have that much. But what I don’t have is what I guess you really want to know. Specific names, right?”

  “Yeah. Like … Okay, her best friend is Megan. And this Franklin guy. For all I know, MaryLou was the big boss of some clique herself.”

  “Not MaryLou. She was a star athlete, all right. But ‘Mighty Mary’ was just something the papers started calling her. Around school, it wasn’t really a compliment. More like saying she was standoffish. Even snobby. But the real snobby ones—especially the girls—they’re always in groups.”

  “Boys, too?”

  “Oh yes! Maybe even worse for them. There’s a fraternity. Kind of like they have in college. You don’t have to be an athlete to get in, I don’t think. But I can find out.”

  “Good. Any of those boys in that group have some outsider they single out? Put down? Talk about like he’s some kind of freak?”

  “There is one. I don’t remember his name. But what he does is tape girls fighting. Fighting with each other. Then he puts them on the Internet. It’s a kind of porno—you know, like girls in negligees having pillow fights. But this is the real thing, the fighting. They don’t just pull hair, they punch and kick. Even bite. You can hear the crowd cheering on the tapes, but you only see the girls.

  “And they do talk about this guy like he’s this real degenerate. But that doesn’t stop them from watching the tapes. Even egging some of the girls on themselves.”

  “Good! This fight-film guy, he ever get one of MaryLou?”

  “I don’t think so. But I can find that out, too.”

  “So he doesn’t get the girls to fight, he just shows up when they do?”

  “It has to be that. There’s no way this guy could get girls to fight.”

  “Why not him?”

  “The boys who get girls fighting, it’s fighting over them, you see? This film guy—and I will find out his name for you—the way the girls talk about him, it’s like he’s real creepy, so I can’t see any of them fighting over him.”

  “Then I need a bigger map. If you had a close-up map of this town, would you be able to point out places where kids hang out?”

  “I can download a map like that easy enough. But hang out for what, Dell? Some places, they … socialize, I guess. Others, it’s more like Lovers’ Lane. Or getting high. Or skateboarding. You see what I mean?”

  “Yeah. And if you could mark which places are for which things, that would help a lot.”

  “I’ll start now,” Dolly told me, as she booted up her laptop.

  I don’t ride my motorcycle much anymore. But it’s got plates and insurance, and I keep it fresh-tuned. I store it off the ground, so the tires don’t flat-spot.

  A 1995 Honda VT600C isn’t much for speed, and it doesn’t come close to the handling of the ones they make now. But it also doesn’t look like anything. Actually, it kind of looks like it could be all kinds of different bikes—especially in battleship gray with extra-quiet pipes.

  Another good thing about using a bike is that the cops expect to see you with a helmet and face shield, wearing gloves. So you can be damn near invisible if you stay off the main roads. Even more so after dark.

  I keep the bike behind the false back wall of the garage. That part’s vented, so I can fire the bike up indoors if I ever have to. But this time I planned to walk it far enough so I could pull the clutch in and coast downhill. Anyone who heard it after that wasn’t going to connect it with our house.

  I made sure everything was tight, including the HID boat light I have taped to the front of the tank. It’s not for seeing; it’s for blinding. Anyone hit in the face with that on full beam isn’t going anywhere. Unless he’s driving—then he’ll probably crash.

  But they’re not illegal, and neither is the Glock 23 I carry. For this part of what I wanted to do, having a registered handgun with me made more sense.

  I did a before-battle check, point by point. Then I went back inside.

  I wasn’t surprised to see Dolly using a bunch of different-colored markers on a map.

  “The colors are codes,” she told me. “Like, see the ones in red? Those are danger zones.”

  “Danger?”

  “Dangerous to kids, I mean.”

  “Because …?”

  “Because of a lot of different reasons. See, here?” she said, touching a red dot on the map with a black line drawn through it. “That’s a skateboard park. It’s fine in the daytime, but a different crowd takes over at night.”

  “And they’re dangerous because …?”

  “You know. Drugs, liquor—”

  “Dolly, I’m not interested in places where kids shouldn’t be hanging out. I don’t know how much time we’ll have, so I want to start with the worst. But it has to be someplace you could hide and use a videocam.”

  “Here,” she said. “The only reason anyone would go there is to park and make out, or have sex.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “There’s talk about someone who doesn’t have a car.”

  I was on her wavelength instantly. “Who’s doing the talking?”

  “Everyone, it seems like. All of the girls, at least.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t—Wait! You mean, how long has this story been going around, yes?”

  I just nodded.

  “Three, four years, minimum.”

  “Good enough.”

  “Good enough for what?”

  “Good enough place to start,” I said, thinking of the kind of guy who liked to video girls fighting. A guy who none of the girls would ever be fighting over.

  I laid the bike down just a few feet in from the road, and pulled some loose brush over it. Nobody would see it in the dark. And even if they did, there was no way to hot-wire it. Or even wheel it away—I had it locked in gear.

  But none of that would stop somebody who stumbled over it and cell-phoned his pals to bring a pickup truck. That’s why I had it fixed so if anyone lifted it off the ground a flare would go off. That should be enough. Still, liquor makes people stupid, and meth makes them crazy, so it wasn’t an absolute guarantee that some amateurs wouldn’t try and haul it away.

  But if the flare went off, I’d see it. And the GPS unit I was carrying would tell me where they took it to, even if I didn’t get back over there myself in time to stop them.

  It only took me a few minutes to find him. Whoever he was, he wasn’t short of cash. An infrared videocam outfit wouldn’t come cheap. Maybe that full-cover ninja outfit cost some serious money, too—I couldn’t tell from a distance.

  The red dot on the
videocam popped whenever he activated it. No way to see that dot if the camera was aimed your way. But if you came up behind it, it was a lighthouse beacon.

  He was on a rise, overlooking the Lovers’ Lane on Dolly’s map. Not even thirty meters from the action.

  I didn’t like that ninja suit. No way for me to tell if it was a uni-body, so I had to take him in two moves instead of one. A one-arm choke is a sentry-killer. We called it a “scorpion.” The natural reaction is to use both hands to pull the pressure off your throat. That leaves the killer the chance to use his free hand, the one with the blade.

  The problem with any snap-choke is the tiny distance between going too far and not going far enough. I had better equipment for handling this, but I didn’t have time to go back and get it, and I didn’t want to waste another twenty-four—no way a guy like him would come back in daylight.

  He was in the middle of filming something when I took him down. Even though I was sure he wouldn’t want anyone to know he was there, I couldn’t risk his making panic noise, so I snapped the choke instead of squeezing it. I was trained in both styles, but neither was designed to leave a sentry alive.

  As I dropped to the ground, I pulled him with me. I dropped the hold, slid my left hand across his throat, found the Velcro closure at his neck, and ripped it open. My right hand snapped open my black-bladed Tanto—I had its serrated edge just below his Adam’s apple before he got his breath back.

  “Don’t make a sound,” I whispered, moving the serrated edge just slightly so he’d understand his situation.

  He smelled so foul I was grateful it was a windless night.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.” I spoke very softly, because I didn’t want to reassure him, I wanted to keep him paralyzed with fear. “There’s only two outcomes here. You can be calm, let yourself relax, and we can talk. Or I can rip your throat out.”

  He couldn’t make himself relax—he was just a little short of rigor. But he could keep quiet. The only noise was his ragged breathing.

  “I’ve been watching you for a long time,” I whispered. “You’ve got something I need. If you help me, we can be friends. If you don’t want to be my friend, that makes you my enemy. And then I have to leave you here. Understand?”