Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  “When are you going to start?”

  “I need a shower, a shave, and a change of clothes. Suit and shirt, right? But it’s still too early.”

  “If they have jobs, they’ll already be—”

  “Dolly, let me do this, okay? There’s only one group that we know will talk. Talk to you, I mean. Your girls. They’ll be here soon enough, I’m thinking. I don’t want to be here when they show up.”

  “But what do I ask them?”

  “If one of them ever got raped—no, not that—if any of their friends got raped, what would they tell them to do?”

  “Climate testing.”

  “On the nose,” I said, kissing her cheek. She stood up, wanting a better one. I tried. It must have done the job, because her eyes got that sweet glow. I patted her bottom, telling her that I was going out. There were other ways to tell her, but I’d used that one so much that it became a signal. There were other ways to pat her bottom, too, but she never got them mixed up.

  Sliding around the truth can work sometimes, but an outright lie risks blowing a whole operation. So I didn’t even think about telling any of the girls that I was working for the DA’s Office.

  Swift was worth every penny of his “retainer” just for the paper shield he gave me. Whether he earned another dime past that would be up to him.

  No Zimmermans in the local phone book. But there were five Langs—not much easier.

  Not much harder, either. The good thing about being in such a small town is that even the most trivial crap makes the papers. So, when I identified myself as “Warren Sims. From the PTA …?” not a single person showed the slightest surprise. Four of them—three males, one female—wanted to know why the PTA would be contacting them; after all, they didn’t have any children in school. The woman said she was an “empty-nester”; the men all said they were “retired.” None of them complained about being called; all of them sounded sober.

  The last number was a cell. It took me right to voice-mail. That one had been listed as “Lang, Teresa.” Amber’s mother, turning off her cell while she was at work? No way to tell. But her address was in the phone book, too. And it was early enough so her daughter might still be hanging around the house. If she had a summer job, or if a man answered the door, I’d have to catch her alone somewhere else.

  The address was a nicely kept little cottage, off-white, with a cedar-shake roof. The girl who answered the door was wearing jeans and a sleeveless purple sweatshirt with “Orcas” in white letters across the chest. Purple and white. The school colors, as per that twisted videographer I’d met in the woods. I guessed she’d cut off the white sleeves.

  She wasn’t what you’d call fat, but she was well over the weight limit for her height and frame. Bad complexion, which she was battling with some kind of white stuff. Probably saw me through the peephole in the door, checked my age and my suit, and decided it wasn’t worth scrubbing it off.

  “Ms. Amber Lang?” I said. Like it wasn’t a question, just verifying the information I’d been given.

  “Who are you?”

  I told her my name and got the expected blank look, but I had “I’m a private investigator” out of my mouth too quickly for her to hide the widening of her eyes.

  “How come a—?”

  “I’m working with Bradley Swift,” I said, as if that name would mean anything to her. “He’s the defense attorney for MaryLou McCoy.”

  “The one who …?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you want with me, then? I mean, I go to Cove, but I’m not even in her—I mean, I’ll be a senior when I go back after the summer, but she’s already graduated. I’ve, you know, like, seen her, but I never talked to her. I don’t know anything about her except for … for what she did. And I wasn’t even on the same floor when it happened.”

  “I know. But I assure you, I wouldn’t be coming out here unless I believed you could really be an enormous help.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Could I come in and explain? I imagine your neighbors are already wondering what I’m doing here.”

  “Well …”

  “If you’re concerned about being alone with me, you can call Mr. Swift’s office, and he’ll verify that I’m working on this case with him. Or I have a letter on his stationery right here in my case,” I told her.

  I held up the slim black Halliburton I was holding in my right hand; its anodized-aluminum look fit perfectly with the Lexus parked in front, and she couldn’t look at the case without seeing past it. I don’t know how many “private eye” movies she’d seen, but I was pretty sure I didn’t fit the image. Still, nothing reassures some people like the look of money.

  She stepped back and held the door open. I crossed the threshold and saw that the front door opened into what must have been their living room. I grabbed the lounger right next to the couch, so she could decide how close she wanted to sit next to me.

  Pretty close, as it turned out. She leaned against the arm of the couch, watching as I pulled a legal pad and clipboard out of my black aluminum case. I had a matching pen, too—a black aluminum Halliburton that said more than just “money.” It said, “This is serious business.”

  She had a menthol cigarette all fired up before I could offer her a light. She looked half frightened and half defiant—the cigarette helped her with both.

  “Do you prefer ‘Ms. Lang’ or ‘Amber’?”

  “Amber’s fine.”

  “Okay. Now, you must have heard all the talk about what happened at school.”

  “Me and everybody else. It’s, like, all some people talk about. I’m, like, who cares? Sure, it’s too bad and all, but it didn’t have anything to do with me personally.”

  For a flash second I wished I was younger and better-looking, but I instantly realized that older and harder was actually a better look for this job. If my guess was right, she wasn’t a girl who could be charmed into giving up anything. Not again, anyway.

  My choice of tactics was narrowed way down. Guerrilla warfare relies on surprise and speed. You become part of the jungle and wait until the enemy relaxes, thinking they’re finally in a safe zone. Surprise freezes them, but not for long. That’s where the speed part comes in. Hit fast, hit hard, and hit the road.

  What the hell, I thought, she’s not the only girl on the list. So …

  “How can you say that, Amber? What could be more personal than the death of the liar who raped you?”

  Her mouth opened. Her cigarette burned in the ashtray. Her eyes went everywhere but on mine.

  “I don’t blame you for not naming him when they asked you,” I went on, dialing my voice perfectly to the pitch of a professional interrogator—that toneless, no-way-out inexorability that you use only on the target who’s not willing to die. The one that says, We both know you’re going to tell me eventually, so why make it painful? “Nobody was going to do anything about it, anyway.”

  “How could you—?”

  “That’s not important. What’s important is that my sources of information are my sources. That means I’m the only one they talk to. Nobody knows where I get my information. Nobody ever will.”

  “But if you know—”

  “Amber, listen to me. You know how it works. School, I mean. Do you honestly think a story like yours would be kept a secret? It doesn’t matter if anyone believed it or not—if there was any blame to go around, it was all going to be put on you.”

  She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds. When she opened them, she still wouldn’t look at me, but she said, “Not at that school. Not there. You’re right.”

  “So why should MaryLou spend the rest of her life in prison? All she did was what a lot of girls wanted to do.”

  “They did it to MaryLou?!”

  “No. You know they only go after the real young ones.”

  “I … I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Yes, you do, Amber. Because you’re one of the ones they threw away when they were finishe
d with you.”

  “I …”

  Then she broke down. But her bitter tears stopped as quickly as they’d started.

  “You know what? I’m so fucking stupid, I’d probably believe them all over again.”

  “Stupid?”

  “Yeah,” she said, turning to look into my eyes. “I had to be stupid, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t see how that fits.”

  “Really?” she said, her voice turning even more bitter with the sarcasm laced through it. She lit another cigarette. Then she looked at me, as if daring me to deny the truth. “The best-looking boy in school, a boy who runs with the coolest clique, he’s going to want some fat pizza-face to hang out with him? Only a really stupid girl would buy any of that. All I had to do was look in the mirror.”

  “You looked in the mirror plenty,” I said.

  She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she surprised me. “That’s right, I did. And I saw something that wasn’t there. Just like I didn’t hear what other girls whispered about me.”

  I used my silence to urge her on.

  “Only, I did hear. But I told myself they were just jealous. That’s a good one, huh?”

  “Why are you blaming yourself, Amber? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “No? My mother works two jobs just to keep this house. All by herself—my father’s idea of child support is to call me on my birthday. She was all the ‘role model’ any girl could want, but so what? Everything my mother told me to do, I did the opposite. I smoked—not these, you know what I mean—I got drunk, I did lousy in school. You know why?”

  “I think so.”

  “If you’re going to give me some ‘adolescent rebellion’ speech, save it.”

  “Your father, he’s a handsome man, isn’t he?”

  “I … That’s right, he is. So what?”

  “So you blamed your mother for your looks. For what you see as your looks. That all came from her genes, right?”

  She shook her head. Not to deny what I said, more like shaking off a punch. “How could you possibly—?”

  “Is your mother overweight?”

  “Her? No way. She’s skinny. Probably from all that work she puts in.”

  “So get a job.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Amber. And you know what I’m saying by it. You don’t have any ‘fat genes.’ That’s as good an excuse as any. Because, by the time you really cared about how you looked, you decided it was already too late. Which was still another lie. It wasn’t too late then. And it still isn’t.”

  “How could you know all this?”

  “I’ll tell you. But only if we make a deal, you and me. And stick to it.”

  “What … deal?”

  “I want to know what you didn’t tell. Why you never told. Not at the hospital, not to the police, not to the counselors … not to anyone. You tell me, and I’ll tell you how I know about the other things. I’ll tell you more than that, too.”

  “Sure. Only, I go first, right?”

  “No. But you have to give me your word. You do that, I’ll go first.”

  “For real?”

  “First you listen. Then you tell me, okay?”

  Amber stared at the smoke from her cigarette like it was an Enigma machine. Her way of saying, “Go ahead.”

  No lies. Just not all the truth. I could do that.

  “I don’t know who my parents are,” I told her. “I grew up with people I don’t even remember. But I learned that secret thing all orphans keep inside them. We all make up stories to explain … anything that needs explaining. We tell ourselves that our parents really loved us, but they died in a plane crash. Our fathers were all important men. Our mothers were all gorgeous women. Everything was wonderful and perfect.

  “Or we tell ourselves our mothers were whores who dumped us in the street. Our fathers, our real fathers, they would have loved us, but they never knew.

  “It’s like being a writer who can’t find a publisher: anyone who shows the slightest interest, we’re all over them. We’ll do whatever we’re told. Why? Because they know the secret words. They just say, ‘If you really loved me, you’d—’ and they fill in the blanks with whatever they think they can get away with. We have to do what they say, because the only way our stories become the truth is if they believe us.

  “I was a soldier once. A long time ago. Some of the men I served with didn’t care if they lived or they died. There was nothing for them on earth. No wife, no children, no family, no friends. Nothing to go home to. But they never admitted this, not to any of us.

  “In battle, they were the bravest of the brave. You know why? If they lived, all those secret dreams could still come true. A man called Henri, I remember him. All I knew—all any of us knew—was that ‘Henri’ wasn’t his real name. Then the fighting. If Henri was brave, if he protected his own comrades, if he risked his own life, that became Henri. We knew him by what he did, what we saw with our own eyes. You understand? If we got asked, every one of us would swear that Henri was a brave man. And if Henri died, that’s how the rest of us would always remember him, too.

  “So, when you think about it for a second, it’s easy enough to understand, yes? What did Henri really have to lose?”

  Halfway through, I could tell I had misjudged Amber. I could see she fully understood what I was talking about way before I finished the roundabout route I’d chosen.

  “So, if someone told Henri they saw something ‘special’ in him,” she said, “Henri would want that to be true so bad that he’d …”

  “Do anything,” I finished for her. “Anything in the world. Even die.”

  She lit another cigarette. But this time, she was more relaxed about it.

  “You already know, don’t you?”

  “That it was this punk Cameron’s crowd, or even Cameron himself? Yeah.”

  Her eyes filled. “Are you …? Oh God, are you one of the other girls’ fathers?”

  “And what else do you want to know?” I challenged this girl who had surprised me so much already. Challenged her by letting her think she’d figured out why I was really there.

  “I get it. If you’d known, you would have killed him yourself, wouldn’t you? That’s why you want to protect MaryLou now.”

  Time to get back to the truth—it would have been too easy for her to check if I went on pretending to be one of the other girls’ fathers. “I’m not a father, Amber. Not of anyone. But you’re right—if I had a daughter, and I found out what Cameron did, I would have killed him myself.”

  “You could do it, too.”

  I just nodded, thinking my looks worked a lot better for one role than another. But then it hit me—I’d left out the one part I owed Amber. Really owed her.

  “Would you stomp on a cockroach?” I asked her.

  “Ugh! Of course.”

  “How about a butterfly? Would you crush one of those?”

  “What’s wrong with you? How could you even say—?”

  “What’s the difference, then?”

  “Between a cockroach and a butterfly?”

  “Yes.”

  “A butterfly is beautiful, delicate … like a moving flower. But a cockroach is just a filthy insect.”

  “They’re both insects, Amber. One’s pretty; one’s ugly.”

  She went stone-silent.

  “But that’s not the difference. Listen to me. A butterfly spreads pollen. So things can grow. A cockroach carries diseases. So things can die.”

  “Is this some kind of lesson?”

  “If it is, you’re not paying attention to it. You have an encyclopedia here?”

  “I have my laptop.”

  “Good enough. Now, look up ‘coral snake.’ ”

  She expertly swirled her finger over the mouse pad set just below the keyboard, and the screen sprang to life. She tapped “coral snake” into a box at the top right on her screen. A bunch of underlined sentences filled the screen. She clicked on “images.”

>   “Oh, they’re beautiful.”

  “Yeah. Now look up ‘milk snake.’ ”

  It only took her a few seconds: “They’re the same.”

  “Almost. But if you look real close, you’ll see a difference in the banding. One’s red and black; the other’s red and yellow.”

  “I … I see it now,” she said, splitting the screen so there were pictures of both snakes on it, side by side.

  “The coral is one of the deadliest snakes in the world. The milk snake is completely harmless.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I thought we were going to be honest with each other,” I said. “You get it just fine. This isn’t some ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ crap. This is about making mistakes. Some mistakes are harmless. Some mistakes are fatal. You’ll never know until you make one.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What I asked. What I asked because I promised to tell you that secret I knew. And, Amber, I did that, didn’t I? Didn’t I trust you?”

  “It wasn’t Cameron,” she said, her voice as dry and painful-sounding as if she had swallowed sandpaper. “I mean, it was Cameron, but he wasn’t the one who invited me.”

  “Invited you …?”

  “Gave me the RSVP. That’s what they call them. It’s just this heavy black card—folded, like a birthday card. On the outside is their sign—like the symbol for something in Japanese. They just walk up and hand it to you. The inside is all white. You’re supposed to write ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the blank part. I wrote ‘yes,’ and he told me ‘party of two.’ ”

  “You and Cameron?”

  “That’s what I thought. Or … maybe I didn’t think so. Maybe I just didn’t care. It was the real thing, I could see that.”

  “From the symbol?”

  “Yes. Nobody else would dare to—”

  “Who gave you the card?”

  “Bull. His real name is … I don’t think I even know what his real name is. Everyone just calls him Bull.”

  “The party was that same night?”

  “Yes. There’s this old fast-food place.”

  “What kind of food?”

  “I guess it used to be different kinds. Everyone likes the location in the daytime, and it does get a lot of traffic, so different franchises keep trying it. But they always fail. The people who have it now, it’s just for kids. Like this huge day-care center. You can leave your kids there all day—my mom says it’s open from six in the morning until eight at night. They have rides and swings and a trampoline and … it’s kind of like an amusement park for kids, even little ones.”