Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  “And the other place doesn’t open until—when?—after dark?”

  “Way after dark. Midnight was what Bull told me. I think that was probably when they started.”

  “Who was there?”

  “Everyone,” she said again, biting into her lower lip so hard that she drew blood, determined not to cry. Maybe not in front of anyone, maybe never again.

  I reached over and took two of her smokes. Lit us each one. She took hers like it was a hit of morphine, stuck into her by a comrade on a battlefield where she’d taken a bullet.

  “I don’t even know how many there were,” she finally said.

  “Were where?”

  “In … Oh, I see what you’re saying. Over to the right side, way back in the woods, there’s this little cabin. That’s where they took me. It was dark, but they have flashlights. And the way was marked with that orange tape—the kind that reflects light. Inside, they have candles.”

  “And Cameron …?”

  “He was there. Bull was, too. But neither of them went first. I mean, neither of them made me do anything. I took … whoever it was in my mouth. I kept my eyes closed, so I could think it was Cameron. I told myself it was. But then they all … raped me. And did other things. I thought I was going to die.”

  “How did you get to the hospital?”

  “I didn’t have a car. They had to hold me up to walk back. To the kiddie place. They had a big sack of something. They put it over my head. Then they drove me to a block or so away from the hospital, and dumped me out on the street. I’m not sure how I got the rest of the way.”

  “The story around school is if you don’t tell, you get … moved up, like. On the social ladder. I didn’t really believe that, I only wanted to. I saw how some girls were just … avoided. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have a boyfriend, they couldn’t have any friends at all.

  “But when the cops asked me their questions, I could tell they already knew the answers. And they weren’t going to do anything about what those people had done to me. All I wanted to do was go home. Just go home and get into bed and never come out.”

  “Have you ever heard of a girl who did report them?”

  “A couple of years ago,” she said, naming two who were already on the boss SANE nurse’s list.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. Nothing ever happened to anyone. It was like that was the way it was supposed to be. Like making the pledges for the boys’ fraternity dress up like girls and walk around school. Hazing. I mean, if it wasn’t supposed to be that way, why didn’t the police arrest them? Why didn’t any of them go to jail? Why didn’t they ever stop?”

  It took quite a while to get her to calm down. But when she did, her eyes were clear. Harder, too. I don’t know why those two lights always seem to come on at the same time.

  “Are you going to kill them?” she asked me.

  “No. There would only be more. What has to die is this idea that, like you said, this is the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “How could—?”

  “That depends on what happens to MaryLou.”

  “But that’s already … happened, right?”

  “Not even close. The final chapter, that still depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether I can find another Henri out there. Only, this time, I won’t be looking for a man, I’ll be looking for a young woman. A woman willing to do whatever it takes to become a warrior.”

  I didn’t want to go home. I’d have to see Dolly then, and I wanted a quiet place to think. To think about Dolly.

  There’s a place not far from here where people go to watch whales—the coast is the migratory path for the big ones. The rail was lined with cars. Pickups and RVs, too. Plates from all over. No room for the Lexus to get any privacy, but there was plenty to be had only a couple of blocks away—people around here hate walking, and tourists pick up that habit real quick.

  I went as far back as I could go. With Dolly, I mean. I thought about meeting her by accident. Twice. I didn’t take that as a sign or anything. I just knew that, for me, it was Dolly or nothing.

  A person isn’t something you can steal. You might think different, especially if you watch a lot of TV. But you can only steal a body, not a heart.

  So, back then, I’d done everything I could to slant Dolly’s answer. Things I thought she would like. But until a few minutes ago, I’d never asked myself the hardest part. Not why did she go with me—whatever her reasons, I was too grateful to go poking around. But how come, when I told her she’d have to give up her own past, too, she’d never blinked?

  For me, it was nothing. I had nothing to give up except a name that wasn’t mine. But for Dolly, she’d had all the stuff regular people came with, hadn’t she? A name, a family, friends, a place she could call home. She gave all that up as quick as I told her why she’d have to. I was sure that would have been the deal-breaker, especially when she had to give up those nursing credentials. But it all fell right off her, as naturally as a scab from a healed wound.

  She knew I’d tell her the truth about anything she asked, but she never asked. I didn’t know what she’d tell me if I asked, and I wasn’t going to dig under scar tissue to find out.

  What was such a young girl doing in the middle of a tribal war in Africa? Nobody runs to Médecins Sans Frontières to clean up their back-trail. For that group, you’d need papers, real ones. You’d need a background they could check. Credentials. Stuff you couldn’t fake.

  And Dolly never carried a rape bomb, like some of the nurses did. A “rape bomb” is pretty much what it sounds like. All the women—doctors, nurses, do-whatever-it-takes volunteers—knew what was going to happen if women were ever taken captive, and most of them had a pin they could pull just in case.

  Rape is part of the way they fight wars in some parts of the world. When a soldier rapes a woman from another tribe, there’s no need to kill her—her own people will do that if she starts showing pregnant. That’s how it was in Africa, anyway. I know it happens in other parts of the world, too. There’s places where a rapist can call himself a man of honor, even if his victim is his own sister.

  Dolly didn’t get that. I don’t know if she actually believed that nobody would hurt healers who didn’t carry weapons. It wasn’t that she didn’t care what happened to her, either. It was more like she had signed on and she’d either complete the mission or … take whatever came.

  Not like me, though. Not for life. Dolly must have had a get-out plan for her future, but I never thought there was anything else I could do. After a while, I had money, but I still kept on working. As I got better at what I did, I made more money. That was all there was for me—even after I knew I wasn’t working for the money anymore.

  But when I met Dolly that second time, she’d already escaped one battlefield, and gone on to pick another. And she had plans for another after that.

  Dolly hated anything that hurt people, whether it was a crazy boy in a woman’s negligee carrying a banana-clipped AK, or a core-killing disease. Me, I didn’t really hate anybody, or anything. But I killed people, so … why wasn’t I one of those things Dolly hated?

  Maybe Dolly believed you could change people. Me, I didn’t believe that. I only knew you could change what they did. Not because they changed their minds, because they changed their path … to avoid places with skulls on stakes. That’s what killing was for, to make your village safe. That’s how I saw it.

  So did MaryLou.

  That thought ripped into my thinking like a slice from a ceramic blade—the kind where you don’t even know you’ve been cut until you feel the blood flowing.

  What if MaryLou understood rape the same way I did? You are what you do, and rape is what rapists do. She knew she couldn’t fix them—the best she could do was stop her little sister from going near them. When that didn’t work, she did the only thing she could think of. Maybe she couldn’t put Cameron’s head on a stake, but she wasn’t trying to protect
a whole village from invaders. All she wanted was to keep them away from her baby sister.

  Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe I was just trying to put off asking the one person who I was sure knew the answer.

  I crossed under one of the little bridges they have everywhere here, headed back the way I’d come. Carolyn Kubaw had been one of the names on my list. She wasn’t hard to find—the newspaper had followed her life since graduation. Got a degree in hotel management from a community college, then a job with one of the chains. Now she was Carolyn Kubaw MacTiever, married to a guy her age who wasn’t from around here. Met him when he was transferred by the same hotel chain. They lived two towns over, a little more than sixty miles away.

  I gave up on the idea of trying to make telephone contact. She’d given birth to a child only two months ago, so maybe she was still staying home on “maternity leave” or something. Even in this economy, if she had a job to go back to, she wouldn’t be taking any real risk.

  About halfway there, I pulled up at one of those little roadside stores. I wanted to stay hydrated in case I got a chance to talk with her. Dolly always says my voice sounds like I’m threatening someone, but I think that’s only because folks around where we live now talk much louder than I was used to.

  What would I ever have to shout? “À terre!” or “Nord!” … things like that. The first always means what it says: “Get down!” That’s when the enemy’s still too far away to hear you. A sniper can tap you from a long distance, but he can’t hear anything from that far away. The other is the opposite: when they can hear you, but not see you. Not yet, anyway. So you yell, but it’s misdirection. And only the point man would do that. If you’re the last man in line, you walk backward, close enough to the man at your back to hear his breath. If you shout “Nord!” from that position, it really means “North!”

  “Toute erreur est fatale.” Yes, every mistake was a fatal mistake. That wasn’t some slogan to memorize, it was as if the trainers slipped it into your food during the training. One man, all I knew was his name, Mathieu. I never knew whether he was stupid or just hated doing what he was told. We were working our way up a hill when the point man screamed, “À terre!” Mathieu just stood there, like he was frozen.

  Just after I heard the sharp crraack! of the sniper’s weapon, Mathieu kind of floated to the ground. The shooter had to be one of the trainers. Or maybe someone who was being trained. Either way, Mathieu was just as dead. The round he took injected the lesson. None of us moved until we heard “On laisse rien à l’ennemi!” from the man on point.

  Yes, “Leave nothing for the enemy!” I was right behind the dead man. The man just in front of him tossed down his own harness. I hooked it to Mathieu’s belt. Then I hooked up my own harness, secured Mathieu’s unfired rifle, crawled around the dead man, and handed the other man his own harness back.

  Together we dragged Mathieu all the way up the hill. We didn’t speak, but I knew the other man’s thoughts, just as he did mine. Tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés, ni tes armes.

  We had been five; now we were four. One man ahead carrying the dead recruit’s weapon, two of us hauling his body up the hill, and one man behind, covering us. That was our kind of training—we all knew the sniper was still out there, helping to train us.

  When I came out of the store, they were in the parking lot. Five of them. All in their black jackets with the red sleeves. Not making any secret about who they were. They must have all come in the same car, a clumsily repainted Crown Vic that probably came from a police auction. It stood just a few feet away from the Lexus.

  For a second, I didn’t understand. Whoever had trained them must have been a real … Then I realized nobody had ever trained them.

  One had an aluminum baseball bat—he was taking practice swings with it. Two others had tire irons. I could see the sun glint off the brass knuckles on another’s fist. The last one had his hands clasped in front of him—I guessed they were wrapped around some kind of knife.

  I could have gone back inside and made a call. And I had a cell phone with me, too. Yeah, they’d never been trained—none of them moved to cut me off from those options. They didn’t have me boxed in at all. Maybe they thought I wanted to get into the Lexus bad enough to risk passing right through them.

  I kept walking, as if I couldn’t see any danger in front of me. I could see their faces tighten.

  There’s a man who makes water bottles that look exactly like one of those I was carrying—a squeeze bottle that costs around three thousand euros. It was lined with flex-glass, filled with skin-searing acid. You could use the cap to dial it to anything from a mist to a hoselike squirt. Then all you had to do was move so the enemy was downwind, twist the top like you were going to take a drink, and get as close as you could before you sent the acid on its way.

  But men like them wouldn’t know about such things. Men, not boys—they were older than I expected them to be. I guess I’d thought that, wearing those jackets, doing what they did, they were some kind of high school club.

  There wasn’t any reason for me to have thought that. A mistake, but not a fatal one.

  That’s because I knew how to fix it. I stopped analyzing. Why they were there, what they expected—right then, it didn’t matter. I kept walking toward the Lexus.

  When I got close enough, the man with the brass knuckles said, “What’s your problem, man?”

  “Huh? I don’t have any—”

  “What’re you, some kind of private eye?”

  “Me?”

  “What did Amber have to say?”

  “Oh! I get it. I’m working for Bradley Swift,” I said, as if that name would mean something to them.

  “Who?”

  “He’s a lawyer. Defending MaryLou McCoy. You know, the girl who—”

  “Yeah, we know,” the man said. “What’s that got to do with us?”

  “You? I don’t even know who you are.”

  “Then why go see Amber?”

  “Huh? Why would I talk to Ms. Lang about the McCoy case? She was in a car accident, and her lawsuit is on for trial in another few weeks. I had to interview her again, go over her deposition, and …”

  “You just make sure you keep out of our business,” he said. I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t sure about anything—not anymore, anyway—so I just looked confused.

  “Are you threatening me?” I said, trying to sound indignant.

  He smiled. I guess whatever I put into my voice worked—he had his confidence back.

  “Threatening you? Man, what makes you say such a thing? We’re just, you know, hanging out.”

  “Do you have guns?”

  “Guns? Come on, man. Don’t make such a big—”

  The water bottles were on the ground. They were all staring at them, like they’d just seen a magic trick. Or maybe they wanted to look anywhere but at the pistol I was holding.

  “A threat is nothing but a promise. You believe it or you don’t. I don’t know what you want, and you don’t want to tell me. So here’s my promise: If you don’t disappear in another minute, I’ll kill you. Then I’ll call 911 and tell the cops that you came at me with those bats and things. I was forced to defend myself.

  “I’m a licensed private investigator. There’s a background check for that, so you know I don’t have a criminal record. This is a legally registered weapon. I won’t even go to jail. You—some of you, anyway—you’ll go to the morgue.”

  “Look, we made a mistake, that’s all.”

  “Mistake? You think people inside that store behind me haven’t been watching us? They can’t miss seeing your bats and stuff. But they can’t see my pistol. So get in your car and go away. I’m not talking anymore. Get in your car and go away or you start getting dead in the next few seconds. At this distance, I couldn’t miss. Especially with you all standing so nice and close together.”

  Scaring bullies is always a tricky business. If I went back the same way I’d come, there w
as always the chance one of them could use his cell phone to order up a few firearms. And they knew the Lexus.

  If I’d thought they could trace that car to Dolly, they’d already be dead and I’d be making that phone call I’d promised them.

  I picked up my water bottles, got back into the Lexus, and drove off in the same direction I’d been heading.

  Less than four miles up the highway, I saw a wooded piece of flat-land. I pulled over to let the car behind me pass, checked the lanes on both sides until the road was empty, then went off the road. I drove in deep enough to be invisible to passing cars. If a trooper spotted me, I’d say I lost control to avoid hitting a deer.

  I scratched the hell out of Dolly’s friends’ new car by going in so deep. But I knew they carried full-collision and I’d make up the deductible, so I didn’t think they’d be too mad … especially when I told them how it happened—the “miss a deer” story, I mean.

  Only a drug dealer would be stupid enough to use the same throwaway cell twice. I used one to call 911 and say a big greenish car just passed me going in the opposite direction, around mile marker 31—I figured that was a safe estimate, since it would put them about ten miles from that store’s parking lot. I said the car was really flying, weaving all over the road. At first, I thought it was an unmarked police car, but as it shot by, I could see it was full of young guys. They had to be drunk or …

  I lost my connection then. Laying the canvas-wrapped phone across a flat rock and smashing it with the hammer side of my tomahawk made sure of that.

  The second throwaway was to call Dolly. On the only throwaway she ever had. She carried it with her everywhere she went, and never used it. Any incoming call would be me.