Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  She opened the channel without saying anything. “It’s me,” I said. “I had a little accident, but it’d take a fucking winch to pull that little Jap car of yours out of this damn ditch.” When she didn’t say anything, I was proud of her—anyone can have a good memory, but it takes a soldier’s skills to stay calm in crisis. “Yeah, I know it’s ten at night,” I said, slurring my words even more. “What the hell do you want me to do? I’m still a good fifteen miles from the nearest town, and it’s not like I can call fucking Triple-A!”

  The second phone broke as easy as the first. The canvas protected the rock from showing signs of the hammer strikes. I bagged the little pieces of the phones inside the canvas. Disposal would depend on what I found after I took a deeper look at the terrain.

  I had plenty of time to use the ax blade of the tomahawk to cut cover for the Lexus. There was more than enough foliage to construct a complete blanket, even down to making sure the mirrors wouldn’t throw off a glint.

  It must have been state-owned land; I couldn’t see a thing that resembled a farm, even going in more than a mile deep. I wasn’t worried about hunters—much too close to the highway for even the dumbest of them, and it wasn’t deer season yet.

  But there’s no such thing as being perfectly safe. I couldn’t predict what might be coming, especially after it got dark. All I could do was deal with whatever showed up.

  At 9:45, I DayGlo-taped an “X” on the tree closest to the highway.

  At 9:59:25, I heard Dolly pull up. She was behind the wheel of our Jeep. It had plates and registration, but if anyone looked close enough, they’d see that registration was “farm-use limited.” The insurance company didn’t care that we overpaid every year, and the state didn’t care that we had plates for a vehicle that wasn’t allowed to leave our property.

  I stepped out from the dark, climbed into the Jeep, and told Dolly I’d drive the Lexus back to her friends’ place, with her following me.

  “Can I?” Dolly asked, holding up her own cell phone.

  “Sure.”

  She called her friends while I cleared the Lexus. Then I just pulled straight out and headed over there, checking every minute or so to be sure I had her headlights in my mirrors.

  It wasn’t until we were inside their garage that I realized Rascal had come along with Dolly. He watched with great interest as I opened the hatch of the Lexus and removed the set of Velcro’ed plates. I held them out so both Dolly’s friends could see them.

  “This is my fault,” I said to Martin, pointing to the scratched-up paint. “One hundred percent mine. But you don’t have to worry about anyone coming around—these plates don’t trace back to you.”

  “We have insur—”

  “I apologize for interrupting you,” I told Johnny. “But there’s no way you can explain all these scratches to any insurance company.”

  “As if we had to explain anything to those thieves,” Martin sneered. “With what we pay them for the bundle, Billy, that’s our agent, he would just shoot himself if we ever switched. Fire, theft, on home and business, homeowner’s on the house, plus the umbrella, never mind the zero deductible on the cars. And we’ve never made a claim on anything. It’s been—what?—fifteen years—”

  “Thirteen,” Johnny said. I got the impression that they did this all the time.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told them. “Even if they don’t question a word you say, it’s still a claim, and you don’t want that—especially not with your perfect record. You did a real favor for Dolly, and never asked a question. So there’s only two ways to do this: One, you get a complete new paint job, maybe a color you like better? Or I can buy the car from you. It’s got less than five thousand miles on it, so it’s the same as new.”

  “Martin’s car is just a toy,” Johnny said. “This one is a utilitarian vehicle. It’s bound to get scratched up one way or another. We’re only keeping the car until the warranty runs out, anyway.”

  “You don’t want to sell it to me?”

  “Oh, don’t act so offended. We don’t want to sell it to anyone.”

  “Then it’s the paint job.”

  “Your husband is a difficult man to deal with,” Martin said to Dolly.

  “Tell me,” she said. But her squeezing my arm as she spoke told me all I wanted.

  “You know more about cars than I do,” I said. “How much is the best paint job going to run?”

  “The dealership—”

  “Come on. It’s getting late. Maybe I don’t know cars like you do, but I know any dealership is going to screw you. You’d pay less at a custom shop, and get a much better job, too.”

  “What do you think we want?” Johnny said. “One of those paints that change color, or something crazy like that?” But I could see Martin didn’t think the idea was all that crazy.

  “Nobody’s got money today. They don’t have enough work as it is. Five grand would buy you the best there is,” I said.

  Now they both looked annoyed. Dolly’s right—I’m real good at some things, but real bad at others. So I just took out the money—even in hundreds, it was a pretty thick stack—and put it on the still-warm hood of the Lexus.

  I saw Martin make a “call me” gesture to Dolly out of the corner of my eye just as we pulled out.

  On the way back, I told Dolly everything. She listened patiently until I said, “MaryLou killed the wrong man.”

  “What?!”

  “Dolly, I didn’t mean—”

  That’s when she started to cry. All I could do was kind of pat her and wait it out.

  “Dell, this town, it looks so beautiful, but there’s poison in it. And Cameron, he’s just a little piece of it. Those men who threatened you, they were older than him. So this must have been going on for a long time.”

  “Isn’t that what that SANE boss said?”

  “I know. But there’s no way to change it. I see that. I see that now, anyway.”

  All I could see was a dream dying. And if I couldn’t give Dolly her dream, would she still …? I couldn’t allow that question to pollute the pond. Not our pond.

  “There’s a way, Dolly. I swear to you.”

  “Dell! Don’t you even think about—”

  “I wasn’t. For real, honey.”

  “Then what?”

  “You can’t change some people. Once they’ve become themselves, they’re going to keep doing what they do. But you can make them do it somewhere else.”

  “I know you’re not talking about therapy.”

  “No. I’m talking about raising the stakes.”

  “Dell …”

  “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t mean to talk in riddles. I wasn’t talking about playing poker, I meant—”

  “I’ve been there, too, you know. I’ve seen those heads on stakes.”

  “It’s no different here. You have to do it in a different way, but you can always deliver that same message.”

  “But you said—”

  “Dolly, listen, okay? Just for a minute. I don’t lie to you.” I just don’t tell you some things, I thought. How was killing the deer-hunters and spraying those green “X” marks on them different from putting their heads on stakes? “If I thought killing every last one of them would make you happy, if I thought I could pull the poison out of your dream, yeah, I’d do it. But that’s not what I meant. We can’t change them, or even stop what they do. But we can make them stay away from our village.”

  She didn’t say a word. I knew I had about five seconds to come up with something I could make her believe in. I thought about what I’d found myself saying to Amber. And then I knew.

  “Right now, you’ve got this gang who can do all kinds of things because they’re not worried about having to pay for it,” I said softly. “There’s only one way to change that. And not what you think. The way to change everything is to get MaryLou off.”

  “But that’s—”

  “Dolly, listen. This wasn’t any Columbine ‘kill ’em all’ thing—it
was an execution. What’s the chances of something like that ever happening again? Look, that gang does what they do because they’re not worried about their bill coming due. They can rape those girls and nothing happens. But what if that was turned upside down? What if the whole town changed its vote?”

  “Dell, you are driving me insane. Nobody votes on … rape.”

  “No? That’s exactly what they do. This has been going on for years, right? Nobody goes to prison. Nobody even gets arrested. Those girls—the ones like MaryLou’s little sister—the town passed judgment on them, not on the rapists.”

  “You mean, like they deserved it?”

  “You tell me, Dolly—you’re tuned into this place a lot more than I could ever get in a hundred years.”

  She took a deep breath. Held it a long time. When she let it out, it was like a sigh of surrender. “I’m not plugged in at all, Dell. To the kids, sure. And I know a few of the folks my own age. But nowhere near enough to even take a guess. About what you said, I mean. The voting. If that’s what they voted for, goddamn them to hell! Every last one.”

  By the time we got the Jeep back where it belonged, it was getting close to daylight.

  “You don’t look tired,” I said to Dolly.

  “Neither do you. I wish you did.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I want to go to bed, Dell. Not to sleep. To be with you. All this … filth. I need to get back to what love feels like, if I’m going to help you make this happen.”

  “I need you to rent a car,” I told Swift the next morning.

  “Me?”

  “You. Use your credit card. I need a car to keep on investigating, and I can’t have it traced back to me. I know you guys keep track of expenses, and you can take it out of the next retainer installment if you want to do it that way,” I said, putting another five grand on his desk.

  “I … I understand what you’re saying. And it does make sense for all expenses to trace back to me.”

  And makes you even more of a big shot than you were a few hours ago, I thought. But what I said was “Would you mind taking care of that right now? I have someone I want to interview, and I want to get an early start.”

  He didn’t mind at all.

  On the drive over to the rental place, he said, “I don’t mind telling you, this case is taking up just about every hour I have.”

  He must have felt skepticism coming off me. “I know what you must be thinking,” he said. “How much work could I be doing, when my own client won’t even speak to me without you there?”

  I let my silence do my talking.

  “Mr. Jackson, I don’t mean to come off as condescending, and I know you must be working very hard yourself. But one of the unwritten rules of being a criminal-defense attorney is this: when you don’t have the facts on your side, you have to use the law.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. And I wasn’t lying.

  “Well, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that if the DA can’t prove premeditation the charge has to be downgraded to—”

  “She brought the gun to school. She walked right up to the boy she wanted to kill. She shot him in the head. He died.”

  “I didn’t mean we were going to use that as a line of defense,” he said, sounding defensive as all hell himself. “That was just an example.”

  “All right, I get it now. There might be something in the law that can help MaryLou, no matter what the facts are.”

  “Exactly! Such as, if MaryLou was a victim of battered-woman syndrome, that could be a complete defense.”

  I listened to him explain all about this “syndrome” thing. Then I said, “So, if this Cameron Taft was MaryLou’s boyfriend, and he was always beating her up … Say he was threatening to break her left arm, so he was holding her college scholarship hostage, the same way you just told me, about a man who kept telling his wife that if she ever squealed about beating her he’d kill her dog?”

  “That’s it. And that’s only one of hundreds of possibilities. All I’ve filed with the DA’s Office so far are the usual discovery motions—no point letting them have a peek at our trial strategy.”

  “You’re driving that car,” I said. Either a gesture of respect or a warning—up to him how he took it.

  Swift didn’t have any objection to spending my money. “I think a Cadillac would be just the right image,” he said. “With that suit and attaché case of yours, driving around in some econobox would be the wrong move.”

  “You’re the boss,” I told him, taking the letter that said I was working for him out of my inside jacket pocket, so he’d know I wasn’t mocking him.

  Carolyn Kubaw MacTiever was a trim young woman, from her workout body to a short and bouncy haircut I’d seen before in a magazine. Dolly told me it was “efficient.”

  “May I help you?” she said, as if a stranger at her door was standard procedure. Maybe it was all the hotel training.

  “I hope you can, Ms. MacTiever.” I told her who I was working for, and I wasn’t shocked that Swift’s name didn’t ring any bells for her. Even when I said who he was representing, her eyes didn’t flicker.

  But when I said, “That girl in the school shooting—” she interrupted me by stepping away and motioning me to come inside. Then she pointed silently at a pale-blue egg-shaped chair. She seated herself in the chair’s mate, separated from me by a small table that looked like a slab of geode perched on an hourglass formed from black metal. A high-tech baby monitor stood on the surface of the geode, as if the whole piece had been designed that way.

  “We have to be quiet,” she said, holding her finger to her lips. “I just got Talia down for her nap.”

  I nodded agreement.

  “This is about that crazy girl? The one who brought a gun to the high school and went wild?”

  “The girl’s not crazy, but this is about her.”

  “If she wasn’t crazy, why would she—?”

  Showing her the photo of the black symbol on the red rectangle cut her breath quicker than any stranglehold.

  “Them! But they’re not … I mean, they wouldn’t still be in school.”

  “Yes, they are, ma’am. Not the same ones you remember, but the same gang. Or club, or whatever they call themselves.”

  “A society,” she said, as if I’d been interviewing her about some subject—any subject outside of the rapes. “Tiger Ko Khai.”

  “Do you know when they started?”

  “Started …?”

  “The society. When it was formed.”

  “Oh. I’m pretty sure it was 2001. There was supposed to be some special significance about that, but I never knew what it was.”

  “You were a sophomore when it happened?”

  “A junior,” she said, then slapped her hand across her mouth as if to prevent more truth from spilling out.

  “And you reported it to the police,” I said, as if there could be no question about it.

  “That same night. Actually, the next day. After midnight, I mean. But it wasn’t me who reported anything—the nurse was the one who called the police.”

  “But they never ended up arresting anyone.”

  “No.”

  “And you knew the name of—”

  “Wait! I must have been in a fog when we started talking. The baby kept me up most of the night. She’s colicky, so I had to take her into the guest bedroom and lie down with her. My husband needs his sleep. He’s working double shifts all the time.”

  “Ms. MacTiever, I apologize if I upset you.”

  “You didn’t upset me. I … I thought I’d put it out of my mind forever,” she whispered. “Then you come here and act like you already know all about it. But how could you? Those records are confidential.”

  “They are.”

  “Who did you say you work for?” Her voice turned suspicious. Suspicious and scared.

  “Bradley Swift, Esquire, ma’am. Please feel free to call him,” I said, handing her one of his business cards. �
�And, please, just to ease your own mind, look him up in the Yellow Pages, satisfy yourself he’s an attorney, and that he’s representing MaryLou McCoy in the alleged murder of one Cameron Taft.”

  “This one?!” she hissed, pulling a local paper from some shelf behind her chair.

  I glanced at the SCHOOL SHOOTING! headline. “That’s the one, yes.”

  “But … she’s a star softball player, isn’t she? I don’t know her. I graduated in 2009. She would still have been in middle school.”

  “That’s not the connection, ma’am. It’s Tiger Ko Khai.” Slipping in the name to keep her focused.

  “The boy she killed—?”

  “Yes. And two others that she shot.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  I took that as the red-flare signal: the one that told us to stop working the perimeter and strike at the core. “I want you to help protect the next victims from this gang of rapists.”

  “Me?”

  “You and another forty or so young women, yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, glancing around nervously, even though the baby monitor hadn’t transmitted anything but the sweet snuffly breathing of a contented infant.

  “No one in that gang has ever been prosecuted for rape. You did everything right. Went by the book. But the police never even made an arrest, did they?”

  “No.”

  “And you told them at least one of their names,” I said, not spelling out the “their.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s happened more times than you could imagine. I mean, that exact same thing. Why should the police arrest anyone when they know the DA is never going to prosecute?”

  “But the nurse—the one who examined me—she told me the doctor had already told them I was … And they had those samples, too.”

  “And every time you tried to ask questions, somebody told you they were working on the case.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a kind of dull bitterness. “After a while, all I wanted to do was get out of there.”

  “That’s why you transferred schools?”

  “The school year was nearly over. I got early admission to college, so I skipped my senior year. Nobody did me any favors; I did very well in school.”