“I know. I read the papers about when you came back to this area after you graduated.”
“Why should that have been in the papers? I never saw it.”
“I meant when you got married. You know those society things, ‘Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So, the parents of Whoever, are pleased to announce the engagement of their daughter to …’ ”
She nodded dully.
“It probably isn’t every day that a hometown girl marries someone with an Ivy League degree. And the chain probably ran something, too, bragging about the caliber of personnel they have. The Cornell School of Hotel Administration is one of the most prestigious in the country, isn’t it?”
“It is!”
I guessed she had gone north for college. By the time she graduated, the only job openings were things like working the front desk of a motel chain. Not as far away from a place she’d never call “home” again as she would have liked, but far enough for that “distancing” thing she tried so hard for.
I’m no psychologist, but—you’re asking this woman to open up a wound and you’re still playing games with words, I thought to myself. I didn’t like myself much for doing it. So I started over. As a soldier, I’d seen “distancing” plenty of times. The combat zone might only be a klick away, but some people had to move it to another planet in their minds to keep sane.
“You think that’s right?” I asked her.
“Do I think what’s right?”
“Letting them get away with what they did. With what they still do.”
“Of course I don’t. But … I don’t know who you are, and you know everything about me, don’t you?”
“No, ma’am, I don’t. I don’t know anything about you personally; I only know that a crime was committed against you.”
“My husband doesn’t even know.…”
“Are you concerned that your name would come out? It wouldn’t. That would be illegal,” I said, making it up as I went along, and making myself believe it at the same time.
“Sure. Like when they don’t use a victim’s name in the paper, but they give away enough information that everyone would know, anyway. And the way people down there are always gossiping …”
People down there. “You wouldn’t be a ‘victim’ in this case, ma’am. You’d be a witness. And you know they can’t give any information about a witness. You wouldn’t even be testifying in court,” I said, wishing I had asked Swift some of the things I was pretending I knew.
“You don’t understand. I would like to help that girl. But if my husband ever found out—”
I cut her off before she could end the sentence with “he’d kill them,” or “he’d want a divorce,” knowing either answer would carry its own brand of terror for her.
“I understand,” I told her. “But I can promise you two things, Ms. MacTiever. One, the only thing your husband will ever know about any of this is whatever you decide to tell him. And that includes nothing. Nothing at all. That’s not me speaking, that’s the law. Two, I don’t know your husband, much less how he’d react if you decided to speak with him about it. But I do know this. Your daughter, your baby girl, Talia, when she’s old enough to understand, she’ll also understand that her mother was a hero. A hero for protecting girls like her.”
I barely noticed the single tear tracking down one cheek, but I couldn’t miss seeing her jaw clench and her hands ball into fists.
“Do it for her,” I said very softly as I rose to my feet and left my card next to the baby monitor—Dolly had printed up a bunch of them for me.
All I could do was hope she’d call the number on the card. Because I know how dangerous any wronged person can be if they ever get a chance to hit back.
The computer screen said:
|> If current, most likely a soldier’s tattoo. More info needed.<|
By then, I had more info, so I typed in:
|> Outfit called Tiger Ko Khai. Probably started around year 2001. <|
“You have to rent some more office space,” I told Swift.
“More space? I didn’t even have my own—”
“Short-term. Just for this case. You’re going to have all kinds of records and exhibits and stuff like that. You couldn’t possibly store them all here.”
He gave me a look. Testing the water to see if I was dismissing his work, just using him like a tool, or if I had some reason he could live with.
“I’ve been looking around places where they don’t welcome strangers,” I said. “That’s why you rented the car. If the plate traces back to you, so what? You’re not causing any problem for anyone. And it’s appropriate for a lawyer to add on things he needs temporarily, right? I mean, for a particular case.”
“That’s true. But I’d feel better if I knew exactly what you’ve been doing.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I told him. I guess Patrice had been right. About my voice, I mean. The lawyer didn’t say another word. He started to get up from his chair, as if he wanted to pace around the little room, but he checked himself.
“I’ll get you the address soon,” I said, not telling him I’d already rented the place. “And a receipt for a six-month lease.”
I found seven more girls on the boss SANE nurse’s list. Seven more who would talk to me, I mean. None of them had disappeared, but some were away at school, or staying with relatives, or just told me they didn’t know what I was talking about.
I saved the most logical one for last. MaryLou’s sister, Danielle. She was real young. Around thirteen. After spending a couple of days watching from a distance, I didn’t know how I’d get close to her without sending up a danger flag. She never seemed to go anywhere alone. I guess it was because she didn’t have a car—there’s no public transportation here. And after what MaryLou said about their parents, I didn’t think that either one would help me. Or that I could trust them, even if they said they would.
Before I did something that might backfire, I wanted to make sure MaryLou gave me everything I could possibly use.
They let me in at the jail without any problem. They even seemed apologetic that I had to walk through the metal detector.
There’s a dozen ways to get a handgun inside a jail.
The easiest is four pieces of plastic. Through an X-ray, they’d look like side-support bars for my black aluminum case. You open the case, slide them out, snap them together, and just follow procedure: left hand behind the head, right hand drives the spike through the trachea.
It’s a quiet death, just a little gurgling sound. Now you have a pistol—the one the dead guard was carrying.
And, if you want, a silencer. The guards all carry the same semiautos. Even though the barrels aren’t extended or threaded, there are silencers that you can push straight in. They won’t hold past a single shot, but you couldn’t tell that just by looking.
What you want isn’t more dead guards; you use the silencer to keep the rest of them silent. That always works—only a gunsmith looks directly into a pistol barrel.
The problem with that move is, you have to run forever after you’re done, even if you don’t have to kill any more than the one guard. Like Mesrine, I thought to myself.
So it wasn’t going to be me who pulled off that kind of escape. All I wanted was my Dolly. And the life we used to have. I wasn’t going to risk that, even if I had to slip MaryLou enough pills to take herself away from all this … if she asked.
“What would I have to say to Danielle to make her trust me?”
“There’s nothing you could say,” MaryLou told me. “You’re too old. That wouldn’t stop her from fucking you for money; she’s done that before. But trust you, not a chance.”
“What if your parents asked her?”
“Which one?” she half-sneered. “They’re both full-time drunks now. My mother already found one of those lawyers you see on television, so now she’s applying for Disability, too. Stress. I guess it’s pretty hard on you when your daughter kills someone.”
She closed the
door on any possibility of their being any help: “That stress, you know, it must be just so very terrible.” Her voice was venomous enough to French-kiss a cobra and drop it back into its basket, dead.
I know torture only works if you can focus on the target’s fear of something that might happen if he didn’t tell the truth. Pain is a waste of time. What could I possibly hold over people like MaryLou’s parents?
But I knew something else: the promise of pleasure works better than the promise of pain.
“Your father, he’d take money to let me talk to your sister, wouldn’t he?”
“He’d take the money, all right. But Danielle wouldn’t do anything he told her to. And he’s crazy enough to start whipping on her if there’s money in it for him, now that I’m not around.”
“He’s done that before?”
“Not for a long time. I wasn’t even thirteen when I got too big for him to reach for that belt. And, after that, I told him what would happen if he ever touched her again.”
“What?”
“I don’t—”
“What would happen to him?” I asked her, hoping she wouldn’t say she’d shoot him.
“Oh. It could be almost anything. Danielle’s a genius, you know. She made up a whole list for me. Wait till he passes out, then open his mouth and pour in a jar of Drano. Or sprinkle cyanide over a pizza and—”
“Where would you get cyanide?”
“Danielle said she could make some. She’s the big brain, don’t forget.” She was whispering so offhandedly that I couldn’t tell if she thought the whole idea was silly or she didn’t doubt for a second that her little sister had that kind of mind.
“Your mother, then?”
“They’re two of a kind, her and my father. She’d take money from anyone, but she wouldn’t give you anything for it. Not anything you’d want, I mean.”
“What would Danielle want?”
“Danielle? There’s only one thing in the whole world she wants: to be a movie star. She’s smart enough to get into any college, but I know she’s going to head straight out to Hollywood the second she’s old enough. So, unless you can make her believe you’re a talent scout, forget it.”
I guess I waited too long. When you interrupt the rhythm, whoever you’re milking for information has time to ask questions. The next words out of MaryLou’s mouth were “What do you need to speak to Danielle for, anyway?”
Damn! “Uh, we’re going to make a motion to have you examined by a specialist.”
“What kind of specialist?”
“We’re not sure yet. Look, I know you’re not going to plead insanity, okay? But if the DA thinks you might be going down that road, we can get a much better deal. The lawyer says the whole office is scared to death of actually trying a case.”
“Even with the school’s videotape and the gun and—”
“MaryLou, if you pulled out another pistol and shot the judge during the first trial, that office would still be afraid of the second trial.”
She kind of barked a laugh. Then she looked at my eyes as if staring so hard would burn away everything but the truth. “That makes sense to me, I guess. For me, I’m saying. That’s what the other girls in here call this: ‘the Game.’ There isn’t a single one who expects to have a trial. It comes down to what you’ve got to bargain with. But that’s not me. So a fake-out is fine, but I’m not telling anyone I’m crazy.”
“Of course not. But that’s why we have to interview Danielle, and your parents, too. The more the DA thinks we’re building some kind of special defense, the more he’ll give away.”
Maybe Swift wasn’t any great shakes as a lawyer, but he knew all about the local system. And when a guy like him says the whole system is built on not taking cases to trial, I believe it.
I hated myself for the hope I saw spring into MaryLou’s eyes. She could do a few years and still have a career as a pitcher. If they let football players off with a warning on a dorm rape, and let basketball players slide on DUIs, why not?
“Would I have to testify?” she asked me.
“I don’t think so. But I don’t know for sure. Not yet, anyway. You know how these things go, right? If our expert is much stronger than theirs, that’ll scare the hell out of them. It’s like a softball game—the team could be just average, but a killer pitcher could get them to State.”
“I guess that’s me, all right.” She bitter-laughed. “A killer pitcher.”
|> For Chinese, year 2001 is Year of the Snake. Tiger testicles *highly* prized in Japan; China now growing and harvesting its own tigers for such sales. Ko Khai is island in south Thailand close to Malaysia, approx. 460–470 KM from Bangkok. Illegal to stay there overnight, allegedly because it is nature preserve. <|
After that info, the map was easy to draw. Kid enlists at seventeen, takes R&R in Bangkok, just like the older guys tell him. After the “Quick time, okay, soldier?” whore, he walks into one of the little tattoo stalls scattered throughout the red-light district. He’s looking for something cool and Japanese, like any kid who quotes comic books the way some do the Dalai Lama.
And the Thai tattoo artist, who knew why any farang would wander into his shop, must have had that chop displayed on his wall. He’d tell anyone who gave it a second look that it stood for “Tiger Ko Khai” and claim that it meant “Dangerous Dragon” in Japanese.
That same kid had come back to this place, and started the not-really-a-secret society.
If he mustered out somewhere around 2001, he would have been in his early twenties, the perfect time to get teenage punks excited about forming a branch of “Tiger Ko Khai.”
That tattoo was the only cred the “combat vet” would need. Even teens would know the biker gangs don’t let you ink up unless you’re in for real. And for life. Didn’t it say so on TV? So the tattoo would be proof enough that he’d been granted authority to form a chapter.
Whoever it was had known exactly the gap to fill: someplace between lightweight skinhead and no-pride whigger. The school had both, and each group had girls. So who better to instruct them in the strategy and tactics of gang rape than a punk who could tell them war stories from a real war?
Still, it was just a theory, so I dipped into my credit again. The cracker once said he owed me his life. I didn’t know how to put a value on that, but I figured his poking around various “secure” sites on my behalf wouldn’t be stretching it too far.
|> Need list: served in military and returned to this area … county, not city … discharged somewhere around 2000. Current address, phone, and any other info. <|
I went over to Swift’s office to give him a copy of the six-month lease I had signed as his “authorized agent” and a spare key to the place. I’d found just what I wanted: a bare room on the second floor in a cheap-to-build structure, on a main street that had “For Rent” signs in just about every storefront window. Which is probably why the “premium office space” had been vacant for more than a year. And why the number I called got me a promise to meet there in an hour.
I’d told the rental lady—a pinch-faced woman with a lemon-sucking smile—that the three-hundred-square-foot unit at the back of the building would be fine, as long as the parking space behind it was included. She was chicken-necking at every word I said—the place was such an overpriced dump that the prospect of finding a tenant got her all excited.
I told her that I’d left my driver’s license at home, adding, “Same place I must have left my head,” so she could bend herself into accepting my explanation of why she should make the lease out to “Bradley L. Swift, Attorney at Law.”
“That’s not me,” I told her. “I only work for him. He’s got some big case going, so he has to have temporary office space to store all the files and stuff.”
The rental lady was saying something about this being an unorthodox situation, when I interrupted her with an explanation that would stroke her soft spot again.
“Your ad said ‘temporary,’ but Mr. Swift said to te
ll you that a case like this could go for years, or be over just like this!” I said, snapping my fingers and putting three thousand in cash on her desk with the same hand. “That’s why he wants to pay six months in advance, provided he can renew on the same terms if he gives you thirty days’ notice.”
I pulled out a notebook, pretended to be checking it over to see if I had missed something, but that charade was unnecessary—the rental agent hadn’t taken her eyes off the cash.
It’s a rough market, I thought to myself. She probably owns the place. A real-estate broker who gambled that the “individual office units” concept would turn that firetrap into a gold mine. For her, the cash was proof that she hadn’t tricked herself the way she did her clients.
A thin blue thread was weaving inside my mind, twisting itself into an empty frame. I knew that frame wouldn’t fill until my mind was ready for it.
The first time that happened, the thread frame filled in a split second: a blood-spattered wall, freezing me in place. I calmed myself down and started to scan the area. I didn’t see the Claymore until I looked down at my own boots. It was one of the new ones, the kind that shoot steel balls at a preset angle, designed especially for infantry kills. Packed with C4, not the old-style TNT. One more step and six men would have turned into body parts.
The blue thread frame told me that I had something. More than an “idea,” a solution of some kind. Concentrating wouldn’t help. I knew I couldn’t force a solution—the frame would fill in its own good time.
So I went back to work.
“Late afternoon, she’ll be hanging out at the skateboard park,” Dolly had told me the next morning. “I wouldn’t swat a fly, much less a child’s bottom, but, Dell, I swear I can understand why MaryLou slapped her sister’s face that time.”
“You don’t get raccoon eyes from a slap.”
“She didn’t use her pitching hand,” Dolly said, as if that explained everything.
Something was missing. Something … Then it came to me. The more I could get Dolly helping, the more she’d be able to get information from those girls.
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