Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  The same stunt I used before wouldn’t work twice. I doubted any of them went off into the woods alone anymore. But maybe they still felt safe inside that permanent pool of darkness behind the day-care center.

  This should have been a three-man operation. Like this: One man stands with his back to the field; another off to the side, covering the middle ground from an angle. Only the third man—the shooter—would need a silenced weapon. I already had one of those, but I didn’t have anyone I trusted enough to split up the other tasks.

  I don’t mean “trust” the way you might think. I believed that Franklin would do anything if he thought it could help MaryLou. And that he’d never talk. But you can’t use a man’s love the way you’d use a tool—that’s not only dishonorable, it’s way too risky.

  Even though darkness was still hours away, I couldn’t stop myself from driving past. Just to take a look, make sure I had it down right.

  Surveillance was no more difficult than finding higher ground with a decent sight-line. The little monocular was the kind of stuff only the Germans care about making anymore—as clean, efficient, and beautifully engineered as a Minox had been in its day.

  There were three of them, standing by their cars in the area that turned into their playpen after dark. Even though I could dial in close enough on their faces to pick up the color of their eyes, and even though they looked too old to be teenagers, I couldn’t be sure. Not sure enough for what I’d thought about doing—hell, wanted to do—ever since Danielle’s “screen test.”

  But one thing I was sure of—they’d know who Ryan Teller was.

  Just as I was pulling back the zoom by touching a button on the side of the focusing ring, I saw the Crown Vic pull in.

  I made myself disappear and tried to do the math in my head: (1) That was the same car, unless they had a damn fleet of police-auction Crown Vics. Probability: close to zero. (2) Either my phone call hadn’t worked, or they’d been cut loose by the troopers when they couldn’t find anything. Probability: high. They weren’t drunk, and they’d been following me for miles. They weren’t professionals, but they’d know better than to be traveling with any weed, or even an open container. (3) If it was the same car, either it was a kind of “corporate vehicle” or it belonged to one of those who got out. That they were all lounging, not working, weighted it in favor of the last. Probability: medium. (4) Americans think terrorism started on 9-11. But it’s been around ever since there were enough people to start dividing themselves into tribes, or clans, or whatever. It’s always been here. The only thing that changes is how it’s inflicted.

  But nothing works better than … Damn! That’s Rape Trauma Syndrome. An implanted fear that you can’t brush off. Because you never feel safe. Now, that’s the truest terrorism there is. Would it work on these punks? If I could really implant that trauma, I could leave this “probability” guessing behind, and get to where I needed to be: utility.

  Torture doesn’t work if it’s designed to extract information. But implanting a feeling deeply enough so that the victim knows something horrible is coming—that form of torture does. Some people don’t fly anymore. Others don’t open their own mail. Some are afraid to start their own cars.

  You don’t have to be some lunatic predicting the “End of Days” to believe that you’re not safe. But you’d have to be a lunatic to believe the government has it all under control.

  That’s how terrorism works. And it’s working, one way or another, all over the globe. “Counterterrorism” is a fake. That job shouldn’t be to capture-hold-kill terrorists. “Counter” is transferring energy from one side of the table to the other. Like aikido. The only true “counterterrorism” would be to terrorize the terrorists. If our government was willing to hire professionals—not those overpaid, well-connected fools they used in Iraq—that could be done.

  I couldn’t help thinking of the Legion. As professional as they come. Put them here. If I just closed my eyes, I could actually see it on that screen in my mind:

  A mob of white-robed terrorists are watching a cross burn on the front lawn of a family that moved into the wrong neighborhood. Suddenly they start dropping like flies under a cloud of DDT. Nobody hears anything; nobody sees anything. They take off, running for their HQ. And when that safe harbor gets blown to hell, each atom from the fallout turns into a Bouncing Betty, spreading the message—they were the ones in the wrong neighborhood.

  Governments hire mercenaries all the time. But once they step over to that side, they have to trust people whose loyalty is for sale. And the highest bidder isn’t necessarily the first bidder.

  The Cadillac was safely docked almost two miles away, but I had my traveling kit with me.

  Because I had some sense of the terrain by then, I had passed the spot, went on for a little bit, then doubled back. I didn’t want to cross a highway wearing a balaclava—too good a chance that some cell-phone addict would stop yammering long enough to snap a picture. “OMG!” would be the next thing she texted.

  I dressed for my role. Total black, from the toe-weighted boots to the coveralls, gloves, balaclava, and full-wrap sunglasses.

  Once I got close enough, all I had to do was wait for a clear chance to send both messages. The hardball .22 round would speak for itself, but only if it was the second move in the sequence I’d rehearsed.

  I was less than ten meters away from them, just past where the parking-lot asphalt met the woods. That was within the slingshot’s range, but not by a lot.

  The slingshot wasn’t a toy: I didn’t know what had been used to construct its frame, but it was heavy enough to be lead. As for the elastic, I couldn’t even guess—all I knew was that it wasn’t any kind of rubber.

  But the real brilliance of the design wasn’t that it could fire what looked like way-oversized paintballs; it was the paintballs themselves. They were engineered to burst open on impact and drop a twice-folded three-by-five card to the ground. Result: an impossible-to-remove yellow splatter on the target, together with an impossible-to-forget message on the ground.

  I wasn’t wearing a watch, and I wasn’t counting time. I had guessed that ten in the morning would give me the best chance of finding the far-back parking lot close to empty. So I waited, telling myself, over and over, that there would be other chances if today didn’t work out.

  It came quicker than I thought. The car I was waiting for pulled in, and three men got out.

  N’hésitez pas! I slid sideways into an archer’s stance, pulling the slingshot back in the same move. The giant paintball hit the side door of the Crown Vic with an audible splat!

  “What the fuck?!” one of them shouted as they all jumped out.

  All three turned in the direction where I was standing, now right on the borderline of the forest. They were frozen in place, scanning with their eyes, as still as paper targets. I was already braced. I shot the middle one in the head, just above the bridge of his nose. Then I vanished into the woods.

  I didn’t expect the others to follow me, but making sure of that made me move slower than I wanted to. Even so, I was dressed like a normal person and driving the Cadillac back toward the house within fifteen minutes.

  I wasn’t worried about being stopped. People who bought a car like this expected an adjustable ride, so the shock settings required plenty of room in the wheel wells. And left plenty of room to Velcro-attach my carryall to the undercarriage. I’d tested the setup over bumpy roads and it hadn’t budged.

  I couldn’t know whether the Tiger Ko Khai maggots would panic and call the cops, or panic and throw the body into the trunk before they took off.

  Maybe I couldn’t deliver a message to Ryan Teller, but I was sure they could. Both sides of the open-on-impact card had the same message:

  TELL RYAN WE’RE COMING FOR HIM

  There’s no daily news coverage here. There’s newspapers, but they only come out twice a week, and usually only print press releases and the owner’s “editorials.” Dolly keeps the BBC on TV all
the time, running mute, but the local news was pretty much statewide, and it would automatically cut in if there was something important enough—college-football rankings weren’t international news.

  Nothing cut into the BBC, so they must have hit panic button number two. That would have been the only sane move. Trying to tell the local cops that some masked ninja had stepped out of the woods and drilled their friend between the eyes would have gotten them questioned for hours, with more than one detective in the room.

  So—what you’re telling us is that somebody in a black hood just walked out of the woods and popped your friend in the head? And nobody heard a shot, so he must have been using a silencer? And all this started with a giant paintball hitting your car? How come there’s a section of that paintball that looks like somebody pulled something loose? Well, just relax here a bit—we’ll have the CSI team go over the car, just in case this guy, this mystery killer, left any evidence behind.

  Oh, by the way, this guy, the guy with the hood, was there any symbol on it? You know, like a circle with a cross over it?

  And while that was going on, anything that had ever been in their car could turn into a serious problem. Never mind the fact that the dead guy and the two of them were all wearing the same jackets.

  How about telling us about those jackets? It’ll help in our investigation. Maybe somebody has some kind of grudge against your club that you know about? Can you think of any reason why someone would want to kill your friend?

  The longer that went on, if any of them had any kind of criminal record anywhere—not only convictions, even arrests—the cops would know about it. That should do it. Even the dumbest cops would know enough to start a roundup. Then they could cut the weakest one out of the herd, and make sure the others heard them do it.

  No, you aren’t under arrest—that’s why we didn’t give you any Miranda warnings. But if you want to be under arrest, we can always charge you with obstruction of justice. Then you can call your lawyer, if you have one. Or we’ll get someone assigned. Is that what you want? No? That’s a smart move, doing the right thing. No reason why you have to go down with the rest of them.

  Not giving a damn who you hurt doesn’t make you a hard man. Or even a cold one. I knew it wouldn’t necessarily be the smartest one who gave the orders. It would be whoever said that an unreported disappearance was better than going anywhere near the cops. In a panic situation, everyone listens to the man who stays calm, even if it’s the calmness of a man too stupid to understand that he should be afraid.

  Dolly certainly wasn’t all that calm when I came back to the house after stashing the Cadillac behind Swift’s “extra office space.”

  The second she got me alone, she starting talking. Talking so fast that I had to ask her to slow down every few seconds.

  “She’s coming! I called her and she’s coming! She’s coming here, Dell. And she’s going to do all the interviews. And not only that, she got the top forensic psychologist in the whole country to help out. They’ll be here tomorrow. Oh God! We have to pick them up at the airport, and …”

  “Honey …”

  “I know, I know. It’s just that, with experts with their credentials on our side, we have a real chance now, Dell.”

  Good thing, I thought. This wasn’t the kind of case where you could give witnesses an incentive to change their minds.

  Debbie Rollo walked over to me as she stepped through the exit slot at the airport. I don’t look like anything special, but wearing a suit and tie and holding up a big white card with her name printed on it was probably enough of a hint.

  People who are highly educated sometimes make me feel resentful, although I don’t know exactly why—I’d probably have to hire one of them to find out. But she was a sweetheart. “Please call me Debbie. I hate all that formal nonsense.”

  “Sure,” I said, holding out my hand, now that I was no longer a limo driver. “My name’s Dell.”

  “Is that short for Delbert?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, my goodness! I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I’m not. I know my name’s unusual. It’s short for ‘Adelbert.’ Who wants to get their mouth around that?”

  When she chuckled, I could see why Dolly liked her so much. I don’t know when they met, but I know it was way before Dolly and I came here. To our home, I mean. So, whoever she was, she was a woman who could keep a friend’s secrets.

  “Damn it!” she said as I was loading her suitcases into the Cadillac. “I forgot to tell you. I got an e-mail from Dr. Joel last night. He’s still coming, but when I told him it wasn’t an emergency, he said he’d just drive up.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know where exactly. I only reached him on his cell, so he could be anywhere. I can’t believe he’d be crazy enough”—she blushed at having just called a psychologist potentially crazy—“to drive from where he lives.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Tucson,” she said. “That has to be over a thousand miles from here! But I know he’s some kind of car nut”—it was easier to catch the blush this time; I’d been ready for it—“and he just got some super-special new one.”

  She didn’t say another word for a good twenty minutes, content to look out the window and watch the scenery. Maybe Dolly had told her I wasn’t a world-class conversationalist.

  “What kind of car does this doctor have, do you know?”

  “I can tell you exactly if you give me a minute. I have his e-mail on my phone.”

  Before I could tell her it wasn’t all that important, she was tapping madly on the tiny typewriter keyboard attached to her phone.

  “It’s a … Mercedes-AMG, as if I knew what that meant.”

  “AMG is a special little operation that makes high-performance versions of different kinds of Mercedes,” I told her. “Mercedes itself has to approve—it puts its own warranty on anything AMG makes—so they work really close together. This could be anything from a—”

  “It’s an SLS Roadster,” she interrupted. “Does that help?”

  “Sure does. ‘Roadster’ is just fancy-word for ‘convertible’ today, but the SLS is no car for an amateur—it’s so fast it could be dangerous. Probably capable of hitting two hundred–plus on a flat stretch of road.”

  “My goodness!”

  “Yeah. But this doctor, he may be nuts. Who keeps a convertible in Tucson?”

  She chuckled at that one, too. I hoped she’d tell Dolly I was pretty clever at small talk.

  I tried to coax Rascal down to the basement, where I was going to be sleeping. The house really wasn’t built for guests, and my den took away the only extra room, so Dolly told me she and Debbie would be sleeping in our bedroom. There’s only the one bed. I don’t know why it is, but girls are comfortable sleeping in the same bed, the way men never can be.

  Anyway, Rascal lived up to his name. Once he had the rawhide treat firmly in his jaws, he ran up the stairs like he was after a bitch in heat. I was good enough for hanging out with, but Dolly, she was his job.

  I called him a miserable deserter. In French, to make sure he didn’t understand—who knows what words a dog knows? But inside, I was really proud of him.

  They were all asleep when I took another look at the video of the little girl who wanted to be called “Danyelle.” On zoom, her eyes were the color of steel nailheads. And just as deep. One-way mirrors. A good thing we’d left that website up and rented a 213-area-code answering service. If anyone called, they would just read what we sent them: “Arquette Aland Film Productions.” And, depending on what was asked, “No, Mr. Laveque is not available at the moment,” or “No, I am not Mr. Laveque’s personal assistant. My name is Trixie. All I do is answer phones in this madhouse.” And “Yes, of course, I’ll take a message.”

  No matter what the answer, “Trixie” would be interrupted by a tape of phones ringing, all of which she’d simply answer, “Hold, please.” After all, Danielle was an important client.
A priority.

  I decided to map out the distance from Tucson to where we were. I couldn’t get it exact, not knowing where in Tucson this psychologist would be coming from, but it was no less than thirteen hundred miles. I wondered for a second if he knew where he was coming to, but then I let it go—Dolly and Debbie would have worked that one out between them.

  The next couple of days turned the kitchen into a phone bank. I didn’t know how these girls could all talk into different phones at the same time and not get in each other’s way, but they handled it like it had been choreographed.

  Dolly didn’t even ask me where I was going.

  Franklin was home. Sitting on the front step of the house his football skills had bought his parents, glaring at passing cars like he was expecting a drive-by … and was wearing a bulletproof vest, with a grenade launcher close to hand.

  But he had a smile for me.

  “Hey, Franklin. What’s going on?”

  “I thought you might have some … news for me.”

  “I’ve got something better, maybe. You got anything inside that’s a little more like what I’m wearing?”

  “A suit, you mean? Gee, no. I mean, why would I—Wait!” he interrupted himself. “My prom suit. I had to buy it—the rental place didn’t have anything in my size. But you can’t tell MaryLou. She’d kill me if she thought I’d spent all that money.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  “The whole prom—I got her an orchid and all—it cost almost a thousand dollars,” he said, proudly.

  “That’s a lot of money …” I started to say, before it hit me that Franklin’s pride wasn’t in how much he’d spent, but in how he’d managed to earn that much, so I closed that door quick with “… to save up.”

  “I worked after school. Helping Mr. Spyros. He’s an expert horta-something. With trees and all. He knows everything about them. And you know what he paid me? Fifteen dollars an hour! He said that was about twice the minimum wage, and I worked like two men, so he paid me like two men. Isn’t that something?”