Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

  “They are descriptive terms appropriate to a more-than-extreme situation.”

  “You were present in court when one Franklin Wayne testified, were you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “If MaryLou had asked him for help, what do you think he would have done?”

  “Considering that that would have had to happen before anyone knew MaryLou’s little sister was a manipulative liar—”

  “Objection! Your Honor, is this witness now conferring the status of ‘expert’ on that … on that large young man who testified earlier in the trial?”

  “The witness is repeating what another witness has already testified to,” Swift shot back.

  “Please finish your answer, Ms. Rollo” was all the judge said.

  Debbie gave the judge a look he probably took the wrong way … which was good for us. She turned to face the jury: “As I was saying, if MaryLou had asked for Franklin Wayne’s help, there is not a doubt in my mind that he would have done exactly what MaryLou did. Only he wouldn’t have needed a gun.”

  “Fine. But she didn’t ask for his help, did she?”

  “No. In MaryLou’s mind, her baby sister was her responsibility. Hers alone.”

  “Well, let me ask you this. Hypothetically, if you had a weapon such as Franklin Wayne at your disposal, a—shall we say—low-IQ man, twice the size of the victim in this case. If that individual would do whatever you asked—wouldn’t you use him?”

  “No, I would not.”

  “Oh, really? Why is that?”

  “It would be morally wrong. MaryLou is a very straightforward, honest young woman. She undoubtedly knew of Franklin Wayne’s feelings for her. But she wouldn’t, as you put it, use someone she cared for in such a matter. Only her sister would be capable of such a foul act of betrayal.”

  “Objection!”

  “To what now?” the judge asked, very wearily.

  “The witness refused to answer my question.”

  “Are you serious, counsel?”

  Fat Face sat down like a fighter in his corner. One who knew he wouldn’t be coming out for the next round.

  “You were beautiful,” T.D. said to Debbie. “I mean, you did a beautiful job.… I mean, actually, you—”

  “Will you stop?” Dolly told him, taking Debbie’s hand and pulling her away.

  T.D. didn’t mistake that for a question.

  At least Dolly didn’t have to give her girlfriend CPR in front of us all. Even Rascal seemed to get it. He may have slept in that bedroom a million times, but, for now, it was strictly No Males Allowed.

  “I have to put her on,” Swift told us.

  “Yeah, you do,” T.D. agreed. “This isn’t an insanity defense, where the defendant sits staring into space. No history of mental illness. No ‘Trench Coat Mafia’ she ran with. No matter what you call it, this is all about self-defense. Or defense of another, actually. And no matter how strong your case, if the jury doesn’t hear MaryLou’s side of the story, they’ll hold it against her.”

  “She’s a fucking zombie!” Swift said fiercely. “She wasn’t when we started, but now …”

  “There’s no court tomorrow,” I said. “There’s plenty of time between now and Monday for me to talk to her.”

  “You?”

  “Like T.D. said, now we’re in a place where I have an education. A very good one. But I’d want you to come along.”

  “Me?”

  Swift gave T.D. a look. T.D. nodded.

  “You don’t have to talk, MaryLou,” I told her the next morning. “But you do have to listen.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’re not going back to your cell until you hear me out,” I told her. “And you’ll want to hear what I’ve got to tell you. Something you don’t know. Something you’re going to need.”

  She didn’t move, but I could see a nerve muscle jump in her left cheek. All the way up from her throwing hand, I thought.

  “Mr. Swift, your lawyer, he’s not going to say a word. He’s not going to hear a word. Him being here protects me. I’ve got some things to say that I wouldn’t want the police to hear.”

  Swift moved as far away as he could, held a soft-cover copy of the Oregon Rules of Evidence in front of his face, and made it clear he was tuning us out.

  “Cameron Taft was a virus,” I told MaryLou, in a half-whisper. “He was a carrier. If he hadn’t been stopped, he’d have spread it too far for it to ever be contained.”

  Her face didn’t move, but those hard, pale eyes of hers shifted.

  “He didn’t start Tiger Ko Khai, but I know who did.”

  Now her eyes were locked on mine. I met her stare with one of my own. Hers was cold, but I’d had way more practice: mine was freezing.

  “His name is Ryan Teller. He’s gone into hiding now, but I’ll find him. And when I do, I’ll cut his head off and plant it on a stake, as a warning to anyone who might try to follow his path. I’m trusting you with that.”

  She made some little noise in her throat. I waited for her to speak, then realized she’d said all she was going to say. For now, anyway.

  “I know how to finish what you started. There’s no more Tiger Ko Khai anywhere near here. Next year, nobody’s going to be wearing those jackets at your school. You know why, MaryLou? Because they’re scared to death, all of them. They know what’s coming. They don’t know who, but they sure know what. They’re already missing a couple of members. I don’t mean the punks you wounded, or that virus-carrier you killed. I mean the ones I did.”

  The nerve stopped jumping in her cheek. She leaned forward, spoke well below a whisper. “Are you saying that you—?”

  “Yes. And I’m not finished. But when I am, they’ll all be gone.”

  “Why?”

  “You executed that virus-carrier because you thought he was going to rape your little sister. You were wrong about Danielle, MaryLou. But you weren’t wrong about Cameron Taft. If you hadn’t taken him out, dozens of young girls were going to be gang-raped. Every single year. In fact, they already would have been … if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Even if that was true, why would you put yourself in any of this?”

  “It was a simple choice, just like yours was. Either you let someone you love get gang-raped, or you shoot the rapist in the head.”

  “I thought it was that simple. I … I couldn’t just leave her to … that. But now—”

  “ ‘Now’ is Monday, MaryLou. You get on that witness stand and just be yourself. Mighty Mary brought glory to this town. And she couldn’t leave it with that virus still alive. Me, I’m not leaving. So I can’t let it ever come back.”

  “You talk like you’ve done this a lot.”

  “I’ve been in a lot of wars.”

  “This is different.”

  “No, it isn’t. The only difference between you and me is that I’m a lot better at it than you are.”

  “I killed him.”

  “You did. And that took out one of them. I’m promising you that I’m taking them all. I’m promising you that I know how to do it. And then there’s the biggest difference of all.”

  Once she figured out I wasn’t going to say anything more until she did, she gave up. “What?”

  “I’m going to burn their crops in the field. I’m going to salt the ground so nothing can ever grow there again. I’m going to poison their rivers. Just like I promised you before, I’m going to plant their heads on stakes.”

  Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

  “And I won’t get caught,” I told her as I got up to leave.

  “You sure she’s ready for this?” Swift said to me outside the courthouse Monday morning. I could feel real nervousness eating at him.

  “She’s ready. But give her a chance.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Just put her on the stand, ask her what happened, and get out of the way. You may have to coax her a few times, but I
’m not sure she’ll even need that much. She wants to do this now. Not for Danielle, not anymore. But, remember, this whole town loved her when she was bringing them to the State Championships. Ask around. Most of them would swear on a stack of Bibles that if they’d let MaryLou pitch all the games they would have brought home the trophy.”

  “That’s not love,” Swift said, bitterness deeply buried in his voice. But not so deep I couldn’t feel it. “These people, they think if some athlete wins a trophy they won it, too. But let that same athlete flop on the field, and watch all the ‘love’ come raining down.”

  “MaryLou didn’t flop on the softball field. And she won’t on the battlefield, either. The one we’ll all be on today.”

  “The defense calls MaryLou McCoy” was all Swift said. He was already on his feet, so all MaryLou had to do was push back her chair and walk to the stand. She walked like a soldier. Like so many soldiers I’d served with. A soldier who is going to keep walking until he either gets where he’s going or dies where he falls.

  Swift skipped all the usual preliminaries. He didn’t even so much as ask her name before he launched the rocket everyone had been watching for:

  “MaryLou, on Friday, May 31, 2013, did you shoot one Cameron Taft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you shoot at other members of a gang known as Tiger Ko Khai?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please tell the jury why you did this.”

  “The minute I wasn’t around to stop him, they were going to rape my baby sister.”

  “That’s a very strong statement, MaryLou. Can you tell us how you knew such a horrible event was going to occur?”

  “Objection!” Fat Face screamed out. “She couldn’t know any such thing!”

  “Goes to the state of mind of the defendant at the time of the events in question,” Swift said, as if anyone with half a brain would know that. Making it clear the jury sure as hell did.

  “Overruled,” the judge said—by now, to nobody’s surprise except Fat Face’s.

  “I apologize for the unnecessary interruption,” Swift said, speaking directly to MaryLou. “Unfortunately, I have to ask you again how you knew your sister was in immediate danger of such a horrible attack.”

  “That’s what they do.”

  “And by ‘they’ you mean …”

  “Tiger Ko Khai.”

  “That same gang Detective Lancer described?” Swift asked, looking at the prosecutor’s table as if daring them to object again. “Because they had done this before? To your certain knowledge?”

  “To everybody’s certain knowledge,” MaryLou said. “The minute I—”

  “Objection! Your Honor, how can this witness possibly testify as to what ‘everybody’ knew?”

  Swift pounced. “Anybody who’s been in this courtroom certainly knows, Your Honor. The defense has put on several separate young women, all of them prior victims, all of whom testified to that exact same experience.”

  “It is not significant whether or not the defendant ‘knew’ anything,” the judge lectured both sides. “The defense here is ‘justification.’ What is pertinent to any such defense is the defendant’s belief—not her factual knowledge, her belief—and the reasonableness of that belief. Which is why, the court assumes, the defense witnesses who had undergone a similar experience were put on. The objection is overruled.”

  “Again, I apologize,” Swift said to MaryLou, who sat like a granite-faced statute. “But it was important that the court make it clear what is pertinent to your defense and what is not. So—I am compelled to ask you again. Is it true that you shot Cameron Taft and two others on the date in question?”

  “I don’t know how many I shot,” MaryLou said. “I know I shot him. After that, I just kept pulling the trigger until the gun clicked and clicked. I knew it was empty, then, so I just sat down and waited.”

  “Waited for what?”

  “For whatever. It didn’t matter anymore.”

  “Because …?”

  “Because they weren’t going to rape my little sister.”

  “You believed that killing Cameron Taft—?”

  “He was the one Danielle was in love with. She had his pictures on her bedroom wall, with kiss marks she made on them. I knew the gang he was leader of, and I knew Danielle had been around them before.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “She told me. Bragging that they thought she was fourteen because she skipped two grades, but she was only twelve and already the best boys in the school wanted her.”

  “What did you do when she told you?”

  “I slapped her all over the room,” MaryLou said. “I ripped those pictures off the wall. And I warned her, if I ever heard of her going back around them—the Tiger Ko Khai bunch—I’d punch her silly instead of just slaps. Punch her in the face. Danielle was afraid of that more than anything. So I thought I’d stopped the … whole thing from happening.”

  “And when you found out that Danielle was involved with them again?”

  “That’s when I knew I couldn’t stop her after I left. I knew I could never stop them. I was supposed to be going to summer camp. For softball. It’s like a showcase. The coaches would all be there. Then, if they liked what they saw, I’d have my pick of scholarships.”

  “You couldn’t stop Danielle, but …?”

  “I could stop them. I remember thinking that: I could stop them. The next thing I really remember is the police. They probably wouldn’t even have grabbed me except there was nobody else. In the hall, I mean.”

  “Did you intend to kill Cameron Taft?”

  “I … don’t know. I don’t know much about guns. But I meant to shoot him, I know I must have. Him and any of the others. Danielle is my sister. My baby sister. She was smarter than me, okay, but she didn’t have any … experience.

  “If you knew my mother and father, you’d understand. She was like my own baby. I knew I had to … protect her. And I thought I was. Until the doctor—I mean the doctor that testified here—until he said what Danielle really was, I …”

  MaryLou started crying then. But she never dropped her eyes, staring at the jury as if challenging them to say a word about it.

  Swift sat down.

  MaryLou turned slowly and looked over at the prosecution table. Tears were still running down her face, but the eyes they came from were lasers.

  The last of the prosecution team must have been saved just for this one job. He was a little older, a little better dressed than Fat Face. All that told me was that he’d been around longer.

  “Don’t people call you something besides ‘MaryLou’?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on, now. Are you saying you never heard anyone call you ‘Mighty Mary’?”

  “Only in the papers. Or, sometimes, people would shout it at games. But nobody ever called me that, like a nickname or something.”

  “I see. Well, let me ask you this, then: were you personally afraid of Cameron Taft?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, if he so much as touched you, there isn’t a doubt in your mind that you could have fought him off, is there?”

  “No.”

  “In fact, you could probably beat him to a pulp, isn’t that true?”

  “I don’t know. But … yes, I guess so—a coward like him, he’d quit before I would.”

  “So tell us, why did Mighty Mary need a pistol to send a message to Cameron Taft?”

  “Message?”

  “A message to leave your sister alone.”

  “Oh. Beating him up, that wouldn’t work. He’d never take that kind of humiliation—it would just make him more evil. And he’d take it out on my little sister.”

  “Why didn’t you get your retarded boyfriend to beat him up? He’s certainly big enough, isn’t he?”

  Insulte sa mère! I thought. Le fils de pute finit enfin par conger!

  You could see MaryLou calling on every vestige of self-control. You could also see the bloo
d-flash in her eyes. Sure, I tried to tell the jury with my mind, MaryLou might snap like a dry twig. Then maybe snap you like a dry twig. But she’s a teenage girl, not some icy assassin.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she finally said.

  “You don’t know of one Franklin Wayne?”

  “Yes, I know him. He’s one of my best friends. Probably my best friend.”

  “Isn’t he better known as Bluto throughout your school? And isn’t that because he’s retarded?”

  “I never heard him called that name,” MaryLou gambled on the lie. Or maybe nobody ever called him that when she was around—now that would be retarded.

  “And you don’t know he’s retarded?”

  “How would I know that? Franklin’s the same age as me. If he was so retarded, how did he pass all his courses?”

  “Perhaps because he was a star football player?” the prosecution’s ace asked.

  You just cut your own throat. I felt the pounding in my head. You’re telling this whole town that they looked the other way to get a football player. Why not just go up to the jury box and spit in their faces?

  “I don’t understand,” MaryLou said, playing it perfectly. Easy to do when telling the truth is the only job you have.

  The prosecutor retreated, but it was already too late. The best he could do was “So you had to kill Cameron Taft?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you crying about?”

  MaryLou wiped the tears away with one hand, sweeping them over her prominent nose in the same gesture she might use to brush off a punch to the head. She looked at the prosecutor, as if deciding what to say. Finally she settled on, “I’m not sure.”

  “Are you crying because, after sitting in this courtroom, you now realize that Cameron Taft was completely innocent? In fact, it was Danielle who came to him, not the other way around, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t know any of that when it … when it happened.”

  “You mean, when you murdered Cameron Taft in cold blood?”

  “I guess so” was MaryLou’s only response.

  “So you thought that young man was going to rape your sister after you left for this summer-camp thing, and that thought made you carry a concealed firearm to school? And that thought made you shoot that same young man in the face, killing him instantly—is that about right?”