Shockwave (21 page)

“I’ve already set the school record for strikeouts in one season, and I’m going to have the best ERA in the league this year … again.”

I didn’t miss the difference between “where I came from” and “home.” Or the bitter flavor of her words. Any athlete of her caliber could write her own ticket—what would an extra scholarship cost the school, compared with what it would be getting—actually,
keeping
—for its money?

So I just told her what I was thinking about. I didn’t gloss it, but I underestimated how she’d react.

“And you’re telling me because—what?—you think Franklin would have to ask my permission? No, that wouldn’t be it—every time he comes down here, sometimes for a whole weekend, it’s always ‘Mr. Dell’ this, and ‘Mr. Dell’ that. He still thinks you’re some kind of magician, the way you saved my life.

“So … Ah, okay! The only way you can be sure Franklin wouldn’t let something slip if the cops came around asking questions is if he thinks he’d be protecting me. How’m I doing so far, ‘Mr. Dell’?” she asked. The bitterness of her tone made it no question at all.

“Bad.”

“Really?” she said, her voice now just short of downright hostile.

“Yeah, really. If all I wanted was to make sure Franklin never talked, I’d just make sure he couldn’t.”

Her blue eyes met mine. Not for the first time. But now she was searching for something else—trying to find my soul.

“You’re a real piece of … dry ice, aren’t you?”

“This isn’t about me. Or what I am. I was good enough for some things, wasn’t I? I trust you with what could put me away forever, and you get all insane because I trust you with something
else
?”

“When you said you could make sure—”

“Don’t be such a little princess, okay? You’re not stupid. I could have made sure
you
wouldn’t let something slip, too, right? Did I do that? No. But could I have? Sure.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, holding my eyes, meaning it. That’s when it hit me.

“You really do love him, huh?”

“I … I guess I do.”

“There’s no ‘guess’ on Franklin’s part. That’s why I wanted you to be there when I break it down for him. What he’d have to do, I mean.”

“What would he have to do?”

“Just let some people find him. Find him, and pitch him on joining, the same way the school pitched him on playing football.”

“And?”

“And get them to come to meet with him. Or even just one of them.”

“That’s when you’d—?”

“Yeah.”

“No good.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. They’d never see you coming, I know that. But they’d know Franklin. Know where to find him. Find him
again
, I mean. You’re going to be his bodyguard?”

“No. It’d be quick. It has to be quick. Whoever comes to
Franklin with a recruiting pitch the first time—one man or even a few of them—they wouldn’t be leaving.”

“But what if they, I don’t know, had already put his name on a list? You know, like a scout would write ‘worth a look,’ or something like that?”

“They wouldn’t. If they did, and they
couldn’t
persuade Franklin to join up, they’d be screwing themselves. At the minimum, they’d lose status. At the worst …”

She went quiet.

I waited.

“I’ve got a better idea,” the young woman said.

“Y
ou’re not being straight with me,” I told her after I listened to her better idea. “You just want to put yourself into this. Into it deep enough so that Franklin would know that anything he might tell anybody, ever, could be enough to wreck your life.”

“Uh-uh. That’s not it, not even a little bit of it.”

“I know,” I said and watched a stunned expression cross her face. “The real reason you want to make sure Franklin never says a word is because you still think I might think I have to … protect myself from that possibility.”

She shook that off like a fighter who’d been hit hard, but nowhere near hard enough to put him down. “Let me ask you something. If you thought Franklin letting something slip would get Dolly in trouble, what would you do then,
Mr. Dell
?”

I nodded. She was right. And she knew it.

“You really want to be in it, MaryLou? In it that deep?”

“Franklin’s been shortchanged enough in his life. I’m going to stand up against that, stand up
with
him—even if it means standing on the tracks with a train coming.”

B
efore I filled Dolly in on what had come of my visit to MaryLou, I made a “wait a minute” signal with my hand, and stepped down into my basement.

I read what was waiting for me, then replayed it in my mind over and over, but I still wasn’t sure I understood what the cyber-ghost had told me:

Someone inside the same organization that had killed the man Homer took the watch from had his own personal government handler? And this handler wasn’t telling his bosses about the arrangement?

If that was right, maybe this “Welter” guy wasn’t the first one the off-the-books informant had murdered? A man like that being run by a government agent gone rogue, it wouldn’t be the first time. An agent who could pull that off, he could probably name his own salary, too.

Too many questions. And asking them would tell whoever it was on the other end how confused I was by his message. Not a good idea—it could give the cyber-ghost one of his own … like it might be time to disappear.

If that happened, the channel would close, forever. So I tried to show him that I could see the lines clearly, and that I’d always color within them:

“C
razy, stupid little—”

“You were the one who got it started,
ma jeune fille
.”

That seemed to calm her down. A little bit, anyway.

“This is all a chain of protection,” Dolly said, grimly. “And that’s on me,” the woman I loved more than my life said, before I could even ask her what she was talking about. “Mack wants to protect Homer. I want to protect Mack—he protects this whole town—so I get you to sign up. You decide the best way to do that is to … kill one of them, so now I have to protect
you
.

“And if that isn’t enough of a mess,
your
plan is to lure them out by getting them to recruit Franklin. But you can’t do that without signing MaryLou up, too. You don’t know anything about women. If you did, you’d have known that what
she
wants is to take Franklin’s place! That chain, it’s turned into a noose around all your necks. And I did that. Me. I did all that.”

“All I did was run it past MaryLou, honey. I haven’t put anything in motion.”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t mean we’re only going to have the one chance.”

“Yes? And what is that supposed to mean?” Dolly asked. But at least she was sitting down now, taking a sip from her cup of that bitter tea she likes so much.

“It means you missed one thing—whatever happens from here cuts out the weakest link from our chain.”

“What?”

“Your pal. This Detective Lancer. He’s not inside our circle. Our circle of trust. So there’s not going to be any ‘reenactment’ scene. Sure, it might prove Homer couldn’t have done it, but it would only prove it to
him
. And I can’t see him going that far out on a limb. He doesn’t like the cowardly little DA we have here—what cop would?—but he’s not going public with any Sherlock Holmes stuff. It’s not his job to dismantle murder
cases … especially ones like this, ones where there’s no way for the DA to lose.”

“Oh.”

“Dolly, tell me: you trust Lancer like you do Mack?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You see now?”

“See what? That we’re back to where I started when I said your plan is to kill
another
one of them just to prove Homer didn’t kill the first one?”

“Pretty much,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. I can’t do that like the French do, can’t make it say a dozen things at the same time. But I only needed it to say one.

“H
ow come you always want Mack to come over after dark?”

“Dell, are you just pretending to be dense?”

“Do I have to?”

“No,
mon brave soldat
,” she whispered, kissing the side of my mouth on her way to dropping into my lap. “When it comes to certain things, you are as thick as concrete.”

“You, too,” I said. And slapped her bottom.

“Stop that! He’ll be here any—”

“So?”

“So I don’t want to be all silly when he shows up.”

“So just sit quietly. And tell me where I’m so thick.”

“Ah, Dell. If you could have seen how some of my girls get whenever Mack comes over, you’d understand.”

“He’s not all that—”

“Oh, yes, he is!” my wife said, snuggling into me to take any jealousy-sting out of her words. “And I’m not letting any of my girls anywhere near him, not if I can help it.”

“He may not be a fossil like me, but he’s way too old for them, is that it?”

“Will you
stop
? It’s not that. Some of my girls, they’ve been coming over since middle school. I know some are certainly … adults now. By law, anyway. It’s not the age difference—how could it be, with me being so much younger than you?” she teased. “But Mack just gets uncomfortable when girls go all goo-goo eyes around him. Maybe if—”

“I thought you used up your supply of unmarried girlfriends when you got Debbie and Dr. Joel together.”

“Dell! I did not! I can’t help it if—”

“Tu crois qu’en étalant le beurre tu vas cacher le pain?”

“Hmmph!”

Before I could translate whatever Dolly’s sound meant—she uses it for all kinds of things—Rascal let us know that Mack was pulling in behind the house.

“W
e have to start from here: we
know
Homer didn’t kill that guy.”

“That’s not where we start,” I told Mack. “The DA doesn’t have to prove Homer killed anyone. All he needs is for some judge to say he’s crazy. As far as the whole town’s concerned, that’s the same as saying he’s guilty. Another major victory for the DA. Another load on that ‘cooperation between agencies’ pile of crap he’s always pitching.”

“Yeah, I get it. What you said before, right? The only way to get Homer released—
really
released, so he’s back to where he was when they picked him up—is to prove someone else did it.”

“How many on your caseload?” Dolly asked. Trying to divert him from walking the same road she knew I was going to?

“I don’t know, exactly. The Medicaid disability reimbursement is the official head count. But that just covers the permanent
homeless, the shelter visitors, and the people who live in the residence or with their families.”

“Just?” Dolly said, smiling at him like he was being too modest.

“You mean the jail? That’s a variable. When they get a guy who’s so off-the-wall that they pick up on it right away, they’ll stick him in a camera cell, put him on suicide watch, and give me a call. I could get three the same night, or none for a month.”

“And the freelance stuff?” she said, still smiling.

“That’s only—”

“Every day. Or night. Nobody’s paying you to hang out with some of these kids. How else would you have known the nearest place to find skinheads?”

“I don’t spend that much time …”

“Yes, you do,” Dolly said, her tone saying it wouldn’t be a good idea to argue with her.

Mack just nodded. Probably knew more about women than I did at his age.
Probably? Who am I kidding?

“Maybe it’s time to think about triage,” I said, knowing Dolly would get what I was saying.

She did. “You mean just—”

I cut her off, turned to Mack: “If you get yourself in trouble trying to protect Homer, you risk everything you’re involved in. It’s taken you years to get so much traction in this place. I don’t mean with the homeless, or … the mentally ill, or anyone like them. I mean with the people who run the show. You wouldn’t just be cutting your connection to the people you work with, you’d probably be cutting all the programs, too. Not just cutting them down, cutting their throats.”

Mack’s face set itself in hard, sharp lines. “I’m not just walking away. It’s not that there’s anything special about Homer. It’s just me. Walking away, I can’t do that.”

My wife turned to me. Said,
“Tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés, ni tes armes,”
her voice heavy with sadness.

Never abandon your dead, your wounded, or your weapons. The code of La Légion. And she’d gotten it right—Mack was hell-bound to save Homer, and he lived under the same code I once did, except that he wasn’t following any orders but his own.

She twisted on the seat of her chair to face Mack. “But you see what Dell’s saying?”

“Sure.”

“So isn’t there a line somewhere?”

“I’m not sure what you’re—”

“We take it as far as we can without putting everything else you’re doing in danger.”

“How would I know where that line would be?”

“You’ll know,” I assured him, now back on familiar ground—Mack probably knew more than me about a lot of things, but he’d be lost in the jungles I’d worked for so many years. “You’ll see it for yourself, as clear as neon at night.”

“W
hat I said to him, that goes double for you,” my wife told me, the second Mack closed the back door on his way out.

“Pick a square and stand on it, honey.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You think I’d give a damn about some Nazi being killed? Or some crazy man who might have to go to the state hospital? No. So why am I in this at all? You know why, and you know I’ve already done some things—”

“What things?”

“Things that had some risk to them. But only
while
I was doing them. Now I’m done. In the clear.

“But MaryLou knows something’s up. I’m not saying she’d talk—it’d take a lot more than threats to scare
that
girl—but if she thinks Franklin might get dragged into …”

“I never meant—”