Shockwave (6 page)

“They fired her for that?”

“They said she wasn’t fired, just ‘laid off.’ But nobody could miss the message. By then, she was seeing so many school-age kids that she had a … ‘following,’ I guess you’d call it. So, when that nasty old crone that used to be the guidance counselor at the high school retired, Laura got the job.”

“ ‘Nasty old crone’?”

“That’s what the kids always called her,” Dolly said, making it into an unchallengeable truth. “All of them. If any of them had a … secret of some kind, or even wanted to talk about how they were feeling, she was the
last
person they’d pick.

“Besides, nobody really wanted that job. It doesn’t pay much, and the only other applicants were just college grads, without a counseling license.

“Laura didn’t have any political backing, but you’d be surprised at how many people told the school board that they wanted the most qualified person for the job. Maybe it’s all those school shootings—” She cut herself off, and I stepped in quick, so her last words wouldn’t just hang in the air.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I told her. “Anyway, with that psycho who blew himself up building a pipe bomb a while back, and then that … horror show in Connecticut, folks would
want
the early-warning signals now.”

“Uh-huh,” Dolly said, not interested in going any further down that trail. “
Now
can we get back to why that homeless guy couldn’t have been the killer?”

“What’s that got to do with Laura?” Which got me another acidic look from the only person I loved still able to walk this earth.

“Laura is what they call a ‘sit-down therapist.’ This kind of thing, that’s Mack’s work. I told him I’d let him know. When he could come over, I mean.”

My wife was telling me she’d given her word. That was enough. If your word doesn’t mean much, neither do you. So you can’t just warn anyone off—a threat is a promise. And my life was a simple equation: you hurt my Dolly, you hurt me. I was taught very early on—you let anyone do something bad to you, they’ll come back and do something worse. Since then, it’s been very simple: hurt me, you won’t get another chance to do it again. Ever. But all I said was “It’s your house, Dolly. I’m not—”

“Dell,” she said, hands on hips to let me know she was really running out of patience, “it’s you I want him to talk to. And you know damn well it is. So I’d have to make sure you weren’t planning on being off somewhere when I tell him—”

“Tonight’s fine,” I cut her off, this time earning a dazzling smile and a sweet kiss I didn’t deserve. All I wanted was to get whatever this was over with, and I knew the only way I could do that was to show Dolly it had nothing to do with us. Or her girls.

I
’m not a hermit, but in a town this size, I’d already been way too visible for my taste.

Dolly, now, she was all over the place, all the time. That was fine with me. And it was no secret that we were married. When we’d walked away, it was understood between us that I was finished with what had once been my work. I’d never expected
the same from Dolly. I knew healing was in her blood. And I needed to believe that killing wasn’t in mine.

So I’d gotten used to the flocks of teenaged girls—and the boys who kind of followed them around—being in the house. And to Dolly going off to one of her endless meetings—I guess “fights” would be a better word, like when the town tried to close the animal shelter. But the last time I went back to my past, I’d reacted as if I’d been waiting for the chance. That state of readiness bothered me—I didn’t want to go near that place again.

That last time, everyone knew “Mighty Mary.” But how many knew that Cameron Taft—the man she gunned down in a high-school corridor—was the boss of a gang-rape “society”? One that only plucked the lowest-hanging fruit: girls who were underage, undesirable, and unwanted by anyone else. Those who
did
know never told anyone, not anymore. What would have been the point? When the earlier victims had told the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner on duty in the ER exactly what had happened to them, when the SANE nurses immediately reported the rapes, complete with their own medical findings for confirmation, nothing happened. Nothing at all.

After a while, everyone believed the gang rapists who called themselves “Tiger Ko Khai” had some kind of special immunity.

I found out a lot of things then. In between the work I’d had to do and a jury finding MaryLou not guilty, a lot of … violence took place.

And even after that verdict, I’d killed another man. That was keeping my promise to MaryLou—the promise that had finally convinced her to help the lawyer we’d paid for and the experts Dolly had assembled to defend her.

Before that, she’d been a stone.
La mission est terminée. J’ai fini. Il n’y a rien d’autre à faire
. I’d seen that look before, when I soldiered for La Légion. Always the same: “The mission is over. There is nothing left to do.” Nothing left of me, either.

That tree had been pulled out by its taproot. Chopped up into stakes just right for impaling. Those heads turned into skulls, now surrounding the village.

It wasn’t my job to protect anything other than my own perimeter. If Dolly hadn’t pulled MaryLou inside that perimeter, I wouldn’t have done a thing.

So I’d listen to whatever this Mack guy wanted to say. And then the only work I’d have to do would be to keep Dolly from pulling him or whoever else he might be talking about inside our perimeter. If what he wanted was money to hire a lawyer, I knew a good one, right in town. And we had the money, too. But that was as far as I was prepared to go.

L
a Légion held all kinds of men, the full range of the human spectrum.

But we lived under the same rules, some official, some cultural.

To ignore orders when there were no officers around to enforce them was part of that culture. As was hero worship of men who had most flagrantly disobeyed
all
rules, those who
chose
a life of violence, despite knowing how all such lives must end.

That was why a famous criminal named Mesrine was admired by every
légionnaire
. First for his battlefield courage in North Africa, later for his international string of bank robberies, the beautiful women he always seemed to have with him, and his many escapes from custody.

It was assumed some of his exploits had been financed by the Organisation Armée Secrete—those former soldiers who still regarded de Gaulle as a traitor for abandoning the fight to keep Algeria a French colony.

But Mesrine’s journey proved to be longer than the distance
between continents. He slid all the way from the fascist-loving Right to the overthrow-obsessed Left, moving like a superb tango-dancer, never missing a step. Or losing a single worshipper.

To a
légionnaire
, it was not whether Mesrine stood to the left or to the right—it was that he stood with
us
. Politics were for fat men who sat behind desks—fighting was for the soldiers they sent out like one-way carrier pigeons. We existed solely to deliver death messages. Whether we returned or not was of no great interest to them. So Mesrine’s motivations meant nothing to us—what mattered was that he represented everything we respected.

I remember a passage from a pamphlet one of the men in my unit showed me:

He glanced up to see if I was still looking over his shoulder; then his eyes returned to the page, stopping only when he reached the point where his own life was a tribute to his hero.

I could have translated the gist of it easily enough. But, as Patrice had cautioned me many times, I never spoke more than
a few words of French aloud—only those words the officers required us all to know. So I just glanced at the passage and shook my head in frustration. That didn’t matter. The man who held the pamphlet was very passionate about it—he couldn’t wait to recite it for me in English, with a few embellishments of his own. He was an Aussie, maybe as much as twice my age. All I knew about him was that he called himself “Mal.”

“Listen to this, mate. Here speaks a man who knows the truth of things.” He translated: “Prison is a foul pit of hatred, fear, and despair. The pious bourgeoisie claim that living in pain will ‘rehabilitate’ us. After all, what sane man would want to return to such a palace of horrors? But they do not understand: the pain they inflict produces only total desperation. True, none of us wish to be thrown back into Hell. And perhaps such a prospect frightens the weak and the cowardly. But for the warrior, there are only the choices of the jungle: kill, or be killed. Prison itself is an instrument of evil, designed not to ‘change’ convicts, but only to protect the wealthy from the poor. I reject their bourgeois ‘values’ as I reject them all. I vow to proudly wear the brand of
OUTLAW
until I die. And I vow to die in battle, in mortal combat against the enemy of all who truly revere justice.”

Mal knew I was much younger than him, but not so young that I might not have already tasted prison wine and found it too sour to ever drink again. I didn’t know if those words he quoted had actually come from Mesrine himself, or if the Aussie was reading some leftist French “analysis.” In France, the Left specializes in explaining things to those too uneducated to understand them. They are certain that no one is too ignorant to understand the messages of the Right.

I knew that the Aussie had no plans to earn a living by unskilled labor. And I guessed that “Mal” wasn’t short for “Malcolm,” just his way of proclaiming that he would be a bad person to have as an enemy. He didn’t mind fighting—he
was a courageous man, and adept as well—but the only work he’d ever do would end in his death. Or, worse, capture by the enemy. Either way,
OUTLAW
boldly tattooed on the outside of his thick right forearm would be with him always, even if only in a shallow grave.

If it hadn’t been for Dolly, I might have followed him. Not to any political ideology. La Légion had shown me that those are all the same—excuses to take power, or to keep it. No, I would have followed Mal to the only two depots where the trains for men like us ever stopped: prison or death. And for those willing to risk death to escape prison, even those two were really only one.

It was as the Aussie had said—those with the power to make the laws can brand “outlaw” on whoever they choose.

And even if those with that power took it by force, so what? No real power is ever acquired legitimately, because the conqueror is always the final authority.

I will never forget two men I’d served with. Hard men from America. They didn’t look alike, but they had the same look.

One was a Cherokee, I think. I knew he was from one of those tribes that fought to the death rather than be captured and enslaved, and I knew that this was no political position—it was something inside him. The other one was black—not an African, like Idrissa, a Senegalese who preferred to fight with his sword—but an African born in America. His English was the same as mine, but he never talked to me. And I never started a conversation in all the time I was a
légionnaire
—more advice from Patrice.

I
thought that maybe the Indian blood in Dolly’s friend Laura had risen to the surface—better to fight than surrender, tribe trumping race, as it always does—but I never said anything.

Why would I? She had a really good way with those girls who were always around. And I knew she had Dolly’s trust. Otherwise, she would never have allowed Laura to take one of the girls into our bedroom—the only place in the house that was unmonitored.

Rascal—a mutt Dolly had rescued from the shelter—made a noise deep in his chest. Not a threat, just an alert. People usually didn’t come near the house after dark. If I wasn’t around, he’d guard Dolly. When Dolly left the house, Rascal would go along. I guess he figured I could take care of myself. Or he didn’t give a damn.

I understood that. All of it. Rascal had his job, and he’d do it—that was all that counted, no matter what it might cost.

I’d already seen a car pull in. The camera we had set up in the driveway didn’t throw a monitor image sharp enough for me to see exactly what kind of car it was, but I could tell it was a good twenty years old … and it hadn’t been an easy twenty years.

I heard a car door close—sounded more like a screen door than a bank vault. Watched an unfamiliar figure walk around to the back entrance. Soon as Rascal got the man’s scent, he relaxed.

“This is Mack,” Dolly said. “Laura knows him, too.”

No more “Maksim” for you, huh?
flashed in my mind. I know a Russian when I see one, and this guy was right off a recruiting poster: close-cropped blond hair, flat blue eyes, heavy cheekbones, and that squared-up stance they always took—relying on strength, not flexibility.

We shook hands. He didn’t go for a bone crusher, like some do when they first meet me, but he let me feel he had more in the tank if he needed it.

Dolly moved her head and he sat down. No surprise to me. Dolly never played hostess—if anyone wanted something, they
knew where the refrigerator was. And the coffee urn, where you could mix your own brew.

“I work two jobs,” Mack said. Speaking to me, no preamble—I guessed that Dolly already knew whatever he was telling me. “Actually, three. But they all overlap. I deal with two of the permanent homeless populations, and I’m on call if the jail gets a prisoner who could be losing it.”

“I never heard of a shrink that worked with homeless people.”

“You mean, worked with them outdoors, right?”