Strike Dog

by Joseph Heywood

  To trust someone with your six was to entrust your life to them. This was the first positive thing Service had heard about Tatie Monica. But Gasparino was green and didn’t have enough experience to understand how few people you could truly trust.

  Her sudden contrition had no currency. His gut said she was a game-­playing screwup with major personal issues who would never have been able to lead an investigation had it not been for the luck/courtesy of Check Six/Rud Hud. The major question now was, Who is he, and what the hell is his angle?

  Gasparino departed with a sad face and Service wrote down the name Rud Hud several times, underlining each iteration.

  He thought about sleeping, but there was too much loose detail in his mind. Even with the list, how did the killer actually find game wardens in the field, much less get the better of one? This case had all sorts of threads of varying lengths, like wires someone had randomly chopped. How did you reassemble spaghetti?

  The phone rang several times before the sound registered, and when he picked it up, there was nobody there. What the hell?

  He lit a cigarette, stripped to his undershorts, and called Candi McCants. “It’s Grady. I’m sorry to call so late.”

  “They’re fine,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “I don’t know when I can pick them up.”

  “Really, Grady, they’re just fine. Newf loves everyone and Cat—well, she’s Cat.”

  Service was groping for words when headlights flashed in front of the cabin. Jesus, he thought. “Candi, I gotta go.”

  Karylanne Pengelly, his late son’s girlfriend, stormed into the cabin without knocking. Service scrambled for his trousers but she walked over to him, put her arms around him, put her head on his chest, held tight, and began to sob. He tried to pry her loose but couldn’t break her grip; he had to stand helpless, feeling her body convulse.

  Eventually the sobs relented. He led her to a chair at the card table, sat her down, gave her a box of tissues and a glass of water, tugged on his trousers, and joined her at the table.

  She wiped her nose and glared at him, saying nothing. One minute she was clinging to him and now her eyes looked like they could kill.

  After a long pause she said, “How could you? What kind of monster are you?”

  Before he could say anything she shouted, “You didn’t even bury them, you selfish bastard!”

  He decided to keep quiet and weather the storm.

  “Do you have any herbal tea?” she asked, wiping her nose again.

  “Coffee.”

  “I can’t have caffeine.”

  “A little won’t hurt,” he offered.

  He lit a cigarette and she slapped the table angrily and screamed, “Put that out!”

  “It’s my house.”

  “Secondhand smoke is dangerous for the baby!”

  Grady Service looked across the table at her. Baby?

  She glared at him. “That’s right,” she said slowly. “I’m pregnant, and you’re gonna be the grandpa, but there isn’t going to be a father.” The sobbing started all over again.

  He had no idea what to say. And so it went: periods of sobbing followed by increasingly longer periods of rationality, and bit by bit she told him how she had been on the pill, but it wasn’t 100 percent, and Walter died not even knowing. She had learned a few days before he died and never got to tell him. She had her heart set on finishing school, but she wanted the baby more than anything. She did not want to go home to her parents in Canada.

  Service had learned from Maridly Nantz that women sometimes simply wanted to vent to a sympathetic ear. They were not looking for male problem solving, and this seemed like one of those times. Grandfather? Geez . . . He’d barely had time to adjust to being a father. But a grandfather? Christ, he was too damn young to be a grandfather!

  “I wasn’t going to tell anybody about this,” she said, “but when I saw you I couldn’t keep it inside. Do you ever get the feeling that God is a mean sonuvabitch?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She looked up at the ceiling and shook a fist. “You can kick my ass, but you can’t break me.” She looked back at Service. “I guess I’ll have a little coffee. Have you got cream?”

  He nodded dumbly, poured coffee for her, added powdered cream, and stepped outside to have a smoke.

  “Hey,” she called out, “come back inside. I was out of line. This is your house. You can smoke in here—it’s okay. Really,” she added, “I just panicked a little. I mean, it’s only been two months; it could be a false alarm.”

  Two months?

  “Have you been to a doctor?”

  “No. I used an over-the-counter test and it was positive, but I also know they have false positives. Nothing is ever a hundred percent, right?”

  He flicked the cigarette away, stepped back into the cabin, sat down, and looked at her. She reached out a hand. “Can I have a cigarette?”

  Grady Service pushed her hand away. “Not a chance.”

  She shrugged and looked at one of the notepads on the table.

  “Are you into Gaelic punk?” she called out.

  She had pulled him into a vortex of non sequiturs and illogic, and he was having a hard time keeping up. “Huh?”

  “Rud,” she said, pointing to his notepad. “Are you interested in Mill a h-Uile Rud?”

  He said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s a punk band from the Seattle area. I think the name means something like ‘destroy everything,’ or something like that.”

  “Gaelic?”

  “Yeah, Scotland, Ireland, even Wales, I guess. It all derives from Celtic,” said Karylanne.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Some of Walter’s teammates were big into punk. There’s a retired prof in Houghton who knows all about Gaelic punk. He taught at U of M in Ann Arbor I think.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Flaherty. He was an English professor and he’s a computer nerd, but most of all he’s a hockey freak. He skates with the boys sometimes, eh. He’s in his sixties, but he moves around pretty good, and Walter said he’s slick with the puck. He has an over-thirty team called the Galloping Gothinks.”

  “Gothics?”

  “Go-thinks. It’s a play on words.”

  “Flaherty?”

  “Yeah, but all the boys call him Knickknack. He has team dinners at his house once a month during the season, and the place is filled with all sorts of weird and cool stuff—suits of armor, things like that. He’s got one of Tony Esposito’s old Tech sweaters in a frame on the wall.”

  Esposito was a Michigan Tech alum and an NHL Hall of Fame goalie. “What do you mean he’s a computer nerd?”

  “One of the guys on the team told Walter that Flaherty’s a big-time hacker. His specialty is getting into closed university collections.”

  “To do what?’

  “Read and learn, what else?”

  “I thought hackers screwed around with things.”

  “Mr. Service, you really ought to find a way into this century. Hackers exploit holes in software to help make it better. Crackers are the ones who inflict damage.”

  “Flaherty, a hacker who knows Gaelic,” he said.

  “I’m not supposed to know about his computer life. See, by accessing closed collections, he saves money and time he’d have to spend traveling, and after he’s seen what he needs, he lets the collection keepers know he was in and how he got there. He’s like ancient, but a way-cool dude.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Sure, I used to go to the dinners with Walter and the team.”

  “Where are you staying?” he asked Karylanne.

  “I had a place in Houghton with Walter.”

  With Walter. “You two were living together?”

 
“Yeah,” she said. “Maridly knew.”

  “She did, did she?”

  Walter had been living with this girl and he hadn’t known. What else had he missed in his son’s life, and why hadn’t he paid more attention?

  “She used to drive over and have dinner with us.” Nantz hadn’t told him.

  “Do you know where Walter and Nantz were going when they crashed?” he asked her, already knowing what she’d say.

  “I wish I did,” she said. “Maybe she was taking him shopping. She sometimes did that for us.” There was a lot Nantz hadn’t told him. But if he’d been less thickheaded, he might have seen things himself.

  “You drove here tonight from Houghton?”

  “Yeah, I have to go back to Canada. I sort of ran out of money, and the landlord sort of kicked me out.”

  She was acting tough, but he saw fear in her eyes. “You’re not going to Canada tonight,” he said.

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “If you’re pregnant, Karylanne, I’d say that makes us related, and I don’t turn family away.” Not that he’d ever had any family before Nantz and Walter. For the longest time there had been just him and the old man. He didn’t count his ex-wife.

  He pointed to the footlockers. “The only bed I have.”

  “No offense, but that’s not a bed, eh. I’ve got my sleeping bag in my car. The floor and my air mattress will be fine.”

  While she was getting her sleeping bag, Grady Service sat down and tried to focus on something, anything. Grandfather? Holy shit! Nantz would have been sky-high. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. He felt oddly grateful to Karylanne for being pregnant with Walter’s child. This baby would be his only link to Walter, however tenuous.

  Denninger called at 6 a.m.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Home. What a day and night. Charley the Turd lost his cool yesterday and jumped me. I had to whack him behind the leg with my baton. I swear the earth shook when he hit the ground, and then he started complaining of chest pains so I had to call EMS and haul his worthless ass to the hospital. I took his father with me and it turns out he’s eccentric, but pretty decent. He said they were computerized until this summer, but somebody got into their program and poached their lists.”

  “Did they report the theft?” Service asked.

  “No. Charley the Turd just dumped the program and went back to the old way.”

  “Any idea who it was?”

  “No clue, but the old man thinks it had to be one of their customers. They had a rudimentary Web site, and the guy must’ve come in through e-mail.”

  “What about Charley the Turd?”

  “Not a heart attack. Turned out to be gallstones. The doctor says he may wish it was his heart in the long run.”

  “Can you write this up for me?”

  “Planned to.”

  “Don’t send it electronically.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m old-fashioned like the Mains.” Or he was suddenly feeling very insecure about the security of the cyberworld. He gave her his Slippery Creek address and she promised to send the report. He knew his apprehension about computers was turning into paranoia.

  “Great job, Denninger.”

  “My name’s Dani.”

  “Great job, Dani.”

  47

  HOUGHTON, MICHIGAN

  JULY 30, 2004

  Karylanne called the retired professor in the morning and rode to Houghton with Service. The house on Seventh Avenue was multi-gabled and painted several shades of black and blue. A sign on the lawn said house of dark light.

  “Did I mention he’s Goth?” Karylanne asked.

  Service had to think for a few seconds. “You mean, the name of his hockey team?”

  “No, his lifestyle.”

  Another pause. “The freak-jobs who dress in black and paint their faces white?”

  “Pretty much.”

  They parked in the street in front of the house and went up to the porch, where they were greeted by a young woman in a tight, slinky black outfit and black Mary Janes. Stiff red ribbons stuck out of her glistening black hair like stalagmites. She wore a see-through black blouse and some sort of vinyl gismo underneath.

  “Ice-jock girl,” she greeted Karylanne. “S’up with the turkey bacon?”

  “A friend.”

  The girl smiled at him, said, “S’up,” in a cutesy voice, and slithered past them.

  “You know her?”

  “She’s an instructor in computer engineering.”

  “Turkey bacon?” Service asked.

  “Technically it means security guard, but more generally, any police officer.”

  “I’m not in uniform,” he said.

  She laughed. “Yeah, like that fools anyone.”

  Flaherty looked almost normal. He was average height with white hair in a buzz cut, and one tiny gold stud in his right nostril. “Service?”

  “Grady.”

  “I’m sorry about your son. He was a great kid, and he was going to be an outstanding player. Heard you were a player too.”

  “Pleistocene age,” Service said.

  They were seated in an old-fashioned parlor. There was a suit of armor on a pedestal in one corner and a broad-blade ax with a six-foot handle on one wall.

  “Is that real?” Service asked, pointing to the weapon.

  “It’s a replica of a Viking battle-ax,” Flaherty said.

  “How could anybody use that thing?” Service wondered out loud.

  “Teamwork,” Flaherty said. “Something to drink? Beer, soda—name your poison.”

  Service wasn’t thirsty, and by the looks of the place, he didn’t have a lot of faith in what might be served. “I’m sorry to drop in like this,” he began, “but I’m working on an investigation of a hacker who calls himself Rud Hud, or Check Six. We’re trying to identify him.”

  Flaherty said, “I thought the police had unlimited cyber assets.”

  “Not the DNR,” Service said, not bothering to amplify. “Is it possible to find someone’s real name based on a screen name?”

  Flaherty smiled. “Handle is what it’s called, and sure it’s possible . . . depending on how the guy operates.”

  “Karylanne thinks the name is Gaelic.”

  “No doubt,” Flaherty said. “I’ll have to play around with it some. How quick do you need the information?”

  “Yesterday,” Service said.

  “I’m good, not God,” the retired professor said with a grin.

  A boy came through a door wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with bad cop! no donut!

  Service blinked as he read the shirt.

  Flaherty waved to the boy, who moved on through the house. “Atmosphere getting to you?” he asked Service.

  “Some.”

  “Don’t let their getups throw you. They’re normal kids—if you ignore their IQs. I assume you already considered the obvious with Rud Hud?” Flaherty said.

  “The obvious what?”

  “Rud Hud Hudibras, which in Welsh is Run baladr bras.”

  “You call that obvious?”

  “For some old English professors it is. You familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth?”

  Service shook his head.

  “He wrote a history of Celtic kings, basically those from the period when there was no written language.”

  “If there was no written language, how did he get his information?”

  Flaherty grinned. “There’s a big debate about that, but it’s probably a product of oral history. Others say it’s a hoax, that he fabricated the whole thing. But in recent years scholars have found correlations in various sources like grave registers. In any event, Geoffrey’s work gave a face to the unknown history
of Britain and King Arthur, and the Round Table probably grew out of it. Kind of like Lonesome Dove for us, you know—we’d like to think that’s how we were. No archaeological substantiation, of course, but hell, most Britons think Arthur was real.”

  What the hell did cowboys in Lonesome Dove have to do with King Arthur? “And Rud Hud?” He was having a terrible time keeping up with the professor.

  “Troy fell, Aeneas and his son Ascanius split to Italy. Long story short, Ascanius had a son named Brut whose mother died in childbirth. Later the kid accidentally killed his father in a hunting accident, and he was banished from Italy and eventually ended up in Britain as Brut the Trojan, aka Brutus, who started a line of Celtic royalty that lasted two thousand years. A few steps down the generational ladder you find one Brutus Greenfield, whose son Leil followed him as king, but toward the end of his reign, Leil went sort of dotty, and his son, Rud Hud Hudibras, had to step in and get the kingdom under control. This would be at about the time Solomon was operating in Israel, to give you some sense of time frame. Ninnyevent, time marches on, and later we get a Celtic king named Uther Pendragon, who may or may not be the Arthur of legend,” said the Flaherty.

  “This is for real?”

  “It all stems largely from oral traditions, same as the Bible. Is that real? A lot of people think so. Tell me what you know about your Rud Hud.”

  “He thinks the feds aren’t doing their jobs right.”

  “Really,” Flaherty said. “That sort of fits.”

  “Fits what?” Service was lost in a lot of historic mumbo jumbo.

  “Rud Hud more or less reformed his enfeebled old man’s kingdom and ruled it for almost four decades. Centuries later, an English poet named Butler wrote a burlesque, a comic satire about the roundheads and Puritans and how they turned British society upside down. Using Rud Hud Hudibras as his model, he called the hero of his poem Hudibras, who was a sort of religious colonel who went out to clean up society in the way the Puritans wanted to, only he pretty much screwed up everything he touched, which made the ­Puritans into a sort of joke, which they were in many ways, except to those who died at their hands or for their bizarre reasons. It was a damn brutal satire, somewhat along the lines of Don Quixote. Based on this, I’d guess your Rud Hud took his name to express his interest in reform, and I’d also guess he’s exquisitely and classically educated. Most English students, even those with doctorates, don’t know diddly-squat about Rud Hud Hudibras.”