Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  “In there,” I told him, pointing to the right, where heavy brush made a natural garage. “We’re going the rest of the way on foot.”

  I was proud to see him back into the spot I’d shown him. He was ready when I pulled a roll of camo netting from my carryall. I handed him one end, and we snapped it out like a towel over sand at the beach.

  The car became part of the scenery.

  I started up the hill, Mack slightly behind my left shoulder. We walked less than fifty yards before stepping off the packed-earth road and into the forest.

  —

  The hill wasn’t that high, but its top was just right for what I needed.

  Once Mack saw me pull out what he probably thought was a pair of binoculars, his breathing changed.

  Not enough for most people to pick up on, but I’d been listening for it—his nose had been broken a few times and you could hear a faint whistle when he didn’t breathe through his mouth. For all Mack knew, I was setting up a sniper’s roost. That wouldn’t have come as a shock, or even have gotten him to ask questions—he’d seen me do things that had permanently changed the way he looked at the world.

  We were up there for almost an hour. More than enough time for me to double-tap the laser range-finder with a built-in inclinometer that could compensate 60+/– a few times, and read off the numbers. The Bushnell Scout could be set for “bow” or “rifle,” but I wasn’t thinking about that kind of work.

  Mack wrote down what I said, not pretending to understand things like “H-three-oh-five.” Not asking me, either.

  I scanned a left-to-right circle, then reversed direction. The distances weren’t off by more than a couple of feet, but I wanted to be dead-sure, so I did the whole thing again. The numbers held.

  The only surprise my scan turned up was a total absence of the “No Trespassing” signs you see tacked up on just about every plot of unfenced timber around here. Those weren’t meant for hikers, just for hunters. Stray rounds were always a danger to people who lived anywhere within range of a deer rifle.

  At least they used to be, before an ecoterrorist had killed a pair of hunters who’d been waiting in a deer blind. The FBI profile said that the shooter was probably a white male, ex-military, most likely suffering from PTSD, and “moon-phase delusional.” Even with all that information, whoever was responsible was never brought to trial. Or even arrested.

  We were back on the paved road in another twenty minutes. Mack dropped me off and went back to his work.

  I walked up the long driveway to our cottage, ready to start mine.

  —

  As I walked in the back door, my eyes flicked over to the red circle Dolly had drawn around a spot on one of the terrain maps spread all over the butcher-block table.

  The same area I’d just visited.

  “What is it, Dell?” my wife asked, not even looking up from the papers she was marking in different colors. All her girls would use those same colors every time they were working on something together, but I didn’t know what each one stood for.

  No point in saying, “Nothing.” It wouldn’t be an acceptable answer. My wife was a human barometer, at least where I was concerned—she knew when the weather was about to change.

  “Who threatened you?” I said. I can’t sense the same things Dolly can, but when it came to death-math calculations, I could do quadratic equations in my head.

  “Oh, that wasn’t a threat, Dell.” She made a brush-it-off gesture, not asking how I knew. “He just—”

  “Who?”

  Even Rascal growled.

  “What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Just sit down, baby. I’ll get you some of my lemonade, and we can talk, yes?”

  I didn’t answer her, but I did sit down. I pulled a strip of rawhide out of my field jacket and tossed it to Rascal. He ignored it, keeping his eyes on Dolly—the mutt wasn’t interested in a good chew any more than I was in a glass of lemonade.

  —

  “Benton,” Dolly said, handing me a heavy tumbler of iced lemonade. “He’s nothing. Not even a councilman,” she went on, the contempt in her voice clearly communicating what she thought of the group of people who supposedly made all the political decisions for the town we lived in.

  There’s a mayor, too, but none of them really make decisions—they just follow orders. Around here, all of them usually run unopposed. When there’s an actual race, the good-for-garbage-wrapping “newspaper” is careful to print an equal number of letters supporting each candidate.

  That’s probably the only reason anyone buys that paper anymore—to see their name in print. Or to clip coupons. Nobody reads that useless rag for news; for that, there’s a blog called Undercurrents. Whether people liked it or not, I didn’t know, but I did know it actually investigated whatever was going on. And that it had a reputation for no-bias digging.

  I didn’t know what funded it. Undercurrents didn’t run advertising, gush over some moronic “wine festival,” or even print “comments,” the way most blogs did. Especially the ones that were replacing print newspapers all over America.

  It’s only been running for a few years, but it’s built a reputation for sniffing out stories that prove true, even if nobody can figure who their sources are. Or where they get some of the photos they run.

  I knew the answer to that last one. Mack had been working with a video ninja for quite some time. That was Mack’s work, not mine…which is why I never asked him about it.

  When I first encountered that young man, he was an expert voyeur—his back-channel footage of girls fighting each other went viral very quickly. I’d needed his skills on the last thing I’d been forced into doing.

  Forced by Dolly, although she’d had no idea she was forcing me into anything. Mack was her friend, not mine. I don’t have any friends, not like she does. But anything that might protect my wife in the future was of immeasurable value to me. She already owned everything of ours, and she’d never want for money. But protection, that was a legacy beyond price. And Mack was a lot younger than I was.

  —

  “Benton?”

  “Dell, in this town, voting is a sham. You know it as well as I do. Just look under the ‘Vote for One’ box—there’s usually just one candidate listed. Even the DA’s such a frightened little twit that he spent a lot of money putting up signs urging people to reelect him when he ran unopposed.”

  “I thought he quit.”

  “He did. There was this truly dangerous beast charged with all kinds of crimes—kidnapping, rape, torture….But the girl, the victim, she was killed in a propane explosion just before the trial. And the DA wanted to drop the case! Without a live witness, he could actually lose, ver lâche!

  “And that all might have gone unnoticed, but for two things: The girl was really liked by a lot of people—she worked on one of the fishing boats. Then Undercurrents got their hands on some in-house memos that showed him for what he—the DA, I mean—really was.

  “He knew if the town drunk ran against him in the next election, he’d lose. Not just his job, but his government pension. You have to work—I’m not sure, maybe twenty-five years?—to lock that in at the max. So he took another government job, in another part of the state.”

  “I thought people never voted here.”

  “A lot of them don’t,” she said, disgusted with that lot. “Remember that Web site I showed you? Oh, it would be such a hassle to mail a ballot.”

  “So?”

  “So they don’t pay attention. Mack says that the only difference in corruption between Chicago and this town is that Chicago’s proud of theirs.”

  “Dolly…”

  “Dell, what he said, all Benton said, was…Well, it wasn’t even a warning, really.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Dell, stop that.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew what she wanted me to stop, but all I could control was my conduct, not my temperature. I felt the coldness spread through me. And welcomed it.

>   “It was, you know, roundabout. Like, my ‘people’—as if!” she interrupted herself to segue into that teenage-girl-speak without even realizing it—“shouldn’t run around half cocked, whatever that was supposed to mean.”

  I didn’t say anything. In my world, “half cocked” would be “full stupid.” You either cock a weapon or you don’t; that “half cocked” nonsense is what they show people at shooting ranges. Just like racking the slide on a semi-auto after you’re inside a target’s house, the way they always do in movies.

  “He had to be talking about that logging road,” Dolly said.

  “Why would you and your girls care about that?”

  “We don’t. It’s a lose-lose deal all around. Nobody wins…except maybe some lawyers who keep filing those ‘Environmental Impact Statement’ things. Or the insurance companies.”

  “Geological surveyors?”

  “They get paid once. And both sides are going to pay for plenty of those, anyway.”

  “He found out who owns those parcels you’ve got marked off in red,” I said, pointing at some of the plat maps.

  “I’m only one of the owners,” she shot back. “We’ve wanted to build a dog park out there for the longest time. One for real dogs. You know, like Rascal.”

  “Rascal?”

  “Rascal,” she said, in that dull-flat tone of voice she uses when anyone dares to so much as flirt with the idea that Rascal is one degree off perfection.

  I retreated to silence. Dolly joined me in that, but she was still smoldering. Diversion was my best move, so…

  “Then what’s that thick line between the water and the road? The pink one?”

  “A corporation has been buying up that land for years. The only houses out there—well, trailers, really—they don’t get city water, and they can’t drill wells that close to the bay, so their places aren’t worth much. In fact, they don’t get any city services: no electricity at the curb to connect to, which is why even the cable companies don’t bother.”

  “They all run off generators?”

  “Pretty much,” she shrugged. “Propane can power just about anything. Heat, hot water, even barbecue grills. And they all have those satellite dishes for TV, so they’re pretty self-sufficient.”

  “Some of them are still there?”

  “That’s the thing, Dell. Not really many, not now. And Tova—you remember her, she’s in her second year of law school, but she comes home every summer—Tova says that if that strip of land was annexed by the town, they’d be entitled to city services, same as anyone else.”

  “So what?”

  “So some areas don’t want to be annexed. Some little town, about eighty miles north of here, it fought in the courts for years and years. It was a pretty exclusive area—I guess they wanted to keep it that way.”

  “But it lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this corporation, you think it plans to build something?”

  “That’s the part that doesn’t make any sense, Dell. What could it build? No condo would ever succeed along that strip. Who wants a place overlooking that sludge the bay vomits up, never mind smelling it? And with a logging road coming through, there’s no way anyone could get approval to build there, anyway.”

  “But this Benton guy, he must have heard something, right?”

  “Not from us. There was this piece in Undercurrents, though. That’s how we found out one single corporation was buying up all that property.”

  “How you found out. So you weren’t their source?”

  “Well…I guess I was. I mean, we had a message sent to them. Just an e-mail. We wanted people to start thinking about…You know, just like you said: why would one owner want that land? But I told you, this wasn’t like a formal meeting or anything. Benton just came up to me in the coffee shop.”

  “Doing you a favor, huh?”

  “That’s how he made it sound.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dell…”

  “Don’t fuss, Dolly. I just need to find out some things. And, me, I won’t make any sound.”

  —

  I’m no private detective.

  In a village like the one Dolly and I live in, the phone book is where you look for names and addresses. The little book even has a separate section for businesses. Every kind of business you could imagine, from boatbuilding to aroma therapy. Debt-collection agencies are listed, too—probably the closest thing to “investigators” around here.

  I thought about that. Maybe there wasn’t much need for private detectives anywhere—not anymore, not with the Internet offering all kinds of services, from skip tracing to “background.” But local phone books will always exist, if only for advertising—a person looking for a lawyer will try the lawyer who took out the full-page ad first.

  “It’s like your own Web site?” I asked, trying to understand.

  “No,” Dolly said. “Your own Web site, it’s called a ‘domain’ for a reason. You actually own it. Which means you have to pay for it. First you register the name, then you pay to keep the name. There’s been a ton of lawsuits over people trying to use a celebrity’s name for themselves. Tova says there’s even a special court to decide who has the right to a domain name.”

  “So this Facebook, the whole thing is one domain?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then nobody actually owns their own Facebook page?”

  “What difference does that make?” one of her girls said. “It’s not like they charge you for having a Facebook page. It’s free.”

  How would these kids understand jungle law? I thought. Nothing’s “for free.” And it’s only yours for as long as you can hold it. But I just shrugged, as if I had no answer to her question. Then I covered up by asking the girl, “Couldn’t people just make up whatever they wanted?”

  “Well, of course,” she said, looking to the other girls for confirmation. “There’s a whole TV show about that.”

  I just walked away before I asked any more stupid questions. I knew I’d never understand why all these people walked around glued to their cell phones, or texting madly about every tiny thing in their tiny lives, or carrying tablets so they’d be able to have a “conversation” with someone they didn’t even know.

  Some of their phones could actually do all of that. Like Dolly said, they had to be “connected” all the time. When I asked her how they could be connected to people who maybe didn’t even exist, she gave me one of those Parisian shrugs that could mean anything, from “It doesn’t matter” to “Who cares?”

  “What if someone stuck a GPS chip in those phones? They’d know every place anybody was, anytime they wanted to know.”

  “They all have those chips, Dell.”

  “But…”

  “Oh, they don’t mind. And it’s supposed to be a safety feature.”

  “Like if they’re injured? Or even kidnapped?”

  “No.” My wife chuckled. “In case they lose their phone.”

  —

  A jungle doesn’t have to mean palm trees—it could be anything from a desert to a housing project.

  A jungle is a place where your life is worth no more than your ability to protect it.

  Even in this beautiful little village, jungle rules might apply—especially when privacy and self-protection were always at risk, thanks to the mania of some people to “stay connected.”

  This seemed insane to me. When I was still a child, I learned one thing that would never change: all secrets have value…to someone, somewhere.

  —

  I’ve never been arrested.

  I don’t ever expect to be. My fingerprints have never been taken, and the lump of scar tissue on my left wrist could look like anything from an industrial accident to a botched tattoo-removal.

  In truth, that scar was from a branding iron. Yes, I’ve never been arrested. Not by the police. But I have been captured, and my captors knew mercenaries don’t take prisoners.

  They liked their work so much they
prolonged it. My screams excited them as a woman might excite a man. All it took was tolerating the pain a little longer than they thought I could. Passing out came easily to me, but not as easily as the confidence of my captors came to them.

  One of them, I knew, would return on his own. And that his death would be noiseless.

  Torture isn’t for information; it’s for enjoyment. That had been part of my early training with La Légion, that knowledge. Within that knowledge was the certain truth—no torture victim is ever allowed to outlive his value. When death is the only possible outcome of any encounter, the most valuable knowledge of all is that it doesn’t have to be your death.

  I knew what Luc’s work had been after the Nazis occupied France. I always heard his voice in French—“Les Boches ont fait de certains d’entre nous des putains ou des assassins, à moins qu’ils n’aient fait que révéler ce que nous portions déjà en nous”—but it always turned to English, as if I knew his native language should never leave my mouth: “The Nazis made some of us into whores, and some into murderers…or maybe they just brought out what had always been within some of us.”

  Dolly was quite a few years younger than me—a gap that seemed to widen every year. But she’d learned the truth of torture at a very young age, working in war zones where there were no sides, just enemies. Working with a rape bomb always attached to her belt, under her bloodstained white smock.

  I don’t know why my mind went to that place as soon as I walked in our back door that afternoon. The big TV screen was showing the sentencing of some creature who had captured women and kept them prisoner for years. Usually, the sound was muted, because Dolly wanted to follow world events in real time, and most of the “news” stations had scrolls running along the bottom of the picture. But this time, the sound was on—I could hear some woman reciting the details of the horrors perpetrated upon her, as if what she said would affect the sentence the creature was about to receive.