Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  “What you needed?” MaryLou asked.

  “I think so.”

  “You want to…?”

  “No, no,” I assured the tall girl. “I may have to look some other places, but I can go there myself, no problem.”

  “Give Dolly my—”

  “Why don’t you drop me off and come in? That way you can tell her yourself.”

  —

  While MaryLou was upstairs having some of that tea Dolly brews different ways for different people, I was in my basement, putting together the machine.

  |>Photo last sent: how recent? Seen by CIF?<|

  I had just started to disassemble the machine when the screen flickered, as if the ghost had been waiting for me to ask those questions.

  ||

  The screen went blank. I unsnapped the slides, reboxed the machine, and started my mind working on why the Commander-in-the-Field—the ghost would know I’d meant the boss at Undercurrents—hadn’t seen the photo he had sent me. And where the ghost had found it.

  But before I threw another |> his way, I wanted to consult an expert. And as soon as MaryLou was gone, I would.

  —

  “Could you take ten, fifteen years off the way you look?”

  “Dell, I know you’re not asking a fashion question. And even if you were, I know you’re not asking about me,” she said.

  The “you better not be” ending to her words was unspoken, but as clear as a red skull-and-crossbones sign on a little black bottle.

  “No, no. Don’t be absurd,” I said, using a word that would tell her that I was working, not playing. “I was asking if there’s…I don’t know, makeup tricks, stuff like that. Not a disguise, exactly. But some way a woman almost thirty, say, could have a picture taken of herself so she looked maybe half that?”

  “A photo? You know there’s computer programs that could retouch anything. So…Wait! Are you talking about those software programs that they’re always showing on TV, like how a kid who went missing ten years ago would look today?”

  “No, precious. I mean something that would work like that, only in reverse. Ten, fifteen years before today.”

  “Well, that’s even easier. Anyone with Photoshop could do that much. Some of the girls who come over here do it when they’re being silly—see how they’d look with different-color hair, or purple eyeshadow….What do they call it? A ‘cyber-makeover,’ that’s it.”

  “Not a photo, Dolly.”

  “How much time would they have?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, now even more lost than I’d been when I started.

  “Well, if you lost a lot of weight, that would—”

  “No,” I cut her off. “Something where you could look like one age, then go into another room and come out looking like you were much younger. Not you, I mean—”

  “Yes. Sure, you could. Depending on certain things. Like, if you were really skinny, you probably couldn’t add weight that quick. But if you wore your hair differently, or had it cut, or—”

  “Your clothing, too?”

  “Well…up to a point. And that would depend on how well other people knew you, how close you were standing….”

  “Say you never met. In person, I mean.”

  “You’re back to that cyber-thing again?”

  “I guess….On a computer, you could look like a grown-up to one person and a kid to another, right? I don’t mean a baby, just like a teenager to one and an adult to a different one.”

  “Sure,” she said. Unsaid: Who wouldn’t know that?

  “Then why…?”

  “This isn’t like you, Dell. Just ask me whatever it is you want to know. Why be so…delicate about it?”

  “I wasn’t trying to be. I just don’t know the questions I’m supposed to be asking.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I have a photograph—an actual picture, I’m saying. Then I have another picture, but that one’s in my head. And in that one, the same woman looks like a kid just starting high school.”

  “Someone you remember from…?”

  She cut herself off before she reopened a wound. A wound I always told her I didn’t have.

  “Okay, like this,” I said. “The picture where the woman looks like a…girl, that one’s the most recent. But when she”—a lightning-flash thought warned me against even mentioning Undercurrents—“applied for a job, she used a photo that made her look much older.”

  “What good would that do her? Sooner or later, if she got the job, she’d have to show up for work.”

  “What if the job…what if the job was one she could do from home?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can’t think of any job where you wouldn’t need a résumé of some kind. Credentials, references, stuff like that.”

  “There must be—”

  “Cyber-sex!” Dolly burst into what I was saying. “It’s like phone sex, where the man just imagines what the woman he’s talking to looks like. It’s like that TV show the girls go on about. Some slob who never goes out of the house pretends he’s this sixpacked hunk with a Ferrari in the garage. Even has his picture on his Facebook page, too. Only it’s all a fraud. And some of it can get real ugly, like if some vicious girls get together and make up a dream lover for another girl. Then, after they get her hooked, they humiliate her by putting up the whole story for everyone to see.”

  “That’s…Well, that’s cruel, sure, but—”

  “You don’t understand.” Dolly was so angry that her words ripsawed out of her mouth. “Do you know what some of those poor girls end up doing? One girl, she got ‘played’ into believing that this guy from a town that was a couple of hundred miles away was going to take her to the prom, so their first date would be ‘special.’ When these disgusting little…when those miserable swine who thought it would be such fun to just torment that girl, they had this nonexistent guy post on her Facebook page that she must be insane to be telling anyone he’d ever take her anywhere except maybe to a 4-H Club if he wanted to win a blue ribbon in the pig contest….Do you know what she did then?”

  I didn’t even want to guess.

  “Well, do you, Dell? She killed herself! She put on her pretty prom dress and went out to the garage. She ran a hose from the exhaust into the car, closed the windows, and started the engine. Then she cried herself to death.”

  “What happened to…?”

  “Those other girls? Nothing. They were just playing a ‘prank’ on her. They never meant for any such thing to happen. One of them was so upset, they put her under a doctor’s care! Some of the others, they even wanted to go to the funeral!”

  If I’d been one of those girls standing in the same room as Dolly right then, I would have been frightened. My sweet, loving wife’s face had tightened into the mask of a fanatic about to push a detonator switch.

  “Some people just can’t take it,” she snarled, imitating those she despised through clenched teeth. “You remember, that professional football player, he was a huge man, but he was so…so pressured by this other one—his ‘teammate’—that he had an emotional breakdown. Guess how much sympathy he got!

  “Everyone circled the wagons around the man who’d bullied him. ‘Bullied’—there should be another word for what he did. He threatened that other player, even said he was going to do things to his mother. And this was no new thing for him, either. The bully, I mean. But all these ‘commentators’ said, Well, that poor boy, he should’ve just punched the bully in the mouth. This is a man’s game, you know?

  “I looked up some of those tough guys. One was a cokehead, another one a wife beater. And the toughest of them all was the one who ordered an underage prostitute from room service!”

  “It goes both ways?” I said, making sure Dolly would hear it as a question, not a statement.

  “What are you…?”

  “I mean, do boys kill themse
lves, too? Teenage boys, if somebody plays that kind of evil little joke on them?”

  “I guess they…could. But, now that I think about it, I don’t remember ever hearing about one.”

  “Because boys are, what, stronger-minded?”

  “Hah! No, baby, it’s because girls can be so much more vicious. Everyone knows some old biddies who could draw blood with their gossip. But this is different. The young ones today, there’s nothing they won’t do.”

  “Oh,” I said, as if I’d just learned something. Maybe I had. I’d seen girls go after each other, clawing like wild animals. But the girls who hounded that teenager into suicide, there was nothing wild about them. They may have been as cold-blooded as cobras, but reptiles don’t torture for fun—they just go after what they can kill, and avoid those who could kill them, moving as quick as a triggered reflex in either direction.

  “So, if a grown woman got herself all dressed up and made up her face to look like she was just a kid, that could be her idea of a…?”

  “A bully wouldn’t do that, honey. It sounds more like one of those ‘escorts’ that are always posting pictures of themselves.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes,” my wife said, a little calmer now. “Une putain, non? That is part of what the customer buys. That…fantasy, I guess you’d call it. A man could be treated like a cash register by his own wife, but if he dares to spend some of his own money for the right whore, he can be King of the Castle. The boss. Master. Snap his fingers, and she’ll do anything he commands.”

  “That’s only a—”

  “It’s as real as the customer believes it is, Dell.”

  I knew she was right. A “window girl” in Amsterdam once paid me a lot of money to make her “man” dead. She told me she was used to doing anything the buyer wanted. “I’m just an actress,” she said. “It’s a movie. I play a role. And I have to sell it—I have to make the buyer believe it.”

  “So he’ll come back?”

  “He’ll come back to me. And when he’s with me, he’s…I don’t know, a big movie director, a race-car driver, an athlete….Whatever he wants to be, that’s what he is.”

  “That’s expensive?”

  “It depends. If all he wants is for me to make all those excited little moans, that’s not such a big deal. But if he wants to be a slave master…”

  “So you make money? And you give most of it to…?”

  “Most? I give it all to him. I’m not a slut, I’m a slot. Customers don’t see that part. I say ‘slot’ because that is all I am to him—one of those cash machines. Different people make deposits, but he’s the only one who can make withdrawals. If he wants, he might even give some of it back, like when I beg him for new shoes or something.”

  “Why kill him, then? I’m sure there’s plenty of others—”

  “Not anymore,” she said, flicking on a light in the dark hotel room I’d been paid to meet her in. The left side of her face was scabbed and twisted; her upper lip on that side couldn’t cover her teeth.

  “Candle wax,” she said. “He heated it first, so I could see what was going to happen. Then he gave me a shot of heroin before he poured it over my face. When I came out of it, the pain was so horrible I just screamed and screamed. This,” she said solemnly, pointing at her face, “this is me now.”

  “But if you were earning so much money for him…”

  “Oh, he could always get other girls. He always had other girls. This was a lesson. So other girls would know what would happen to them if they ever crossed him. They’d go from movie stars to skags that had to work in dark alleys just to make enough money to pay their rent and eat.”

  “What had you…?”

  “I hadn’t done anything! And he knew I hadn’t. He really didn’t want to do this to me, he said. But it was like an…investment. That’s what he said, just before he…”

  “You must have been holding out, right? I mean, for what you paid the broker to get this done…”

  “I earned that money,” she said. You could drop a fresh slab of raw meat on her voice; it would still be good a month later. “You don’t even want to hear what I had to do. In fact, you’d have to pay me to tell you about it.” She kept talking, but a weird note throbbed inside her voice: “That’s what they want, some of them, just to have you tell them. They all want the same thing, only some of them like it packaged differently.”

  I slitted my eyes. As if she could read my thoughts, she flicked off the light.

  “You’ll do it, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You’re thinking: Doesn’t she want him tortured? Or acid poured on his face? Or even cutting off his…?”

  I stayed quiet.

  “All I want is for him to hear my name. Not my name, even—just the one he gave me. I want him to hear that ‘Heidi’ paid for it. Before you kill him. You can do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will?”

  “Yes.”

  She’d never know. I mean, she’d know he was dead—that news might never make the newspapers, but it would be all over her world in a couple of nights. The streets with their bright windows if the customer could pay enough, and dark, twisted little alleys if he couldn’t. She’d never know if I said her name first, that part.

  I hadn’t. I might have, only I wasn’t going to spend weeks scouting for a chance to get him alone. I knew the gambling clubs had doormen, and security people working inside. But once you left the club, none of that protection left with you.

  Still, maybe she got her money’s worth—the first shot from the little subsonic hardball probably did it, but the suppressor might have choked it down far enough that he could have still been alive for the few seconds it took me to empty the magazine into his eyes.

  I don’t know when the brain shuts down. There wasn’t any blood; after I used my Saran Wrapped boot tip to roll him facedown, he just looked like a drunk using the gutter as a hotel room. He was already dead, but it might have taken him a few seconds to close off completely.

  Later, I thought that if I’d just walked away after the first shot, he might have been found and taken to the hospital. They might even have saved him, but he’d be a drooling lump of flesh forever after that.

  I tried not to think about how Heidi might have liked that even better.

  —

  Hours later, alone in my basement, I kept working—probing the darkness of my mind.

  “Cui bono?” Always the assassin’s first question.

  You might think this a contradiction. But I had always heeded Olaf’s words. If there was only one person who profited, it wouldn’t take the police long to start looking at that person. And anyone who paid others to kill for him leaves a human chain of potential informers. If one of those links broke…

  I worked on my breathing until I slowed my heartbeat down to what the best snipers need for their work. Then I started on my list:

  • Benton wouldn’t have threatened Dolly if he hadn’t somehow known that she was the source that had started Undercurrents looking into all those land purchases.

  • The only thing each land parcel had in common with the others was that they were all connected.

  • But even if all connected under one ownership, they were just as worthless as they were before.

  LEAVE IT!

  I came out of wherever I’d gone with a start, that inner-screamed warning still echoing. I knew what that meant—I’d come to a fork in the road, and not recognized it until I’d already gone too far down the wrong one.

  Trust it. I could feel those words. Luc’s? Olaf’s? It didn’t matter, not then. If you try analyzing the motives of a man shooting at you before you dive for cover, you might as well shoot yourself. I went back to where the road had forked:

  • The Undercurrents boss was the narrow end of the funnel. That same narrow end became the nozzle that sprayed out assi
gnments.

  • You’d have to be cleared to be able to pour anything into that funnel.

  • And whatever you poured in, that would have to be cleared, too. “Fact checking,” the old newspaper guys called it. I knew what they called it because the Internet was full of their complaints that it isn’t done anymore.

  • The only way the CIF could check out Rhonda Jayne Johnson would be to check out the info she submitted. He must have done that many, many times before he let her drop anything into the funnel’s mouth.

  • That would have been a long-term investment….

  THERE! my deep-wave subconscious screamed. Loud enough to wake me up.

  —

  I knew there was no point reaching out to the ghost so soon.

  Oh, he’d pick up whatever I sent, but he wouldn’t stay around after he answered—that’s why I had less than a minute to write it down before the screen would flicker a warning, then go blank. I didn’t understand how he did what he did, but I knew he wouldn’t tolerate “conversation” again so soon. An open connection was against all his rules, and his rules were the only ones that mattered.

  But I wouldn’t need a cyber-genius for some of what I needed to know.

  When I went back upstairs, Dolly was alone in the kitchen, tapping on her tablet, Rascal at her feet. The sun was just coming awake in the east. Soon the birds would start their screeching for their breakfast.

  I never look over Dolly’s shoulder when she’s working, unless she asks me to. It wouldn’t be right. I have my basement; what privacy did Dolly have?

  “Hungry?” she asked, not looking up from whatever she was doing.

  “Just want some juice,” I told her as I opened the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of that red-orange-colored stuff that Dolly made herself. I didn’t know what was in it; she called it “jungle juice.” I knew some of her girls liked it, but she didn’t force it on them. Me, she kind of did. I knew I was supposed to have no less than three full shots a day when I was home.