Aftershock Read online

  He closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he nodded.

  The vulture wasn’t hard to find. A young, light-skinned black man, not much older than the girls he pulled. I told him that I understood he had merchandise for sale, and that I represented a buyer. A wealthy buyer.

  “Who told you where to find me, man?”

  I broke into the rapid-fire, guttural Corsican French I had learned years before. I could see he didn’t understand a word, but the foreign language convinced him that the buyer was the kind of internationalist he’d probably been trying to connect with since he went into business. Putting teenage girls on the street was a small-profit deal. Between the emotionally anesthetic drugs always tempting the girls, and predators who only wanted to use the goods once, he couldn’t expect any of them to last long.

  When he turned his head and yelled, “Neek, get your ass out here,” he didn’t know he had just closed his own coffin. By the time the girl stumbled into the room, struggling with the four-inch heels that were to be her working shoes, her “man” was under the same couch he’d been sitting on.

  “Where’s D-mand?”

  “He had to run out,” I said, holding up a pager to indicate that the dead man was taking care of business. “I’m the one who drives you to Seattle.”

  “Seattle?”

  “I just do what I’m paid for. And D-man—”

  “—D-mand,” she corrected my error.

  “I thought that was what I said. Anyway, you ready to go? He told me he had all new stuff for you waiting, so don’t worry about packing.”

  “This isn’t the way to Seattle.”

  “I know,” I said, switching my voice to everything she hadn’t been trained to expect: polite, educated, and respectful. “And I apologize for deceiving you. But it had to be done. D-mand sold you. To me, he thought. But, actually, it was your father who hired me to bring you home.”

  “Home? My father—”

  “I understand. But now … at least, give him a chance. He took some big risks, and spent a lot of money to make this happen. A lot of money to make you see the truth about that vulture—the one who just sold you like a used car. Your father knows that nothing he could say would persuade you that he did all this because he loves you. He only wants the chance to try. If you don’t like what you see, if you don’t want to be treated as he intends, he won’t stop you from leaving again.”

  I didn’t have to immobilize her. The twin shocks of being sold like a piece of meat and her father actually wanting her were too much for her fragile system.

  The new ID papers were waiting when I returned the girl. They were “start from scratch,” so the genius probably thought I needed American citizenship—he already knew I was a legal citizen of France.

  What he didn’t know was that the ID he changed was itself legitimate. I’d been an American citizen for a long time. That was part of the price for some work I’d done in the Cambodia-Laos region.

  I hadn’t been the only ex-legionnaire in the area. For some of the older ones, the loss to the Viet Minh was still burning a hole in their guts. Some were just going back to familiar territory, drawing extra pay because they knew the terrain so well.

  My job was different. The Americans wanted to know the truth of the “live sightings” of POWs being reported ever since a guy named Garwood walked up to a man in Hanoi and said he was a U.S. Marine who’d just escaped captivity.

  Not many believed him—most thought he’d just gone over and the Viet Cong had kicked him loose when they had no more use for him. But his story had enough supporters to make the American government need “confirm or deny” info that would stand up if it was ever needed.

  I understood that didn’t mean they’d ever tell the truth, no matter what I turned up. And they understood my backstory—so they knew I’d never say anything. To anybody, ever.

  Nobody under the name they’d given me was ever going to come to anyone’s attention. I hadn’t worked since then. I’d never work under that name or any other. I was done with all that.

  Dominique is still with her father. Over the years, he’s helped me in many ways, refusing payment as if I had insulted him.

  And he’s been true to his word. Never would he allow what is now the most precious part of his life to waste hers in a desperate search for love. Whether he ever believed anything else I’d told him made no difference. Not then, and certainly not now.

  In the stretched-out moment when I heard the door open, I had plenty of time to make a decision before the first footstep creaked.

  Time enough to slide the silenced pistol back into its compartment. Time enough not to push the button that would make the last five steps disappear. Any intruders who got this far might walk ninja-soft, but they wouldn’t be weightless. Easier to make the whole stairway disappear in a soft explosion, but the last thing I wanted to do was attract attention. That’s why the pistol was silenced. Even a fall from the stairs onto a concrete floor wouldn’t necessarily kill, and I had to seize any chance to learn how anyone had gotten so close.

  How they had gotten past the only person on earth whose life mattered to me.

  Inside that rocket-blast of thought was another one—no one could ever get that far unless Dolly had betrayed me. And if she had done that, my life was over no matter how this played out.

  “Dell?”

  “I’m right here, Dolly,” I called, leaving my voice to trail behind me as I backed away to the pool of blackness that formed the entire far wall of my basement “workshop.”

  My voice was still where I last used it, but I wasn’t. And I had a new weapon trained on the staircase, its scope turning blackness to greenish light. A modified FAMAS bullpup auto that people in my old line of work had called “un clarion.” If someone had forced Dolly to open the door and call my name, she was as good as dead anyway. The only job I’d have left would be to make sure that everyone else in the house followed her.

  And find out who sent them.

  And then take out the chain, link by link.

  Her voice hadn’t sounded afraid. That could have meant a lot of things, but it stopped mattering the second I heard her misbegotten mutt woof at whatever small animal was outside the house. If there had been a human intruder, Rascal would have been inside. Growling deep in his throat. Waiting, just like I was.

  “Dell, I … I really didn’t want to disturb you. And I’m not coming any further if you don’t want me to. But sometimes you’re down here for hours on end and I … I didn’t think this should wait.”

  “Come on down, honey. It’s okay,” I said, watching through the scope so I could make sure Dolly was alone. When she was on the third step, hands held palms-up to tell me she was okay, I said, “Ah, never mind. Give me a second and I’ll come upstairs.”

  Dolly didn’t know anything about my way of keeping her safe from some deer-killer’s bullets. And she’d never know what I’d been forced to do when something even more dangerous had wormed his way inside our home a couple of years ago.

  I remember thinking, Alfred Hitchcock is dead. He’s lying there dead, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  I wasn’t surprised when I found him dead on the ground. The woods behind our house are state-owned but wild—a country where Darwin makes the rules. I’ve been in enough places like that to know how they work.

  Alfred Hitchcock was one of those crow-raven hybrids you see around this piece of the coast all the time—too big for a crow, but without that classic thick raven’s beak. You couldn’t miss him, even at a distance. He had a white streak along one side of his head, like the fire-scar a bullet leaves when it just kisses you on the cheek as it goes by.

  He hadn’t shown up for a few days, but that didn’t worry Dolly. Though she loves all her animals, she doesn’t regard them as pets. “They have their own ways” is what she always says.

  It was Dolly who named him Alfred Hitchcock. “Look how he walks,” she said to me one day, pointing out behind the house. “S
ee how dignified he is? Not raucous like the others. You never hear a peep out of him. He just paces back and forth, like he’s deep in thought.”

  I realized he did kind of look like that famous profile of Alfred Hitchcock, especially the way his head wobbled when he walked. Dolly had names for all the creatures who came to visit, and you could tell she thought about each and every one before she finally decided what to call them.

  Take Winston. He’s a chipmunk, but not one of those little things they have on the East Coast; this one’s damn near the size of a squirrel. Dolly named him because he had a stance like a bulldog. And he was fearless, too. Whenever he saw Dolly on the back deck, he’d rush right up and take a peanut out of her hand. Then he’d just sit on his haunches and strip away the shell casing, the way you’d sit and share a beer with a pal.

  Winston had a mate—Dolly called her Mrs. Churchill—and a whole family of little ones. They lived under one of the sheds in the backyard. The entrance to their den was marked by two jagged pieces of granite I put there, leaving just enough room between them to form a portal. It looked like they’d hired an architect to build it that way.

  And something was always going on back there. Like a couple of hummingbirds fighting it out over one particularly fine fuchsia bush. Those little guys are as territorial as wolverines, and they buzz-bomb each other almost too fast for the eye to follow. Or maybe a stray cat would come visiting. Big mistake. The mutt Dolly had rescued from the shelter spent a lot of time out there, too, in this little house I built for him. Any cat that padded into the yard would launch Rascal out of his doghouse door like a feline-seeking missile.

  I think that’s why we have so many birds around all the time—Rascal is hell-bent on turning the whole place into a cat-free zone. A dog is like a person: he needs a job and a family to be what he’s meant to be. Rascal always came inside for supper, and he’d stay inside until daybreak. He slept on this sheepskin mat I cut for him. I tried putting it by the back door, but Rascal kept dragging it over until it was just outside our bedroom, and finally I just left it there.

  Dolly also had herself a whole flock of jays. They were a lot larger than any I’d ever seen. Out here, they’re called Steller’s jays—big-bodied thugs with black heads and high crests. Every morning, if Dolly didn’t get out there quick enough, they’d hammer on the back door with their beaks like a mob of crazed woodpeckers. And they’d keep it up until she went out with a little bucket of peanuts and just flung the whole thing into the yard.

  “Slopping the jays” is what she calls it, and that’s not being unfair to them; they do act like a pack of hogs. No manners at all, wings flailing, shrieking loud enough to empty a cemetery.

  Dolly doesn’t care how much noise they make, but she won’t let them fight. I know it doesn’t make sense, but the birds actually seem to mind her. Once, I saw a couple of the jays really get into it over a big fat peanut, leaping into the air and ripping at each other like spurred gamecocks. Dolly yelled, “You two just stop that!” and they did. Even looked a little ashamed of themselves.

  Sometimes, one of the bolder chipmunks will charge right into the middle of a mob of jays and try to swipe a peanut for himself. But mostly they hang around by their portal, standing straight up like prairie dogs, waiting until I wind up and throw long-distance over their heads. The peanuts bounce off the shed, and the chipmunks have a private feast—the jays are too busy to take notice.

  The roof of the chipmunks’ shed is where Alfred Hitchcock always waited. He had a spot all to himself, and he seemed content just to watch all the ranting and raving without getting involved.

  When things got quiet enough to suit him, Alfred Hitchcock would kind of float on down to the yard. He’d go right into his back-and-forth pacing until Dolly called his name. Then it would be my job to lob a peanut close enough for him to pick it up without acting all undignified, but not so close that he thought I was trying to hit him. I got real good at it.

  One day, I was out on the deck by myself, testing some new optics I was putting together, when Alfred Hitchcock showed up. He watched me from his perch on the shed for a long time before he finally dropped into the yard and started his walk.

  “Alfred!” I called to him, but he just ignored me.

  When Dolly came out later, I told her what had happened. “I guess he only likes you,” I said.

  “It’s not that, honey. It’s what you said to him.”

  “I said the same thing you do. Called his name.”

  “His name is ‘Alfred Hitchcock,’ Dell. Not ‘Alfred.’ He’s a very dignified bird.”

  When he came back, a few days later, we were both outside. “You try it,” Dolly insisted.

  “Alfred Hitchcock!” I called.

  And damned if the bird didn’t stop his walk and cock his head, like he was waiting. I tossed him a peanut. He slowly strolled over, picked it up, and lofted himself back to the shed’s roof. Dolly and I watched him eat the peanut.

  That had been a fine moment.

  Now Alfred Hitchcock was done—lying dead on the ground. There’s at least one bobcat working those woods. I’d seen the prints myself—way too big for a house cat, but no claws showing. If it’d been a bobcat that nailed him, I would have been okay with it. Maybe a little sad, but not all that worked up. Dolly doesn’t feed the night hunters—they have to look out for themselves.

  But I know a human kill when I see one. No flesh was missing from Alfred Hitchcock’s body, and no animal could have wrapped one of his legs with a strand of wire. No animal uses gasoline. Or matches.

  No animal kills for fun.

  If he had fallen to a natural predator, I wouldn’t have said a word to Dolly. I would have just given him a proper burial, and let her think he’d moved on. Maybe found himself a girl bird who wanted a dignified mate.

  But I knew better than to bury him. I couldn’t let whoever had tortured Alfred Hitchcock to death know anybody had seen their work. So I just slipped back the way I’d come.

  I didn’t leave tracks. I learned that the same way I learned that you don’t always get to bury your dead.

  The Legion had been all about its own traditions. Tu n’abandonnes jamais ni tes morts, ni tes blessés, ni tes armes.

  Never abandon your dead, your wounded, or your arms. Maybe this was supposed to give us that esprit de corps they were always yammering about, but we all could do the math. Carrying your dead off the field of fire would slow you down and make you a better target, too. Why should that matter to the officers? To them, we were as disposable as bullets.

  Once I left and started working freelance, I could feel the difference. Jungle or desert, I was never with a unit that even thought about carrying away their dead. The best you could do for some of the badly wounded was to finish them off. They were always grateful to go—none of us ever wanted to be taken alive.

  And no weapon is sacred. Why carry a jammed or broken rifle with you when you’re trying to put distance between yourself and the battle scene?

  La Légion est toujours avec toi. Always with me. When I was their property, maybe. But when I became a soldier for money, their fine words left me as I’d left them. Forever.

  When I finally got back to the house that day, it was full of kids, like it always is on afternoons during a school week. Teenagers. Dolly’s just a magnet for them. Mostly girls, but anytime you’ve got that many girls, there’s going to be some boys, too.

  She knows how to have fun, my Dolly. And she can tell some stories, believe me. But what she’s best at is listening; I know this for a fact.

  There’s a lot of stuff I never told Dolly, not out loud. Not because I wanted to keep it a secret. Dolly’s got this … I don’t know the word for it, exactly, but she feels things inside her that other people are feeling. I would never want Dolly to have some of the feelings I still have inside me.

  Maybe that’s why those kids are always talking to her. Not the phony way they’d talk to some school guidance counselor; more as
if she was the kind of aunt you could trust, the kind who’d never rat you out to your folks, no matter what you told her. If you needed an abortion, she’d know where to go, and take you there herself. That last part, I knew for a fact, too.

  She’s always teaching those kids something, like how to stitch up those crazy costumes they’re wearing out in public today. And they’re always teaching her stuff, too. Like how to work her cell phone with her thumbs to send messages. She showed me one of those messages one time—it was like it was in a different language. When she tried to explain it to me, I told her I didn’t care about stuff like that, stuff I’d never have a use for.

  What I didn’t tell her was that using any kind of code was for business only. I was out of business, and I didn’t want any reminders of what I used to be.

  I don’t … I don’t dislike kids, exactly, but I’ve really got nothing to say to them. I’m not interested in anything they’ve got to say, either. What could they know at their age? Well, maybe it isn’t their age. When I was younger than any of them, I was already doing things that these kids only see in movies. Not things I’m proud of.

  After a while, they got used to my staying in my workshop in the basement, and they never bother me when I’m down there. Dolly doesn’t have a lot of rules in her house, but the ones she has you better follow, or you’re eighty-sixed. Like bringing drugs or booze into her house. Try it once, it’s two weeks. If there’s a next time, it’s your last.

  No one can ever open that basement door, anyway. Even if they get past everything else, only Dolly knows the keypad code.

  I’ve actually got two places of my own. The basement workshop, and what Dolly calls my den. She fixed it up real fine. It’s got a big dark-red leather easy chair, and a flat-screen TV with earphones, so I can watch the BBC without the racket from all those kids bothering me. I like to read, too. I never read that “I was there” stuff. I tried it for a while, but it wasn’t any different from what the library racked in the Fiction section.