Aftershock (23 page)

So it wasn’t going to be me who pulled off that kind of escape. All I wanted was my Dolly. And the life we used to have. I wasn’t going to risk that, even if I had to slip MaryLou enough pills to take herself away from all this … if she asked.

“W
hat would I have to say to Danielle to make her trust me?”

“There’s nothing you
could
say,” MaryLou told me. “You’re
too old. That wouldn’t stop her from fucking you for money; she’s done that before. But
trust
you, not a chance.”

“What if your parents asked her?”

“Which one?” she half-sneered. “They’re both full-time drunks now. My mother already found one of those lawyers you see on television, so now she’s applying for Disability, too. Stress. I guess it’s pretty hard on you when your daughter kills someone.”

She closed the door on any possibility of their being any help: “That stress, you know, it must be just
so
very terrible.” Her voice was venomous enough to French-kiss a cobra and drop it back into its basket, dead.

I know torture only works if you can focus on the target’s fear of something that might happen if he didn’t tell the truth. Pain is a waste of time. What could I possibly hold over people like MaryLou’s parents?

But I knew something else: the promise of pleasure works better than the promise of pain.

“Your father, he’d take money to let me talk to your sister, wouldn’t he?”

“He’d take the money, all right. But Danielle wouldn’t do anything
he
told her to. And he’s crazy enough to start whipping on her if there’s money in it for him, now that I’m not around.”

“He’s done that before?”

“Not for a long time. I wasn’t even thirteen when I got too big for him to reach for that belt. And, after that, I told him what would happen if he ever touched her again.”

“What?”

“I don’t—”

“What would happen to him?” I asked her, hoping she wouldn’t say she’d shoot him.

“Oh. It could be almost anything. Danielle’s a genius, you know. She made up a whole list for me. Wait till he passes out, then open his mouth and pour in a jar of Drano. Or sprinkle cyanide over a pizza and—”

“Where would you get cyanide?”

“Danielle said she could make some. She’s the big brain, don’t forget.” She was whispering so offhandedly that I couldn’t tell if she thought the whole idea was silly or she didn’t doubt for a second that her little sister had that kind of mind.

“Your mother, then?”

“They’re two of a kind, her and my father. She’d take money from anyone, but she wouldn’t give you anything for it. Not anything you’d want, I mean.”

“What would
Danielle
want?”

“Danielle? There’s only one thing in the whole world she wants: to be a movie star. She’s smart enough to get into any college, but I know she’s going to head straight out to Hollywood the second she’s old enough. So, unless you can make her believe you’re a talent scout, forget it.”

I guess I waited too long. When you interrupt the rhythm, whoever you’re milking for information has time to ask questions. The next words out of MaryLou’s mouth were “What do you need to speak to Danielle for, anyway?”

Damn!
“Uh, we’re going to make a motion to have you examined by a specialist.”

“What kind of specialist?”

“We’re not sure yet. Look, I know you’re not going to plead insanity, okay? But if the DA thinks you might be going down that road, we can get a much better deal. The lawyer says the whole office is scared to death of actually trying a case.”

“Even with the school’s videotape and the gun and—”

“MaryLou, if you pulled out another pistol and shot the judge during the first trial, that office would still be afraid of the
second
trial.”

She kind of barked a laugh. Then she looked at my eyes as if staring so hard would burn away everything but the truth. “That makes sense to me, I guess. For me, I’m saying. That’s what the other girls in here call this: ‘the Game.’ There isn’t a single one who
expects to have a trial. It comes down to what you’ve got to bargain with. But that’s not me. So a fake-out is fine, but I’m not telling anyone I’m crazy.”

“Of course not. But that’s why we have to interview Danielle, and your parents, too. The more the DA thinks we’re building some kind of special defense, the more he’ll give away.”

Maybe Swift wasn’t any great shakes as a lawyer, but he knew all about the local system. And when a guy like him says the whole system is built on not taking cases to trial, I believe it.

I hated myself for the hope I saw spring into MaryLou’s eyes. She could do a few years and still have a career as a pitcher. If they let football players off with a warning on a dorm rape, and let basketball players slide on DUIs, why not?

“Would I have to testify?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so. But I don’t know for sure. Not yet, anyway. You know how these things go, right? If our expert is much stronger than theirs, that’ll scare the hell out of them. It’s like a softball game—the team could be just average, but a killer pitcher could get them to State.”

“I guess that’s me, all right.” She bitter-laughed. “A killer pitcher.”

A
fter that info, the map was easy to draw. Kid enlists at seventeen, takes R&R in Bangkok, just like the older guys tell him. After
the “Quick time, okay, soldier?” whore, he walks into one of the little tattoo stalls scattered throughout the red-light district. He’s looking for something cool and Japanese, like any kid who quotes comic books the way some do the Dalai Lama.

And the Thai tattoo artist, who knew why any
farang
would wander into
his
shop, must have had that chop displayed on his wall. He’d tell anyone who gave it a second look that it stood for “Tiger Ko Khai” and claim that it meant “Dangerous Dragon” in Japanese.

That same kid had come back to this place, and started the not-really-a-secret society.

If he mustered out somewhere around 2001, he would have been in his early twenties, the perfect time to get teenage punks excited about forming a branch of “Tiger Ko Khai.”

That tattoo was the only cred the “combat vet” would need. Even teens would know the biker gangs don’t let you ink up unless you’re in for real. And for life. Didn’t it say so on TV? So the tattoo would be proof enough that he’d been granted authority to form a chapter.

Whoever it was had known exactly the gap to fill: someplace between lightweight skinhead and no-pride whigger. The school had both, and each group had girls. So who better to instruct them in the strategy and tactics of gang rape than a punk who could tell them war stories from a real war?

Still, it was just a theory, so I dipped into my credit again. The cracker once said he owed me his life. I didn’t know how to put a value on that, but I figured his poking around various “secure” sites on my behalf wouldn’t be stretching it too far.

I
went over to Swift’s office to give him a copy of the six-month lease I had signed as his “authorized agent” and a spare key to the place. I’d found just what I wanted: a bare room on the second floor in a cheap-to-build structure, on a main street that had “For Rent” signs in just about every storefront window. Which is probably why the “premium office space” had been vacant for more than a year. And why the number I called got me a promise to meet there in an hour.

I’d told the rental lady—a pinch-faced woman with a lemon-sucking smile—that the three-hundred-square-foot unit at the back of the building would be fine, as long as the parking space behind it was included. She was chicken-necking at every word I said—the place was such an overpriced dump that the prospect of finding a tenant got her all excited.

I told her that I’d left my driver’s license at home, adding, “Same place I must have left my head,” so she could bend herself into accepting my explanation of why she should make the lease out to “Bradley L. Swift, Attorney at Law.”

“That’s not me,” I told her. “I only work for him. He’s got some big case going, so he has to have temporary office space to store all the files and stuff.”

The rental lady was saying something about this being an unorthodox situation, when I interrupted her with an explanation that would stroke her soft spot again.

“Your ad said ‘temporary,’ but Mr. Swift said to tell you that a case like this could go for years, or be over just like
this
!” I said, snapping my fingers and putting three thousand in cash on her desk with the same hand. “That’s why he wants to pay six months in advance, provided he can renew on the same terms if he gives you thirty days’ notice.”

I pulled out a notebook, pretended to be checking it over to see
if I had missed something, but that charade was unnecessary—the rental agent hadn’t taken her eyes off the cash.

It’s a rough market
, I thought to myself.
She probably owns the place. A real-estate broker who gambled that the “individual office units” concept would turn that firetrap into a gold mine. For her, the cash was proof that she hadn’t tricked herself the way she did her clients
.

A
thin blue thread was weaving inside my mind, twisting itself into an empty frame. I knew that frame wouldn’t fill until my mind was ready for it.

The first time that happened, the thread frame filled in a split second: a blood-spattered wall, freezing me in place. I calmed myself down and started to scan the area. I didn’t see the Claymore until I looked down at my own boots. It was one of the new ones, the kind that shoot steel balls at a preset angle, designed especially for infantry kills. Packed with C4, not the old-style TNT. One more step and six men would have turned into body parts.

The blue thread frame told me that I had something. More than an “idea,” a solution of some kind. Concentrating wouldn’t help. I knew I couldn’t force a solution—the frame would fill in its own good time.

So I went back to work.

“L
ate afternoon, she’ll be hanging out at the skateboard park,” Dolly had told me the next morning. “I wouldn’t swat a fly, much less a child’s bottom, but, Dell, I swear I can understand why MaryLou slapped her sister’s face that time.”

“You don’t get raccoon eyes from a slap.”

“She didn’t use her pitching hand,” Dolly said, as if that explained everything.

Something was missing. Something … Then it came to me. The more I could get Dolly helping, the more she’d be able to get information from those girls.

“What would I have to do to convince a girl that I was a talent scout from Hollywood?”

“You?!”
Dolly laughed so hard her eyes got teary.

“Me” is all I said, when she finally stopped.

“Dell …”

“MaryLou told me that the only thing in the world Danielle cares about is being a movie star. I’m not thinking about how a talent scout would
look
, but what he’d
know
, okay?”

“You mean, like, names to drop, stuff like that?”

“No. Too easy to check. But I need to
sound
like I know people. And movies, I need to know about them, too.”

“Give me a few hours. Some of the girls will be here by then, and I’ll dig up a lot before they even show up. You don’t have to leave until around four.”

T
he rented Cadillac wasn’t as big as I’d expected, and its ground-fog paint job made it look even smaller from the outside. What I also didn’t expect was how quick it was, and how well it handled.

I found Danielle right where Dolly said she’d be, wearing a T-shirt long enough to make you wonder if there was anything beneath it. There was still enough sunlight to take any mystery out of the question, and the ridiculous orange spike heels she was prancing around in would get even the girls in the red-light district of Marseilles pointing at her and screaming,
“Salope!”

Even if Danielle hadn’t been putting on such a show, none of the skateboarders would have glanced at me twice. I couldn’t guess at their social class. They all seemed to be wearing the same kind of uniform: short-sleeved T-shirts advertising energy drinks, and khaki pants hacked off to make shorts.

I parked the Caddy where they could all see it, and walked down a slight slope of grass. By the time I got close to the configured concrete of the skateboard park, they were all in a bunch, watching the stranger approach.

Three of them broke off from the crowd. I guess I wasn’t supposed to see them slip away past a squat brick building—probably public restrooms—and disappear. I didn’t care why they were taking off—by then, Danielle had wiggled her way to the front of the pack.

I pointed at her, and made a “come here” gesture. Most girls her age would have backed away, but Danielle swivel-hipped up to me as if I was expected.

When I handed her one of the business cards Dolly had printed up for me, she took it without a word.

The card was a real work of art: a lot of red at the top, a much smaller piece of black at the bottom, with a wide white slash running through them at a sharp angle. Within that slash, in fancy-font black letters:

Patrice Laveque
Arquette Aland Film Productions, Inc
.
202 N. Robertson Blvd. · Hollywood, CA 90048

In the red space at the top, phone and fax in the (213) area code, plus the obligatory, can’t-be-real-without-one e-mail address: [email protected].

And in the little bit of white at the bottom:

www.aafpi.com

Dolly had told me the street address was in the right area, but it didn’t actually exist, the phone had the right area code, and the number would be answered by a woman with a French accent—
“Moi, non?”