Aftershock (31 page)

Martin glowed under the praise the way he never would have if I’d been the one talking. He reached in the glove compartment and took out a piece of paper and some cash. The paper was a receipt for forty-three hundred from a place I’d never heard of: “B
³
” with “Buddha’s Bad Boys” in a much smaller font beneath it.

“They’re the best,” Martin said. “But you have to drive through the worst part of Portland to get there. Whoever heard of a custom-fabrication operation built out of cinder block with a barbed-wire fence, and a whole horde of pit bulls running around loose?”

“Apparently you” is all I said. Accepting the money, handing back the receipt.

“I have got to get some of that,” T.D. said, walking around the Lexus, running his hand lightly over the surfaces.

“Want to trade?” Martin said, grinning at the very idea of a man who had such a rocket for a car admiring his paint job.

“Don’t think so, hoss. Those SUVs really widen our carbon footprint.”

It took a second, but then both Martin and Johnny broke out laughing. T.D.’s car probably widened that footprint every time he started the engine.

We strolled back toward the roadster. Martin couldn’t stop himself from gaping at it like a virgin walking down one of those streets
in Amsterdam where nothing more than glass stands between him and the whores performing in windows.

“Want to give it a run?” T.D. asked him.

“Really?”

“Sure, hoss. Just let me show you a few things.…”

It took T.D. a couple of minutes to explain some different settings—things you could turn on or off, depending on what kind of ride you wanted—then he tossed the key fob at Martin, who snatched it out of the air like it was a Patek Philippe watch that wouldn’t take well to hitting the concrete.

T.D. just stood there.

“Don’t you want to—?”

“Only seats two,” T.D. said. “And I know you don’t want your partner on my lap.”

Johnny vaulted into the passenger seat like he’d been doing it all his life. It was way more showy than when T.D. had done it, but he ended up just where he was supposed to be—next to Martin.

W
hile they were gone, I gave T.D. pretty much all of what I knew, then said: “If I talk to you, is there something like attorney-client privilege?”

“If you talk to me as a patient, no matter what the conversation contains, I couldn’t reveal it even if I wanted to. And no court would even try to make me.”

“So I’ve been a patient ever since I opened my mouth, right?”

“Before that, hoss. From the second I saw you do that magic trick with the pistol.”

“Why then?”

“Because nobody acts like that unless they’ve seen some truly ugly stuff in their lives. And anybody who’s seen a steady diet of stuff like that probably should be seeing a therapist.”

“Because they’re, what, crazy?”

“Nothing like that. But PTSD is something you either work through or suffer from—those are the only choices.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder?”

“Yep.”

“How did you know that I’d know what ‘PTSD’ meant?”

“Debbie prepped me. Just over the phone, but more than enough to see the defense strategy. Since you’re playing a key role, you’d know.”

“I get it.”

“But I wouldn’t need that,” he said. “You’re a very angry man. You’ve learned to put that anger in a box, and you only open it when you want to. So there’s something you don’t know, something you’ll never know. But what you do know is, if you don’t keep that question in that same box, you’ll go off the rails.”

I’ve been hit. Hit hard. But not like T.D. just did. It took me a while to get my breathing back.

“How could you know that?” I said, knowing I was admitting it just by asking.

“How do you know when a man’s about to do something violent?”

“I’ve seen—No, wait. You mean, it’s the same thing? You see enough of something that you …”

“Recognize it when you see it again? Yeah, that’s it, hoss.”

Just then Martin and Johnny pulled up, almost decorously.

“You like it?” T.D. asked, just a shade of sly in his voice.

“It’s … unbelievable. I’ve never driven anything like it.”

“Tell you what,” T.D. said. “That Mini Cooper in there, it’s a John Cooper Works, right?”

“It is,” Martin said, proud to have common ground with a man who shared his love of cars, never mind one who actually owned a car he could only dream about.

“I’m going to be here a couple of weeks or so. Maybe a little longer. Want to trade?”

“You don’t mean—?”

“Sure. I take yours, you take mine. When I’m ready to leave, I’ll come back and we’ll switch again.”

Martin’s jaw dropped. It must have taken him a full minute just to get the keys to the Mini out of his pocket.

T.D. took the keys, said, “Let’s roll, hoss,” to me.

And that’s just what we did.

“T
hat was an incredibly fine thing for you to do,” I told him. “It’ll mean the world to Martin. Johnny, too.”
And now I’ve truly settled my debt to them, thanks to you
, is what I thought to myself.

“I had an ulterior motive,” T.D. said. “I’ve never driven one of these, and I want to see if they can really make a front-driver as sharp as they claim.”

I didn’t know if they had or not, but after he played with it for a little while, getting the feel of it down, I was back to playing navigator.

And he was back to sliding the car through the turns. One was wild enough that I had to look through his side window to see the road ahead of us.

“Yee-haw!” T.D. yelled, happy as a boozehound watching an “All You Can Drink” sign go up in the window of his favorite bar.

He was still muttering about not being able to fully disable something or other when we slid into the driveway of our house.

“T
here’s no decent hotel close by,” Dolly told T.D., “but two good friends of mine have a little cottage they use as a guesthouse, and they said you’re welcome to it for as long as you stay.”

“Now, that’s a generous offer,” T.D. said.

“Ah, you don’t know them. Nel and Sue are true partners. It goes so deep that you can’t even say one name without the other. For them, this is the most natural thing in the world, to help out a friend. Besides, I’ve told them enough so that they have their own reasons for helping MaryLou.”

I guess that was true enough. I’d been there when Dolly had asked them. Right away, Nel started musing about long-term strategy. Sue went on about tiger traps—“you know, the kind with punji sticks”—near where Cameron’s gang used to hang out. I told her that they probably wouldn’t be using that spot anymore, and she just nodded.

I didn’t ask her why she assumed I’d know what punji sticks were. In the Legion, we called those traps
trous de loup
, and feared them greatly. Not just the deep-anchored bamboo spikes, but what the enemy would smear on their tips. And, just like the land mines left behind from every war, some of those tiger traps were still where they were first built—still waiting for the wrong boots to walk those trails.

“Can’t say no to that,” T.D. told her. “This guesthouse, it wouldn’t bother them if they heard a little banjo music late at night?”

“Not a bit,” Dolly assured him.

“You play
banjo
?” Debbie said, as if T.D. had just told her he won a Nobel Prize for Perfect Bachelor.

“Only late at night,” he said. “When I have to think through a problem, I sometimes just sit back and do some picking. The sound relaxes me.”

“Let’s go and get you settled, then,” I said. Quick, before Debbie got to tell him how she’d love to hear him play. I didn’t look at Dolly, but I could feel what she was going to say to me later.

“Y
ou can’t stage interview times,” Debbie said. “One interview could last all day, another could be over in ten minutes.”

The camera equipment I’d used on Danielle would be perfect, but we couldn’t use the same hotel—which was why Dolly had told T.D. there weren’t any decent ones around.

That’s where Nel and Sue stepped in again, after T.D. drove over there. Dolly was in the front seat, me in the back—hard to call that little shelf a “seat”—but it wasn’t a long ride.

They explained that their guesthouse had two floors, one for living—bedroom, full bath, library, kitchen—on the ground floor, and one upstairs, for working. That floor was already crammed full with computers, fax machine, printer, scanners, work tables, cork-boards. They said the downstairs library would be comfortable for just about anyone being interviewed, and they were right. It was certainly private, and easy to wire up like we needed.

“I’d have to drill a couple of holes,” I told them.

“I wouldn’t mind drilling a couple of holes in any of those scumbags,” Sue said. Her eyes said that wasn’t a joke. Nel nodded. Case closed.

“S
he couldn’t have been more blunt,” T.D. said. We were all watching the tape of Debbie interviewing Victim No. 1—that’s how the tapes were going to be labeled, so we could refer to each girl in the presence of others without giving up any information. “But she’s so angry that it might look like something else to a jury.”

“You really think so?” Dolly said, clearly disappointed.

T.D. just nodded.

I was disappointed myself. When No. 1 said she only wished she could have been there when Cameron cashed in, I thought that was just as good as when Franklin said he’d tell a lie to help MaryLou. So I asked T.D. what the difference was.

“Franklin was saying he loves MaryLou enough to lie for her. That underscores the honesty of his other answers, just like you thought. But this girl’s coming from the opposite direction: she hates that punk so much that she’d like to watch him die. I believe her. So would a jury. But they might carry that too far, and come up with a ‘she’d lie to get MaryLou off, too’ scenario. So that doesn’t support her earlier testimony; it poisons it.”

We all looked at each other. And we all saw the same thing.

V
ictim No. 4 was the pick of the litter. On paper, she was odds-on to be the runt. Raped by Tiger Ko Khai when she was twelve. Last year, she’d been raped again.

Not by the gang—to them, she was as appealing as a used condom. The perpetrator of the second rape was her mother’s boyfriend. Apparently, she’d fought. Hard. Not only did the hospital records find what they called “significant bruising consistent with a prolonged fight or calculated beating,” but she had the top of every index for “rape victim.” And the aspirated DNA nailed the boyfriend cold. He didn’t even know that his DNA had been data-banked years ago, the second time he’d gone to prison.

“ ‘Why should I testify
now
?’ That’s what I told them. Those little slime.”

“The police?” Debbie had asked. Her voice was as gentle as a caress, as comforting as a blanket to a baby.

“No. I mean those two ‘girls’ from the DA’s Office. You could see it was freaking them out. Not me getting raped—them seeing such a sure winner slip out of their greasy hands. You know what
else I told them? I said, ‘You wouldn’t prosecute Jerry Milhouse, so how come you’re so hot to trot now?’ ”

“What did they say to that?”

“Oh, they said that was a different administration. If they’d been working for the DA then, they would have prosecuted him.”

“But you didn’t believe them?”

“I stopped believing anyone when Jerry and his friends tied me over that sawhorse thing they have.”

Debbie made a sound I hadn’t heard before. Soft sympathy and red rage, blended together in something you couldn’t swallow except as a whole.

“They—those DAs, I mean—they made the same mistake most people do. Just because I’m fat and ugly doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Until it … happened, I was an honor student. I don’t go to school now, but I still read, and I still learn. Over the Internet.

“That’s how it started. Thinking back, I can see it so clear. My mother’s boyfriend, he said he used to be a teacher before he gave it up to concentrate on his writing. My mother told him I’d been gang-banged.”

I never heard her say “Mom” once in the two hundred and twelve minutes of tape.

“And he was so understanding about it. Said he could home-school me so I never had to go back there again.

“I swallowed that hook. So did my mother. By then, she was swallowing everything that came out of his mouth. All he did was play on his computer. His ‘writing.’ My mother grabbed all the overtime she could, to pay for his toys.

“I guess he figured I was supposed to be one of those. After he raped me, he dared me to go to the cops. ‘They didn’t believe you the first time, you fat slob. They’re sure as hell not going to believe you this time, either.’

“I didn’t go to the cops. He was probably right about what he said. But I hurt so much I called my friend—I’m not going to say
her name—and she drove me to the hospital. That’s when it all started.”

“The DAs tried to pressure you—?”

“—into pressing charges. You better believe it. They were the ones who told me about his criminal record. He was a teacher. And he went to prison for burglary, but those DAs told me the
other
DAs, the ones who came before them, let him plead to burglary even though he got caught in the bedroom of a girl. The burglary was more time in prison than what he would have got for attempted rape, and they weren’t sure they could convict him of the rape—he never actually touched the girl; she was still sleeping when her dad heard a noise and ran downstairs and grabbed him. So they made this deal. They got a conviction, and he didn’t get to be a registered sex offender.

“That was so funny, that part. My stupid mother, she checked him out on the Internet. That was his idea. He
told
her to check the Sex Offender Registry. He said that’s what any good mom would do if she was going to let a man move in with her and her kids.

“She really trusted him after that. But, anyway, you know what I told those DAs?”

“What?” Debbie asked, not even trying to calm the girl down, just letting her go with whatever she was feeling.

“I told them it isn’t only morons like my mother who can use the Internet. So I’d be glad to press charges against her boyfriend … if they prosecuted Panther Wornic and those others for what they did to me. See, I knew they could do that. The statute of limitations doesn’t even start to run until I turn eighteen. That’s the law.
That’s
what I looked up!”