Shockwave (15 page)

“Homer didn’t kill that guy.”

“I fucking
know
that. There probably isn’t anyone around who doesn’t. But getting him off at a trial isn’t going to accomplish anything. Like I said before, we have to get him kicked loose, out of
any
confinement, no matter what they call it. So he can go back to the way he was before.”

“He could do that? Even after all this?”

“Homer? Sure. I see him pretty much every day. Or night. He’s on his meds, and that isolation unit suits him fine, now that I got the staff to keep the lights off at night. But a trial …”

“I got it. As long as they think they got the killing solved, they won’t even be looking anymore.”

“Yeah.”

How much can I trust this guy?
“What if they got a phone tip, or something like that?”

“Wouldn’t do a thing. Far as the people around here’re concerned, Homer solves everybody’s problems. Cops’re happy, DA’s happy, City Council’s happy, Chamber of Commerce … happy. And it’s not like there’s going to be some nosy reporter sniffing around, either.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what? If we don’t solve the case—prove someone else did it—nothing’s going to change. They’ll all just stand pat.”

He took one of his deep, whistling nose-breaths. “Look, here’s what it comes down to: The liberals, they’ll go along with a mental-health commitment. I mean, what’s the issue—that Homer’s
not
loco? And everyone else will get what they want, too—crime solved, streets cleaned, and the guy who got himself killed, nobody’s going to miss him. Remember, the dead guy wasn’t a local—that means a lot. All Homer can tell anyone is what he told the cops. That body could have floated miles from where the killing happened.”

“We already know that’s not true. He had to be killed by either at least two men, or by one he trusted enough to turn his back on. Either way, the killer was good at what he did. You have to be skilled
and
strong to execute that move: drive your knee into the target’s spine at the same time you plant the spike. That keeps it planted. So, if the whole chunk doesn’t come out, you can ride him all the way down. Finish the job on the ground.”

He just looked at me like he was waiting for more. Okay, I could do that:

“And there’s the time line, too: That photo that was in the papers? I know who took it. And when.”

Mack listened to everything I’d learned from the video ninja.

“He’d never testify.”

“He wouldn’t
want
to testify. But …”

“You mean, get some lawyer to try it on the facts?”

“Why not?”

“Because Homer
would
want to testify. They couldn’t stop him. If they tried, he’d start his screaming thing. And once he did, no way he stays out of the state hospital, even if some jury bought the idea that he wasn’t the guy who did the killing.”

“There could be another way.”

“What?”

“I’ll have to check on a few things first.”

“D
on’t you have any opinion of your own?” my wife demanded. Hands on her hips, a sure sign she wasn’t playing around.

“If I had to guess, I’d say, yeah, he’d keep quiet if he knew something happened. But would he actually help
make
something happen? There’s only one way to tell, Dolly.”

“I am not asking about Mack,” she said, the muscles in her arms tightening, like she was getting ready to throw a punch at anything that might be a threat to me. “I’m asking you.”

“It’s the most logical tactic.”

“Murder is the most logical tactic?”

“You want them to kick Homer loose, there’s only two ways: find out who killed that Nazi—find out
and
put together a case so strong that the cops would grab it
and
convince the DA to go along—or kill another one. Homer, he’d have the best alibi that could ever be.”

“Just like that.”

“It’s not exactly blowing up a day-care center.”

“Dell … Most of them—the young ones, I mean—they’re just … trying to find themselves … or find a place where they could fit in, maybe. This town, it’s ultra-tolerant of gays, Mexicans, almost anyone you can think of. Except what they call
‘trailer trash.’ White kids who don’t have working parents. And aren’t that smart, or good at sports, or … I don’t know. But
you
know what a young man does if nobody wants him. Better than most. Why hate them so?”

“It wasn’t just Jews they sent to the ovens, Dolly. A
gitan
would always be first on that line. You ever hear a Sabra talk about his ‘homeland’? That’s Israel. The place where the ‘wandering Jews’ could settle down. Gypsies are never going to have a homeland, never going to stop ‘wandering.’ They can’t. When you say ‘Rom,’ people think of Hungary, right? Okay, remember what we saw on the BBC last week, about this swine Orbán, their Prime Minister. I plugged his name in, took about five seconds to find this. I even printed it out:

“
Der Spiegel
ran this editorial saying how ‘shocked’ they were. And if anyone would know an undercover Nazi agenda, who better? When this filth says ‘not fit to live among people,’ you think he’s
not
saying unfit to live, period?”

“Dell, you don’t even know if you’re a—” Dolly cut herself off before she cut even more deeply.

“You put me back there,” I told the only person I loved.

“Dell, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ever—”

“Sssshh, precious,” I whispered, holding her against my chest. “I’ll get it done.”

“I don’t care about it! Not anymore, Dell. I swear.”

“Okay. I’ll give Mack what I found out, and let him take it from there.”

“Promise?” my sweetheart said, very softly.

“Yes,” I lied.

I
t wouldn’t be the first time I’d hopped a freight.

And I hadn’t learned about the existence of the FTRA from Mack. I’d let him think that, because it was the only way to make sure Dolly thought that, too.

It wasn’t so long ago that I had needed a way to get in and out of Denver without leaving tracks. Not that “paper trail” nonsense TV is always bleating about—if you stayed off airplanes, didn’t use credit cards when you needed gas, and didn’t pose for convenience-store cameras, that part would be easy enough. What I’d needed was a way to
float
through, moving like the mountain breezes they take for granted that high up.

I had to go to Denver to keep my promise to MaryLou McCoy. I had promised to take a life in return for her promise to fight for her own. Up to that moment, she’d been a block of stone. Whatever was coming, let it come. She wasn’t going to move toward it … and she wasn’t going to step aside.

“What do you think is going to happen if you won’t let us help you?” the lawyer we’d hired for her had asked.

MaryLou’s pale eyes were as empty as her response: “It’s already happened.”

That’s when I saw it clearly, instantly translating her whole attitude into the obedience the Legion had drummed into us:
La mission est sacrée
. MaryLou had been supposed to leave town the next day for summer softball camp, a showcase that would let her pick from the bouquet of scholarship offers they’d be handing her. But she’d had a higher mission—protecting her baby sister, Danielle, from a fate she was sure awaited the child if MaryLou left her.

She never knew the truth until the fourteen-year-old viper she’d thrown away her own life to protect took the witness stand … as a witness for the prosecution.

“I’m not like them,” Danielle told the jury, distancing herself from all those girls who had told how they had been gang-raped before being dumped outside the ER like bags of garbage. The girls who’d lacked Danielle’s beauty and physical endowments. Making it clear that nobody had raped
her.
No, she’d been “initiated” into a special society, run by a special man, a man who loved her with all his heart. A man named Cameron Taft. “All the girls were after him,” she crowed
.

“So your sister was jealous of you?” MaryLou’s lawyer asked, keeping his voice empty of inflection
.

“Look at her.” Danielle pointed. “And look at me. What do
you
think?”

By then, I knew that the founder of Tiger Ko Khai was a man named Ryan Teller, a “combat vet” who’d been kicked out of the military years before. I was already sure he’d never return. Three of his acolytes had stopped by their hangout, but only two of them left alive. I was confident they’d deliver
that
message to their Supreme Leader.

But I’d had to make MaryLou trust me. And get her to understand that, no matter the outcome of the trial, she hadn’t sacrificed for nothing. Ryan Teller was a human virus, and other places wouldn’t have been vaccinated against him. The only way to stop him from spreading was to make him dead.

Hopping a freight wasn’t hard. I sure wasn’t the only one riding that way, and I looked right for the part. Everything I wore was “used,” and my face fit my clothes.

Anyone who looked in my duffel would have known I wasn’t a hobo—if the equipment hadn’t tipped them, the cash would have.

But nobody was going to take that look. A couple of men caught the same car I was riding. A working team—I could tell from the way they ran through their routine: check the car for occupants, then evaluate potential targets. I was the only one in that car. Sprawled in the corner, the duffel’s strap looped over my left arm as if I was asleep and wanted to protect whatever was in there against a sneak thief.

They came up on me quiet. Not like experienced soldiers would, just without talking.

I had the pistol out while they were still closing on me. When they got near enough for whatever they wanted, they saw what they didn’t.

“Not me,” I said, keeping my voice polite, so they could back off without losing face.

They put their hands up together, as if they were marionettes.

“I’m not law,” I said. “I don’t want you. I don’t know you. I never saw you. And you didn’t see me.”

They nodded. Message received. Whether I was an escaped convict or a traveling psychotic didn’t matter—what mattered was getting out of that car as soon as they could.

When the train slowed down for a sweeping curve, they bailed out as smoothly as a pair of acrobats.

T
he FTRA guys were a different breed.

They made no secret of their brotherhood as they gathered in the farthest corner of the car, speaking too low for me to hear.

They were smarter, too. We never exchanged words, but they could tell the only thing I’d be willing to “share” with them was some bullets.

N
ow I thought about all that.

Easy to miss what you’re not looking for. And all I was looking for on those freights to Denver was to be left alone.

So I replayed the memory tapes. I hadn’t seen anyone flying Nazi flags on those trains. Some had a little ink, but it wasn’t anything they showed off. The Master Race on the rails was the FTRA, and all the other nonpaying passengers seemed to know it.

So I scratched my first idea. Not only couldn’t I be sure of finding the right men on a freight, I was even less sure of finding one alone.

I had the equipment—a spiked tool mountain climbers call a rock hammer—and I had the plan: kill another heavy-inked Nazi somewhere down the line, let the law think some maniac was riding around, taking them out one by one, always the same way. Once the locals had their “profile,” Homer would be off the hook—a serial killer had passed through their town and moved on, nothing to discourage tourists from visiting. Might even bring some new ones, “researching” the porno printed in paperback as “true crime” so supermarkets could rack it without getting complaints.

But it was too complicated. Too risky. And too likely to flop. Even if I managed to get one of them alone and finish him the exact same way, who knew what would happen after that? For what I needed, even as few as two possible outcomes was one over the limit.

“A
lot of people you see around here in the daytime, they might act crazy—talk to themselves, even have arguments with themselves—or they might be carrying everything they own around with them … but that doesn’t mean they’re homeless.”

“You mean the shelter?” Dolly asked Mack.

“That’s been closed for a while. But there’s that flophouse they call a ‘residential rehab.’ It’s on the far side of 101, in a little … valley, I guess you’d call it. Nothing but rock there. Some idiot once thought it would be a perfect place to build a motel. The town bought it for pennies on the dollar when they hired me—I told them if they wanted to keep people off the street, especially at night, they had to give them a safe place to sleep.”

“You said some of them—the homeless, I mean—they
never
go indoors,” my wife narrowed it down.

“Oh, they all go indoors when they need to—sometimes to use … the facilities. Sometimes to steal, sometimes just to get out of the rain. The ones who never go inside no matter what the weather, they’re never more than a step away from hospitalization.

“The ones with high coping skills, they know where to camp for the night. Every night. The … more disturbed ones, they have to … be shown, you know? Otherwise, they’d just keep staggering around. That leaves the kids. You met them,” he said, nodding in my direction, “the homeless-by-choice crowd, and the circuit riders.”

“None of them killed that guy who was found on the beach,” I said.