Shockwave (17 page)

“Always comes down to the money, then?”

“Yeah. That’s why, for this county, the most important thing I do in
their
eyes is getting my documentation in on time.”

“Like a time clock?”

“No. This isn’t punch-in, punch-out. I have to keep records of every interaction with every client, chart goals, progress … damn near enough to turn some of my clients into actual human beings instead of numbers.”

“But not quite.”

“No,” he said, back to that arctic voice. “Not quite.”

B
ack at our house, alone with Dolly, I knew I had to decide, right then and there.

This part of the coast, there’s no shortage of people who claim they can read your “aura,” tell you all kinds of things about yourself. I can’t do that. And knowing they can’t, either, isn’t worth anything to me.

But I’ve always relied on trust—my trust. Not “voices” in my head, something that’s been in me ever since I can remember. All my life, I trusted whatever it was that told me “Run!” Or “Hide!” Or later, when I learned how … “Kill!”

A working merc proves he’s passed all those tests just by saying where he’s been, and being alive to say it. It took me much longer to be able to listen and trust the one command I’d never heard before about a woman: “Love.”

From the moment I first saw Dolly, she had a kind of rosetinted glow around her face. I could see it even when I was nothing to her but a wounded soldier fighting for money, and she was a nurse who hated all war.

I thought it must have been the knockout shot they’d given me when they had to cut into my leg, but when I saw her years later, it was still there. It took me longer than that to realize Dolly didn’t have an “aura.” The soft rosy tint was the way
my
eyes saw her.

Now my eyes can still see that glow around her face … and I can see when it changes color, too.

If Dolly had said what she wanted me to do, I would have done it. But the only things she ever pushes on me to do are things to protect myself—those leafy vegetables, that’s an example.

I knew asking her would always get me the same answer: only if I could pull it off without endangering myself. So—no answer at all.

Okay, then.

“The Nazi who got himself killed, he was on the run,” I told her.

“From what?”

“Other Nazis.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You know why?”

“No. But he was moving
down
the coast. Picked up some traveling cash from a crew of skinheads in Vancouver. After he left, three others showed up. A team, looking for him.”

“So they were chasing him?”

“No doubt.”

“And they got their work done, so they’re not around anymore?”

“Why would they be?”

“How does this help Homer?”

“It doesn’t. But if we find the men who killed him—even one of them, so long as he wasn’t a local—they wouldn’t be able to prosecute Homer.”

“And then they’d kick him loose, you’re saying?”

“You been around here for a while. This excuse for a DA we’ve got here, he’s going to need a rock-solid case—a case he
can’t
lose—before he’ll let Homer go.”

“I know he’s weak, but—”

“He’s fifty kilos below ‘weak.’ He knows this is all about how things
look
. Nobody wants Nazis around here—not visible ones, anyway—and nobody wants crazy people, either. He prosecutes Homer now, he can’t lose—see?”

My wife said nothing, but the grim line of her lips told me what she felt.

“Y
ou’re sure these will hold?” I asked Dolly.

She looked up from where she was blotting a transfer screen of a swastika to the left side of Mack’s chest. He’d tried to refuse the hypo full of freeze juice—it was just a local, but he was
going first, and he wanted to come across just as tough as he guessed I would. Dolly ignored him.

And she didn’t even ask me about the injection. The ability to bear pain is something you can learn—but practicing the techniques can get you dead. I’d had no choice about learning, La Légion called it
“entraînement.”
It wasn’t until I got into the field that I learned that the techniques of pain tolerance are only useful for pain you can’t avoid.

“These patches have to be kept moist,” she warned, handing over a bunch of individually sealed packets. “They’ll remove every trace, but they’ll leave a lightened area of skin behind, so have some dirt or mud or something like that handy before you start to scrub. You especially, Dell—a whitened area would show up on you much more than on Mack.”

When Dolly was done, Mack and I looked like what we were supposed to be—a pair of hunters, tracking down a traitor.

M
ack vaulted into the open boxcar with ease—the train was crawling around the curve where we’d been waiting, barely moving. I tossed both duffels up to him, then jumped in myself.

The car wasn’t empty. Three men, one woman. All in the corner opposite ours. Too dark to tell much more.

Mack held a drop-point knife in his right hand—an all-black Böker I’d handed him before we started our ride, easier to handle than a Tanto. My hands were empty, but my jacket was open.

The rules are simple: You don’t close ground unless you’re sure. Or desperate.

They stayed where they were. I could tell they were talking, but I couldn’t pull out any words. As the train picked up speed, it got too noisy to even try.

It was about twenty minutes before one of them stood up and started toward us.

“Not unless you have to,” I whispered to Mack. Repeating what I’d told him while we were waiting for the freight to show.

The guy was big. Tall and beefy. Could’ve used a haircut, but he was too clean to have been riding long.

“You guys going far?”

Neither of us said anything, both of us watching his hands.

“We were thinking, maybe you got some stuff you want to trade?”

“We’re good,” Mack said. Meaning the big guy was welcome to take that any way he wanted.

“You like to meet the rest of us?”

“No” is all I answered.

“Hey, look, man, we’re all riding together. Just thought I’d be friendly.”

Neither Mack nor I said anything.

He stepped closer.

“That’s enough,” I told him. There was more than enough daylight coming into the car for him to see the pistol he hadn’t seen me pull out.

He jumped back like a cat who’d just seen a mouse turn into a rat. A hungry one.

All four of them hopped down as soon as the freight slowed enough.

“Now what do we do?”

“Now we wait,” I told Mack. “We’re looking for circuit riders, not hoboes.”

W
e didn’t find what we needed.

So we jumped off, waited, and boarded a car heading back
the way we came. This time, it wasn’t a long wait. Five of them. All male. They hopped on, checked the car, saw us, and flowed themselves into a loose semicircle.

“You know what this is?” said a skinny guy wearing a faded red T-shirt, showing us his tattoo: the letters “FTRA” separated vertically and placed within the boxes created by a string of railroad tracks. He was wearing a bandanna, but it was too dark for me to make out its color.

“Yeah,” Mack answered, pulling his own tee up to show the swastika. “You know what this is?”

The five of them exchanged looks.

“This is our car,” the skinny guy said. I guessed he was the spokesman. Nobody else seemed eager to say anything. None of them smelled of liquor. None of them looked nervous. In the world I’d left behind, “professional” meant you got paid for what you did. And you had to be good enough at it to keep doing it.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my hand inside my jacket. “Your car. We get it. We’re not pro riders like you are. We’re looking for someone, and we got word he might be trying a freight, so we thought we’d check for ourselves. A long shot, but sometimes you get lucky.”

“We’re not—”

“We know,” I cut him off. “We know
now
, anyway. The man we want wouldn’t be riding with a crew. And he wouldn’t have your ink, either.”

“How bad you want this guy?”

“Bad enough.”

“Bad enough to pay?”

“Bad enough to pay what something’s worth. You guys, you’ve got a reputation. We respect that—and we’ll be jumping off next chance we get. Like you said, your car. But don’t think telling us you saw some guy a while back is gonna make you any money.”

“How much money are we talking about here?”

“Budget is seven. One for seeing him recently—that’d point us in the right direction. Another if that was
real
recently, so we’d have some chance of catching up. Three for where he is now, right this minute. And the whole bankroll for taking us to him.”

They kind of looked at each other. Long enough for me to tell they were making up their minds about something. But about what? Try and fob us off with some bogus info? Rob us for the seven bills I said I was holding? What I knew they
couldn’t
do was take us to a dead man. So, if they offered to do that, I wouldn’t have much choice—wasting a couple of hundred would certainly be smarter than wasting their whole crew.

“What if we ran across some guys looking for the same one you are?”

“Be worth something,” I said. “
Maybe
worth something. Easy enough to tell.”

“Yeah? How would you do that?”

“If they were looking for the same guy we are, they would have told you what he looked like. Even showed you a picture. Maybe one like this,” I said, flicking at the FTRA boss the same rolled-up and rubber-banded photo I had of the dead Nazi.

He caught it deftly. I didn’t have to tell him how to open it—he wasn’t scared the way the Vancouver boys had been. And he was going to do things the way he wanted, no matter what anyone told him.

Whoever these guys were, they didn’t play games. The skinny guy didn’t even pass the photo around. He rolled it up, banded it, and tossed it back.

“You got seven bills, I’ll tell you exactly where you can find him.”

“Not what I offered. The seven is to take us to him.”

“Money-back guarantee.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay. Hand over five, and we’ll tell you where he is. Right this minute. How’s that?”

Mack opened his flashlight, played the beam way off to the side.

“Understand?” I said.

The skinny guy nodded. “Go for it.”

Mack put the light on each of them. Face by face. The light was so soft it didn’t even make them blink. I’m not sure my pistol would have, either. But if they made me go that way, they wouldn’t have time to do much blinking.

I reached in my pocket, used my fingers to pluck out the separately banded rolls of fifties, and tossed five hundred his way.

“You came prepared, huh?”

“I try to always carry what I might need.”

“Okay, pal. Here’s where this guy you’re looking for is: go back in the opposite direction this car’s headed, cross the border to the next county, and that’s where he is. And he’s not going anywhere. The county morgue’s got him. His body, I mean.”

“How do you know?”

“You guys, whatever else you are, you’re not riders. Any rider would know—you stop off anyplace, first thing, you grab yourself a newspaper or two.”

“You’re saying he’s dead?”

“I said he was in the morgue. You think he was just visiting?”

“How far back?”

“The paper was almost a week old when we read it. And that was a few weeks ago.”

“And the other guys looking for him?”

“Nobody rides for free. But you know that already, don’t you?”

“You know the budget. Two hundred is all that’s left. You
want it for what you know, it’s yours. You want more, you’re out of luck—I’m guessing you don’t take IOUs.”

The skinny guy looked to his right, as if he was silently consulting his crew. Then he said, “Three men. About his age”—moving his head in Mack’s direction; easy enough for him, since his neck was as long as a swan’s—“all with the same marks as yours. Way north of here.”

“What line?”

“No line. We were camped; they came up on us.”

“Friendly?”

“Oh yeah. Real nice. But they made a mistake.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They figured we was down with them,” he said.

“All white, all right?”

“That’s about … Yeah, that
is
what they thought.”

“Nobody rides for free.”

“You catch on quick. They didn’t offer anything. One of them showed us he had a knife.”

“Imagine that.”

The skinny guy chuckled.

“For that other two in the budget, what’d they look like?”

“Already told you that.”

“You said ‘white.’ And ink. There’s more. I know you don’t miss much, any of you.”

The skinny guy looked at his pack again. Nodded as if agreeing with them. Said: “The boss was short. Stocky. He was the only one who did any talking. The others were younger than him. With those shaved heads. One had inked up the whole side of his head. Otherwise, they looked almost like twins.”

“Which one showed you he had a knife?”

“The fool with the ink on his head.”

I tossed the last two rolls—four fifties. Then I told him, “We could find you again.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn’t matter—what I just told you is gospel. And I’ll throw this in for free: We’re only about fifteen minutes out from the next slowdown. Hop off and lay low until dark. That’s when the next one’s coming through, going back the way you want to go.”

M
ack and I found a nice spot to wait.

Not for some incoming freight that wouldn’t be around for a good ten hours—for Dolly to come and pick us up.

We used the time to let those removal patches do their work. I didn’t mind the Nazi ink. Camouflage is camouflage. I didn’t like rolling myself in jungle-dropped dung years ago, but I’d done it. A merc I worked with once explained about stillness—it’s not enough to slow down your heart, take only shallow breaths through your nose, and cover yourself with vegetation; you have to blend in so deep that you’re not giving off human spoor. But I could see Mack couldn’t wait to get that foul ink off his body.

“H
e was running,” I told Dolly. “And the people chasing him were the same ones who visited the skinheads in Vancouver.