Shockwave (4 page)

When Luc neared his end, he knew. That’s when he pointed me toward that only door open to me: La Légion Étrangère. I never looked back—that last memory of the old man standing on his own feet, that was the picture I needed to keep in my heart forever. My last chance to show him my love and respect.

For years, that memory was a pacemaker, the only thing keeping my heart alive. Before its batteries ran out, Patrice had come into my life, and they recharged. But my heart never grew powerful enough to pump on its own.

That’s when fear left me forever, I thought. I hadn’t watched Luc go—the old man would never have wanted that. Years later, I’d carried the bullet-shredded body of Patrice all the way back to base. When I dropped him to the ground, the officers praised me for bringing him back.

Our orders: we were never to abandon our dead, our wounded, or our weapons. But the officers were wise enough to understand that even the dullest of our despised band would
never actually obey any such order if it meant even the slightest reduction in their own chance to survive.

I knew I still had a heart only because blood continued to pump through me. But after Luc, after Patrice, I didn’t have any other use for that heart.

Not until Dolly.

O
nce Dolly accepted whatever was left of my heart, I was forever finished working at the only thing I knew.

Cutting my ties to my past was easy—I didn’t have a past. Dolly never told me why she’d been no less willing to sever whatever ties she’d had, and I never asked.

But just to stop working at my deadly trade wasn’t enough. Dolly told me I had to find a way to atone. This wasn’t any religious thing—nobody who’d seen what Dolly had seen could ever believe there was any “God.” Not on this planet, anyway.

If there was a Hereafter, we’d find out together. Whoever went first would wait for the other. I prayed that would be me, because nothing in Heaven or Hell would stop me from staying wherever I landed, so Dolly could find me when she arrived.

Regardless, Dolly said I had to atone for war because it was the only way I’d ever be at peace. I don’t know how she knew this, but I trusted anything she said. So when she told me there was no reason to search—the opportunity would come to me—I trusted that as well.

D
olly was right.

A man who had access to the same network I once used reached out to offer me a job. The job—a job I would have
refused, as I’d refused so many in the past years—was to bring his daughter to him.
To
him, not
back
to him. He’d never been her father; she was just some carelessly spilled seed.

Unwanted children are unprotected, and the unprotected are always the most clearly marked, the easiest of prey. So this man knew he was responsible for his daughter’s willingness to go with a flesh trader. I knew that was the truth—her “choice” was the same I’d once made.

Finding the target was easy. There was nothing special about him—all I did was use the photos the father had supplied me with. Then follow the girl when oncoming morning drove all the night-birds “home.”

He was a young prettyboy with nothing but some fraud-flash—zircons, fake fur, and a tired Cadillac. A galaxy’s distance from a place he could never reach. Just a nasty little punk with no training, limited to running one girl at a time. Without the trappings to compete with professionals, he couldn’t enter the same clubs frequented by serious pimps without being laughed out the door.

He didn’t even try to pull a girl already in The Life—no working girl would go near a nothing like him. He did his recruiting on Facebook.

His product lasted only until a better offer—or a degenerate with a knife—came along and took it away from him. All he could do then was restock his empty cupboard.

He would have kept that up until … Well, an amateur like him never thought more than a few hours ahead.

I atoned for the killing I’d done for money by killing for free. I disposed of him quickly, and left his body to rot under a couch—an eventual message to anyone experienced enough to read it.

The girl never saw it happen. I told her some lies to get her to come with me. Once the car was moving, I told her that her father wanted her. More than anything in the world. She didn’t
believe me, but she came along without a struggle or even a protest. As she would have with anyone who took her, for any reason.

I told the man that the vermin who had taken his daughter would never call out to her again. And if he made the story I’d told the girl into the truth, none of his kind ever would.

His atonement was to be a father. He had a lot of ground to make up, but his commitment was strong enough so he could go the distance.

When I refused his money, the man was puzzled. When I wouldn’t take a higher offer, he was mystified. Then he told me, if I ever needed anything, I had only to call, but I shook my head. The only way to make sure he accepted his own burden was to put what I’d promised into his hands, and leave with nothing in my own.

Maybe I could have explained that leaving without payment was my only path to what no amount of money could buy. But I didn’t even try to explain. My debt was to others, not to him.

That man did become a father. The baby girl he never wanted became the most precious thing in his life. I never told Dolly how I’d made that happen—in truth, only given it a
chance
to happen. I told her I had found a way to atone for lives I’d taken. And I had done that. She accepted what I said, and never mentioned the subject again.

No invader can claim he killed with justification—only to protect himself, as if he’d had no other option. But I could claim—
now
I could claim—that I had killed to create an option. An option for a life. For
two
new lives.

A
couple of years ago, a girl who’d been the high school’s most prized athlete—“Mighty Mary” in the sports pages throughout
the state—gunned down a popular boy, killing him with a pistol she’d stolen from her drunken father.

Dolly knew this was wrong. Not the killing itself, but the way everyone was looking at it. Even though it seemed a day couldn’t go by without the national news reporting another “school shooting,” Dolly knew this wasn’t any such thing.

When I say I know something, Dolly never questions it. I never question her, either. Not because of trust—that is a permanency between us—but because we know where the other’s knowledge came from. And what we learned was embedded so deeply that it has become part of who we are.

Love came to us much later, arcing like an electric current over the chasm between life-taker and life-saver. Since then, whatever we are now, that’s how we’ll always be.

I guess I could have passed. Maybe if I had, I never would have learned what a foul human sewer ran beneath this pretty little town. It wasn’t that Dolly asked me to try—it was her absolute faith that I
could
do something that drove me back to where she’d first found me.

Not to that life itself, but to what that life had taught me.

Not all jungles have canopies. But they can still have land mines, and they all have enemy patrols. There’s only one thing you can always be sure of: they’re all ruled by the same laws.

A
fter it was all over, a whole bunch of folks around here finally realized what they had to do.

They came to understand that theirs was no different from any other village: unless they surrounded it with the image of a ring of human skulls planted on stakes, they were inviting predators to a party.

I thought it was all done then.

I was wrong. So now I was an invisible part of the under-brush
on a little hill that sloped down to Lovers’ Lane. Waiting for a little red dot to pop into life. A little red dot that would tell me he was back to work.

I didn’t know his name, or where he lived—although he thought I did. I didn’t know what demons drove him to film the action down below. Still, I knew
him
. I’d just have to turn the right key to unlock the rest of what I needed to know.

T
hat first time, I’d snapped him into a choke and held him tightly in the one embrace no man seeks.

When I gently ran the serrated edge of my black-bladed Tanto across his Adam’s apple, he’d almost collapsed in terror.

This time, he responded as though I was a guest he’d been expecting. An unwelcome guest, to be sure. But an inevitable one.

“It’s time for us to work together again,” I whispered. “You know you can trust me, don’t you? You know if I wanted to use this blade, you’d be gone, yes?”

“Yes,” he said. Or maybe I could just feel him say it.

“You don’t always have to wear the same outfit,” I said. “Here, you wear it to blend with the night. But, sometimes, you have to blend in other places. To film what you need, yes?”

That time, I was sure he didn’t speak. But I could feel the “yes” again.

“That body, the one the ocean spit out on the beach …”

I felt him quiver, but he stayed silent.

“It was marked with all kinds of Nazi tattoos. The head was shaved, but the whole back of the skull was caved in. No shark could do that. Not even those razor rocks just a few yards past the shoreline. But there’s still a dozen different ways that body could have gotten into that ocean to begin with.”

He stiffened.

“You took that picture,” I said. Not an accusation, a statement of fact. Indisputable fact. “The one that was on the front page of the paper.”

“How could you—?”

“The quality,” I said, slipping a thread of admiration into my voice. “That was no cell-phone snap—it was the work of a top professional. The papers around here are too small to have their own staff photographers. The reporters take what whoever their story’s about gives them—like a picture of some politician. Anyone can take a picture, but that body on the beach,
that
was a work of art.”

He longed for just that kind of praise, but he couldn’t risk the blame … which is why he’d sent the photo to the papers. So he took another feeble stab at throwing me off his scent. “There’s more than one photographer in—”

“Studio men.” I dismissed them all under the same blanket of disdain. “They’re not photojournalists. And they aren’t night workers, either. You got a first-light photo. So you had to have been right there when it happened. When the body first washed up.”

It was a safe guess. This wretched little man I was talking to would know all the spots where he might capture what he hunted. Images. Images of people doing what he … I stopped myself from speculating. It didn’t matter why he did what he did, only that he’d never stop. I didn’t judge him. All that mattered to me about his sickness was that it ensured I could always put my hands on him if I needed to.

“I wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

“Did I say you were? I found you once before, didn’t I? And I know where you live, too. But I never said a word, not to anybody. I said we were going to be friends then, didn’t I? Aren’t we still friends?”

“I … guess.”

“If we were enemies, I could hurt you a hundred different
ways,” I said softly. “I could hurt you right now. Very badly. Much worse than death, if I wanted. Two quick little pokes with this”—tapping the point of the Tanto lightly on his cheek—“and you’d never use your eyes again. But I’d never hurt a friend. I’d never
let
anyone hurt a friend, either.”

He wasn’t my friend, but I wasn’t lying to him. Torture is stupid. All it achieves is pain and terror. If you want someone to talk, you have to put more incentive in front of him than just making the pain stop. The thought of a hidden protector somewhere out in the darkness he prowled was stronger than any fear I could have induced.

He went silent again, but I could feel the calmness settle over his spirit.

“Just tell me about that photo. All I want to know is what was happening just
before
you took it. You were there, so you know. You tell me and I’m gone. Just like last time. I kept that promise, didn’t I? And remember what I told you then: someday, you may be thankful you have a friend like me.”

T
he body had washed up way north of where we live. Not far from where a huge chunk of concrete pier torn loose by a monstrous tsunami in Japan had floated all the way across the Pacific.

For a while, that pier had been a tourist attraction. Some just wanted to see it, so they could e-mail the sight to their friends, or post it on Facebook if they didn’t have any actual friends. Some brought metal detectors, “prospecting” for whatever valuables might also have made the journey. “Salvaging,” that’s how they’d describe their hobby. As if they were deep-sea divers taking risks, not scavengers looting a corpse.

Finally, the government managed to chop the whole thing up and turn it into concrete granules that could be used for road fill. “Recycling”—that’s a magic word around here. I knew
more about recycling than any of them ever would, but it wasn’t knowledge I’d share.

Oregon doesn’t have private beaches. You can pay millions of dollars for oceanfront property to sit out on your deck and watch the beautiful sunsets with nothing blocking your view, night after night. If you stayed there until after dark, you could listen to the sounds of eardrum-destroying “music” … and the accompaniment those lying on the sand a long way below you create when the meth kicks in. The next morning, you walk down your “private” staircase and self-righteously clean up the mess those disgusting people always leave behind. After all, you didn’t pay a fortune for a landscape of garbage.

All along the beach, skull-and-crossbones signs were posted, warnings of what people call “sneaker waves.” You can’t see them coming—they reach out like the tentacles of a giant octopus and pull you under. You just vanish, as if you’d never really been there at all.

That didn’t stop some drugged-out fools from sleeping under those signs. Or stop perfectly sober people from letting their dogs “run free.” Or not watching their kids close enough.

Every time one of those waves took a child, the sand would be dotted with heartfelt “memorials,” artistically arrayed by anguished locals. It wouldn’t do to plant a row of tombstones blaming the grieving parents—the self-proclaimed liberals who populate the coast would tolerate just about any lifestyle, but “anti-tourist” conduct was strictly prohibited.