Signwave (11 page)

Mack's voice was flat and hard, the kind of hostile calm that scares people like them.

All three whirled. None of them liked the view.

“Who're you guys supposed to be?” the first one said.

“I'm a friend of Franklin's,” I told him. “A good friend. And this is a friend of mine”—quickly nodding my head toward where Mack was standing. “He wanted to meet Franklin, so I brought him with me. That's a problem for you, maybe?”

“We never saw you before.”

“You don't want to see us again,” Mack told him, very calm.

I watched their hands. Twitchy, but not ready to reach for anything.

Franklin opened his stance, but stayed as rooted as one of the trees he was working on. He wasn't sure what to do, not yet. But I knew what he'd do if any of the three punks moved toward me, and I didn't want that.

“Tough guy, huh?” their spokesman said. “I'm not fighting no pit bull.”

“Off!” Mack snapped out. Minnie hit the deck. Mack looked at the guy who'd been doing all the talking for the three of them, holding out two empty hands. “Feel better now?” he said, his voice as empty as a hollow-point slug.

“Look, we were just having some fun,” the spokesman said, turning to me, as if my age would make me more reasonable.

“Have it somewhere else,” I told him. “We don't like people having your kind of fun.”

“We can do whatever—”

“Whatever isn't the same as
wherever
,” I said.

“You own this property?” another of them whined. Not tough, looking for an excuse to go away.

“We're
standing
on it,” I said.

“Mr. Dell, they weren't doing anything,” Franklin finally said. “Really. They were just—”

“I know,” I assured the giant. Then I dropped my hands to my sides, stepped off to my right, and told the three punks, “We're all done talking.”

Minnie was still flat on the ground, but she never took her eyes off them. Mack rotated his head on his neck. The audible
crack!
was as loud as a gunshot in the still air.

They all walked off, their leader muttering under his breath. Bullies need to save face, but this lot wasn't stupid enough to make threats loud enough for us to hear.

—

“G
ee, Mr. Dell, I didn't expect to see you.”

“Actually, I'm looking for Spyros,” I said. “It was Mack who wanted to meet you, so I brought him along.”

“That's a pretty little dog,” Franklin said. I didn't see what gesture Mack made, but the white pit shot toward Franklin, leaping up at his chest. The giant caught her in the air, spun her around, and scratched her behind her right ear. “See, Mack! She likes me.”

“Of course she does, Franklin. She knows who likes
her
, too. You and me, you and me and Minnie, we're going to be pals.”

“If you're Mr. Dell's friend, then you're
my
friend, right?”

“Right,” I said over my shoulder as I was walking off. I didn't look back, already punching Spyros's number into my phone as I walked. He couldn't be far away—I'd seen his truck parked next to Franklin's before we started to climb.

—

H
e wasn't.

“What?” came snarling through the earpiece of my cell.

“It's Dell, sir. I wanted to consult you on something, and Dolly said you were working in this area, so…”

I'd said the magic word. The old man was waiting for me, sitting on a downed tree. His greeting didn't change, though.

“What?”

“You know Sector 27? That chunk of land Dolly and her crew bought to build a dog park? Inside a much bigger one…303.”

“Do I know it? I was the one who told her it'd be perfect.”

“Something's going on there. I don't know what.”

“With the land?”

“Not that land. With the land along the strip, just across the road from it.”

“What could be going on there? All the trailers are gone, except for that one at the west edge. And that one—it's a meth lab. Either the cops'll find it, or it'll blow up,” the old man said, making it clear that either result would suit him equally well.

“Some company's been buying all that land. The strip, I mean.”

“So?”

“So Dolly and her girls traced it down. Then they let the paper know—”

“I didn't see nothing in the—”

“Ah, I should have said this Internet thing.
Undercurrents
.”

“I don't bother with that stuff.”

“It doesn't matter,” I told the old man. “Here's what does: When Dolly sent the info to them, they ran it. And now they're doing their own investigation. The deal with them is that you can send something in—info, photographs, whatever—and they may run with it or not. But, either way, they'll never tell anyone where it came from.”

The old man didn't say anything; by then, he knew there had to be more.

“The guy who runs the group who bought all that land, he told Dolly to keep her nose out of it.”

“He
told
her?”

“Not those exact words. He made it sound like a friendly warning. ‘I hope you aren't running around half cocked,' something like that.”

“And you want to show him some land he might be interested in?” the old man asked, as subtle as a crowbar to the head.

“Me? I wouldn't do anything like that. But I sure would like to figure out what's so damn important about that strip.”

“Look, just because I like your wife doesn't mean I lost my eyesight. So don't play me for some brain-dead nursing-home case, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He gave me a long look. Then he just nodded his head, as if we'd agreed on something. “I'm telling you, that strip ain't good for—”

“I'm not arguing. But the land Dolly's crew owns, it's on the hillside that looks down toward the bay. The only thing it could be looking down at is that strip.”

The old man dry-washed his hands. Big hands, as dark and gnarled as the ancient trees he loved. “I told Dolly I'd be poking around over that way,” he said. “The only access is pretty rough now, and there's no place to park. She knows her club would need to buy some more property to make it work.”

“I'd appreciate that, sir.”

“You were a soldier, am I right?”

I just looked at him.

“That ‘sir' thing,” he said, “you didn't learn good manners in no prep school, ‘respect for your elders' crap. You don't make noise when you walk. So I figure, you must've…”

I nodded. Let him take it any way he wanted.

—

“I
t's better if you hold it like this.”

Franklin's voice. He was showing Mack the best way to handle the lumberman's ax he was using to reduce fallen dead-wood to chunks that could be moved away from the live roots they'd been impeding.

“This way?” Mack asked, swinging with his shoulders, not just his arms.

“That's
good
,” Franklin encouraged him. “Mr. Spyros said we have to give those long roots more room.”

“Hey,” I said, so they'd know I was coming. I'd had to learn to do that—I'd once made Dolly nearly jump out of her jeans years ago. “You never made a sound,” she'd said, hands on hips like I'd done something wrong.

There wasn't any point explaining that moving through brush like cigarette smoke through a mesh screen was ingrained in me. Too many years of training, too many years prowling hostile jungle—if they knew I was coming, they'd be waiting. Those times when fear was my most cherished friend. Now I always warn people I'm coming.

If I want them to know, I mean.

Franklin and Mack turned in my direction. Minnie was already looking, not making a sound herself, the tensed muscles twitching all along her hindquarters.

“Franklin's going to come over and show me and Bridgette how we can make a better yard.”

“Franklin knows his stuff,” I said to Mack.

“You know who's coming for a visit, Mr. Dell?” the big man burst out, unable to contain himself any longer.

“MaryLou?” I said. A safe guess—there wasn't another person on this earth who could get Franklin so excited at the prospect of a visit.

“Yes! She's got four weeks off. And now that I've got my own place, she wouldn't have to—”

“Why don't you bring her over for dinner?” Mack asked him.

“You and…you and your wife?”

“Sure.”

“I bet she'd love that,” the giant said. What he didn't say was that MaryLou would love the idea of Franklin's having a friend like Mack. The only other friend of his she knew about was me, and I wasn't her favorite person. MaryLou knew what I could do, and she didn't want Franklin learning any of it. Unlike most, she knew Franklin could learn all kinds of things.

“Then it's done,” Mack said.

The giant bent down and patted Minnie's shovel-shaped head. “MaryLou is going to love
you
, too,” he promised the pit.

—

“J
ust make sure she understands this isn't some kind of…social-worker thing, okay?” I told Mack.

“MaryLou's not
that
suspicious, Dell,” Dolly said.

“Not of you, honey.”

“
You're
the one that's suspicious of everyone,” my wife said. And I had no comeback—it was the truth.

“MaryLou knows I keep my promises” was the best I could do.

“Well, there you go. Isn't that enough?”

“You're probably right,” I lied. “Still, I'd really appreciate it if you'd just…”

“All
right
,” my woman said, as if giving in to a stubborn child. The truth is, she's the stubborn one in our family. Once Dolly plants her feet, a steamroller would bounce off her. She didn't know exactly why MaryLou was so confident that I'd keep my word, and it wasn't something she needed to know.

—

I
'd kept my promise to MaryLou when I tracked that pile of toxic waste to his new home in Denver.

He wasn't calling himself Ryan Teller then. I don't know what they put on his tombstone—or even if he got one.

So MaryLou believed that, when I said I'd do something, I would.

If she had so much as suggested that the boy she'd killed was “bothering” her, Franklin would have pulled his head off his body. But MaryLou was nothing like her foul little sister—she wouldn't use people, especially a man she knew truly loved her. And she knew I was a different species—I wouldn't care what I had to use to get something done.

MaryLou had come so close to throwing her life away on a psychopathic prodigy. Maybe that's why she was so fiercely protective of the only person in her world that she knew would never betray her.

—

“W
hen're we gonna see some damn action?”

I didn't know why that fool who spoke only the few words of French that La Légion required us to learn worked so hard at letting the rest of us know how eager he was to see combat. But even though I was still a very young man, I'd already learned enough to know he wasn't broadcasting to any of us—he was convincing himself. Trying to, anyway.

“That's not ours to decide,” Patrice told him, moving his head in the direction of the officers. His voice was low, but it carried.

Carried a message. More than one.

Idrissa shifted his body. Only a few inches, but it was a clear signal to those of us who knew him—not as a person, as a warrior.

The man so eager to see action wasn't going to return from
any mission we were sent on. Not because he would act foolishly in combat, endangering the rest of us. He'd never see combat—he wasn't going to survive the journey to reach the Blood Zone. How we explained his loss, that would be for later. But we could all see he was radioactive, glowing in the dark. Better if he was under the ground than walking it beside us.

In our work, there were no guarantees, only empty promises. We knew the truth—we wouldn't last any longer than the weakest of us did. We all knew that the best we could hope for was to increase our chances of survival. La Légion had its inflexible rules. We could all recite them by rote, but not a one of us would hold them higher than our own, single rule: do
anything
that might tip the odds in our favor.

So we always paid strict attention to scouting reports, but not necessarily so we could follow them. That would depend on what was known about the scout.

Some snakes are harmless, some are venomous. What we called a “carpet viper” is the same dirty-brown color as the trails we walked, and less than two feet long. But if one bites you, death is certain—its venom causes internal hemorrhaging. All the medics could do was to inject painkillers. A silenced bullet was kinder, and it preserved the meager supply of painkillers for the rest of us.

A python could be ten times the viper's size, but not really dangerous—it wouldn't attack anything the size of a man, and it couldn't kill with a bite, anyway. So the rule was:
any
small snake, you kill it.

But it would be Idrissa's blade doing that work, not my pistol. No silencer was ever as noiseless.

Too much patience can keep you silent forever.

I had to wait for the scouting reports to come back. But, in
this
zone, I trusted the scouts.

So it wasn't impatience that made me put together the
machine. But it was my training that made me disassemble it when I saw no message from the ghost.

—

I
was trained to move from one world to another, and return as if I had never left. But when I wanted to
stay
in that new world, I'd had to learn new rules.

When you cross such a barrier, you must become what is expected each time—reentry is the most difficult phase. Sometimes, the barrier is so wide that you might have weeks, even months, to study, listen, learn…and blend. But when two worlds run parallel through your life, there's no time at all—you are
always
a resident of both.