Signwave (17 page)

“What happened to…?”

“Those other girls?
Nothing
. They were just playing a ‘prank' on her. They never meant for any such thing to happen. One of them was so upset, they put
her
under a doctor's care! Some of the others, they even wanted to go to the funeral!”

If I'd been one of those girls standing in the same room as Dolly right then, I would have been frightened. My sweet, loving wife's face had tightened into the mask of a fanatic about to push a detonator switch.

“Some people just can't take it,” she snarled, imitating those she despised through clenched teeth. “You remember, that professional football player, he was a
huge
man, but he was so…so pressured by this other one—his ‘teammate'—that he had an emotional breakdown. Guess how much sympathy
he
got!

“Everyone circled the wagons around the man who'd bullied him. ‘Bullied'—there should be another word for what he did. He
threatened
that other player, even said he was going to do things to his
mother
. And this was no new thing for him, either. The bully, I mean. But all these ‘commentators' said,
Well, that poor boy, he should've just punched the bully in the mouth. This is a
man's
game, you know?

“I looked up some of those tough guys. One was a cokehead, another one a wife beater. And the toughest of them all was the one who ordered an underage prostitute from room service!”

“It goes both ways?” I said, making sure Dolly would hear it as a question, not a statement.

“What are you…?”

“I mean, do boys kill themselves, too? Teenage boys, if somebody plays that kind of evil little joke on them?”

“I guess they…could. But, now that I think about it, I don't remember ever hearing about one.”

“Because boys are, what, stronger-minded?”

“Hah! No, baby, it's because girls can be so much more vicious. Everyone knows some old biddies who could draw blood with their gossip. But this is different. The young ones today, there's
nothing
they won't do.”

“Oh,” I said, as if I'd just learned something. Maybe I had. I'd seen girls go after each other, clawing like wild animals. But the girls who hounded that teenager into suicide, there was nothing wild about them. They may have been as cold-blooded as cobras, but reptiles don't torture for fun—they just go after what they can kill, and avoid those who could kill them, moving as quick as a triggered reflex in either direction.

“So, if a grown woman got herself all dressed up and made up her face to look like she was just a kid, that could be her idea of a…?”

“A bully wouldn't do that, honey. It sounds more like one of those ‘escorts' that are always posting pictures of themselves.”

“You mean…?”

“Yes,” my wife said, a little calmer now. “
Une putain, non?
That is part of what the customer buys. That…fantasy, I guess you'd call it. A man could be treated like a cash register by his
own wife, but if he dares to spend some of his own money for the right whore, he can be King of the Castle. The boss. Master. Snap his fingers, and she'll do anything he commands.”

“That's only a—”

“It's as real as the customer
believes
it is, Dell.”

I knew she was right. A “window girl” in Amsterdam once paid me a lot of money to make her “man” dead. She told me she was used to doing anything the buyer wanted. “I'm just an actress,” she said. “It's a movie. I play a role. And I have to
sell
it—I have to make the buyer
believe
it.”

“So he'll come back?”

“He'll come back to
me
. And when he's with me, he's…I don't know, a big movie director, a race-car driver, an athlete….Whatever he wants to be, that's what he is.”

“That's expensive?”

“It depends. If all he wants is for me to make all those excited little moans, that's not such a big deal. But if he wants to be a slave master…”

“So you
make
money? And you give most of it to…?”

“
Most?
I give it
all
to him. I'm not a slut, I'm a
slot
. Customers don't see that part. I say ‘slot' because that is all I am to him—one of those cash machines. Different people make deposits, but he's the only one who can make withdrawals. If he
wants
, he might even give some of it back, like when I beg him for new shoes or something.”

“Why kill him, then? I'm sure there's plenty of others—”

“Not anymore,” she said, flicking on a light in the dark hotel room I'd been paid to meet her in. The left side of her face was scabbed and twisted; her upper lip on that side couldn't cover her teeth.

“Candle wax,” she said. “He heated it first, so I could see what was going to happen. Then he gave me a shot of heroin before he poured it over my face. When I came out of it, the
pain was so horrible I just screamed and screamed. This,” she said solemnly, pointing at her face, “this is me now.”

“But if you were earning so much money for him…”

“Oh, he could always get other girls. He always
had
other girls. This was a lesson. So other girls would know what would happen to them if they ever crossed him. They'd go from movie stars to skags that had to work in dark alleys just to make enough money to pay their rent and eat.”

“What had you…?”

“I hadn't done
anything
! And he
knew
I hadn't. He really didn't want to do this to me, he said. But it was like an…investment. That's what he said, just before he…”

“You must have been holding out, right? I mean, for what you paid the broker to get this done…”

“I
earned
that money,” she said. You could drop a fresh slab of raw meat on her voice; it would still be good a month later. “You don't even want to hear what I had to do. In fact, you'd have to
pay
me to tell you about it.” She kept talking, but a weird note throbbed inside her voice: “That's what they want, some of them, just to have you tell them. They all want the same thing, only some of them like it packaged differently.”

I slitted my eyes. As if she could read my thoughts, she flicked off the light.

“You'll do it, then?”

“Yes.”

“I know what you're thinking.”

I didn't say anything.

“You're thinking: Doesn't she want him tortured? Or acid poured on his face? Or even cutting off his…?”

I stayed quiet.

“All I want is for him to hear my name. Not my name, even—just the one he gave me. I want him to hear that ‘Heidi' paid for it. Before you kill him. You can do that?”

“Yes.”

“And you will?”

“Yes.”

She'd never know. I mean, she'd know he was dead—that news might never make the newspapers, but it would be all over
her
world in a couple of nights. The streets with their bright windows if the customer could pay enough, and dark, twisted little alleys if he couldn't. She'd never know if I said her name first, that part.

I hadn't. I might have, only I wasn't going to spend weeks scouting for a chance to get him alone. I knew the gambling clubs had doormen, and security people working inside. But once you left the club, none of that protection left with you.

Still, maybe she got her money's worth—the first shot from the little subsonic hardball probably did it, but the suppressor might have choked it down far enough that he could have still been alive for the few seconds it took me to empty the magazine into his eyes.

I don't know when the brain shuts down. There wasn't any blood; after I used my Saran Wrapped boot tip to roll him facedown, he just looked like a drunk using the gutter as a hotel room. He was already dead, but it might have taken him a few seconds to close off completely.

Later, I thought that if I'd just walked away after the first shot, he might have been found and taken to the hospital. They might even have saved him, but he'd be a drooling lump of flesh forever after that.

I tried not to think about how Heidi might have liked that even better.

—

H
ours later, alone in my basement, I kept working—probing the darkness of my mind.

“Cui bono?”
Always the assassin's first question.

You might think this a contradiction. But I had always heeded Olaf's words. If there was only one person who profited, it wouldn't take the police long to start looking at that person. And anyone who paid others to kill for him leaves a human chain of potential informers. If one of those links broke…

I worked on my breathing until I slowed my heartbeat down to what the best snipers need for their work. Then I started on my list:

LEAVE IT!

I came out of wherever I'd gone with a start, that inner-screamed warning still echoing. I knew what that meant—I'd come to a fork in the road, and not recognized it until I'd already gone too far down the wrong one.

Trust it
. I could feel those words. Luc's? Olaf's? It didn't matter, not then. If you try analyzing the motives of a man shooting at you before you dive for cover, you might as well shoot yourself. I went back to where the road had forked:

THERE!
my deep-wave subconscious screamed. Loud enough to wake me up.

—

I
knew there was no point reaching out to the ghost so soon.

Oh, he'd pick up whatever I sent, but he wouldn't stay around after he answered—that's why I had less than a minute to write it down before the screen would flicker a warning, then go blank. I didn't understand how he did what he did, but I knew he wouldn't tolerate “conversation” again so soon. An open connection was against all his rules, and his rules were the only ones that mattered.

But I wouldn't need a cyber-genius for some of what I needed to know.

When I went back upstairs, Dolly was alone in the kitchen, tapping on her tablet, Rascal at her feet. The sun was just coming awake in the east. Soon the birds would start their screeching for their breakfast.

I never look over Dolly's shoulder when she's working, unless she asks me to. It wouldn't be right. I have my basement; what privacy did Dolly have?

“Hungry?” she asked, not looking up from whatever she was doing.

“Just want some juice,” I told her as I opened the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of that red-orange-colored stuff that Dolly made herself. I didn't know what was in it; she called it “jungle juice.” I knew some of her girls liked it, but she didn't force it on them. Me, she kind of did. I knew I was supposed to have no less than three full shots a day when I was home.

“That's not breakfast.”

“It's all I—”

“Then open the breadbox and tear off the end of the baguette in there. It's yesterday-fresh.”

I did that.

Then I sat right across from Dolly, chewing slowly, washing every bite down with a sip of her concoction.

“What?” she finally said.

“I didn't say anything.”

“Dell, how long is it going to take you to learn? You think I can't hear you talk just because you don't speak out loud? I know you could sit there for hours, waiting for me to finish whatever I'm doing. I'm not going to be able to finish
this
for a few days,” she said, hitting a key that made her tablet beep. “So?”

Arguing with Dolly was always a waste of time, especially when she was right. “Remember when you told me about how people could pretend to be other people on…Facebook, and stuff like that?”

“Yes,” she said. She said it patiently, tapping her nails against the butcher block so I'd know she really wasn't.

“You can do it with pictures, too? Of yourself…Well, not really of yourself, pictures of someone else.”

She made a “Get on with it” noise.

“Isn't there a way to tell if someone stole a picture?”

“Sure,” she said, leaning a little forward. “It's so easy that I don't know why these kids don't do it. Or maybe it's that they
won't
do it. I think…I think it's like those crazy karate movies—you know they can't really be flying around and kicking each other ten feet off the ground, but you never say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because
everybody
knows it. So if you say it like you're telling them something you know, they go, ‘Like, who
doesn't
?,' ” my wife said, switching to that teenage-girl voice that comes out of her mouth as naturally as French does—Dolly's bilingual in English. “There's a term for it: ‘suspension of disbelief.' You volunteer to do that when you go to one of those movies. Or read a
Batman
comic, stuff like that.”