Signwave (9 page)

“Why are you so sure?”

“When he…when he beat her up, it was when they were living together. So that would be ‘domestic violence.' The way I understand it is that the cops
have
to arrest someone when they're called out on a case like that. Around here, the way they get around the law is, they arrest them
both
. That means the woman has to have her kids get picked up by CPS. If she has a dog, the dog has to go to a shelter. And even if they cut them both loose, it all depends on whose name is on the lease. Or who owns the house.”

“I didn't know any of that.”

“Why would you, Dell? It's not like you're…I don't know…‘interested' in that kind of thing. But the cops, they're
supposed
to be interested. Once they passed a law about ‘mandatory arrest,' the cops use the threat of taking the woman in, too. As soon as they hear that, most women will forget about pressing charges.”

“They don't live together anymore.”

“No. No, they don't. But she—Cordy—she still gets the shakes even
talking
about it. He told her—before, I mean—he told her that if she ever tried to get away from him, he'd find her. And he did. He even sent her a letter last week.”

“Isn't that enough to…?”

“No! It was just one of those stupid ‘Can't we try again?' cards you can buy in any store. It's not against the law to ask someone who broke up with you to give you another chance.”

“How did she meet him?”

“Why does that matter?”

I just looked at her. She was close enough to touch by then, but I didn't reach out my hand—I just waited.

“She used to live not far from Eugene. There was a poolroom close by. Not some dive, a very nice place. They even had leagues and everything. This man—Donny, everybody calls him—he's very good. At pool, I mean. Won all kinds of trophies and stuff. That's how he got to meet her. They ended up on the same team—looking back, she knows that wasn't some accident—and they even won some league championship. The team, I'm talking about.”

“Huh!”

“What does
that
mean?”

“Nothing, honey. It's just that he's the kind of creep who follows women around. Not because he loves them, because nobody leaves
him
, right?”

“Yes.”

“So I was just curious how he got together with your friend.”

“Dell. Dell, I am
serious
now. I was
not
trying to get you involved with this. We'll handle it.”

“Who's ‘we'?”

“Just me. And Laura. And Bridgette. He's not going to threaten any of
us
.”

“Okay.”

She gave me one of her “I can see right through you” looks. Only she couldn't. So it was like when one of those teenagers always around the house says, “Oh, my mother will
kill
me if she finds out.” That girl's just amping it up—she doesn't think for a minute that her mother's going to take her life.

—

“W
hat now?”

“Your wife.”

“Bridgette? Who…?”

“Nobody. Not yet, anyway. But my wife just
had
to go and tell her about her friend, Dolly's friend, I mean, and Bridgette wants to trap this guy with—”

“Wait! Slow down. Just start from the beginning.”

So I told Mack everything Dolly had told me. Maybe amping it up just a little.

—

T
he house was dark, but that didn't mean he wasn't there.

“There's a nice spot just down the road,” I told Mack. “Drop me off there. Then go over to the poolroom. The fancy one, with all those colored tables. Here's his photo. If you spot him, ring the number I gave you. Ring it
once
. Then move off and put the end of a lighted cigarette to the photo. One
poof!
and it'll disappear.

“But keep watch. As soon as you see him move, push the number-seven button on this,” I told him, handing him a burner cell.

“Then what?”

“Then snap this piece of plastic crap in two, pull out its chip, and scatter the pieces on your way over to pick me up again.”

—

T
hey take trophies.

This guy earned his, I guess. Sure had enough of them, scattered all over the front room of the house he lived in. A couple of them were heavy—glass crystal, etched with his name and whatever he got them for. I'd brought the bag because I didn't want to make any noise as I dropped them all in, one after another.

Still no vibration from my phone, so I had time enough to find half a dozen different cue sticks, racked point-up on his bedroom wall like they were standing guard. They were really nice ones, the kind that you screw together. The one with the gold-inlaid butt-piece was by far the fanciest.

I took all but that one. And I still had enough of the padded cushions inside the golf bag so all I needed was a flat rock behind his house and a few cracks of my tomahawk to turn his fancy cue into fragments.

As I worked, my mind flashed to when I'd vowed to always carry that tomahawk with me in the field. Back to when I'd used it to fashion the crude crutch that got me to the field hospital where Dolly's team had set up. I didn't know it was there—all I knew was that I had to get as far away from the blast scene as I could. When I came around, there I was. And there was Dolly.

Maybe I was more superstitious than I'd ever admit.

As soon as I finished, I went back inside and scattered the cue shards all over his top sheet. Then I pulled the bedspread back over it.

It was almost three hours before my phone throbbed.

Mack was at the pickup spot way ahead of time, like I expected.

“What happened?” he asked, as I slid into the front seat.

“Tomorrow” is all I said.

I was back inside the house before Dolly. So I didn't even have to bribe that mutt of hers into silence.

—

“T
his is a rule of life,” Olaf had once told me. “Any terrorist can be terrorized.”

“How do you know that?” I'd asked him.

“Physics” is all he said, as if that one word answered all the questions in the universe.

Maybe he was right. I'd never seen anything that contradicted him. So I was ready when Dolly dropped the question on me, just before I fell asleep. When you…Well, I guess I only know about me and Dolly, and she always called sex just another kind of communication between people who loved each other. “You can't
make
love,” I'd heard her explain to a group of those girls once. “You can have sex if you get talked into it. To ‘prove' your love, something like that, you know what I mean. But if you really love someone, and they love you, too, sex will show up all on its own. It's like a play: if a character makes an entrance at the wrong time, it ruins the whole thing.”

“Put a ring on it, Tontay!” one of them cracked.

“Anyone can
buy
a ring,” Dolly shot back.

“You're saying we should all be virgins—”

“I'm not saying anything like that.” Dolly turned to face the girl who'd been expecting a different answer. “All I'm saying is that sex isn't love. People can have sex, but they're not ‘making love,' see? Virginity isn't some medical thing. You can be first-time pure in your heart no matter what you did with your body before…”

She let the sentence trail off, settling over her girls like a comfort blanket over a baby.

None of them noticed me as I slipped past.

—

L
ater, I thought about what Dolly said.

And I realized she'd known I was there all the time. She was talking to me, too, not just to her girls.

So we waited until we…finished, and she was curled up inside my arm, before she said, “Donny left town.”

“Who?”

“Donny. The man who had been stalking Cordelia.”

“Oh. Maybe he was just passing through.”

“Stop it, baby. I don't know what you did, but you made him go.”

“Me?”

“Oh, go to sleep,” my wife whispered.

—

I
didn't go far.

Those cursed woodpeckers. Not the red-topped kind in the cartoons. These were flickers—big birds, with a black patch on their throats and salmon-colored underwings.

They had a whole forest to bang away in. And I'd been good to them, too—I made a bunch of nesting boxes and stuck them up on square stakes of pressure-treated lumber, about eight feet off the ground. You'd think they'd be satisfied with all that. Not a chance. Some of them pounded on the bat houses, too.

Now,
those
I really cared about. Where Dolly and I live is a long way from where I'd been hit with malaria, but mosquitoes really spook me. Even standing water gives me the creeps. So I put together the bat houses very carefully. I followed all the instructions to the letter—even if the small opening wouldn't keep some birds from nesting, the depth would. Then I applied coat after coat of flat-black, and fastened them to much higher stakes, with a three-piece sheet of green plastic riveted under the box to help keep the insides cool no matter what the daytime weather was.

And it worked. Sometimes you could hear the bats at night. Most of the time they were noiseless, but they gobbled every mosquito around. In the summer, the girls would always be asking Dolly how come her yard was never buggy. She'd tell them about the bats. Some did that “ee-you” thing. Bats were just so disgusting.

“You don't have to play with them,” my wife would say.
“They only come out at night, anyway. And if you like mosquitoes, there's plenty of places where you can go and find all you want.”

But those damn flickers were relentless. I stood there and watched one of them hammer away at the sides of a bat house for ten minutes straight. Like he was drilling just for the hell of it—he'd never find a single bug inside that pressure-treated wood, but he just kept at it, anyway.

At first, I figured if it was okay with the bats it was okay with me. But one day I saw some of the green plastic dangling from its rivets. That's when I realized that, if I wanted to keep things the way they were supposed to be, I had to be as relentless about maintenance as the flickers were about drilling.

There wasn't any other option: I couldn't exterminate the flickers without putting the whole place out of balance. I didn't know what role they played, but I knew they were there first. The bats were the intruders, and I was the one responsible for bringing them in.

So, every couple of weeks or so, I made the rounds, checking on the bat houses. Most of the time, they were fine. When they weren't, I used an aluminum ladder to get up high enough to put them right.

Every time I did that, I wondered if those damn flickers were watching, waiting their turn.

—

W
hen I got back inside, I went down to my basement and assembled the machine.

|<1,000 shares @ US$5,000. Full as of 2011. Only investment activity, purchase 100% share of TrustUs, LLC. Cost $225K. Remainder still in Fund.>|

I hit
|>Thx<|
and unsnapped the two halves.

Five million dollars. Two hundred and twenty-five thousand to buy total ownership of that LLC. The other $4.7 million and change just sitting there, waiting for…what?

People with money always want more money. Some just gamble blindly; some think they're getting inside info.

But this was tying up a
lot
of money, like putting greenbacks in Mason jars and burying them in the ground.

I could make guesses, but that's all they'd be.

“Benton” kept running through my head.

I tried writing down some questions, but I had to make them precise. The cyber-ghost had no use for adjectives.

So I'd have to wait until Dolly was alone upstairs.

—

“H
ow much land have they bought up, that LLC?”

Dolly didn't bat an eye. “So far?”

“Yes.”

“Reach up and take down the plat map, Dell. The one with the strip running along the bay. It's marked in orange….”

I brought the map over to where Dolly was sitting, laid it down in front of her, put a hand on her shoulder, and watched her uncapped gel pen as she traced it out for me.

“Starts here,” she said. “Looks like someone just made a random choice to buy that lot to give his single-wide a home, but it's actually the borderline between our village and Bayside Bountiful.”

“What's the—?”

“That unincorporated slice that runs all the way up through here,” Dolly said, anticipating my question, her fingernail tapping the point around a foot away from where the thin orange line started.

“It's all these trailers? The ones that don't get city services?”

“Except for this spot, right at the end. There's nothing there, and it doesn't look like there's ever going to be.”

“I don't get it. What's all this got to do with your dog park?”

“I don't know. Not yet,” she said, in that promise-threat voice that comes out of her mouth every time she smells a rat. “But we're going to find out before this is over. There's got to be a reason why one corporation would want all that land. And if a town votes that it
wants
to be annexed, and the town next to it wants that, too…well, it's going to happen.”

“How can a corporation vote? I mean, you can't own a town, can you?”

“I don't know. But Tova says a corporation is just like a person when it comes to some things. So maybe there
is
a way.”

“You think it's something like a trade? This ‘Bayside Bountiful' place, if it becomes part of the town, it gets those services—electricity and all—but it'd also have to pay taxes.”

“Sure. But if it had all those services, then the land would be worth more, too. And that's just it, Dell. Worth more to who? What good is electricity and water and garbage services and all that if you're not going to
build
something?”