Free Signwave by Andrew Vachss Page B

up.”
    “How quick does he find her?”
    “How quick?”
    “Yeah. She’s been here, what, three, four years?”
    “So?”
    “So he’s been looking all this time, and now he’s found her?”
    “Oh. Yes. That’s what happened. That’s why she only just told Laura about it.”
    “There’s a law against that, right? Stalking, or something.”
    “That’s only if he
does
something. He can
watch
her all he wants.”
    “She has a Facebook page?”
    “So—you
do
listen once in a while, huh?”
    “Dolly…”
    “No, she
doesn’t
have a Facebook page” was my wife’s tart response. “She isn’t in the phone book. She doesn’t even have a landline, just her cell. And she’s changed her e-mail address, too. More than once. But now that he’s found the place where she works, all he has to do is follow her home one night.”
    “Sure. But what makes you think…?”
    “He walked right into the place—they do men and women both, so it didn’t seem strange. The girl at the front pointed him to her station. Probably figured she was doing Cordy a favor—her chair was empty. He sat down and told her he wanted a haircut. She said she wasn’t cutting his hair. Ever. And you know what he did? He complained to the manager!”
    “She shouldn’t have to—”
    “Oh, she didn’t. I mean, the manager, Liz, she told the guy he wasn’t welcome in her place. She’s tough, Liz. We all went down to Legal Aid, but they said there was nothing we could do unless he had a record. A record of assaulting her, I mean. Or if she had some kind of Order of Protection.”
    “Couldn’t she get one?”
    “She tried. But the court they sent her to, they said she needed proof that she was in immediate danger.”
    “Wasn’t she?”
    “Not as far as
they
were concerned. When he beat her up the last time, that’s when she took off. All the times before that, she never reported him to the police.
Now
she would, but he’s not going to do that again.”
    “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