Free Shockwave by Andrew Vachss Page B

recognized it immediately for what it was—that wasn’t Luc’s training, any mercenarywould have seen that kind of thing many times. So I left the scene untouched, and went hunting. I wasn’t seeking “justice” for Alfred Hitchcock. I wasn’t after revenge. I was responding to a cancerous tumor that had already grown too close to my Dolly. I couldn’t kill the tumor, but I could kill its carrier.
    “And it
looks
like a cell phone?” Dolly asked me.
    “Like
your
cell phone,” I said, taking the duplicate from my pocket and holding it out to her.
    “T his was no send-a-message beating,” I told her a few days later, pointing at the computer’s big HD screen. “This was a killing. A planned-out killing.”
    “How—?”
    “See how his skull was punctured right down into the brain, and then a triangular wedge pulled out? That’s a move you have to practice to be any good at.”
    “It looks like it was something like your … What do you call it?”
    “A Vietnam tomahawk,” I told her. I’d been carrying one when the people from her team had picked me up. It had worked so perfectly the first time I’d been forced to use it that I’d vowed never to be without one again. It’s an ax on one side, with a long spike on the other.
    If the Nazi the ocean had dumped on that beach had been hit from behind by a man who knew how to use such a weapon, the killer wouldn’t have pulled back after the first strike, he would have pulled
up
.
    “If people like him—the dead man—if people like him were thinking about setting up shop here, couldn’t he have ended up being one of those heads on stakes?” Dolly said, unable to keep the hopefulness from her voice.
    “If that’s what whoever killed him wanted, they would haveleft the body where it fell, not tossed it over into the water. For all they knew, it might have stayed in the ocean forever. And they were in a hurry to get out of there.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Those gashes on the body,” I said, moving the cursor over the screen to blow up each of them as I spoke, “they’re from the razor rocks. Not deep enough to keep internal gas buildup from pushing him to the surface. The killers would have known that—they’d have opened him up if they’d had the time.
    “If there was a river or a lake to dump the body in, they could have
taken
the time. But who knows when some early riser is going to come strolling down the beach? And the ocean—they couldn’t have known how deep it was, or where the body might float to. It might never come up at all. Orcas hunt out there, too, right?”
    “What are you saying, Dell? I thought you and Mack were going to—”
    “We still are. But that’s only to see if Homer said anything to anybody. And even if he did, so what? A crazy man talking to some runaway kids, that’s no kind of evidence.”
    “But Homer’s still in jail.”
    “I don’t think he’ll be there long.”
    “Even on a murder charge?”
    “Come on, Dolly. How many times have you heard your friends say that this weasel of a DA we got here isn’t going to even
think
about putting someone on trial unless he’s got a case that can’t be lost? ‘Soft as warm custard,’ that’s what they say about him. And that was
before
the whole town turned on him after his office managed to lose a murder case where they had security-camera tape of the whole thing.”
    “It wasn’t that he lost the case, Dell. It was that he shouldn’t even have brought it to trial. If he’d known about that Tiger Ko Khai bunch, it—what MaryLou did, I mean—it wouldn’t have happened at all. But he didn’t know. Or didn’t care. I mean, thecops knew, but even
they’d
stopped arresting the leader—they knew he’d never go on trial.”
    “Okay. You’re right. But it doesn’t change anything. This Homer guy, no way he killed a man, especially one that size. The dead guy sure didn’t turn into any ‘flab bucket,’ did he? That autopsy said he weighed