Shockwave (10 page)

“None of us is going to be on any
WANTED
poster. And they know if they arrested any kids who left one of those lame group homes, those same kids’d be back with us in a couple of days anyway.”

“Sure,” Mack said, not necessarily agreeing, more like acknowledging without passing judgment.

“I was just saying what I did before because I had to make sure the others didn’t think I’d give Homer up. Some of them, they’ve been with us long enough, it wouldn’t be a question. But we’re always getting new kids coming around.”

He turned to me, his face saying he was asking a question, but his lips didn’t move. A test. I was used to tests, and this was easier than most.

“You’ve got to show that you don’t ‘cooperate’ with the
law,” I said. “You never give up a member. And you’ve got to see if any of the new ones are plants, too.”

“Yeah? How would I know that? The last thing you said, I mean.”

“A planted informer would want to get close enough to hear anything you might be saying.”

“And how would I know
that
?”

“You? You’d probably have people you trust watching them, see if they tried to get closer to where we are.”

“That’s right,” he said proudly. “But you’d never know they were there.”

“Yeah, I would.”

“Really?” he said, more sarcasm than question.

“Nobody’s tried to get closer,” I said. “And I didn’t have to interview any of your people to know that.”

“You sure?”

I made my voice come out tired-sounding. “Tell you what: We leave now, no more conversation. We come back tomorrow. Give you all the time you’d need to find out if I was right.”

The redhead gave me the long, calculating look of the day-to-day survivor. “You got some strange friends,” he said to Mack.

“Skilled ones.”

“What’s the difference?”

“When someone has skills that you don’t, you slap labels on them. Labels like ‘strange.’ Labels like they slapped on
you
until you got it together enough to change your address.”

“You got those skills? The ones he has?” the redhead asked Mack, tilting his head in my direction.

“Not in places like this. In a big city, yeah … some of them, anyway. But not here.”

“I know. I mean, we all know you’re from Chicago. To you, this place must look like a jungle.”

“Some parts of it, sure.”

“Not to you, right?” the redhead said to me.

“To me, too.”

“I don’t get it, then.”

“Jungle doesn’t look strange to me.”

The redhead touched his right ear.

“That. But this, too,” I told him, touching my left eye with one finger and my nose with another. I didn’t have the time to explain pattern-disturbance signals to him, and I’d only scare him if I did.

Probably scare him even more if I told him I’d been within twenty meters of his band not so long ago. I periodically check the terrain all around where Dolly and I live, making sure I can blend if I have to. And not just at night: I’d been even closer to the birders—mostly old people who walk around with binoculars looking for a new species to add to what they called their “life lists.”

I’ve got one of those myself, but it’s not on a piece of paper … and there’s no birds on it.

He gave me a look he’d been trying to learn from Mack—he had to have spent some time in institutions to learn the value of mastering that. He had it down pretty well. Not as good as Mack, but damn good for his age.

He’d have to practice a lot more years before he got close to Mack, and he’d never get close to how I’d learned—been forced to learn. His life had probably been hard enough that he’d never believe how fortune had blessed him.

“J
ust start at the beginning,” I said.

He gave Mack a look. Just a quick glance to lock in that it was okay to talk to me. But then the understanding that Mack wouldn’t have brought me unless it was hit home; he scrunched his eyes closed, trying to concentrate.

It took a minute for his screen to clear. He started speaking, like he was reciting something he’d memorized:

“We were all down for the night, except for Jesus,” he said, saying it like “Hay-Zeus” so I’d know he meant the Spanish kid. “Homer had shown up around … I’m not sure, maybe just before five. He’s always careful to be quiet so he doesn’t wake anyone. This time, he just rolled out his blanket—we all pretty much have our own spots.”

“When the cops came …?”

“Oh, we were mostly
all
up by then. We have to make sure everything’s cleaned by daylight. It’s not like this spot belongs to us or anything—the old guys, they take a place and mark it, but we can’t do that.”

“You’ve got—what?—at least a dozen in your crew, maybe more than that, right?”

“So?”

“So how come you can’t hold your spot against the old guys?”

“They’re not like
old
old. More like, you know, adults. They’ve got … options we don’t have.”

“Weapons?”

“That’s not it. Any crew who lives outside has blades, hammers, stuff you’d need to make a shelter. But the older guys, they’re, like, permanent, you know. Not like the circuit riders. So they know we’re all … we’re not where we’re supposed to be, okay? All they’d have to do … just one time, and we’re burned.”

“Do what?”

“Make a phone call. To the cops, or CPS, or anyone who’s supposed to be looking for us. Then we get sent back. Sure, we don’t stay, but it breaks us up, and it takes a long time to put everything back together.”

“They mark their spot, you leave it alone. You try and mark
yours, they might want it for themselves. And you don’t want that. Not because you’re afraid of them, necessarily—it’s just not worth what it could cost.”

“Yeah,” he confirmed.

“These ‘circuit riders,’ they respect the marks, too?”

“They don’t respect nothing. But they don’t want cops looking at them, either.”

“Okay,” I told him. I needed what he could tell me about Homer—I’d get Mack to explain some of what he said later.

“We saw the cops before they saw us, but, close to the underpass like we are, we just waited on them. If we booked, some of us would get away, like always. But I gave the signal to hold—I could tell by the way they came in they weren’t looking for runaway kids.”

I made a gesture he’d understand, asking him how he knew.

“Four cars, two unmarked. Means they’re looking for someone who maybe just shot at one of them. That happens around here more than you’d think. Some guys go meth-wild. They see a cop, they get all paranoid. And everyone’s got
some
kind of gun, it seems like.”

“Except you guys. And maybe the ones you call ‘permanent’?”

“Yeah. I mean, how stupid would that be? Anyway, sometimes all the cops are looking for is information. You know, like, did we see a man in a red coat an hour ago? We always tell them anything we know—and we don’t make stuff up. It’s like this contract—we do that, and they don’t bring any of us in, like they didn’t see us.”

“So the guys you call ‘permanent,’ they all carry some kind of ID?”

“Yeah. They can even list their address as ‘homeless,’ and that’s okay … around here, anyway. But this time the cops
were
looking for someone, only they didn’t have a description or anything.”

“They asked you about seeing guys with tattoos? Shaved heads? Jackets with Nazi stuff on them?”

“Yeah,” he said, speaking softer. “How’d you know that?”

“Just a guess.”

“Sure,” the kid said, side-glancing at Mack again. “Only we hadn’t seen anyone at all. No strangers. But then Homer just
has
to show them this watch he found somewhere. A minute later, they’re dragging him away. He starts screaming, like he always does when he wants people to back off, but it didn’t work. I mean, they didn’t pound on him or anything, but they wrapped him up good, tossed him in, and took off.”

“When you say Homer showed the watch he found to them, how did he do that?”

“I don’t get what you’re—”

“Did he just hold up his wrist, or did he take it off?” Mack cut him off.

“Oh. Okay, he took it off. Carried it over to them. He was talking about how God tossed it up from the ocean so he—Homer, not God—could tell time or something. It gets so foggy around here, sometimes it’s pretty hard to know when morning’s coming.

“One of them—a guy wearing a suit, so he must’ve been a detective or something—he really looked it over. The watch, I mean. I didn’t hear him say anything, but—
snap!
—they all kind of surrounded Homer. I’m not sure what they said to him, but that’s when he started screaming.”

“T
he permanent homeless the kid was talking about, those are the same ones you said had e-mail accounts?”

“Yeah. Homeless-by-choice, high coping skills.”

“And they’re not the kind to welcome strangers? So those ‘circuit riders,’ they wouldn’t find a spot with them?”

“No,” Mack said, not a trace of doubt in his voice. “The circuit riders aren’t always the same ones, like this was a stop they make every year. Could be FTRA, or—”

I made an “I don’t get it” gesture.

“Freight Train Riders of America. Pretty much what it sounds like. They live on trains, all over the country. Some of them will drop off anytime they want to, usually when they need something. Then they’ll just hop the next thing smoking. Some of them know each other pretty good—the longer you’ve been riding, the better the chance of that.”

“Hard guys?”

“Some of them, sure. And in a pack …”

“But they’re not on the run?”

“I guess one might be, every so often. But that’s not what their thing is about. If one of them jumped off in, I don’t know, Salem, say, and did something he could get himself pinched for, he’d get back on the rails fast. If he was to run across guys he trusted, he might tell them. But most of the time, you’re really talking about some kind of no-contact stealing. Restocking provisions, not armed robbery.”

“They can’t be the only ones riding.”

“They’re not. But if you ride alone, or even with a couple of buddies, you’d want to step off if you saw them coming.”

“So this ‘circuit,’ it could go anywhere?”

“Sure. And there’s been some guys who use the rails the same way other guys use cars, if you see where I’m going with this?”

“Serials.”

“Yeah. Rapists, thrill killers, all kinds of very bad guys. But they almost always work alone. Sometimes, two do everything together—the ugly stuff, I mean, not like two pals traveling together. But that’s pretty rare.”

“So, no matter if it was this FTRA crew or a loner, they
wouldn’t be jumping off to kill someone. Someone
specific
, I mean.”

“I don’t see it. I mean, you’re right—the sex-kill guys, they just take whatever’s available. But a big robbery, no way. That takes planning, and a place you can stash whatever you took. And a contract killing? Who’d hire guys you might never see again?”

“So, no matter how you add it up, there’s no way Homer killed that Nazi?”

“None,” he said, his pale-blue eyes calm but sharp-focused.

“I
want to be sure I have this down right,” I said.

Dolly was listening to me, but looking at Mack, hard. Waiting for him to verify it if I did. So I went on:

“The permanent homeless, the only real difference between them and anyone else is that they don’t live indoors.”

Mack nodded.

“That crew of youngsters, they all come from different kinds of places, but they all … escaped, went AWOL, or whatever they call it.”

He nodded again.

“And those two groups, they don’t mix.”

“No.”

“And the crazy ones, the ones you see walking around, they don’t get together?”

“Not like the others. Some of them even say they’re married. But that’s two people, not a whole group. They’re usually in their own world, each of them.”

“So that’s at least three groups the businesses who make a living off tourists wouldn’t want around.”

“Wouldn’t want them
visible
. The permanent group, they
know that song by heart. So do the kids. The kids don’t
want
to be visible, anyway.

“A tourist sees some of the permanents, he probably figures they’re out on a camping trip. No big deal. But the ones who walk around drooling, talking to themselves, scratching at their faces—
they’re
the ones the businesses don’t want around their places. That’s why they created this job. My job, I mean.”

“Those circuit riders—”

“If they’re any good, nobody sees them. For those, it’s always hit-and-run, sometimes for no longer than just between freights.”

“What about the professional beggars?”

“The ones you see in wheelchairs with signs—‘Wounded Vet,’ ‘Will Work for Food,’ ‘Out of Work, Out of Luck.’

Those?”

“Yeah.”

“They know what they’re doing. This place is way liberal on just about any issue you could come up with, but if a merchant doesn’t want any pro beggars outside his place, all he has to do is make a call—the cops will move them out. Quick. There’s places where it’s okay for them to set up shop, and they all find out about that, sooner or later.”

“The cops … You talked to them about Homer?”

“Talked to one I know. He told me they
had
to hold him. Homer had the dead man’s watch, and, for now, that’s all they got.”

“He couldn’t be convicted on just that, could he?” Dolly asked.

“Not by a jury, I don’t think. But any lawyer they give him won’t be thinking about a trial—Homer’s the perfect NGI. No way he could even be competent enough to understand what’s going on. No matter how this plays out, unless they find whoever took out that guy who washed up on the beach, Homer’s going inside.

“Jail or a mental hospital, it’d be the same to him. The voices would come back, and they’d have to blast him with meds just to stop him screaming. Outside, he can handle it—sleep all day, only go out when it’s dark; that seems to do it for him.”

“Dell …”

“I
’m not a detective,” I told Mack, later.

He gave me a look. “Who said you were?”

“Sometimes, Dolly thinks I can do things.… You know, women, right?”