Signwave (25 page)

“On parcels this PNW Upstream group owns?”

“Yes. But that's not the…the
all
of it. There has to be a road built to get
to
those parking spots.”

“Even so…”

“Even so,
nothing
! If the town takes the land by eminent domain, it has to
pay
for it. Full market value—whatever that means. And, remember, they have to supply electricity to the strip, too. To light up that ‘wave' at night.”

“So the taxpayers…?”

“That's what I thought, too. But Benton, he had all that covered. His group is going to build all kinds of special shops along that strip. Rent them out. Plus, they expect to make money from the parking. So this hedge fund, it's going to give us all that for free! Clear the land, build the bridge, and even pay the electricity bill. Pretty nice, huh?”

“What else?” I asked her, knowing there had to be more. If Dolly was this hot, it wasn't over losing land for a dog park. With this “fair market value” coming into the picture, her crew would come out way ahead. And land wasn't that scarce around here that they couldn't just buy some other parcel.

“The council says, after the land is cleared, and the bridge built, and the wall in place, and everything, then there's a way for the town to turn a big profit, too! The
town
, not the hedge fund. A ‘convention center.' A big one, with hotel space attached, so people could come down to the coast to have their annual meetings and things like that.

“There's plenty to do here, and conventioneers, they always
have money to spend. We can't have a casino, not with the Tribe so close by, but it's not much of a drive if you want to gamble. And they were talking about bringing those MMA fights here. Big-name acts, too.”

“And the hedge fund would own it?”

“No! We'd own it. The village, I mean. You know how much that would cost, just to get it built? Sixty-five million dollars!”

“Where would…?”

“Municipal bonds.” Dolly chopped off what I was trying to ask and got right to it. “It turns out that there isn't a single GO bond issued by this entire state.”

“You're losing me, honey.”

“Ah…” Dolly exhaled. Then she started brewing herself a cup of tea.

—

E
ven Rascal relaxed as Dolly sat down.

She threw him a rawhide chew, said some sweet things to the mutt, and laid it out for me.

“It works like this: a GO bond is a tax-free municipal bond, backed by the full faith and credit of whoever issues it…which means that the investors get paid back from government revenue. Fancy word for taxes. Oregon doesn't issue them, because this state doesn't have the credit rating of a deadbeat dad. But individual cities can issue them, usually only on a project-specific basis.

“Say they want to improve a road where it passes through the town. They can issue these bonds, but the full-faith-and-credit deal only applies to the revenues of an individual department, not the whole government. So, say ODOT—Oregon Department of Transportation—doesn't get enough revenue coming in from the new highway. Well, that's just too bad for the investors.

“And what
that
means is two things: one, taxes go up; two, the bonds have to pay a pretty high interest rate to attract investors. The smaller the municipality, the higher the rate…in both directions.”

“The council can't just decide to raise taxes, right?”

“No, they can't. In fact, there's a state law that prohibits bonds from imposing too high a percentage of property taxes on any community. But there's one exception to that law. If the town
itself
votes for it, they
can
issue those bonds.”

“Why would…?”

“I already told you, Dell. People
want
this ‘wall' thing. It doesn't matter what you call it—they want it
bad
. They don't see it costing
them
much of anything, not really. But, given the sixty-five million—and you know
everything
that gets built runs over budget; it's actually
expected
to—just to put the place up, the bonds may not sell all that easy.

“
That's
the joker in the deck! Amazingly enough, PNW Upstream is willing to build the whole thing—convention center, hotel, the golf-cart transport system so tourists can drive around for free, and not pollute the environment, of course. They'd run it, too.”

“Damn! That's a bigger score than a thousand kilos of dope. All legal, too. Between the graft on the contract to build it—”

“With local labor.” Dolly dripped scorn over the garbage dump. “An endless stream of revenue; all of it high-profit,
no
-risk…it's a beauty.”

“Too late for
Undercurrents
to expose…?”

“There's nothing
to
expose. So the hedge fund makes money—who cares? People are getting what they want, and it's not coming out of their own pockets.”

“The taxes—”

“Like I said, they'll go up a little bit. Not nearly enough to start a tax revolt. Sure,
Undercurrents
could expose that this
whole thing was a staged setup from the beginning, but there's no one really interested in that kind of news. It's the
result
people care about, and this result is one they
want
.”

“No one's going to raise a stink?”

“Fait accompli,”
my wife said.

—

S
ome people get confused by logic—their emotions fog the mirror.

Olaf had taught me never to make that mistake, months before he spat out his last will and testament through the blood frothing his mouth.

“All true logic centers in mathematics. All else is nothing but perception. And emotion clouds perception, making the picture even more hazy.”

“I don't get it,” I told him.

“A
refusal
to understand is no different from volunteering to be stupid.”

“I'm not—”

“Shall we see?” the icy man asked. He wasn't taunting me. Olaf didn't do things like that, amuse himself by mocking others. I'm not sure he did
anything
for amusement. He stood apart from the rest of us. Not physically; he was just on a different level inside his head. It was only because he could occupy that ground without judging the rest of us that I had ever gathered the courage to begin to speak with him. After that, he was my teacher.

Pressuring him to say “yes” or “no” was a bad move. Just a couple of weeks before, a Slavic thug who I knew from my legionnaire days was trying to get some players for the dice game he always set up whenever we made camp. He never changed his pitch: “Afraid to risk a little cash, pal? We're out here risking our damn
lives
, what's a few bucks?”

He hadn't been stupid enough to try that on Idrissa. The Senegalese warrior didn't always understand English perfectly. If he thought he was being called any kind of coward, his long, curved sword would flash and blood would spurt. Idrissa carried his weapon on a leather strap that he could cover if we were in sunlight, but he did his best work in the darkness.

But I guess the Slav thought Olaf's age and his Nordic skin made him a better target. Like I said, Olaf was very good with his “scribes.” But if you didn't force his hand, you'd never know that.

Olaf's spikes were always out of view. And he never seemed to carry them in the same place.

Nobody mourned the Slav. It wasn't like La Légion—mercenary commanders never demanded explanations when they saw a dead body lying just past where we camped. We weren't “comrades in arms,” we were hired guns. And we didn't bury our dead unless we were going to be in the same place for weeks—vultures are afraid of live humans, but they have more patience than any of us do.

“Yes,” I said to Olaf's proposal.

“One plus one equals two?”

“Yes…,” I said, kind of wary. Olaf didn't mock, so there was something behind that simple question I knew I was missing.

“That would be true if it was, let us say, one rock plus one rock. That would be two rocks.”

I didn't say anything.

“But rocks can range from pebbles to boulders. One man plus another man
could
be a force equal to five men. Or putting them together could result in the death of both—so
less
than one.”

“But—”

“We are walking a trail when we pick up the enemy's spoor. If I toss you two grenades, what do you do with them? If you perceive them as weapons to be used against the enemy, you
silently signal your gratitude. If you perceive them as duds, you know that
I
am your enemy.”

“You wouldn't do that.”

“Why?”

I was about to say, “Because you're my friend,” but I could see that would be a wrong answer, so I said, “Because you'd have to carry those duds around with you. Extra weight. And for what? If you wanted to kill me, you could just do that.”

Olaf nodded. “That is a logical conclusion. But it is
your
logical conclusion, based on
your
perceptions. Worse, it assumes I
share
your logic. Who would carry dud grenades in some insanely elaborate plot that had such a small chance of success? And the very real possibility of death if it failed?”

I shrugged.

“Then listen: an insanely elaborate plot would seem quite logical to an insane man.”

“But you can't walk around assuming everyone you meet might be crazy.”

“Why?” Olaf said. “Why must that be so? Is it some law of nature I don't know about? If it is logical to be suspicious of all strangers—and that
is
logical—why is it not logical to include the possibility of insanity in your assessment of others?”

I wasn't a kid anymore. I didn't have Patrice, and that hurt. But I wouldn't have needed him to teach me things I'd already learned. “Whether you get shot in the heart or you get your throat slit, you're just as dead.”

“Yes. But there is a significant difference between the two.”

“Dead is dead.”

“So—no difference, then?”

“I don't see one.”

“You could be shot in the heart from a half-mile away. But your throat could be slit only by someone who was able to get very close to you.”

I nodded my head. What Olaf said was obviously true. But it
wasn't until he was dying that I realized that what he had been trying to tell me wasn't about logic at all.

—

I
thought about that. All the different pieces of it.

People say things like “Why would a man with millions of dollars steal?” as if they were employing some form of dispassionate logic. But I knew better. Some people do things because they
need
to. A wealthy man might not need money…but he might need to steal.

So, yes, there was a mammoth pile of money in the whole scheme—not a guarantee, but certainly in potential. Still, whenever I went over the whole thing, it reminded me of Olaf's “insanely elaborate plot.”

Posing as gay, a patron of the arts, a community activist for years. And
then
putting a lot of pieces together: bribes, graft, kickbacks. Why go to all that trouble for money when you already
had
money, especially when you risked
losing
money if some thread got pulled and the whole thing unraveled?

I let myself fall into those thoughts, releasing a carrier pigeon with a question I couldn't be sure would be delivered, much less that an answer would be returned to me.

It ran through my mind like a ribbon unrolling.
Why pay a prostitute when you could get all the women you want for free?

And Olaf was there, watching. Logic inside the illogical. You pay a whore to
be
a whore. Not to use her body for your own pleasure, to use it for your own purpose.

Rhonda Jayne Johnson wasn't Benton's creation. She had probably been doing business for years before he found her. Maybe it took him a while to find another use for her than he originally intended.

Or maybe he didn't find that other use until she showed it
to him. A blackmailer threatens to expose secrets; a traitor sells them. It's not a long leap—blackmailers and traitors usually have the same motivation. They both gather information—the only difference would be the methods. If Rhonda Jayne Johnson had threatened to expose Benton, she would have investigated him much more deeply before she ever voiced a demand. She wouldn't have to know her client's endgame, only that piercing his disguise would ruin it.

Just wave the wand—that magic, expensive wand—and I can be whatever you want
.

Blackmail is a dangerous game. Some will let you bleed them white, but others will see the end coming and tie a tourniquet into a noose. If suicide seems the only way out, homicide instantly becomes another option.

Selling information is a much more lucrative occupation. The opposite of extortion—the more you tell, the more valuable you become. That was why I'd let the half-completed “agency” slip out. And why I'd spelled out “honey trap” to make sure the founder of
Undercurrents
got the message.

Dolly's e-mail to
Undercurrents
had started a tiny little campfire. One that Benton thought he could extinguish by casually spitting on it. He didn't know Dolly, but he knew Rhonda Jayne Johnson. At least he thought he did.

—

I
waited for Dolly to take off for one of her meetings.

I knew that she wouldn't be going alone, and that her crew would stop for coffee after it was over.

The time window was an easy three hours. I didn't need more than a few minutes…provided I could find Mack quick enough.

I didn't want to go to his house. Bridgette always contorted herself to stay out of any conversation if she thought it was
business. I once told her that nothing I'd want to talk to her husband about would be about his clients, so confidentiality wasn't an issue.