Shockwave by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online

Africa
, I thought to myself.
If they’d ever confederated … But those tribes never will. Why join forces to fight off non-native invaders? They know they’ll eventually go back to wherever they came from. Then the different tribes can start killing each other again. Just like they were before strangers with a different skin color showed up
.
    “Anyway. It wasn’t counseling gamblers that got Laura in trouble on the rez—it was working with young girls.”
    “She changed her own job?”
    “No. She added to it. Her forty-hour week was more like sixty. But she did break a lot of their rules. Like when an Indian woman—no matter how young—gives birth but she can’t take care of the child. Or doesn’t want to. Or even … Well, it doesn’t matter. If the baby ends up a candidate for adoption, their rules are that only an Indian family can adopt.
    “There was this one case: a newborn baby was put in ‘foster care’ with a Mexican family for nine years. But when that family wanted to adopt him, the tribe objected. They
objected
when the only family that baby had ever known wanted to adopt him! There’s some federal law that lets them do that, and they won in court.
    “But there
wasn’t
any Indian family that wanted to adopt a child that age, so guess what? Back to foster care, only with a
different
family!”
    “That’s nuts,” I said, my mind flicking back and forth between “the only family that baby had ever known” and “nine years”—the age I’d probably been when I escaped from that “clinic.” It took more effort than usual to push all that back where it belonged, but I managed it. “Anyway, don’t they have Mexican Indians? Like Aztecs and—”
    “It’s not the same thing. Not to them. And you’re right, that
was
nuts. And Laura said so. In public.”
    “They fired her for that?”
    “They said she wasn’t fired, just ‘laid off.’ But nobody could miss the message. By then, she was seeing so many school-age kids that she had a … ‘following,’ I guess you’d call it. So, when that nasty old crone that used to be the guidance counselor at the high school retired, Laura got the job.”
    “ ‘Nasty old crone’?”
    “That’s what the kids always called her,” Dolly said, making it into an unchallengeable truth. “All of them. If any of them had a … secret of some kind, or even wanted to talk about how they were feeling, she was the
last
person they’d pick.
    “Besides, nobody really wanted that job. It doesn’t pay much, and the only other applicants were just college grads, without a counseling license.
    “Laura didn’t have any political backing, but you’d be surprised at how many people told the school board that they wanted the most qualified person for the job. Maybe it’s all those school shootings—” She cut herself off, and I stepped in quick, so her last words wouldn’t just hang in the air.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised,” I told her. “Anyway, with that psycho who blew himself up building a pipe bomb a while back, and then that … horror show in Connecticut, folks would
want
the early-warning signals now.”
    “Uh-huh,” Dolly said, not interested in going any further down that trail. “
Now
can we get back to why that homeless guy couldn’t have been the killer?”
    “What’s that got to do with Laura?” Which got me another acidic look from the only person I loved still able to walk this earth.
    “Laura is what they call a ‘sit-down therapist.’ This kind of thing, that’s Mack’s work. I told him I’d let him know. When he could come over, I mean.”
    My wife was telling me she’d given her word. That was enough. If your word doesn’t mean much, neither do you. So you can’t just warn anyone off—a threat is a promise. And my life was a simple equation: you hurt my Dolly, you hurt me. I was taught very early on—you let anyone do something bad to you, they’ll come back and do something worse. Since then,