Shockwave by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online Page A

it’s been very simple: hurt me, you won’t get another chance to do it again. Ever. But all I said was “It’s your house, Dolly. I’m not—”
    “Dell,” she said, hands on hips to let me know she was really running out of patience, “it’s you I want him to talk to. And you know damn well it is. So I’d have to make sure you weren’t planning on being off somewhere when I tell him—”
    “Tonight’s fine,” I cut her off, this time earning a dazzling smile and a sweet kiss I didn’t deserve. All I wanted was to get whatever this was over with, and I knew the only way I could do that was to show Dolly it had nothing to do with us. Or her girls.
    I ’m not a hermit, but in a town this size, I’d already been way too visible for my taste.
    Dolly, now, she was all over the place, all the time. That was fine with me. And it was no secret that we were married. When we’d walked away, it was understood between us that I was finished with what had once been my work. I’d never expectedthe same from Dolly. I knew healing was in her blood. And I needed to believe that killing wasn’t in mine.
    So I’d gotten used to the flocks of teenaged girls—and the boys who kind of followed them around—being in the house. And to Dolly going off to one of her endless meetings—I guess “fights” would be a better word, like when the town tried to close the animal shelter. But the last time I went back to my past, I’d reacted as if I’d been waiting for the chance. That state of readiness bothered me—I didn’t want to go near that place again.
    That last time, everyone knew “Mighty Mary.” But how many knew that Cameron Taft—the man she gunned down in a high-school corridor—was the boss of a gang-rape “society”? One that only plucked the lowest-hanging fruit: girls who were underage, undesirable, and unwanted by anyone else. Those who
did
know never told anyone, not anymore. What would have been the point? When the earlier victims had told the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner on duty in the ER exactly what had happened to them, when the SANE nurses immediately reported the rapes, complete with their own medical findings for confirmation, nothing happened. Nothing at all.
    After a while, everyone believed the gang rapists who called themselves “Tiger Ko Khai” had some kind of special immunity.
    I found out a lot of things then. In between the work I’d had to do and a jury finding MaryLou not guilty, a lot of … violence took place.
    And even after that verdict, I’d killed another man. That was keeping my promise to MaryLou—the promise that had finally convinced her to help the lawyer we’d paid for and the experts Dolly had assembled to defend her.
    Before that, she’d been a stone.
La mission est terminée. J’ai fini. Il n’y a rien d’autre à faire
. I’d seen that look before, when I soldiered for La Légion. Always the same: “The mission is over. There is nothing left to do.” Nothing left of me, either.
    That tree had been pulled out by its taproot. Chopped up into stakes just right for impaling. Those heads turned into skulls, now surrounding the village.
    It wasn’t my job to protect anything other than my own perimeter. If Dolly hadn’t pulled MaryLou inside that perimeter, I wouldn’t have done a thing.
    So I’d listen to whatever this Mack guy wanted to say. And then the only work I’d have to do would be to keep Dolly from pulling him or whoever else he might be talking about inside our perimeter. If what he wanted was money to hire a lawyer, I knew a good one, right in town. And we had the money, too. But that was as far as I was prepared to go.
    L a Légion held all kinds of men, the full range of the human spectrum.
    But we lived under the same rules, some official, some cultural.
    To ignore orders when there were no officers around to enforce them was part of that culture. As was hero worship of men who had most flagrantly disobeyed
all
rules, those who
chose
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