Signwave by Andrew Vachss Page A

phone as I walked. He couldn’t be far away—I’d seen his truck parked next to Franklin’s before we started to climb.
    —
    H e wasn’t.
    “What?” came snarling through the earpiece of my cell.
    “It’s Dell, sir. I wanted to consult you on something, and Dolly said you were working in this area, so…”
    I’d said the magic word. The old man was waiting for me, sitting on a downed tree. His greeting didn’t change, though.
    “What?”
    “You know Sector 27? That chunk of land Dolly and her crew bought to build a dog park? Inside a much bigger one…303.”
    “Do I know it? I was the one who told her it’d be perfect.”
    “Something’s going on there. I don’t know what.”
    “With the land?”
    “Not that land. With the land along the strip, just across the road from it.”
    “What could be going on there? All the trailers are gone, except for that one at the west edge. And that one—it’s a meth lab. Either the cops’ll find it, or it’ll blow up,” the old man said, making it clear that either result would suit him equally well.
    “Some company’s been buying all that land. The strip, I mean.”
    “So?”
    “So Dolly and her girls traced it down. Then they let the paper know—”
    “I didn’t see nothing in the—”
    “Ah, I should have said this Internet thing.
Undercurrents
.”
    “I don’t bother with that stuff.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I told the old man. “Here’s what does: When Dolly sent the info to them, they ran it. And now they’re doing their own investigation. The deal with them is that you can send something in—info, photographs, whatever—and they may run with it or not. But, either way, they’ll never tell anyone where it came from.”
    The old man didn’t say anything; by then, he knew there had to be more.
    “The guy who runs the group who bought all that land, he told Dolly to keep her nose out of it.”
    “He
told
her?”
    “Not those exact words. He made it sound like a friendly warning. ‘I hope you aren’t running around half cocked,’ something like that.”
    “And you want to show him some land he might be interested in?” the old man asked, as subtle as a crowbar to the head.
    “Me? I wouldn’t do anything like that. But I sure would like to figure out what’s so damn important about that strip.”
    “Look, just because I like your wife doesn’t mean I lost my eyesight. So don’t play me for some brain-dead nursing-home case, okay?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    He gave me a long look. Then he just nodded his head, as if we’d agreed on something. “I’m telling you, that strip ain’t good for—”
    “I’m not arguing. But the land Dolly’s crew owns, it’s on the hillside that looks down toward the bay. The only thing it could be looking down at is that strip.”
    The old man dry-washed his hands. Big hands, as dark and gnarled as the ancient trees he loved. “I told Dolly I’d be poking around over that way,” he said. “The only access is pretty rough now, and there’s no place to park. She knows her club would need to buy some more property to make it work.”
    “I’d appreciate that, sir.”
    “You were a soldier, am I right?”
    I just looked at him.
    “That ‘sir’ thing,” he said, “you didn’t learn good manners in no prep school, ‘respect for your elders’ crap. You don’t make noise when you walk. So I figure, you must’ve…”
    I nodded. Let him take it any way he wanted.
    —
    “I t’s better if you hold it like this.”
    Franklin’s voice. He was showing Mack the best way to handle the lumberman’s ax he was using to reduce fallen dead-wood to chunks that could be moved away from the live roots they’d been impeding.
    “This way?” Mack asked, swinging with his shoulders, not just his arms.
    “That’s
good
,” Franklin encouraged him. “Mr. Spyros said we have to give those long roots more room.”
    “Hey,” I said, so they’d know I was coming. I’d had to learn to do