“That’s what I was saying before, about not being born with the damn disease. Emotional abuse, it won’t leave marks on the skin, but it digs in the deepest. There’s only one thing they all have in common—there’s nothing they won’t do to make those voices stop.

  “Some go catatonic. Some go mute. Some just make sounds. Some freeze their facial muscles. But the ones who really terrify people are the paranoids. Not the kind of paranoia that makes you think everyone’s plotting against you, the kind people make jokes about. You’d have to take that level of paranoia, multiply it by a hundred, throw in some magical thinking … and you’ve got some serious trouble.”

  “How could they tell what something ‘really’ means?” I asked him.

  “That’s what we call ‘ideas of reference.’ Like, if they stumble over a curb just before it starts to rain, they think their stumble caused the rain.

  “But the true danger is always the ‘voices,’ the ones only they can hear. A paranoid schizophrenic is perfectly capable of picking up an ax and chopping his way through a whole school bus full of kids, because that’s what the voices ordered him to do. They may look like kids, but they can’t fool the voices—the voices know those kids are really all lizards under their skin. Poisonous lizards. So he has to cut them open to see for himself.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah. This has got nothing to do with intelligence. There’ve been geniuses with schizophrenia, but the life they live keeps it at bay. Bobby Fischer was the greatest chess player on the planet until the voices got so strong that they took over his life. He was always ‘eccentric’ and ‘demanding’ and … well, pick any label you like. Then he suddenly stopped playing chess, started muttering about Zionist conspiracies—all out to get him, of course—before he died.”

  “And if the family has enough money …”

  “Sure. That’d do it. Instead of throwing him in some dungeon, they could keep him on an M&M diet.”

  I just looked at him.

  “Medication and maintenance,” he explained. “But the ones who don’t have a dime, they get their meds from the government.”

  “Those don’t work?”

  “The sad thing is that some of them work almost too well. Say nobody figures out that a brilliant college student’s a schizophrenic until his delusions get out of control. He goes on meds in some hospital, stabilizes … and they cut him loose. With a scrip if his family’s got money, with a Medicaid card if they don’t. What happens—especially with the highest-IQ ones—they figure they’re doing so good—you know, back in school, getting good grades—they convince themselves they’re ‘cured.’ They don’t need the meds anymore. And they hate the side effects, anyway. Doesn’t take too long after that before they’re back in some hospital. Or prison, depending on what the voices tell them to do. And some of those voices tell them to kill themselves … but not until after they’ve gunned down the whole audience at a movie.”

  “Jesus. But, once they’re back to doing okay, can’t you tell them that they need the meds to stay that way? Wouldn’t they be able to understand what’s happening then?”

  “You can tell them, sure. And we do. But, like I said, there’s so many really unpleasant side effects—to the meds, I mean—that they’re all eager as hell to come up with any excuse to stop taking them.”

  “Side effects like what?”

  “Tardive dyskinesia, that’s the most common. Those weird movements you see in some of the walking wounded around here. Like they can’t control the muscles in their face, or their arms. It’s embarrassing, and it’s painful. All the meds for schizophrenia are some form of neuroleptic—and the longer you use them, the more ingrained the side effects become. The meds designed to counteract the side effects only go so far.”

  “And they have to be on them for life?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Nice choices.”

  “Choices? Drug addicts, alcoholics, they’ve got choices. They know if they don’t stop they’re gonna die. And that last choice—too many make it anyway. For a schizophrenic, the only way they even understand there is a choice is when they’ve been stabilized on the antipsychotic meds.”

  “You’re saying you’ve only got the choices you think you have?”

  “Yeah. But the intensity varies with the individual. ‘Fineline’ used to cut himself. They had him down as a cutter—self-mutilation isn’t uncommon in borderlines. But we noticed he always preferred the most precise instruments he could find—he wasn’t cutting himself to feel something, like true cutters do; he was drawing. That’s when we realized what was really going on.

  “Now he’s okay about taking his meds. We don’t know why they don’t make his hands shake, and neither does he. But he doesn’t care. What he wants to do, the meds let him do, so he looks at them the same way a diabetic looks at insulin.

  “Truth is, there’s a lot we don’t know. Mental health is really in an infancy stage—there’s a lot more emphasis on what to call things than on how to treat them.”

  “Why?”

  “For the billing,” he said, with a laugh you wouldn’t want to touch with your fingertips. “A good coding-and-billing person can earn a better living than anyone doing my kind of work does. But when I’m paid by a program that’s run by any kind of agency—or even a whole county, like out here—they can bill my time out. I get freedom from paperwork, health coverage, a two-bit 403(b), and enough life insurance to bury me. They get enough to hire a dozen of their pals as ‘administrators,’ or whatever title they want to give them. A good grant-writer can turn a whole town’s problem into a financial surplus, depending on what’s fashionable.”

  “How can one kind of crazy be more fashionable than another?”

  “It depends on the area, for one thing. There’s so-called programs that say they ‘cure’ homosexuality. Now, that’s as crazy as any other delusion, but that doesn’t stop people from making the claim. Once they give some behavior a mental-health name, the government will help fund any state program that says it’s ‘curing’ it. Like … say, ‘pedophilia.’ That’s a crock. Even if a person could be diagnosed with ‘pedophilia,’ nobody would give a damn unless they actually did something. Sex offenders are scary, so ‘treatment’ programs for them always get money—probably every prison in America has one.”

  “Always comes down to the money, then?”

  “Yeah. That’s why, for this county, the most important thing I do in their eyes is getting my documentation in on time.”

  “Like a time clock?”

  “No. This isn’t punch-in, punch-out. I have to keep records of every interaction with every client, chart goals, progress … damn near enough to turn some of my clients into actual human beings instead of numbers.”

  “But not quite.”

  “No,” he said, back to that arctic voice. “Not quite.”

  Back at our house, alone with Dolly, I knew I had to decide, right then and there.

  This part of the coast, there’s no shortage of people who claim they can read your “aura,” tell you all kinds of things about yourself. I can’t do that. And knowing they can’t, either, isn’t worth anything to me.

  But I’ve always relied on trust—my trust. Not “voices” in my head, something that’s been in me ever since I can remember. All my life, I trusted whatever it was that told me “Run!” Or “Hide!” Or later, when I learned how … “Kill!”

  A working merc proves he’s passed all those tests just by saying where he’s been, and being alive to say it. It took me much longer to be able to listen and trust the one command I’d never heard before about a woman: “Love.”

  From the moment I first saw Dolly, she had a kind of rosetinted glow around her face. I could see it even when I was nothing to her but a wounded soldier fighting for money, and she was a nurse who hated all war.

  I thought it must have been the knockout shot they’d given me when they had to cut into my leg, but when I saw her years later, it was still there. It took me longer than that to realize Dolly didn’t have an “aura.” The soft rosy tint was the way my eyes saw her.

  Now my eyes can still see that glow around her face … and I can see when it changes color, too.

  If Dolly had said what she wanted me to do, I would have done it. But the only things she ever pushes on me to do are things to protect myself—those leafy vegetables, that’s an example.

  I knew asking her would always get me the same answer: only if I could pull it off without endangering myself. So—no answer at all.

  Okay, then.

  “The Nazi who got himself killed, he was on the run,” I told her.

  “From what?”

  “Other Nazis.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know why?”

  “No. But he was moving down the coast. Picked up some traveling cash from a crew of skinheads in Vancouver. After he left, three others showed up. A team, looking for him.”

  “So they were chasing him?”

  “No doubt.”

  “And they got their work done, so they’re not around anymore?”

  “Why would they be?”

  “How does this help Homer?”

  “It doesn’t. But if we find the men who killed him—even one of them, so long as he wasn’t a local—they wouldn’t be able to prosecute Homer.”

  “And then they’d kick him loose, you’re saying?”

  “You been around here for a while. This excuse for a DA we’ve got here, he’s going to need a rock-solid case—a case he can’t lose—before he’ll let Homer go.”

  “I know he’s weak, but—”

  “He’s fifty kilos below ‘weak.’ He knows this is all about how things look. Nobody wants Nazis around here—not visible ones, anyway—and nobody wants crazy people, either. He prosecutes Homer now, he can’t lose—see?”

  My wife said nothing, but the grim line of her lips told me what she felt.

  “You’re sure these will hold?” I asked Dolly.

  She looked up from where she was blotting a transfer screen of a swastika to the left side of Mack’s chest. He’d tried to refuse the hypo full of freeze juice—it was just a local, but he was going first, and he wanted to come across just as tough as he guessed I would. Dolly ignored him.

  And she didn’t even ask me about the injection. The ability to bear pain is something you can learn—but practicing the techniques can get you dead. I’d had no choice about learning, La Légion called it “entraînement.” It wasn’t until I got into the field that I learned that the techniques of pain tolerance are only useful for pain you can’t avoid.

  “These patches have to be kept moist,” she warned, handing over a bunch of individually sealed packets. “They’ll remove every trace, but they’ll leave a lightened area of skin behind, so have some dirt or mud or something like that handy before you start to scrub. You especially, Dell—a whitened area would show up on you much more than on Mack.”

  When Dolly was done, Mack and I looked like what we were supposed to be—a pair of hunters, tracking down a traitor.

  Mack vaulted into the open boxcar with ease—the train was crawling around the curve where we’d been waiting, barely moving. I tossed both duffels up to him, then jumped in myself.

  The car wasn’t empty. Three men, one woman. All in the corner opposite ours. Too dark to tell much more.

  Mack held a drop-point knife in his right hand—an all-black Böker I’d handed him before we started our ride, easier to handle than a Tanto. My hands were empty, but my jacket was open.

  The rules are simple: You don’t close ground unless you’re sure. Or desperate.

  They stayed where they were. I could tell they were talking, but I couldn’t pull out any words. As the train picked up speed, it got too noisy to even try.

  It was about twenty minutes before one of them stood up and started toward us.

  “Not unless you have to,” I whispered to Mack. Repeating what I’d told him while we were waiting for the freight to show.

  The guy was big. Tall and beefy. Could’ve used a haircut, but he was too clean to have been riding long.

  “You guys going far?”

  Neither of us said anything, both of us watching his hands.

  “We were thinking, maybe you got some stuff you want to trade?”

  “We’re good,” Mack said. Meaning the big guy was welcome to take that any way he wanted.

  “You like to meet the rest of us?”

  “No” is all I answered.

  “Hey, look, man, we’re all riding together. Just thought I’d be friendly.”

  Neither Mack nor I said anything.

  He stepped closer.

  “That’s enough,” I told him. There was more than enough daylight coming into the car for him to see the pistol he hadn’t seen me pull out.

  He jumped back like a cat who’d just seen a mouse turn into a rat. A hungry one.

  All four of them hopped down as soon as the freight slowed enough.

  “Now what do we do?”

  “Now we wait,” I told Mack. “We’re looking for circuit riders, not hoboes.”

  We didn’t find what we needed.

  So we jumped off, waited, and boarded a car heading back the way we came. This time, it wasn’t a long wait. Five of them. All male. They hopped on, checked the car, saw us, and flowed themselves into a loose semicircle.

  “You know what this is?” said a skinny guy wearing a faded red T-shirt, showing us his tattoo: the letters “FTRA” separated vertically and placed within the boxes created by a string of railroad tracks. He was wearing a bandanna, but it was too dark for me to make out its color.

  “Yeah,” Mack answered, pulling his own tee up to show the swastika. “You know what this is?”

  The five of them exchanged looks.

  “This is our car,” the skinny guy said. I guessed he was the spokesman. Nobody else seemed eager to say anything. None of them smelled of liquor. None of them looked nervous. In the world I’d left behind, “professional” meant you got paid for what you did. And you had to be good enough at it to keep doing it.

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my hand inside my jacket. “Your car. We get it. We’re not pro riders like you are. We’re looking for someone, and we got word he might be trying a freight, so we thought we’d check for ourselves. A long shot, but sometimes you get lucky.”

  “We’re not—”

  “We know,” I cut him off. “We know now, anyway. The man we want wouldn’t be riding with a crew. And he wouldn’t have your ink, either.”

  “How bad you want this guy?”

  “Bad enough.”

  “Bad enough to pay?”

  “Bad enough to pay what something’s worth. You guys, you’ve got a reputation. We respect that—and we’ll be jumping off next chance we get. Like you said, your car. But don’t think telling us you saw some guy a while back is gonna make you any money.”

  “How much money are we talking about here?”

  “Budget is seven. One for seeing him recently—that’d point us in the right direction. Another if that was real recently, so we’d have some chance of catching up. Three for where he is now, right this minute. And the whole bankroll for taking us to him.”

  They kind of looked at each other. Long enough for me to tell they were making up their minds about something. But about what? Try and fob us off with some bogus info? Rob us for the seven bills I said I was holding? What I knew they couldn’t do was take us to a dead man. So, if they offered to do that, I wouldn’t have much choice—wasting a couple of hundred would certainly be smarter than wasting their whole crew.

  “What if we ran across some guys looking for the same one you are?”

  “Be worth something,” I said. “Maybe worth something. Easy enough to tell.”

  “Yeah? How would you do that?”

  “If they were looking for the same guy we are, they would have told you what he looked like. Even showed you a picture. Maybe one like this,” I said, flicking at the FTRA boss the same rolled-up and rubber-banded photo I had of the dead Nazi.

  He caught it deftly. I didn’t have to tell him how to open it—he wasn’t scared the way the Vancouver boys had been. And he was going to do things the way he wanted, no matter what anyone told him.

  Whoever these guys were, they didn’t play games. The skinny guy didn’t even pass the photo around. He rolled it up, banded it, and tossed it back.

  “You got seven bills, I’ll tell you exactly where you can find him.”

  “Not what I offered. The seven is to take us to him.”

  “Money-back guarantee.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay. Hand over five, and we’ll tell you where he is. Right this minute. How’s that?”

  Mack opened his flashlight, played the beam way off to the side.

  “Understand?” I said.

  The skinny guy nodded. “Go for it.”

  Mack put the light on each of them. Face by face. The light was so soft it didn’t even make them blink. I’m not sure my pistol would have, either. But if they made me go that way, they wouldn’t have time to do much blinking.

  I reached in my pocket, used my fingers to pluck out the separately banded rolls of fifties, and tossed five hundred his way.

  “You came prepared, huh?”

  “I try to always carry what I might need.”

  “Okay, pal. Here’s where this guy you’re looking for is: go back in the opposite direction this car’s headed, cross the border to the next county, and that’s where he is. And he’s not going anywhere. The county morgue’s got him. His body, I mean.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You guys, whatever else you are, you’re not riders. Any rider would know—you stop off anyplace, first thing, you grab yourself a newspaper or two.”

  “You’re saying he’s dead?”