Strike Dog (35 page)

She shrugged and looked at one of the notepads on the table.

“Are you into Gaelic punk?” she called out.

She had pulled him into a vortex of non sequiturs and illogic, and he was having a hard time keeping up. “Huh?”

“Rud,” she said, pointing to his notepad. “Are you interested in Mill a h-Uile Rud?”

He said, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“It's a punk band from the Seattle area. I think the name means something like ‘destroy everything,' or something like that.”

“Gaelic?”

“Yeah, Scotland, Ireland, even Wales, I guess. It all derives from Celtic,” said Karylanne.

“How do you know that?”

“Some of Walter's teammates were big into punk. There's a retired prof in Houghton who knows all about Gaelic punk. He taught at U of M in Ann Arbor I think.”

“What's his name?”

“Flaherty. He was an English professor and he's a computer nerd, but most of all he's a hockey freak. He skates with the boys sometimes, eh. He's in his sixties, but he moves around pretty good, and Walter said he's slick with the puck. He has an over-thirty team called the Galloping Gothinks.”

“Gothics?”

“Go-
thinks
. It's a play on words.”

“Flaherty?”

“Yeah, but all the boys call him Knickknack. He has team dinners at his house once a month during the season, and the place is filled with all sorts of weird and cool stuff—suits of armor, things like that. He's got one of Tony Esposito's old Tech sweaters in a frame on the wall.”

Esposito was a Michigan Tech alum and an NHL Hall of Fame goalie. “What do you mean he's a computer nerd?”

“One of the guys on the team told Walter that Flaherty's a big-time hacker. His specialty is getting into closed university collections.”

“To do what?'

“Read and learn, what else?”

“I thought hackers screwed around with things.”

“Mr. Service, you really ought to find a way into this century. Hackers exploit holes in software to help make it better. Crackers are the ones who inflict damage.”

“Flaherty, a hacker who knows Gaelic,” he said.

“I'm not supposed to know about his computer life. See, by accessing closed collections, he saves money and time he'd have to spend traveling, and after he's seen what he needs, he lets the collection keepers know he was in and how he got there. He's like ancient, but a way-cool dude.”

“Do you know him?”

“Sure, I used to go to the dinners with Walter and the team.”

“Where are you staying?” he asked Karylanne.

“I had a place in Houghton with Walter.”

With
Walter. “You two were living together?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maridly knew.”

“She did, did she?”

Walter had been living with this girl and he hadn't known. What else had he missed in his son's life, and why hadn't he paid more attention?

“She used to drive over and have dinner with us.” Nantz hadn't told him.

“Do you know where Walter and Nantz were going when they crashed?” he asked her, already knowing what she'd say.

“I wish I did,” she said. “Maybe she was taking him shopping. She sometimes did that for us.” There was a lot Nantz hadn't told him. But if he'd been less thickheaded, he might have seen things himself.

“You drove here tonight from Houghton?”

“Yeah, I have to go back to Canada. I sort of ran out of money, and the landlord sort of kicked me out.”

She was acting tough, but he saw fear in her eyes. “You're not going to Canada tonight,” he said.

“I don't want to impose.”

“If you're pregnant, Karylanne, I'd say that makes us related, and I don't turn family away.” Not that he'd ever had any family before Nantz and Walter. For the longest time there had been just him and the old man. He didn't count his ex-wife.

He pointed to the footlockers. “The only bed I have.”

“No offense, but that's
not
a bed, eh. I've got my sleeping bag in my car. The floor and my air mattress will be fine.”

While she was getting her sleeping bag, Grady Service sat down and tried to focus on something,
anything
. Grandfather? Holy shit! Nantz would have been sky-high. He wasn't sure
how
he felt about it. He felt oddly grateful to Karylanne for being pregnant with Walter's child. This baby would be his only link to Walter, however tenuous.

Denninger called at 6 a.m.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Home. What a day and night. Charley the Turd lost his cool yesterday and jumped me. I had to whack him behind the leg with my baton. I swear the earth shook when he hit the ground, and then he started complaining of chest pains so I had to call EMS and haul his worthless ass to the hospital. I took his father with me and it turns out he's eccentric, but pretty decent. He said they were computerized until this summer, but somebody got into their program and poached their lists.”

“Did they report the theft?” Service asked.

“No. Charley the Turd just dumped the program and went back to the old way.”

“Any idea who it was?”

“No clue, but the old man thinks it had to be one of their customers. They had a rudimentary Web site, and the guy must've come in through e-mail.”

“What about Charley the Turd?”

“Not a heart attack. Turned out to be gallstones. The doctor says he may wish it was his heart in the long run.”

“Can you write this up for me?”

“Planned to.”

“Don't send it electronically.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe I'm old-fashioned like the Mains.” Or he was suddenly feeling very insecure about the security of the cyberworld. He gave her his Slippery Creek address and she promised to send the report. He knew his apprehension about computers was turning into paranoia.

“Great job, Denninger.”

“My name's Dani.”

“Great job, Dani.”

47

HOUGHTON, MICHIGAN
JULY 30, 2004

Karylanne called the retired professor in the morning and rode to Houghton with Service. The house on Seventh Avenue was multi-gabled and painted several shades of black and blue. A sign on the lawn said
house of dark light.

“Did I mention he's Goth?” Karylanne asked.

Service had to think for a few seconds. “You mean, the name of his hockey team?”

“No, his lifestyle.”

Another pause. “The freak-jobs who dress in black and paint their faces white?”

“Pretty much.”

They parked in the street in front of the house and went up to the porch, where they were greeted by a young woman in a tight, slinky black outfit and black Mary Janes. Stiff red ribbons stuck out of her glistening black hair like stalagmites. She wore a see-through black blouse and some sort of vinyl gismo underneath.

“Ice-jock girl,” she greeted Karylanne. “S'up with the turkey bacon?”

“A friend.”

The girl smiled at him, said, “S'up,” in a cutesy voice, and slithered past them.

“You know her?”

“She's an instructor in computer engineering.”

“Turkey bacon?” Service asked.

“Technically it means security guard, but more generally, any police officer.”

“I'm not in uniform,” he said.

She laughed. “Yeah, like
that
fools anyone.”

Flaherty looked almost normal. He was average height with white hair in a buzz cut, and one tiny gold stud in his right nostril. “Service?”

“Grady.”

“I'm sorry about your son. He was a great kid, and he was going to be an outstanding player. Heard you were a player too.”

“Pleistocene age,” Service said.

They were seated in an old-fashioned parlor. There was a suit of armor on a pedestal in one corner and a broad-blade ax with a six-foot handle on one wall.

“Is that real?” Service asked, pointing to the weapon.

“It's a replica of a Viking battle-ax,” Flaherty said.

“How could anybody use that thing?” Service wondered out loud.

“Teamwork,” Flaherty said. “Something to drink? Beer, soda—name your poison.”

Service wasn't thirsty, and by the looks of the place, he didn't have a lot of faith in what might be served. “I'm sorry to drop in like this,” he began, “but I'm working on an investigation of a hacker who calls himself Rud Hud, or Check Six. We're trying to identify him.”

Flaherty said, “I thought the police had unlimited cyber assets.”

“Not the DNR,” Service said, not bothering to amplify. “Is it possible to find someone's real name based on a screen name?”

Flaherty smiled. “Handle is what it's called, and sure it's possible . . . depending on how the guy operates.”

“Karylanne thinks the name is Gaelic.”

“No doubt,” Flaherty said. “I'll have to play around with it some. How quick do you need the information?”

“Yesterday,” Service said.

“I'm good, not God,” the retired professor said with a grin.

A boy came through a door wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with
bad cop! no donut!

Service blinked as he read the shirt.

Flaherty waved to the boy, who moved on through the house. “Atmosphere getting to you?” he asked Service.

“Some.”

“Don't let their getups throw you. They're normal kids—if you ignore their IQs. I assume you already considered the obvious with Rud Hud?” Flaherty said.

“The obvious what?”

“Rud Hud Hudibras, which in Welsh is
Run baladr bras
.”

“You call that obvious?”

“For some old English professors it is. You familiar with Geoffrey of Monmouth?”

Service shook his head.

“He wrote a history of Celtic kings, basically those from the period when there was no written language.”

“If there was no written language, how did he get his information?”

Flaherty grinned. “There's a big debate about that, but it's probably a product of oral history. Others say it's a hoax, that he fabricated the whole thing. But in recent years scholars have found correlations in various sources like grave registers. In any event, Geoffrey's work gave a face to the unknown history of Britain and King Arthur, and the Round Table probably grew out of it. Kind of like
Lonesome Dove
for us, you know—we'd like to think that's how we were. No archaeological substantiation, of course, but hell, most Britons think Arthur was real.”

What the hell did cowboys in
Lonesome Dove
have to do with King Arthur? “And Rud Hud?” He was having a terrible time keeping up with the professor.

“Troy fell, Aeneas and his son Ascanius split to Italy. Long story short, Ascanius had a son named Brut whose mother died in childbirth. Later the kid accidentally killed his father in a hunting accident, and he was banished from Italy and eventually ended up in Britain as Brut the Trojan, aka Brutus, who started a line of Celtic royalty that lasted two thousand years. A few steps down the generational ladder you find one Brutus Greenfield, whose son Leil followed him as king, but toward the end of his reign, Leil went sort of dotty, and his son, Rud Hud Hudibras, had to step in and get the kingdom under control. This would be at about the time Solomon was operating in Israel, to give you some sense of time frame. Ninnyevent, time marches on, and later we get a Celtic king named Uther Pendragon, who may or may not be the Arthur of legend,” said the Flaherty.

“This is for real?”

“It all stems largely from oral traditions, same as the Bible. Is
that
real? A lot of people think so. Tell me what you know about your Rud Hud.”

“He thinks the feds aren't doing their jobs right.”

“
Really,
” Flaherty said. “That sort of fits.”

“Fits what?” Service was lost in a lot of historic mumbo jumbo.

“Rud Hud more or less reformed his enfeebled old man's kingdom and ruled it for almost four decades. Centuries later, an English poet named Butler wrote a burlesque, a comic satire about the roundheads and Puritans and how they turned British society upside down. Using Rud Hud Hudibras as his model, he called the hero of his poem Hudibras, who was a sort of religious colonel who went out to clean up society in the way the Puritans wanted to, only he pretty much screwed up everything he touched, which made the ­Puritans into a sort of joke, which they were in many ways, except to those who died at their hands or for their bizarre reasons. It was a damn brutal satire, somewhat along the lines of
Don Quixote
. Based on this, I'd guess your Rud Hud took his name to express his interest in reform, and I'd also guess he's exquisitely and classically educated. Most English students, even those with doctorates, don't know diddly-squat about Rud Hud Hudibras.”

“Anything else?”

“You know anything about hackers and crackers?”

“Only what Karylanne told me,” said Service.

“Interesting crowd. They usually don't play well with others and have poor coping skills in terms of face-to-face interpersonal communications, but put them in the privacy of their own hidey-holes with a computer, and they are unbelievably competent communicators. They've evolved their own language, mores, rules, you name it. If your Rud Hud is as educated as I'm thinking he is, I'm guessing he's also pretty sophisticated in the cyberworld, which means he could be difficult to find.”

“Whatever you can do,” Service said. “I appreciate this.”

“Don't thank me until you see what I come up with,” the retired professor said with obvious excitement at the prospect.

Service couldn't get the ax on the wall out of his mind. “You're interested in Vikings?”

“Yeah.”

“You said something about teamwork.”

“The Vikings liked to close en masse with their enemy, shields joined, and once joined, they broke into separate individual combats. But the warriors carrying the big battle-axes couldn't swing them
and
protect themselves with a shield, so the shield guys moved ahead of the big ax guys, who would step up and attack from behind their shields—your basic two-v-one in hockey.”

“You know about the blood eagle?”

The English professor chuckled. “You mean the legendary and alleged blood eagle?”

“You don't believe it was real?”

“Certainly not with an ax like the honker on the wall,” the retired professor said. “That was for rending people into chunks, not opening wounds for postmortem monkey business.” Flaherty studied him. “Are
you
interested in Vikings?”

“Some,” Service said.

A woman appeared from somewhere on the lower level of the house. She looked to be in her thirties. Long, obsidian hair, a leather bodice, short leather skirt with fishnet stockings, and four-inch platform shoes. “Elder Goth Dude,” she said. “Time for unh-unh.”

Flaherty laughed out loud and clapped his hands together. “I gotta go.” He took the woman's arm and they started upstairs. Halfway up, he looked down and said, “Leave your card and I'll call you.”

Service walked out to the truck with Karylanne. He lit a cigarette and started the engine. “Unh-unh?”

“The sound people make when they're really getting down; you know, kicking the gear stick? Like, grind-your-teeth animal sex?”

Grady Service shook his head and closed his eyes.

“You don't understand sex?” Karylanne asked. “That's not what Maridly said.”

“Hey, hey,
hey!”
Service said. “You are
way
out of bounds!”

On the way home he pulled into the Walgreens in Marquette and killed the motor. He took out his wallet and handed her two crisp twenties. “Go inside and buy another pregnancy test. Two months is not a false alarm, and if you're not pregnant, the other possibilities aren't good.”

“You don't believe me?”

“I believe you, but since the accident I've had to work like hell to control my emotions, and I think you're in the same boat. We've both been trying not to face reality. Pregnant or not, you need to see a doctor. Now, tell me the truth: Why don't you want to go home?”

Her lip quivered. “My folks are good people, simple people. They wanted me to stay home, get a job, get married, have kids. I worked hard to earn my scholarship to Tech. If I go home now, I'll lose everything, and I'll never get out of there. I want to be a mom, but I also want more than that.”

He believed her, and more importantly, Nantz had believed the girl and Walter were meant to be together. He made a quick decision, one from the heart, one he was sure Nantz would approve of: “Here's the deal. If you're pregnant, we get you to a doctor. Then you go home. When you come back for fall semester, I'll pay for an apartment in Houghton. You will go to school and take care of yourself.”

“You don't have to do this,” she said.

“That's why I'm doing it,” he answered. “I had a son for only a year, and if I'm gonna be a grandfather, I want to make sure it lasts a helluva lot longer. Deal?”

“Deal,” she said, “but I don't want to go back to Canada.”

“You owe it to your folks to go and tell them what's going on and what your plans are. Since we're just starting out, let's get something straight. I'll always level with you and you do the same for me. No bullshit between us.”

She reached out for his hand, shook it, and went into the drugstore.

Grady Service lit a cigarette. He was taking on obligations, but they felt right. He needed to get this sorted out and get his focus back to where it needed to be.

On the way back to Slippery Creek, his cell phone rang. It was Eddie Waco.

“Booger flies confirmed in Kansas.”

“Thanks, man.”

“You got the scent?”

“Not yet.”

“You'n call when hit's time, Michigan Man.”

Minutes later it was Denninger on the phone.

“I'm almost done with the list, and guess what—your name is on it, with a Gladstone address.”

He was speechless, and by the time he recovered his voice he had lost the signal and the call.