Down Here b-15

by Andrew Vachss

  “You’ll never see me again,” I said, cutting the connection.

  I was in my booth when Michelle came in, dressed in that princess/slut style only she can bring off.

  She sashayed over and took a seat. Mama was only a few steps behind her, clapping her hands for more soup.

  “I took care of it,” Michelle said. “Turns out I was right. Anyone tried to hurt Wolfe out there, it would have been a major mistake. I got that just off the first phone call.

  “Then I found that they’d brought Hortense down from Bedford Hills to testify in some other case. As if. So I went out and visited her myself. No problems after that, guaranteed.

  “On my way out, I left money on the books for ’Tense. I didn’t do the same for Wolfe, just in case anyone was . . .”

  “Thanks, honey. You’re perfect.”

  “This is true.”

  “And Wolfe’s already sprung.”

  “Yes! They dropped that bogus—?”

  “No. Not even close. But Wolfe’s got friends on the other side, too.”

  “Sure, friends?” Mama asked.

  “Looks like, so far, anyway,” I told them. Then I filled them in on what I’d gotten from Sands, and what happened when Davidson went back to court.

  “Have you looked through all that paperwork yet, honey?” Michelle asked.

  “Just a quick glance. That cop must have spent all night at the photocopier. Took some big-time risks.”

  “If the stuff’s real, he did.”

  “Wolfe’s out,” I reminded her. “Soon enough, we’ll get a straight answer. And—I had an idea. Remember when we had all that paper, on that girl who got killed out on—?”

  “Yes,” Michelle interrupted. “You want Terry to scan it all into a computer for you again?”

  “That, and maybe do some sorting programs. . . .”

  “Well, let’s go get him,” she said, flashing her gorgeous smile.

  “Michelle, he’s all grown up now, remember? He drives his own car. We don’t need to go all the way up to the Bronx. Why can’t he just—?”

  “You know why,” she said, winking at me.

  I’d been out to the Mole’s place so many times, my eyes didn’t even register the burnt-out buildings, or the burnt-out humans who staggered between them, pipe-dreaming.

  They say real estate in the city is so precious that every square inch of it is going to be gentrified someday. If that ever happens in Hunts Point, I’ll believe it.

  Michelle’s cat’s-eye makeup didn’t mask her excitement. She was going to people she loved.

  Terry was her son. I had street-snatched him from a kiddie pimp years ago, and Michelle had adopted him in that same minute. Back then, she was still pre-op, and still working car tricks, fire-walking with freaks every night. Michelle came from the same litter I did. Our hate made us kin.

  Michelle had claimed Terry for her own. But it was the Mole—a for-real mad scientist, living in an underground bunker beneath the junkyard he owned—who really raised the kid.

  For years, Michelle and the Mole orbited around each other, never touching.

  Finally, she had the operation. She had been talking about getting it done for as long as I’d known her, but it wasn’t until the Mole became Terry’s father that Michelle became his wife. I remember, a long time ago, when she asked the Mole if he could ever understand how it felt, to be a woman trapped in a man’s body.

  “I understand trapped,” is all the Mole said. It was enough.

  The surgery didn’t change Michelle to any of us. She was always my sister, from the beginning. Always Terry’s mother. But maybe it meant something between her and the Mole. I don’t know.

  The Mole doesn’t like to leave his work, and his work isn’t portable. Michelle didn’t even like visiting the junkyard.

  None of that mattered.

  I pulled up to the entrance, a wall of razor wire, growing like killer ivy through the chain link. The pack of feral dogs that inhabit the place assembled quickly, but I knew the Mole’s sensors would have announced us way before I brought the Plymouth to a stop.

  The dogs watched, too self-confident to bark, except for a few of the younger ones, who were still learning.

  “Looks like Terry’s not here, honey,” I said. “He would have been out to pick us up in the shuttle by now.”

  “Then Mole will just have to come himself,” she said. “The exercise certainly won’t kill him.”

  Not being clinically insane, I didn’t say anything.

  Eventually, we spotted the Mole’s stubby figure, making his way toward us. He was wearing his usual dirt-colored jumpsuit, Coke-bottle lenses on his glasses catching the late-afternoon sun. He shambled over to the sally port, threw open the first gate, then moved aside to let us through.

  I drove the Plymouth in, extra-slow. The Mole locked up behind us.

  He came around to my side of the car, standing in the river of killer dogs like a kid in a wading pool.

  “Mole!” I said.

  He answered me the way he usually does—a few rapid blinks behind his glasses, waiting for me to get to the point.

  “We’re looking for Terry,” I said. I could feel the cold heat from Michelle’s ice-pick eyes at the back of my neck, but I knew they weren’t aimed at me. Mole had gone to the wrong window, and the poor bastard would have to pay that toll by himself.

  “Not here,” he said.

  “Right. But I’ve got Michelle with me—”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “—and I thought we could hang out a bit, while we wait for Terry to show.”

  “Where is that . . . Jeep thing you use?” Michelle demanded, over my right shoulder.

  “Back at the—”

  “Well, go get it,” she said, tartly. “I’m not going to—”

  “I can drive this one back there,” I told her, trying to pinch off the burning fuse before it reached the dynamite. “Mole, you want to—?”

  But he was already moving. Away from the firing line.

  I drove gingerly around the obstacle course of mortar-sized craters and rusted chunks of metal. The Plymouth was no off-roader, but its Viper-donated independent rear suspension and gas shocks handled the trip easily enough. Even the occasional thunk didn’t upset the rollbar-anchored chassis with its heavy subframe connectors.

  I pulled up to the Mole’s lanai—a set of cut-down oil drums with haphazard cushions and a sisal mat big enough to play shuffleboard on.

  The Mole was waiting for us, sitting down. He was awkwardly smacking a scarred old beast on top of its triangular head, in what the two of them had mutually decided constituted “patting the dog.”

  “Simba!” I said.

  The dog’s ears perked, a lot more trustworthy than his ancient eyes. A bull mastiff–shepherd cross, Simba was still the reigning king of the pack, despite being somewhere around twenty years old. “Hound’s so bad, probably even scares off Father Time’s ass,” the Prof said once.

  Michelle pranced over on her four-inch ankle-strapped burnt-orange stilettos. She bent to give the Mole a kiss on his cheek, which turned him the same approximate color, and said, “Well?”

  The Mole looked at her the way he always does—stunned and strangle-tongued.

  “Mole! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am always—”

  “You like my new shoes,” Michelle said, torturing him unmercifully, making him pay. Asking the Mole if he liked a pair of shoes was like asking a cat if it liked algebra.

  “They are . . . very nice,” he tried.

  “Nice? Nice! They are absolutely gorgeous, you dunce! They are stunning. Magnificent. Perfect. Yes?”

  “Yes. I—”

  “Oh, never mind.” Michelle probed in her purse, handed the Mole her cell phone. “Call my boy, please,” she said. “Tell him we need to see him.”

  The Mole didn’t move.

  “You do know where he is, don’t you?”

  “He
has a cell phone, too,” the Mole said, defensively.

  “Well, then?”

  “He is still at school. Is this—?”

  “Yeah, it kind of is, Mole,” I assured him.

  While he was dialing, Michelle took out one of her extra-long, ultra-thin cigarettes. Pink was the color of the day, apparently. I lit it for her.

  “He’s coming,” the Mole announced, handing back Michelle’s phone.

  “What are you working on now?” she asked him.

  “A new polymer,” the Mole said. “It is—”

  “Well, I can’t understand all that,” Michelle cut him off. “While we’re waiting for Terry, you’ll just have to show me. Come on.”

  The Mole followed obediently, his face flaming.

  I sat down with Simba, and we told each other lies about when we’d been young.

  It took Terry over an hour to show up. I took a tenth of that to tell him what I wanted.

  “Sure!” he said. “I can do it, easy. The scanning’s pretty much mechanical. Take some time, though, even with the setup I’ve got. But you might want something better than a simple-sort.”

  “Go slow, kid,” I cautioned him. “Remember who you’re talking to here.”

  “I can write a program, but you’d have to spell out for me what fields—never mind, just the kind of things you want to connect, okay?”

  “I’m not sure I’m . . .”

  “Look,” he said, enthusiastically, “it would be nothing to sort by, say, time of day, or if he used a weapon, like that, see? But if you wanted to make an ANOVA . . . Never mind. If you wanted to know the extent to which different factors impacted on the model . . .”

  “Terry . . .”

  “Okay, wait. I got it. Look, let’s say the ‘standard’ attack was between four and six in the afternoon, and the guy used a knife, all right?

  “But in some of the attacks he was, I don’t know, dressed all in black. Does him dressing in black affect the time of day or the weapon? See? The more . . . factors I have, the more I can help you find the pattern.”

  “Could you superimpose?” I asked him.

  “Now you’ve got me confused,” he said, grinning.

  “If you had all the addresses where the rapes occurred, could you put a map of the metro area over it, somehow?”

  “Sure. But what would you want that for?”

  “The rapes went down in a lot of different counties. But no one was ever actually arrested, so the different offices probably didn’t share information. In fact, I can’t figure out where . . . Wolfe’s friend got them all. Anyway, maybe there’s some main highway that gets him in and out of all the areas, so, if you look at where he hits, you might get an idea where he’s striking from, where his home base is.”

  “No problem,” the kid assured me. “If it’s in the data you’ve got, I’ll write a program that will tell you a lot more than what’s already on paper, I promise.”

  “Isn’t he a genius?” Michelle said, beaming.

  “Pop taught me all of it,” Terry quickly disclaimed.

  “Well, you certainly didn’t get your fashion sense from him,” Michelle snapped back. “Or those good looks, either.”

  “All from you, Mom,” Terry said, putting his arm around her. “And a ton more.”

  The kid was a scientist in his soul. He understood that if a lab ran his DNA, they’d know he hadn’t come from the Mole and Michelle. But he knew something else, too. Something we all know down here—some of the truest truths never make the textbooks.

  On the return trip—Michelle still glowing, humming to herself like a happy little girl—my cell phone buzzed.

  “What?”

  “She wants to talk to you.” Pepper, no-nonsense voice.

  “Wherever she—”

  “Do you remember the last place you met with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “There.”

  “When?”

  “Soon as you can make it. She’s waiting.”

  As if it had been eavesdropping, the Plymouth’s engine answered.

  The office building was on lower Broadway, a few blocks north of what outsiders keep calling “ground zero.” Since 9/11, you don’t want to be bringing a car into that area after dark. Too many eyes.

  Last time I’d been there, Mick had been working the lobby desk. Wolfe’s crew had some kind of deal with the people who ran the building: they rented out little pieces of it for a few hours at a time.

  I tried the front door. Locked. I buzzed for the night man. Not surprised to see Mick, wearing a pair of dark-green pants and matching Eisenhower jacket, with some company’s name stitched in gold on the front.

  He let me in, relocked the door.

  “Same place?” I asked him.

  He turned his back on me without answering, walking toward the freight elevator. I followed, got in the car. Mick threw a lever, and the car dropped, slow and noisy.

  He let me out in the basement. I heard the door close behind me, so I walked around the corner to where Wolfe had been the last time.

  And there she was, sitting on a double-height set of lateral file cabinets. She was dressed in denim overalls and a red pullover, her long, dark hair tied behind her, no makeup.

  “Behave!” she said to the Rottweiler, before he could even threaten me.

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “You mean the lockup?” she said. “Sure. It’s been years since I was putting people away, and those ones wouldn’t be on Rikers, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. Rikers Island was a jail, not a prison. People were sent there to await trial, or to serve misdemeanor sentences. Wolfe hadn’t won all her bouts as a prosecutor, but when she landed her Sunday punch, the opponent always went down for the count.

  “It doesn’t need to be personal,” I said. “It’s a bad joint. Things happen.”

  “Something did happen,” she said, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. “A very large woman came up to me while I was waiting on the chow line. In fact, she bulled her way in, right in front of me.

  “I just ignored it—I wasn’t going to fight over a place in line. Then she turned around and spoke to me. Not shouting, exactly, but loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘don’t say a word to me. Not one word. I know you’re not about talking. Just wanted you to know you got friends here. So, if anyone gets stupid with you, all you got to do is point them out. Not even with your finger. Just nod your head, and it’ll be taken care of.’ Wasn’t that nice of her?”

  “Hortense is a righteous woman,” I said. “Always has been.”

  “I appreciate what you . . . I appreciate what she did,” Wolfe said. “But it wasn’t me who told Pepper to—”

  “Pepper did the right thing, and you know it,” I said. “And Davidson’s the right man for the job.”

  “The job,” she repeated, bitterly.

  “Look, I know you didn’t—”

  “Didn’t what? Didn’t shoot that maggot? How do you know?”

  “It’s not you.”

  “What’s not me?” she challenged. “Maybe I read that letter he sent me, and went over to his house to tell him to step off. Maybe he got aggressive, and I panicked. Pulled out a gun and shot him. And then ran.”

  “Right. As if you’d go to meet a freak like him without backup.”

  “What if my backup helped me get away?”

  “He was shot with a twenty-five.”

  “Isn’t that a woman’s gun?” she said, unknowingly echoing Sands. “And three shots—sounds like panic, doesn’t it?”

  “You don’t carry,” I said. “And if you did, it wouldn’t be a toy like that one.”

  “You’re so sure?”

  “Oh, I’m a lot surer than that,” I said. “A person can change their habits, but not their personality.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You don’t walk around packing, although I suppose you could, if you thought you had to.
But one thing I know you’d never do.”

  “Shoot?”

  “No. Panic.”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling for real now.

  “Besides, there’s one other thing that seals the deal,” I said, pointing at the Rottweiler. “Him. Maybe those little bullets didn’t have enough to get the job done, but no way Bruiser didn’t.”

  “You’re right,” Wolfe said. “If I had sent him.”

  “A situation like that, I don’t think he’d give a damn whether you sent him or not,” I told her. “He’s a dog, not a robot.”

  “He’s also a big bully, aren’t you, Bruisey?” Wolfe said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “He gained ten pounds in the few days Pepper had him.”

  “Pepper probably stuffed him because she felt bad for him,” I said. “Besides, she’s an actress, so she appreciates a good performance, and he probably went around pretending he was starving.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “I need to ask you some questions,” I said.

  “And I need to ask you some,” she shot back.

  “Go,” I told her.

  “Why are you in this? Still in this, I mean. I know Pepper . . .”

  “You want me to tell you a story about my religious conversion? How I’m going to devote the rest of my life to protecting the innocent? You know why. You’ve always known.

  “If you had drilled the miserable little fuck, you think that would matter to me? If you didn’t have a dozen better ones, I’d be your alibi. And if I had known about him threatening you, this never would have happened at all.”

  “You’re not my protector,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Self-appointed or otherwise.”

  “I’m not anything to you,” I told her. “You think I don’t know that? But what I do, I’m good at, and you know that, too. Tell me you want me off this thing, and I’ll walk out of here right now, never say another word about it.”

  Wolfe tapped a cigarette from her pack, lit it with a long-flamed butane lighter.

  I just stood there, watching her.

  The Rottweiler watched me.

  Wolfe took a deep drag, blew a jet of smoke at the ceiling.

  “You’re lying,” she said.

  “ Sands, he’s for real?” I asked her, finally breaking the silence.

  “Molly? He’s a piece of gold. When he first made detective, he was assigned to my squad. He loved the job. Loved making cases against the dirtbags that my bureau specialized in putting away.