Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “Immediately, he knows he’s out of his league. So he slips out without taking anything. Then he starts poking around—you can have him doing it on the Net; there’s Web sites that list the stuff, with images and everything. Makes a nice visual, too. That’s when your guy has this . . . what did you call it again?”

  “Epiphany,” the man across from me repeated.

  “Right. So he finds that electrician. Pays him a fat wad of cash to cause the system to malfunction—that can be done over the line, no need to go anywhere near the house. Naturally, the trophy-collector calls the same guy who installed the system to come in and fix it. And while this electrician’s doing that, earning triple-time plus a bonus, he plants a locator.”

  “A what?”

  “You can program a device no bigger than this,” I said, holding up a nickel-sized disk—same circumference, but much thinner—“so that it alerts at the presence of . . . hell, anything.” This was like showing a surgeon what a scalpel looks like, but Pryce went along with the gag.

  “Like canvas,” he said, as if he’d just caught wise.

  “Exactly. It’s a transmitter. You download all the info, check off the known missing works, and one of them will match.”

  “That’s brilliant,” he said. “You should have been a screenwriter.”

  “And you should have just called.”

  Pryce shook his head. He opened his palm, the webbed fingers on snare-drummer’s wrists underscoring that he hadn’t tried to trick me. “I don’t like phones. Besides, it’s been a long time.”

  “Not long enough.”

  “Just in time, actually,” he said, turning over his hole card: “A private hospital. Top of the line. Best doctors on the planet. And you can visit. All of you. In the state he’s in, he hears your voices, it could make a difference. All the difference.”

  I didn’t pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I sat back as if I was stunned, using the time to think of a way to get him to up the payoff. Because with what he was offering, he had to want something way off the charts in return.

  “Herk and Vyra are doing fine,” Pryce said, lighting a clove cigarette as he stepped inside my thoughts.

  I made a “So what?” gesture with my shoulders. Vyra had been a lot of different things before she met Hercules, including a rich man’s wife. When Herk disappeared, so had she.

  “They wanted to get married,” Pryce said, the expression on his face just short of rolling his eyes at the strangeness of some people. “New York has archaic laws for contested divorces. Adultery counts, and so does abandonment, but that’s what she did, not him. The husband didn’t want to let her go. Not even when she offered to sign away everything, including the joint account and the house.”

  I shrugged.

  “We could erase Hercules—right back to the cradle. But Vyra had no record to clean, and a name change would make any marriage to Herk void ab initio. That means—”

  “That you speak Latin, or hang around too many lawyers.”

  “You want to know what happened or not?”

  “I don’t even know who you’re babbling about,” I said. Pryce’s native tongue was Oblique, so maybe he was reminding me of the deal that put Herk inside the same cell where Pryce was running an informant . . . and the insurance policy I’d added. Not double indemnity, double-barreled. The policy turned Pryce’s new man into his only man . . . and showed him who he’d really signed up with at the same time.

  I played the old tape in my mind, knowing Pryce was doing the same.

  The white Taurus was parked on the street. No other car was close, but the block wasn’t deserted: People walking around, maybe from the change-of-shift at some of the nearby factories, maybe locals. Cars crawled by, too.

  I pulled in behind, leaving myself room enough to drive away without backing up first. “Let’s do it,” I said to Herk.

  Pryce must have been watching—the back doors of the sedan popped open as we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead, as if the windshield held vital secrets.

  “All right, let’s hear this big emergency of yours,” Pryce half-sighed.

  “I want Herk to get his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”

  “That wasn’t the—”

  “That’s the deal now,” I said. “I’ve got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together. Probably take less than an hour.”

  “You can’t expect to have that sort of payment in front,” Pryce said, annoyed at my mulishness. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time. As we agreed.”

  “Me, I think Lothar’s already been taken care of.”

  “That’s different,” Pryce lied, switching to the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”

  “So’s Herk, now.”

  “But my . . . employers don’t need him,” Pryce said, in the patient voice you use on a slow student. “They don’t even know he exists yet.”

  “How do I know you’re going to come through?”

  “I’ve done everything I promised so far, haven’t I? You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  I sat there quietly as a woman trundled past, pulling one of those little grocery carts behind her. Then I took out a thick tube of baffled steel, said, “Lothar?” When he turned sideways to listen, I put a slug in his temple.

  It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.

  “You got it wrong,” I told Pryce, as Lothar slumped over. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  Lothar’s head lolled forward, his body held in place by the seatbelt. I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him back so it looked like he was just sitting there. There was no blood, just a round little black dot on his temple—a reverse birthmark. Some of the powder had been removed from the cartridge to make it subsonic; the slug was still somewhere in Lothar’s diseased brain.

  “You—”

  Pryce cut himself off, out of words.

  I wasn’t. “Now we’re gonna find out,” I told him, watching his hands in case he moved wrong. If it came to that, Herk would have to snap his neck from behind—the piece I’d used couldn’t be reloaded.

  “Look,” I said, my voice as calm as a Zen rock garden, “Lothar was stalking his wife. That’s a fact, well-documented. There’s even an Order of Protection; you know that, too. Now, here’s what happened:

  “Lothar was spotted breaking into his wife’s house. She isn’t there anymore, but he couldn’t have known that. Lothar had all his freak-tools with him: handcuffs, duct tape . . . . He was going to kill his wife and kidnap the baby. But first he was going to teach that race-traitor bitch a lesson.

  “Nine-one-one goes off. Luckily, a sector car’s only a few blocks from the house. Soon as the cops roll up, Lothar knows he’s done. Decides to shoot it out. Gunfire’s exchanged.

  “The result of that is sitting right next to you. Just add a few more rounds to the body. Use different guns—that way, more hero cops can get their medals. And be sure to blow away a chunk of his head.

  “That’s the story that needs to get in the news. The others in the cell will find out what happened, probably on TV. It won’t surprise them, either. They all knew Lothar was a sex-torture freak—look how they found him in the first place. And he never stopped ranting about what he wanted to do to his wife.

  “Get it? That leaves Herk. He’s your inside man now. Your only one. And he needs that immunity. Or the faucet gets turned off.”

  “You’re insane,” Pryce said, not turning around.

  The street was quiet.

  “People could argue about that, maybe,” I told him. “But nobody’s gonna argue about Lothar being dead.”

  “You expect me to drive around with a dead body and—”

  “I don’t ca
re what you do. It’s time to prove up now,” I finished. “If you’re the real thing, you can make it happen. And if you’re not, it’s all over, anyway.

  “You got no more cards to play, Pryce. You thought you knew me. Now you do. You take down the safe house, you dime out Vyra to her husband, you turn Porkpie’s testimony loose on Hercules—any of that, you’re finished, pal. I don’t care what you put in the street, you’ll never find all of us, because you don’t know all of us. But one of us will sure as hell find you.”

  “Get out of the car,” he said in a tight, controlled voice. “Get out now. I’ll call you.”

  We watched the white Taurus drive away. Smooth and steady.

  I crossed the bridge into Manhattan. Pulled up to a deli on Delancey. A Latino in an old army field jacket was leaning against the wall, just out of the rain. He walked over to my Plymouth.

  Herk rolled down his window. The guy stuck his head inside, nodded at me. He went into the deli, came back with a paper bag full of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of apple juice.

  I glove-handed him the wiped-down steel tube and a packet of five C-notes. He pocketed both and walked off.

  Back in the car, Herk turned to me. “Burke, I’m with you, no matter what, you know that. I don’t gotta understand why you did all that, but—”

  “You know what happens when a raccoon gets his leg caught in one of those steel traps, brother? You know what he’s got to do, he wants to live?”

  “Bite the leg off,” the big man said. He probably couldn’t spell “education,” but he had a Ph.D. in Survival.

  “Yeah. There’s two kinds of raccoons get caught in those traps. The ones with balls enough to do what they gotta do. And dead ones. A bitch raccoon gets in heat, she wants a stud that’s gonna give her the strongest babies, understand? You know what she looks for? Not the biggest raccoon. Not the prettiest one, either. A smart bitch, she looks for one with three legs.”

  “I get it, Burke. But we got a problem. I think, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a meeting. Tonight.”

  “Damn! Why didn’t you—?”

  “I forgot,” the dumbfuck giant said glumly. “Until just now. I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus, Herk. Even if Pryce goes for it, he can’t make it happen right now. He’s gonna need a day or so, minimum. The best we can hope for is the newspaper story. I thought we’d get to stand by and watch: Pryce makes it happen, then I believe he can do the immunity thing, see? That’s when I was going to have this lawyer I hired go in and tighten that up for you. But if you go to that meeting and Lothar isn’t there . . .”

  “He’s not supposed to be there, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean, he’s supposed to be out stalking his wife, right? And if Pryce comes through, he gets smoked doing it. No way I could know about that. None of us could. Why shouldn’t I just roll on into the meeting? It ain’t like me and Lothar was supposed to be cut-buddies anyway.”

  “Herk, that’s if Pryce goes along,” I said, thinking maybe the big man wasn’t half the dummy we all took him for. Not anymore, anyway. “That’s if he can do it, even if he wants to. That’s if he hasn’t already decided to cut his losses and take down the whole fucking crew. If you knew about the meeting tonight, Lothar did, too. So he probably told Pryce.”

  “What else can I do, brother?”

  “You could jet,” I told him.

  “I was gonna do that, what’d you take Lothar off the count for? I ain’t that stupid. I know what you was talking about. It was Lothar who got cut down, but me, I’m the one on three legs. So I’m hobbling, okay. But, fuck it, I’m hobbling in.”

  We touched fists. I hoped it wasn’t for the last time.

  The way it turned out, Pryce did his part. And Herk went on to do his. The night the cell’s plan was supposed to go down, a lot of men ended up dead on lower Broadway, but Federal Plaza stayed up. That was years before 9/11, but so was the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. The government’s always listening in, but it never learns to listen good.

  Pryce wasn’t an outlaw like us. There was always work the government needed done, so unemployment wasn’t one of his worries. No surprise he’d been plugged into the White Night underground. He had informants all over the country, on both sides of the Walls. Some people thought he was a myth; others thought he was a magician. That’s the rep you earn when you always find the tools you need to do a job. Any job.

  Pryce wasn’t some fantasy-world “spook.” He knew survival wasn’t about staying in the shadows; it was about never casting one.

  “Maybe you’re more interested in current events?” he said.

  I shrugged again. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I knew it wouldn’t be a threat. Pryce had already seen for himself how far I’d go if anyone threatened my family. Seen a piece of it, anyway.

  “The Prof needs his right leg amputated,” he said, like a mechanic saying you needed a valve job. “It should have been done a while ago. They’ve been keeping him in a comatose state so they can use an air tourniquet on the femoral artery, but he can’t stay like that for much longer. Not only don’t they have the facilities to do a perfect cut-and-reattach, they don’t have a prosthesis-maker, a rehab facility, or a—”

  I held up my hand, meaning, “Enough!” That didn’t stop him from talking, or even modulate his tone.

  “They’re afraid,” he said, in that same mechanic’s-report voice. “Everyone on your side of the fence knows the deal with that place they run. They don’t report gunshot wounds, and they fix whatever they can—bullet extractions, stitching, just about any kind of patch-up work. They’ve got all the antibiotics, and they can even handle transfusions . . . .”

  He paused, waiting for me to be impressed that I’d recently learned that one way to pay for blood is to replenish the supply. When I didn’t react, he rolled right on: “But they don’t have a cath lab or a—”

  I raised my eyebrows. All the communication he was going to get, until he got to what he wanted.

  He moved his head just enough to show me that he wasn’t trying to outwait me, then spread his hand on the table between us. “Their thinking is this: If they cut, and the old man dies, they’re sure you’d send them along to keep him company. And if they don’t cut, and he never comes out of that coma, they’re convinced they’ll all end up in one.”

  I just watched him.

  “It may surprise you,” he said, with just the barest trace element of sarcasm in his metallic voice, “but there seem to be a number of people there who believe if anything happened to that old man you might just lose it and turn their whole operation into a slaughterhouse.”

  “So . . . ?” I said, knowing there had to be more.

  “So they made a phone call,” Pryce said. “But what they had to say wasn’t news to . . . us.”

  The heat from where Clarence was stationed was starting to peel the paint off the wall behind me.

  “We have the whole thing on video,” he said, more like a prosecutor than a mechanic now. “I didn’t know you had access to that level of ordnance. That sniper you blew up—he was ours. In fact, the whole team up there was. We had our own operation in place, took years to set up. We had no idea you were going to make a move on our targets.”

  I speak Pryce’s language, so the translation was instantaneous: “ordnance” meant the RPG I’d shoulder-fired at the sniper’s roost; “ours” meant someone paid by the same agency that paid him.

  I knew Pryce wasn’t there about payback; he doesn’t get emotional over chess pieces. The sniper who had tried for the Prof was a paid assassin. Didn’t know who he was aiming at, didn’t care. Nothing personal. Not for him, anyway.

  But Pryce hadn’t stopped by to shoot the breeze with an old friend, either. Pryce didn’t have friends.

  “Let me guess,” I said, contempt making a crop-duster’s pass over my voice. “Homeland Security, right?”

  “And
you don’t care about that?” he shot back. “No, that’s right. You’re not a patriot, you’re a borderlord, aren’t you? You should read some of Marc MacYoung’s work. Very enlightening.”

  I gave him a blank look.

  “Don’t cross your lines, and the rest of the world can blow itself up, far as you’re concerned,” he decoded for me.

  “And your point is . . . what? I’m not a terrorist; I’m a thief, remember?” I half-answered, sidestepping around that video. I believed Pryce had it, sure, but I also knew he wouldn’t turn it over to the Law. Why bother? You lose one shooter, you just hire another.

  “Just say what you want,” I told him. No point pretending I had any negotiating room; if I turned down any chance to save the Prof, Clarence would have shot me.

  “There’s more than that on offer,” Pryce said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I can do magic tricks, too. Like make prints disappear.”

  “From?”

  “Everywhere they’re logged. Local, state, federal, international. On all of you. Every single one.”

  “Why? You gonna make us all legit so your bosses can make us pay income tax?”

  “You already do,” he said, flexing again. “‘Scott Thomas’ does, anyway. And ‘Juan Rodriguez’ did before him. I hit the right switch and you won’t need to fly under the radar anymore. You know you could never get far enough under so I couldn’t find you, anyway.”

  “Some doors swing both ways,” I bluffed.

  “Listen,” he said, a thin vein of urgency in his toneless voice. “We’ve got a narrow window. Every election, the system changes.”

  “Politicians—”

  “Not that system,” he said dismissively. “Not the future, the past. Right this minute, we have total access, but that’s not for long. There’s two ways to alter existing info: delete it, or overwrite it. Our way, Burke stays dead. Scott Thomas lives. Or anyone else you pick. Backdated IRS, everything. But it all has to happen quick, understand?”

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “Flower has a wonderful future,” he snapped out, as precisely deadly as a balisong artist.