Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “He pays real good.”

  “Me, too.”

  “He pays regular.”

  “I get it. But he’s not the man I want, just one who might give me a lead in the right direction. So you’re not going to lose a client, see?”

  “How high will you go?” she said, flip-siding the question I’d never ask her.

  “I don’t bargain. You want me to name a price, then you either take it or you pass. Or you can pick the number, and I get to do the same.”

  “I like it better when the man’s in charge,” she said, twisting her lips just in case I missed the point.

  “Five large. Cash. Here. In your hand. Now.”

  “He pays—”

  “I’m paying five large.”

  She sat there, pouting. I stood up.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “She travels for this one,” I told Clarence, signing the same to Max. “Her client only gets his kid every other weekend. Visitation. It’s in the divorce decree.”

  “House or apartment?” Clarence asked.

  “House. Nassau County,” I told him.

  “One of those tacky developments?”

  “No, girl,” I answered Michelle. “He’s got himself a serious piece of ground. An acre plus, easy.”

  Max made the sign for a dog snapping its jaws.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Does he have any other protection, mahn?”

  “The usual,” I told Clarence. “But all electronic, nothing live.”

  “Burke, she’s not going to see—?”

  “No, honey,” I promised Michelle. “The whore told me how it goes. How it always goes. She drives to his house after dark. They sit in the living room, sip some wine, discuss what the little girl’s done this time. The scene is like they’re married, and the whore handles the discipline in the family. Meantime, the little girl’s in her own room, way in the back. Waiting for him to call her.”

  Michelle’s eyes went arctic.

  “But this time, he’s not going to call her,” I went on. “It’ll take a while, but, sooner or later . . .”

  “The little girl comes out . . . and finds the bodies.”

  I nodded.

  “I do not like that,” Clarence said.

  “She will,” Michelle told him. “Trust me on that one, honey.”

  I swept the room, holding all their eyes, one by one. This was family business, and we don’t do “consensus” crap. Why vote when there’s only one candidate?

  “There’s not going to be a sound,” I said. “The little girl, at first, she’ll creep down the hall, sneak a look. Probably think they just fell asleep. She’ll go back to her room; I can’t see her trying to wake them up. But next morning, when her father’s supposed to be bringing her back . . .”

  “That’s when she’ll call the cops. Like her mother should have,” Michelle snarled.

  “Mother?” I said. “Mom gets ten large a month. ‘Child support.’ You think she doesn’t know?”

  “There are all kinds of whores, little sister,” Clarence said, gravely. Michelle was turning tricks before he’d been born, but she just nodded.

  “A pro hit,” was all she said. “A double, in fact. Who’re the cops going to look at first?”

  Max made a dismissive gesture.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “The wife wasn’t in on it, probably has the kind of alibi too good to plan. But the life-insurance guys are going to take a hard look at her. And they’ve got enough muscle to make even the Nassau County cops work for that insane money they get paid.”

  Max nodded.

  I unzipped an airline bag. It was stuffed with cash. All I’d told Pryce was that the spank-whore was endangering the ongoing investigation; he wasn’t the kind of employer who asked for expense-account receipts.

  “Things just don’t seem the same.” Paul Butterfield, moaning his bluesboy anthem out of the sound system the Mole had wired for me. “Born in Chicago.” Before my time. Gone before mine, too.

  The blues aren’t about color, they’re about truth. Fuck those self-proclaimed purists who insist only genuine black males—preferably Delta-born ex-cons dying of TB—qualify. Probably the same twits who used to sport “Honkies for Huey” buttons and delude themselves how they were getting down with the “brothers.” Today, they “keep it real” with gangsta-rap CDs that scream “nigger” louder than the KKK.

  Naturally, they make an exception for Eric Clapton, which double-proves how weak they are. Clapton’s fingers never danced like Mike Bloomfield’s, and his voice doesn’t belong in the same juke as Charlie Musselwhite’s . . . but they probably never heard of either one.

  I tried the TV. Watched some “sports journalists” sit around and blather about “team chemistry.” Funny how they never say a word about the team chemist.

  I remembered back when they blamed steroids for some pro wrestler killing his wife and young son, then hanging himself. “Why all this focus on baseball?” one of them demanded, righteously indignant. “How come they don’t do drug testing in pro wrestling?”

  The intellectual on the panel explained that drug testing wasn’t a congressional priority because pro wrestling wasn’t a sport, it was entertainment. Steroids were wrong, of course, but it’s not as if you needed a competitive edge in a staged event.

  The others nodded at this trenchant analysis, proving doping is allowed in the broadcast industry. Sure, nobody cares about steroid use in pro wrestling, but that isn’t because it’s not a “real” sport—it’s because you can’t bet on it. Who do you think cares more about an “undetected competitive edge”—protectors of the purity of the game, or the gambling industry? Just look at how hard they slammed that pro-basketball ref who admitted taking money to fix games. Those lobbyists really earn their money.

  I chewed a few burnt almonds to get the sickening taste out of my mouth, hit the mute, and opened the paper. Some wet-brain on the city council announced he was sponsoring legislation to ban pit bulls. It’s not that he wasn’t an animal-lover—he had a bichon frise, didn’t he?—it’s just that he felt a moral obligation to protect citizens from those “genetically vicious” creatures. Guess he’d know about genetics, since his only qualification for public office was that his father had held the seat before him.

  But the moron made me realize something: I’d waited long enough.

  “I want to buy her.”

  “I ain’t in that business, ese.”

  “I know,” I told the man who owned the two-pump gas station where I keep my Plymouth stashed, inside the same chain-link cage that protected trespassers from the pits who lived back there. Jester had built them a dog condo big enough for a family of six. Probably put in central air, too. “But, come on, bro, you went out and got a mate for that dragon of yours. They got together, she had a litter, and you kept one of them. So you must’ve done something with the others, yeah?”

  “Never sold one,” he said, as flexible as a suicide bomber. Jester was a businessman whose business you didn’t want to know. Even if you missed the message of PELIGRO’S AUTOMOTIVE sloppily spray-painted over the never-opened garage slots, the OUT OF GAS sign permanently fixed to the pumps was clear enough.

  “I know that,” I assured him. “And I know they never went near a scratch-line, either. I was here when those punks tried to get you to put your big guy back into the same game you pulled him out of, remember?”

  He nodded. Crossed his arms. The python-tattooed biceps said he wasn’t willing to concede he couldn’t have handled all three of them by himself, but the nod granted that me slipping out from under the Plymouth and showing them I carried a snake of my own—a four-inch Colt King Cobra .357—had changed the odds.

  “I’ve been coming here for years, right? You think I’d ever—?”

  “No, no, ese. I know you don’t even be thinking that. This on me, not you. When they was pups, I could find them homes with righteous folk, okay? But the little one, she been here too long. I
call her Rosita, ’cause she’s so pretty, but I never talk to her, you know? Not to her mother, either. That one’s muy loco; a stone cocodrilo. You try and take her baby, she maybe take a piece of you, comprende?”

  “I’ve been teaching the little one to trust me, Jester. For a long time now. I’ll risk it.”

  “You sure, amigo? You know her father. Nova, he was a murder machine when I took him away from those maricóns who put him in the pits. Only got him a girlfriend because I thought it would calm him down a little. But the bitch I found, she turned out to be even meaner than him. Got those bruja eyes, you know? Any baby those two make, got to be hellfire in a fur coat.”

  “I’ll risk it,” I said again. “How much for—?”

  “Why you talk to me like that, hermano? Remember the first time you come around, ask me about storing your ride? I tell you, got to make some calls first?”

  “I remember.”

  “Took a while, do that. What you think I am?”

  I made a confused face, not knowing where he was going. Vacant lots don’t scare me, but landmines do.

  “I mean, you know I’m not no citizen,” he explained.

  “Me, either,” I stalled.

  “But you look like one, ese. Come on, you make me for, what, Mexican, maybe?”

  “No.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I’m some kind of spic, sí?”

  “Okay, I get it.” I looked him over carefully, said: “But not Cubano, not Puerto Rican. No way you’re D.R., either.”

  “You pretty good, man. Got any more?”

  “I can cross off Brazil.”

  “That was an easy one. You don’t know no Portuguese, huh?”

  “Escudo.”

  “Bueno!” He chuckled. Jester was a good eight inches shorter than me. Maybe a hundred pounds heavier, with less fat on him than a runway model on the snort-a-line diet.

  “I know you’ve been locked up,” I said, deliberately looking at the prison-issue tattoo that gave him the name I called him by. “But not on this side of the border.”

  He shrugged.

  “And I don’t see any MS-13 ink. Which means you’re older than you look, because you’ve been across a long time.”

  “Pablito said you was a detective.”

  Now it was my turn to give him a look. Not many could call Dr. Pablo Cintrone “Pablito.” You don’t claim kinship with Una Gente Libre unless you’re for real . . . or don’t like oxygen.

  Back in the day, UGL didn’t operate like most so-called underground groups. No letters to the newspapers, no phone calls to the media, no bombs in public places. They had been credit-blamed for a number of outright assassinations over the years—a mixed bag of sweatshop owners, slum landlords, dope dealers, and some apparently honest citizens—but they never counted coup.

  The word would go on the street that UGL wanted someone—and that someone would disappear. Dead or fled . . . without a body, you could never be sure.

  The Puerto Rican independistas had been quiet for years, working a different angle from decades ago, when they were all about urban warfare and the FALN was the most feared of all the guerrilla groups.

  Pablo and I go back a long time, to years before he became el jefe of the UGL. When he’d first introduced me to some of the fighters, he’d been careful to call me “amigo mio,” not “amigo nuestro.” We don’t exchange Christmas cards, but I was there the night his daughter was born, and I was there when one of his enemies had gone in the other direction.

  His daughter’s grown now. But all the years haven’t widened the gap; if either of us reached, he’d still be able to touch the other.

  “You the only gringo El Cañonero ever did a job for.” Jester half-smiled, flashing his badge.

  El Cañonero had been the second-most-feared sniper in the city. Never missed, never captured. He’s been out of action for years. Like the Prof always says, “If there’s a reason, there’s a season.” With UGL walking the slower road, switching from revolution to infiltration, El Cañonero was a hibernating bear. But spring always comes.

  If Jester could even find Pablo, never mind get the UGL boss to vouch for me personally, his own roots went deep.

  “Guatemala?” I guessed.

  “I got this when I was thirteen,” he said, flexing so the jester tattoo popped. “You know what it means?”

  “Respect.”

  “Sí. Only one way to get that. I was born strong, and I learned to take a beating real young. Nothing special about that, not where I come from. They had some very bad hombres in that joint, but none of them laughed at the car batteries those cock-suckers used.

  “That’s how I got my name. I think it made me crazy, the pain. I don’t remember actually laughing, but that’s what they said I was doing when the puercas threw me back into the cage, after they finished their fun.

  “In that cage, I had special respect. The old man who put this mark on me, he’d been locked down all his life, never to leave. He was the one who taught me. When I learned enough, I hired out.

  “‘Your name can fly right over these walls,’ he told me. And it worked just like the old man said it would: One of the narco-reyes bought me a pardon. I was supposed to go work for him, pay off what it cost him.”

  “Yeah, I know. A labor bond. They heard about how you handled enforcer work, so . . .”

  “You got it.”

  “That old man, he named you right. The joke was on them, huh?”

  “Three of them were there, all in white. They told me what I was supposed to do. Very simple. They bought me, so they owned me. They saw a big, stupid dog. Me, all I saw was three chicken necks. Snapped like dead twigs.

  “After that, I found the people the old man had told me about, and they got me across. Pablo, he was waiting, just like the old man promised.”

  “You ever get enough cash together to spring him?” I asked, knowing that would have been Jester’s first move.

  “More than enough,” he said. “Took a few months, but then I made the call. That’s when I found out he was dead. They killed him the day after I made my move. The powder men marched right into the prison, took the old man out of his cell, and dragged him into the yard. They held him down on a block and sawed off his head. Slow, so everyone watching would see what it cost to fuck with them.”

  “Evil fucking—”

  “That didn’t buy them respect, bro; it cost them. The guy who told me about it said the old man’s head kept rolling around the yard for a long time. Said his face was grinning like a cat in cream. Talk about the last laugh, huh?”

  “Madre Dios!”

  Jester laughed out loud. “You sad, Burke,” he said, using my name for the first time. “Pablito always said you speak Spanish like you dance.”

  “I can’t—” I said. Then I started laughing, too.

  I used my key on the three-pound padlock, opened the chain-link, and stepped into their territory, a gallon thermos of Mama’s beef-in-oyster-sauce in one hand.

  The big stud strutted out, eyeballing me same as always. His world was like his little girl’s coat: black and white. Either he recognized me, or I was a dead man.

  Nova was a special brand of warlord: he expected tribute, but trying to bribe him would be suicide.

  I poured out the contents of the thermos on the marble slab I’d installed over the concrete for just that purpose. Nova walked over, followed closely by his mate . . . and that orca-spotted little female I’d been courting so long.

  While the others tore into Mama’s cooking, she slipped behind me and deftly snatched the solid cube of filet she knew would be waiting, just for her. “That’s my good little girl,” I said.

  Then I squatted down and patted her. A real one this time, not just a quick touch of her head, like I’d been doing. I even scratched her behind one ear, just to make sure.

  This time, she didn’t trot away.

  “You want to come home with me?”

  She sat, eyes shifting from my face to he
r father and mother.

  “It’s time,” I told them.

  The stud just watched. The mother looked at me. Into me.

  Judge and jury, side-by-side. The only role still up for grabs was executioner.

  I waited for the verdict.

  Counted to fifteen in my head.

  Then I started up the Plymouth. Let it reach operating temperature, the way I always do. I’d been keeping the passenger-side door open while I warmed up the engine for months now, getting them all used to the sight.

  Usually, they all went right back into their dog condo as soon as I started up. This time, none of them moved.

  The temp gauge said the Roadrunner’s engine was ready. I took one more look. Nova was nowhere to be seen. But his killer-witch wife was still there, standing next to her last child.

  I opened the passenger door, patted the seat, said, “Come on, sweetheart.”

  The dog I knew I was finally ready for jumped in next to me. I reached across her, closed the door. Her mother’s body was a statue, but her eyes crackled with death-threats.

  I drove out slowly. Stopped. Went back, locked the gate behind me. And took my puppy home.

  “She’s a beauty, boss!”

  “She sure is, Gate,” I told the man in the wheelchair who slipped his hand back from under his guayabera shirt when he saw me come in the front door of the flophouse he “managed” from behind a thick wooden plank.

  “Yours?”

  “I hope so, brother. You know what they say.”

  “Time will tell,” the shooter replied, confirming the only test a born convict recognizes.

  If being carried up a few flights of filthy stairs bothered her, she didn’t let on. I opened the door to my place, put her down, said, “It’s yours, if you want it, Rosie.”

  That’s when I realized I’d named her.

  Training a dog isn’t any more complicated than immediately rewarding them anytime they do something you want them to learn. Every time they do it, you add praise and a command, so they make the connection. Eventually they don’t need the treats anymore. But that’s just the mechanics of training, not the heart.