Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “If he’s really gone, you’d never say, would you?” he’d asked me once, aura on 360 alert, every sensing mechanism open. Knowing I wouldn’t answer; watching for a tell.

  He never saw it. How could he? Pryce was an info-master, but I knew one piece of hard data his computer couldn’t process: Ghosts are real. And some of them are close by.

  When I talked to Wesley, he answered me.

  Maybe I was just hearing things in my head. Maybe Wesley only lived there now. But just because you couldn’t touch Wesley didn’t mean he couldn’t reach out and touch you.

  Pryce could never really know. And that scared him.

  “So. All this work to set up the meet, it was for nothing?” he asked, between sips of his soup.

  “I got what I came for.”

  “Which was—?”

  “He doesn’t know who took the baby. And he’s not lying when he says it.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because I know,” I told Pryce. I could have told him how I knew, but you don’t lend a gun to a man who might test-fire it into the back of your head.

  It was as simple as this: The Sheikh had never developed liar’s skills. He had no reason to learn them, and no one to practice them on. Why lie when anything you say becomes the truth?

  “Spell it out,” Pryce said, giving up.

  “There’s places I could look. A lot of ex–military guys sell what they know. Or say they know, anyway—most of the jerkoffs who pay a fortune to take some ‘combat skills’ course couldn’t tell a Ranger from a Rambo. But whoever pulled this one off was a team that had been trained as a team. Mission-specific.”

  “What he said to you about Pollard . . . ?”

  “Yeah, the Israelis could have done it. They’ve got all the tools, and they’ve had cells working this city since forever. But this one has a reverse signature on it.”

  “I’m not a cryptographer.”

  “Missing pieces. You may not know who did the job, but you know who didn’t, see?”

  “See what? You haven’t shown me anything.”

  “No? Tell me, does this sheikh of yours have the juice to change Saudi policy? I mean at some mega-level, like, I don’t know, getting their king to condemn Iran for denying the Holocaust?”

  “No.” Pryce’s answer was so devoid of expression that I knew he’d already asked the same question—in a lot of places—and always gotten the same answer.

  “Then the Israelis wouldn’t spend any Mossad coin on him; he’d be a lousy investment.”

  “You said pieces. As in plural.”

  “Sure. You tell me how whoever put this together picked the target?”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Why this prince? Aldo Moro–type political kidnapping is always about prisoner swaps, and the Saudis don’t take prisoners. Plus, we already know it can’t be money. Your guy would pay, no question. But nobody’s asked.”

  “And you already said it couldn’t be one of those . . . psychosexually motivated individuals.”

  “A fucking team of them? Not a chance. That second missing piece splits into two more. Two questions, that is. Who paid for this job? And why?”

  “Whoever planned this had to know of the target’s . . . proclivities,” Pryce said, touching his no-fingerprint thumb to his plastic chin in a thinker’s pose.

  “Right. And wherever they got that info from is the same place they got the money to do it,” I told him.

  He held his pose. When he figured I’d had enough time to believe he’d been pondering a decision, he said, “Have you got places you could still look? Other places?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Money isn’t the issue,” Pryce stopped me. “But time, that is. And we don’t have much more of it.”

  It took me over twelve hours to find Lune. I wasn’t going back to his—I don’t have a name for it: village? compound? halfway house?—ever again. His border control had too many checkpoints, and too many radioactive maniacs manning them.

  When we were still kids, Wesley and me broke out of one of those jungle-law joints they built to warehouse write-offs like us. We took Lune along. He wouldn’t have lasted an hour in there without us, and you never leave a partner behind.

  Me and Wesley knew where we were going, and what we’d have to do once we got there. Lune couldn’t walk that road, so he went off on his own.

  I didn’t think he could survive the outside world. Lune had been institutionalized all his life, but not for crime. Once you got labeled “incorrigible,” you went into the same garbage can as criminals like us. They called it a “training school.” And I guess it was.

  Somehow, Lune found his own world. That was a lifetime ago, but I knew he’d still take my back. And what I needed was the one thing he did better than anyone on earth.

  So I went to one of those “electronics” stores that clog the West Side with rebranded crap only a tourist would buy, paid a guy who looked like he was auditioning for a part in a hidden-camera documentary two grand in cash for an IBM laptop. He must have left his receipt pad the same place I’d left my faith.

  The Mole reconfigured the torn-out pay phone in the South Bronx as Clarence lounged against the metal pole, one hand inside his dull-khaki coat. The Islander had changed his outfit but not his nature. Clarence was known as a cobra with 9mm fangs, but that was playing him cheap. Cobras aren’t as quick, and their bites aren’t always fatal.

  I plugged in the modem, booted up, hit a memorized URL, waited. Eventually, a box with a giant “?” appeared in the center of my screen, with white space underneath. I typed in my question. Got back “Parameters?” and typed some more.

  “Wait,” the screen read.

  Ten minutes passed.

  “No,” came up on the screen. “More details?”

  I typed in: “No. Thank you, brother,” unplugged, and handed everything to the Mole. He got into Clarence’s beloved ’67 Rover 2000TC, resplendent in its new coat of understated BRG, and they went off together. I got into my rusted-out Roadrunner, and went back to where I belonged.

  Wesley once told me that he never took a contract that called for anything but the killing itself. “The more time you spend with the body, the bigger the risk,” the iceman said. “Let them take out their own garbage.”

  The swampland around JFK used to be a no-tombstone cemetery, but it’s been mostly filled in—covered over with strip joints and high-turnover motels. Once the feds caught wise that the entire airport was a mob paradise, things started to change. Throw Homeland Security into the mix, and that territory isn’t used so much anymore.

  The whole borough of Queens is a crime pendulum. The DA’s Office there boasted the city’s first “Special Victims Bureau.” But that was nothing but a political showcase for a hand-picked star. There’s no “stats” in celebrity journalism, so the pill got swallowed whole. When the head of that bureau decided to run for national office, all the coverage was about her “99-percent indictment rate.” Not a word about trials.

  Then Wolfe took over, and the axis shifted. The “fondling” that once got you probation and counseling suddenly got you felony time. A lot of defense lawyers who’d been working that territory for years figured the new deal was a pose. After all, who actually tries those kinds of cases? Kids? Everyone knows they’re unreliable witnesses, what with implanted memories and all. Street whores? The mentally ill? Retardates? Women married to the alleged perpetrators? Come on!

  But Wolfe opened her own graveyard, and kept it well stocked. While other sex crimes prosecutors were racking up perfect conviction rates by cherry-picking the slam-dunks, she was taking on all comers . . . even those “bad victim” cases that were routinely dealt away—or thrown away—in other offices.

  The pendulum swung, and the freaks dropped Queens from the list of their favorite places to work. Sex-crime rates plunged.

  Then a new DA took over, and immediately proved he was worthy of his appointment by obeying orders. His firs
t move was to fire Wolfe.

  That was like telling the vampires that Buffy just left town.

  I prowled through war-zone streets where the only light was the occasional flare of a crack pipe, found the address I was looking for, and pulled the Roadrunner into the spot I’d been promised would be waiting behind the boarded-up house.

  The back door opened just as I rolled up. I stepped into a single large room, dimly lit, lined with benches and cots. A scrawny black woman in a cheap electric-blue dress gave me a dull look before she took her hit, slamming a spike full of short-term escape into a vein almost as collapsed as her hopes.

  I took the stairs. Exchanged looks with the thug at the top. He stepped aside, and I entered Quayshon’s office.

  “I heard Bones was putting together a string. Talking a serious six figures each.”

  “Meaning you passed?” I said to the red-haired, blue-eyed, mahogany-colored man seated across from me.

  “Bones a hard man, bro. The way I figure, that number he quoted is righteous, but, me, I don’t need that big a funeral.”

  I thought that one through. Bones was about a hundred years old. Born a bluesman. Got his name because he played the kind of joints where you had to bring it vicious just to get the audience to stop their knife fights long enough to listen. The man had done time in places that most people wouldn’t even believe had existed in the twentieth century.

  Bones had been free just long enough to figure out that they don’t give Social Security checks to men who never paid taxes, so what would be an all-or-nothing bet for most people was a can’t-lose proposition for him. Bones had been blues-shouting, “I don’t mind dying!” all his life, and he was a man who lived his lyrics.

  But here was Quayshon, saying the whole thing sounded crazy to him. And Quayshon was such an outrageous madman that he usually won the arguments he had with the voices in his head.

  When I walked into his room, the Prof was watching one of those “You are not the father!” shows.

  I sat down next to him. On the screen, some hideous mass of female flesh dressed sexily enough to induce projectile vomiting was pointing at a photo of a shaved-head, dull-eyed exemplar of inbreeding. The sub-simian’s picture was TV-positioned next to one of a round-headed baby, and the XX chromosome was screaming out the resemblances. The XY’s riposte was that the kid didn’t look like any of his other babies, so it couldn’t be his.

  “My baby’s even got a tiny [bleep], just like his daddy’s,” the mother shouted out her memorized line.

  The host—a smarmy sleazeball who made Jerry Springer look like Charlie Rose—put on a piously disapproving face.

  The accused father grinned, proving that “white supremacy” would never make it as a toothpaste slogan.

  “Makes a man sick, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

  “What?” I asked him. What I didn’t ask was why he was watching the show in the first place.

  “Bitch hits you that low, you got to crack back, Jack! But that lame-ass just sits there grinning. It’s like watching a lump taking a dump.”

  “It’s TV, Prof.”

  “Boy, what you think I’m talking about, going upside her head? You know I don’t play that. But that punk makes me ashamed to be a man. Come on, now! Bitch says your cock ain’t man-size, you supposed to say: ‘The tunnel’s wide enough, any train look small comin’ through it.’ I mean, this is tragic. Don’t people know how to play the dozens anymore?”

  “Not at your level, Prof.”

  “Hey, I ain’t saying they got to be good; I’m just saying they got to return fire, okay? Punks be throwing stones when they need to be growing some. You stand there and just take that kind of down, you know it’s just gonna keep comin’ around.”

  “Amen.”

  “How’d it get this bad, son? We down to where calling some motherfuckers ‘motherfucker’ ain’t even insulting them?”

  “It’s always been there,” I said. “Just wasn’t on TV before.”

  “Lord Jesus. That baby they screamin’ about? Kid’s got as much chance in life as a cross at a Klan convention.” The old man closed his eyes, as if to banish the images twisting in his head. When they snapped open, he was back. “Ah, fuck all that,” he said. “What happened with that perfect score you heard about?”

  The Prof listened to my account, nodding slowly. When I finished, he said, “Anytime you see a red-haired, blue-eyed nigger, you know you lookin’ at a born life-taker. That don’t necessarily mean he got to be spongy under the skull, but Quayshon, he’s the total package. That boy ain’t nowhere close to right. Probably been off the rails since his mama gave him that weird-ass name. Hear me? Quayshon tells you some scheme is insane, you listening to a man who knows.”

  I just nodded, the way you do when there’s no reason to say anything.

  “Tell you something else about Quay. The man is one serious schnorrer. Crazy as he is, motherfucker would still rather pick up gonorrhea than a check.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. From experience. Then I got back to business: “It wasn’t any White Night crew, Prof. They don’t have that level of discipline, for one. And they may call the Arabs ‘sand niggers,’ but they love anyone who thinks Jews need exterminating—a lot of them sent congrats on 9/11. This was way too professional. Some of the Valhalla boys may be ready to pick up the gun, but most of them just put up Web sites.”

  The Prof looked down the hall, using the periscope-style tube the Mole had made for him. Satisfied, he turned back to me, lowering his voice:

  “When I was a boy, they had some creatures down in Louisiana. You serious about finding you a mojo hand, that’s where you got to go. Zombies walk those swamps, boy. But even they walk light around those witchy old women. They can work roots, kill you from the inside out, you fool enough to cross them.

  “Got some animals you wouldn’t believe, too. About a million years old, but still playing the same tricks. You know why, son?”

  “Because they still work?”

  “You listen good, Schoolboy.”

  “I still am.”

  He shifted position in the bed-chair they had just installed. “You know what an alligator snapping turtle is?”

  “I can guess.”

  “Nah. You can’t add words like numbers, boy. Alligator snapping turtle don’t mean alligator plus snapping turtle. I’m talking about a demon. Seen ’em this big,” he said, gesturing with his hands held about three feet apart. “Fucking dinosaurs, they are. Got tails with big spikes, heads like a chunk of rock with little red eyes. I saw one crack a broomstick in his jaws like it was a wooden match.

  “Now, listen: They ain’t fast. Can’t hardly move on dry ground, and can’t swim for shit, either. You know how they get their food?”

  I made a face to tell him I couldn’t imagine.

  “The food comes to them,” he said, twisting his lips to show his own teeth. “They dive down way deep, bury themselves in that black mud so they look like part of it. Lie there all day with their mouths open. Inside those mouths, they got these . . . tongues, I guess they are. Anyway, they’re all pink and wiggly. Look like big fat worms, or maybe even little fish.

  “Those boys are gravely patient. Never make a move. Sooner or later, something down there sees what looks like a meal, goes for it, and . . . snap!”

  I closed my eyes, seeing it. Said, “So, if I backtrack . . .”

  “Now you tuned in, Jim. You go looking for whoever snatched that baby, all you gonna do is spook anyone who’s listening to the drums. You always going to be too late to catch that freight.”

  “But if I put word out that I want the same kind of job done . . .”

  “That’s how you run, son!” the old man said, extending his clenched fist for me to tap. “Remember, now: we in the market for a fur coat, but it don’t have to be no mink, you with me?”

  “I want a particular baby taken, but not an Arab one. I’ll pay what it costs, and there can’t be any killing—I just want the kid.”
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br />   “Not you, you. That pile ain’t your style, and anyone checking your pedigree gonna get in the wind. This is for a client, okay? You just the man putting it together . . . finding the man what he wants.”

  “But that wouldn’t fit, unless . . .”

  “Bring it,” my father encouraged me. Like he had from the day he claimed that title.

  I let myself become the beast. “Kid’s being abused by his mother’s new boyfriend,” I said, forging the hook. Then I baited it with: “Father’s got a ton of cash, but he spent too much of it on hookers, so Mom got custody. She picked a new guy right off the Sex Offender Registry—that’s the one thing that Megan’s Law bullshit’s good for, freakish broads who want to hook up with a degenerate—and the father’s desperate enough to do anything to make it stop. So he asks around, hears about me . . . .”

  The old man put his hands together as if praying. Opened them to form a “V.” Waited a beat, then snapped them shut.

  Violence is total commitment. Middle ground is a myth. Equivocation is quicksand. Where I live, selling wolf tickets buys you a one-way ride. Could be now, could be next year, but every hand gets called.

  I remembered the Prof talking to me on the yard, back when I was still a stupid kid: “The biggest lie in the whole dictionary is ‘foolproof,’ Schoolboy. Ain’t no such animal, ’cause a fool is guaranteed to act the fool. You got to survive before you thrive. Only sure way to win a gunfight is, don’t show up for it.”

  And Wesley’s mantra: “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” whispered to me one night in the dorm. Both of us were children then, but only one of us was a kid.

  What kept me alive was that I was always smart enough to listen.

  I still am. So I put out the bait, and waited for the line to quiver in my hand.

  The whisper-stream is never calm below the surface. Sifting truth from its depths isn’t an exact science, but you know it’s down there somewhere, buried among the lies, rumors, and myths. I’d worked for years to keep my “dead and gone” label certified. It was Burke’s “brother”—me, and my new face—who had been running the family business since I’d slipped away.