Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  The Prof walked closer. His shotgun spoke. Both barrels.

  I looked at the body of Belle’s father for a long, dead minute.

  We bowed our heads.

  Pansy howled at the dark sky, grief and hate in the same voice.

  The pack went silent, waiting for its meal.

  I didn’t feel a thing.

  “Burke was born a criminal, and raised to be a better one . . . by me,” the Prof told his other son. “I trained him to be a true thief instead of some hothead gunman. But you, you was raised up to be a gentleman. Your momma wouldn’t have wanted to even meet some of those give-it-up sluts you always playing around with. But you ain’t no baby anymore. You been a man a long time. When you and Taralyn get married, you through with what we do.”

  “But . . .”

  “You could open a million oysters and never find you a perfect black pearl, boy,” the Prof kept rolling. “Coming as close to crossing over as I did, it’s like every inch of your body picks up signals, not just your eyes and ears. So I know.

  “Listen now: That young woman will not tolerate you doing anything but right. She might—and I say might, can’t never tell with those Island girls—let you slide on church, but you want to be her man, you got to do her right. Take care of her, understand? You got to bring home the bacon without no faking.”

  “I do not know how to—”

  “You putting up the gun, son,” our father told him. Not asking, telling. “This job we got now, we all gonna finish it. Our family always pays its debts. But when this one’s done, you done, too. That Taralyn, she stand behind you if you gotta mop floors. But one wrong move, and she show you the door. I got her memorized, don’t I, now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You ain’t gonna mop no floors,” the Prof assured him. “I got me some ideas, but they can wait. For now, only thing you got to play is straight. Working here, she got to know a lot more than how to do this rehab stuff. The way that girl’s made, you can’t keep her in the shade. She brings her own sunlight. Brings it wherever she walks. You want her to walk with you, you got to walk right. Be true with everything you do.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “How many women you think you been with in your life? Pussy is pussy; pink don’t think. Don’t go to waste behind your taste, boy. Sex ain’t love. Ask Little Richard; that boy knows what I’m talking about.

  “A real man, he don’t raise his son to follow in his footsteps; he raises him up so he can walk further down the road than he ever did himself, even if that means the father ends up walking alone for a while, understand? Now Burke is my true son, but he’s only got but one path to walk. Not you. And now it’s time for you to change yours.”

  “But what if—?”

  “Don’t buy no ring without you talk to your sister first,” the old man said. “Men don’t know ’bout that kinda stuff.” Then he closed his eyes and drifted off.

  When a man pays for sex, the price rises with his age. It can be anything from a lap-dance to a marriage, but it’s still what the Prof always called it: cash-for-gash.

  The older I get, the more I find myself back where I started. Every woman I’ve ever loved, they all left, one way or another. Some dead, all gone.

  Maybe, one day . . .

  But until love comes into my life again, I pay. I don’t pay more; I just pay more often.

  I still remember what my father told me the night before I wrapped up my last felony fall: “Youngblood, listen good now. You walk out that door, I know pussy’s first on your list. A man in this Life don’t need no wife. But never forget: when you get with a whore, never look for more. Do that, you gonna get fucked in more ways than I could ever say.”

  I never forgot. Whores sell things for money, and you could end up being one of those things. They may be sporting a beautifully stacked deck, but there’s no ace of hearts in there.

  I learned from Murphy men when I was still a kid. I learned the badger game later on. I never knock on a stranger’s door.

  The street can be an anonymous play, but the Monster is always loose out there, and I’m not just talking about AIDS.

  I met one of those monsters once. A long time ago, when I was looking for someone. The car-trick hooker’s name was JoJo, and thinking about her still scares me. I guess she’s dead by now. I wonder how many she took first.

  You can’t call an escort service; you could be calling the cops. You can’t make appointments; you never know what will be waiting. You can’t deal with Web sites or setup services. Records can get seized. Or sold.

  So I stick with women I know. None of them are working girls, but none of them work for a living. I don’t make dates, and I never drop in unexpected. Not fair to them, too much risk for me.

  I just call. Out of the blue. My blue.

  If they’re ready to go, right then—I make sure I’m close by when I call—the tiles fall and the mosaic forms. They come downstairs—they never live on the ground floor, not in this city—and wait on the corner.

  If they get there quick enough, and if I don’t pick up on any visual dissonance while I’m waiting, I go the next step.

  I slide the window down, and say the right words. I have to do that—if I tell them I’ll be driving a white BMW, it’ll be a red Chrysler that pulls to the curb. Those extra few seconds could make all the difference if the girl decided to make a call of her own.

  If everything’s clear, she gets in, we drive to a place she hasn’t been before, and we play out our script. Different ones for different girls, but it’s always some version of: I’m on the run from the law, an undercover FBI agent . . . anything that explains why it always has to be come-and-go.

  Then I drop them off at the opposite end of the city from where they live, with enough “cab fare” to fly to Aruba.

  Maybe some of them buy the story, most probably don’t. But even if they tell, who ever they tell, nobody’s going to wait outside their place for me to come back—you can’t set your alarm clock to “random.”

  Saudi Arabia, that’s our bosom buddy. So was Iran, once, remember? The shot-callers here have their own magic label-maker: Pinochet was a realist, Castro’s a fascist, and Vietnam’s a good export market.

  Letting Idi Amin run a country was like making Ted Bundy warden of a women’s prison. Idi Amin never sat in an electric chair, he sat on a throne. But once syphilis gets inside your brain, money can’t get it out. His last years were spent in a castle, not a prison cell. A castle in Saudi Arabia.

  Our government counts Uganda as a major ally in what they call a “troubled area.” An area close to where Mobutu used to fill the same role.

  I learned two things in my life. Everything’s connected. And you never want to be the connection. You know how therapists do that word-association thing? Some people, you say “connection,” first word that comes to their mind is “sever.”

  I remember the Prof chuckling out loud at the whole idea of arming America’s friend-of-the-moment. “Fools think, just ’cause they can get a snake to dance, it won’t bite ’em the second it gets the chance.”

  That’s all about international alliances, not families. Still, I had to reassure Max a dozen times that Mama would never find out who was with us the night we checked out the Sheikh’s fortress.

  Our alliance with the third man on the roof started a few years ago, when I first came back home. We were almost down to our case money, so we started piling up cash any way we could.

  Some people are fool enough to think that a shared profession makes them safe from their own kind, like the embezzler who blows his take on pump-and-dump penny stocks.

  “A fool is money,” the Prof always said.

  That first job we’d done together was trickier than it looked. Disabling that traveling circus of “bounty hunters” was easy enough, but we’d been paid to handle it ghost-style—absolutely no-trace guaranteed. The targets had to wake up permanently discouraged, but without a clue how it had happened.

&n
bsp; Nobody was worried about them running to the cops—bounty hunters aren’t exactly an NYPD favorite.

  Picking them out was embarrassingly easy. Four men, in two “unmarked” cars that were about as undercover as Britney Spears, never mind the stupid baseball caps the men wore, or the cage bars between the front and back seats.

  It had taken us a couple of days to make sure they really were that lame, not just posing for some TV crew.

  Once we locked on, Michelle slut-voiced an anonymous call to the bondsman. He’d figure it for the bail-jumper’s wife. Her divorce lawyers would have told her she’d only get to keep what the government didn’t take, and if her husband didn’t show up for trial . . .

  The professional man-hunters pressed buttons at random until someone buzzed them into the building. They exchanged knowing looks—yeah, people who live in slums really are idiots.

  If they hadn’t been such pitiful amateurs, they might have wondered why the lightbulbs were all burned out in the hallway where they positioned themselves on either side of the door, getting ready to kick it in.

  I guess too much TV can rot your brain.

  Being highly experienced in such matters, only three of them went to the bail-jumper’s door. The other one waited out back in case the bad guy tried the fire escape, a Desert Eagle dangling from his hand. Good choice; that piece is heavy enough to practice curls with, and it’s harder to conceal than a fluorescent brick. Naturally, the genius chose the all-chrome model—it picked up enough ambient light to sparkle in a coal bin.

  That one was mine. Max and his friend took his partners.

  Going in, we knew it was a three-man job, minimum. No matter how we disabled the bounty hunters, we’d need a driver to remove each of their cars, plus one more to follow them to the dump site and get us back to Manhattan.

  The extra man Max brought in was a stranger to me. I didn’t know his name, never saw him before that night. He was an older guy—I wouldn’t even try to guess his age—wearing some kind of mottled-shadow bodysuit under a long, cowled coat, his hands hidden somewhere inside the sleeves. A night-merging hood covered his head. I deliberately didn’t make eye contact with him, but I already knew the one part Mama couldn’t ever know: he was Japanese.

  And now the three of us were working together again. Standing on a rooftop on the East Side just before dawn, trying to see an answer.

  The cowled man gestured to Max as if I wasn’t present. He spread his arms, upturned palms and a slight movement of his head indicating he had seen nothing that could keep him out of the building we had been scanning. He held up an admonishing finger, then mimed a man walking . . . walking slow. Shook his head.

  Max tossed some invisible objects between his hands, like a juggler.

  The black-cowled man placed his own hands together, made a pillow of them, canted his head. Then he shook himself like a man coming out of a daze.

  Max bowed, his eyes never leaving those of the ninja, who returned the bow to precisely the same depth. Maybe Max saw him disappear; I know I didn’t.

  The Prof’s hospital room was the perfect place for us all to meet. “We’ve got a guy who can get in from the top, work his way downstairs, and open the side door for us,” I laid it out. “But there’d be no way to cover up that the place had been visited. It’s just too big, with too much staff. There’d be bodies all over the place. If they got put to sleep, they’d wake up. And if they didn’t . . .”

  “That ain’t the half,” the Prof said, almost condescendingly, taking the idea that a ninja might know more than he did about home invasion as a personal insult. “Even if Max’s boy got himself an invisibility spell, what if the phone rings while he’s doing the job? Or if they got something scheduled we don’t know about, like one of those ambassador meetings? Take nothing more than some FedEx driver ringing the bell to send it all straight to hell. Come on!”

  “Pryce—”

  “Pryce might, is all you can say, son. I taught you better than that; we don’t go till we know. Pryce flops, we all drop.”

  “But it’s the only thing we’ve come up with,” I argued. “And even that window won’t stay open long.”

  “It is logical,” the Mole threw in, looking up briefly from examining the prosthetic they were fitting the Prof for, already thinking of ways to make it work better.

  Michelle exchanged a look with Clarence, silently agreeing that, for the Mole, those three words were a damn filibuster.

  “She never leaves?” Gateman asked. If hospital security had a problem with a man rolling his wheelchair onto the elevator with a reworked 9mm Kahr nestled near his colostomy bag and a pit bull in his lap, they must have kept it to themselves.

  “Could be that way, Gate,” I said. “She’s not some rich man’s playtoy; she’s property. She’s probably allowed out, but no way she’d ever be able to go alone.”

  “There still has to be . . .”

  “Went over the options, Prof. She can’t call a car service; they’d never let one past the gates. She can’t even go for a walk around the grounds without ‘protection.’ Even if she could sneak into that underground garage, so what? It’s against the law for women to drive where she comes from; she probably doesn’t even know how.”

  “That’s a whole different set of—”

  Whatever Michelle was going to say was chopped off by Taralyn’s brisk entrance. She stood by, hands on hips, eye-dueling the Prof until the old man pushed himself out of bed, gripped the walker, and propelled himself out the door.

  Taralyn whirled, her eyes hitting Clarence like a two-ton electromagnet on a pile of iron shavings. “I should walk with my father,” he immediately said, and followed her down the corridor.

  “I thought only a witch could cast a spell,” Gateman said, grinning.

  “You need to get out more,” Michelle told him dryly.

  “You want all this done because you’ve got an idea?”

  “It’s not an idea, it’s a hypothesis,” I told Pryce, echoing the Mole. “So it has to be tested.”

  “Has?”

  “Or not,” I conceded. “But I’ve checked every place I knew about, and a lot more I found out about. Nothing. Not even a tremble on the Web-lines. So it’s either your scenario or it’s mine.”

  I waited, but I could see he was waiting on me. So I said: “Now, yours, I admit, it could have happened that way. I can even see how it might make sense to some sicko; power always makes sense to them. Rats are supposed to desert a sinking ship, but some rats are smart enough to know it’s not the ship that’s going down . . . only the captain.

  “Thing is, I could never test any of that, but I know you could. In fact, I know you did,” I gamble-guessed. “And if your theory had proven out, you wouldn’t have even shown up for this meet.”

  Pryce steepled his fingers.

  “What makes you think you could get her to—?”

  “I didn’t say ‘think,’ I said ‘might.’ For all I know, she doesn’t even speak English.”

  “Like a native.” Pryce was old-school all the way—even liked his razors double-edged. “I’ll have the rest for you in forty-eight.”

  I was on my way back home when my cell throbbed.

  “What?” I answered.

  “I fucked up, boss.” Gateman’s voice, street traffic in the background.

  “I’m on my way.”

  I walked in the front door of the flophouse, hands empty. If something wrong was waiting inside, Gateman would have tipped me when he’d called—we all know how to do that, even if we’re talking with a gun at our heads.

  He was behind the wooden plank, his semi-auto lying flat on the never-signed register book. Rosie ambled over to greet me. I saw she wasn’t chained. Expecting company, then.

  We all went into the back. The interrogation-room mirror behind the “desk” let us keep watch. As an extra precaution, we kept the glass dulled, even though the winos who flopped upstairs never seemed to want to look at themselves.

 
; “I just blew it, boss. Straight up.”

  “Easy, Gate. Run it down.”

  “It was only a couple of hours ago,” he said, glancing at the large-numeral atomic clock Terry had bought for him. Almost 3:00 a.m.

  “I took Rosie for a walk,” he continued. “I figured, past midnight, even those dipshits who like to play urban pioneer would be indoors, I’d have the streets to myself. So I’m a few blocks over—you know, where they’re tearing down that old factory? All of a sudden, Rosie’s hair goes up on the back of her neck. I know something must be just around the corner, but I don’t get all hyped over it—any strong-arm guy working down here knows better than to fuck with me.

  “Only it wasn’t a mugger; it was this bunch of kids. All wearing the same gear, so I figure them for some kind of club. That’s when I saw this huge pit one of them was holding. Heavy chain, spiked collar, you know the look—all that MTV crap.

  “The kid’s dog growls, and Rosie just goes for him. Boss, I ain’t no weakling,” he said, holding up a thick forearm heavily corded with muscle. “And I had my chair locked, too. But Rosie, she was still moving on them, dragging me like she was in a tractor-pull.

  “I tell the kids, ‘Get back!’ But the one holding the dog, he screams, ‘Get ’im, Tec!’ Their dog starts his bounce. Cocky, like it was gonna be an easy piece of work for him. I didn’t have no choice, boss; he was twice Rosie’s size. I pulled my steel, told the punk, he drops that chain, his dog’s a goner. Him fucking too.

  “That stops ’em, but just for a second. One of them, he starts movie-talking. You know, ‘I can’t shoot all of them’ bullshit. So I plugged him.”

  “Fuck.”

  “I know,” he said, sorrowfully.

  “Nobody went nine-one-one?”

  “I didn’t total the punk,” Gateman said, sounding offended and defensive at the same time. “Just tore up his leg a little. They all took off then, dragging him behind. But how hard is it gonna be for them to find this place? All they gotta do is ask around about a man in a wheelchair . . . .”