Terminal

by Andrew Vachss

  I was on my feet by the count of six, with just enough left in my tank to dodge his wild lunge. He went sailing past me into the ropes. I drove a rabbit punch to the back of his head and slammed my shoulder into him at the same time, pinning him to the ropes with his back to me. He whipped an elbow into my stomach and spun around, hooking with both hands, knowing he was almost out of time.

  I grabbed his upper body. He blasted at my ribs. I drove my forehead hard into his eyes, not giving him room to punch. If I’d let go of him, I would have fallen for good.

  I was out on my feet when I heard the bell. It took four men to pull him off me. We won almost six hundred cartons of cigarettes that day. The State even threw in a free bridge for my missing teeth—I’d have to wait for my go-home to have the deviated septum repaired.

  “If you lost money that day, you bet on the other guy,” I told the blond. “The bet was that I couldn’t last the three rounds.”

  “I bet on you to win,” the idiot said. Fucking sucker had gone for the fifty-to-one shot.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “You didn’t even try and beat that nigger,” the blond said, like he was accusing me of treason.

  “I was trying to survive,” I told him reasonably. “Look, pal, it’s not a big deal. How much did you lose?”

  “Three fucking cartons,” he said. Like it was his sister’s virginity.

  “Tell you what I’ll do. That was a few years ago, right? Figure the price has gone up a bit—how about a half-yard for each carton? A hundred and fifty bucks, and we’ll call it square?”

  The blond stared at me, still not sure if I was laughing at him.

  “You serious?”

  “Dead serious,” I told him, slipping my hand into my coat pocket.

  The blond couldn’t make up his mind, his eyes shifting from Pansy to me. The guy with the sunglasses finally closed the books. “Let it go, B.T.,” he said. The blond let out a breath.

  “Sure,” he said as he walked over to me, hand open for the money.

  Pansy went rigid. Her teeth ground together with a sound like a cement truck shifting into gear.

  “I’ll give it to you when I leave,” I told the blond. Even a genius like him got the message. He stepped back against the fence, still flexing the muscles in his arms. Pansy was real impressed.

  “Can we do business?” I asked the guy with the sunglasses.

  He waved me over to the side, against the fence by the Mustang. I flattened my hand against Pansy’s snout, telling her to stay where she was, and followed him over. I lit a cigarette, feeling Bobby against my back.

  “One of your guys did some bodyguard work. Delivered some money to a day-care center. Money was in a little satchel, like a doctor’s bag.”

  I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses; he had his hands in his pockets—waiting for me to finish.

  “There was a woman with the bodyguard. Maybe he was protecting her, maybe he was guarding the cash, I don’t know.”

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “The woman, she’s no youngster. Maybe my age, maybe older. And she has a house somewhere outside the city. Big house, nice grounds. Has a guy who works with her: a big fat guy. And maybe a school-bus-type vehicle.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” I told him.

  “And you want to know what?”

  “All I want to know is who this woman is. And where I can find her.”

  “You got a contract for her?”

  I thought about it—didn’t know if the bodyguard work was a one-shot deal, or if the Brotherhood was part of the operation.

  “She has something I want,” I told him, measuring out the words as carefully as a dealer dropping cocaine on a scale.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “If you’ve got something working with her…then I’d like to ask you to get this thing I want from her. I’ll pay for it.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then I just want her name and address.”

  He smiled. It might have made a citizen relax; I kept my hands in my pockets. “And for us to get out of the way?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Exactly.”

  The blond moved away from the guy in the sunglasses, his back to the fence. Pansy’s huge head tracked his movement as if she was the center of a big clock and he was the second hand.

  “B.T.!” Bobby said, a warning in his voice. The blond stopped where he was. He’d be a slow learner to the grave.

  “What is this thing you want?” the leader asked.

  “It’s nothing you’d want.”

  “I don’t know where her stash is.”

  “It’s not dope I’m after,” I told him.

  The leader took off his sunglasses, looked at them in his hands as though they held the answer to something. He looked up at me. “You’re a hijacker, right? That’s what you do?”

  I held my hands together and turned my palms out to him, putting my cards on the table. “I’m looking for a picture—a photograph.”

  “Who’s in the picture?”

  “A kid,” I told him.

  He looked a question at me.

  “A little kid—a sex picture, okay?”

  The leader looked at the dark-haired guy standing next to him. “I thought it was powder,” he said. “I never asked.”

  The leader nodded absently, thinking it through. “Yeah,” he said, “who asks?”

  I lit a cigarette, cupping my hands around the flame, watching the leader from the corner of my eye. He was scratching at his face with one finger, his eyes behind the sunglasses again.

  “Bobby, you mind taking your friend inside for a couple of minutes? We’ve got something to talk over out here, okay?”

  Bobby put his hand on my shoulder, gently tugging me toward the garage. I slapped my hand against my side, telling Pansy to come along. She didn’t move, still watching the blond, memorizing his body. “Pansy!” I snapped at her. She gave the blond one last look and trotted over to my side.

  Back in the garage, I opened both front doors of the Plymouth and signaled Pansy to climb in.

  “B.T.’s okay, Burke,” Bobby said. “He’s just a little nuts on the subject of niggers, you know?”

  “No big deal,” I assured him.

  We waited in silence. Pansy’s dark-gray fur merged into the dim interior of the Plymouth. Only her eyes glowed—she missed the blond. I closed the door, but didn’t click it.

  The garage door opened, and they came inside. The leader sat on the Plymouth’s hood, leaving his boys standing off to one side.

  “The woman told us she had to deliver money to various places. Serious cash, okay? She was worried about somebody moving on the money. Victor”—he nodded his head in the direction of the dark-haired guy—“he picked up a couple of grand for every delivery. He carried the bag. We thought it was a regular series of payoffs—she never took anything back when she turned over the money.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had a lot of questions, but it wasn’t my turn to talk.

  “She told Victor no weapons. If someone made a move on them with a gun, he was supposed to turn over the bag he was carrying. He was just muscle, okay?”

  I nodded. The woman hadn’t been worried about being hijacked—Victor was there to intimidate the people who supplied the kids. One look at him would get that job done.

  “You’re sure she has this picture?” the leader asked.

  “No question,” I told him.

  “This means she has others? That she does this all the time?”

  “It’s what she does,” I said, flat.

  The leader was wearing his sunglasses even inside the garage, but I could feel his eyes burn behind the dark lenses. “I’m a thief,” he said, “just like you are. We don’t fuck kids.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Some of our guys, they’re a little crazy. Like B.T. He’d stab a nigger just to stay in practice, you know?”<
br />
  “I know.”

  “But none of us would do little kids. Our brotherhood…”

  I bowed my head slightly. “You have everyone’s respect,” I told him.

  “We do now,” he said, his voice soft. “If word got out that we were involved with stuff like that…”

  “It won’t,” I said.

  He went on like he hadn’t heard me. “If that word got out, we’d have to do something serious, you understand? We can’t have anything hurt our name—people would get stupid with us.”

  I kept quiet, waiting.

  “If we give you the information you want, are you going to try and buy this picture from her?”

  “If she’ll sell it.”

  “And if she won’t?”

  I shrugged.

  “Victor made a lot of those cash runs for her,” he said. “A couple of day-care centers, private houses…even a church. There has to be a fucking lot of those pictures around.”

  “Like I said, she’s in the business.”

  The leader put his hand over his heart—I could see the tattoo on his hand. His voice was still very soft. “Her name is Bonnie. The house is on Cheshire Drive in Little Neck, just this side of the Nassau County border. A big white house at the end of a dead-end street. There’s a white wall all around the property—electronic gate to the driveway. Big, deep backyard, trees and shrubs all around. Two stories, full basement, maybe some room in the attic, too.”

  “Anything else?” I asked him.

  “She has that school bus you talked about—a little one, maybe a dozen seats in the back. She uses the big fat guy as the driver.”

  “Any security in the house?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “When we work, we play it straight. We weren’t even thinking about taking her off.”

  I handed him five grand, all in hundreds. “That square us?” I asked. “And you take care of B.T.?”

  He nodded, and we were done.

  They stepped away. Later, I stepped in.

  It made the papers.

  The perpetrators were never caught.

  Bobby had spent a lot of time trying to get me to spray my old Plymouth. The guy I’d gotten it from had been trying to build the ultimate New York taxicab, until the wheels came off his life. Bobby passionately believed I could get the two-ton beast into the twelves if I went nitrous.

  I knew he’d love the Roadrunner I drive today. Kept telling myself I’d bring it over, show it off, take him out for a ride.

  Someday.

  The car I’d heard was well past us by the time I came back to the present. I pocketed the .357, nodded at the man I’d been holding it on, telling him we were back in business.

  “I’ll start over,” the AB-OG said. Making it clear he wasn’t expecting me to acknowledge what he’d called my “references.” He just wanted me to understand that he knew I’d been certified, measured up to the real convict’s standard. Time-tested. “The…other stuff, it has to come in. But just a stage-setter, no soapbox. Work for you?”

  “Your dice,” I told him.

  “People think prisons were always mixed, but that’s wrong. It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson was making all his moves that they started desegregating the joints. I was in Q in ’64. Already been through the whole Youth Authority. Soon as I turned seventeen, they decided I was all grown up.

  “It sounds like it would have been bad there. But I’d been schooled, spent more time locked up than I had on the streets. If they’d just kicked me to the street, I would have been lost. But a prison—even a much bigger prison, full of older guys—I knew how to get along there.

  “I found a little car to ride in—that’s what we called crews back then, cars—and I was just jailing. You know: lifting on the yard, playing cards, moving slow, doing a little of whatever was around, jawing, TV, even some reading. Time, you know how it is.

  “But the minute they made us mix, the niggers took over. They grabbed everything. I don’t just mean they ran the place; I mean it wasn’t safe to be a white man in there anymore.

  “They didn’t try to ease in—negotiate, make deals, split things up. Fucking animals wanted the drugs, they wanted the cash-queens, they wanted the gambling, they wanted the home-brew. They wanted anything that was yours, they just took it. You know what I’m saying?

  “So that’s where we sprung from,” he said, tapping a crude “AB” tattooed in Prussian script over his heart. “’Cause it wasn’t just the colored gangsters coming at us, it was the fucking ‘revolutionaries,’ too. White trash like me, bad-to-the-bone outlaw peckerwoods. Born someplace else, it always seems like. Our people came to the Coast one step ahead of the law, and raised us to be worse than them. No education, no hopes. A whole breed of winos and check-collectors, and we were the fucking ‘oppressor’?! The ‘ruling class,’ if you believed those stupid fucking apes.”

  He lit a smoke, showed some teeth. “You know what’s funny? The only ones who ever did believe them were the same rich motherfuckers we hated.”

  He blew out a long exhale, giving me a chance to talk if I wanted it. I didn’t.

  “And then you had the beaners,” he said. “Specially EME then. Flexing their muscles, starting to get strong, too. It was like it had been up in Tracy. ‘Get in the car,’ that’s all you heard if you were white in there. ‘Ride with us, or ride alone.’

  “You ride alone, you don’t ride long. So we rode together. But we didn’t have anything to hold us together. That’s where the Aryan thing came from. Blood. Pure white blood. Same thing our grandfathers got bought off with, understand?”

  “No,” I said. This wasn’t a man you ever wanted to pretend you understood if you didn’t. I sat back. He lit another smoke from the butt of his last one, settled in.

  “You’re living in shacks and trailers, eating off food stamps, got nothing, never going to have nothing, but at least you’re not a nigger. You get conned, tricked, put down, spit on, you’re not welcome in the good parts of town. That’s what ‘trash’ means, right? After you’re done with it, you throw it away. But at least you’re not a nigger,” he said, self-mockingly. “So you beat the crap out of a man for looking at some pig of a slut you wouldn’t fuck if you were drunk and blind, and you call it protecting the race.”

  I said nothing, waiting.

  “Yeah,” he rolled on, grim-faced. “Got that beautiful, pure white blood beating in your veins. Remember, your ancestors owned those fucking niggers once.

  “Well, that wasn’t what we were about. I don’t mean any of us were liberals, but hating niggers, that’s an attitude, not a job. When we went out to work, we wore ski masks, not punk-ass white sheets over our heads, like faggot ghosts.

  “Didn’t matter what you did so long as it was work, am I right? We were robbers, burglars, dope-dealers, muscle for hire, safe-crackers…in that class. The Life, the outlaw life, that was our identity then. That’s what set us apart.

  “So, when we got locked up, we were somebody. Convicts, not inmates. And what we cared about wasn’t white supremacy, it was supremacy, period—see? Being in charge. Running things.

  “You know what? Quiet as it’s kept, some of us, we worked with colored guys. In the World, I mean. When you’re working, you want the best. Turns out the best wheelman out there’s a different color than you, who gives a fuck? Work, that’s the thing. You know the two tests, right?”

  “What’d you go down for? And did you come alone?”

  “Yep. Same as it is everywhere. I worked with black guys who’d walk into the fucking Death House alone—rather die like a man than live as a rat. But a diddler? Sicko like that, he could never be with us, no matter what kind of skills he had. Because a baby-raper, he’ll give you up before they get the second bracelet on his wrists.

  “Inside, sure, we stayed to ourselves, color-wise. But when we thought of ourselves, we didn’t think of ‘Aryan,’ that never came into the picture. Way before we got started, you had bikers wearing Nazi crap, you kno
w, like Kaiser helmets and stuff like that. Plenty of them even wore big-ass swastikas on their jackets. But that wasn’t about anything but blowing minds. Making a show. All they wanted to do was ride, fuck, and fight. Took them a long time to get the picture, too.

  “Anyway,” he said, with the air of a man who knew he’d digressed, “when things changed Inside, we saw right away that we needed something more than being stand-up thieves to keep us together. You got niggers who’d stab each other in the back walking around calling each other ‘brother.’ What’s that tell you?

  “Right,” he said as if I’d actually responded to his speech. “All of a sudden you got the black-liberation guys. They didn’t want nothing to do with nigger pimps, but they’re not trying to knock them out of the way, they’re trying to recruit them. Just like those Muslims. They got their religion shuck, but they were a gang, for real. Good tight gang, I’ll give them that. So now you got George Jackson spades who want to ice guards; and you got Elijah jungle bunnies who say, ‘When you in the Man’s house, you live by the Man’s rules.’ And, naturally, you always got niggers who just want to take over the rackets, like in the streets. You see what I’m saying? Color’s never enough.

  “And I’m not just talking about niggers, either. Say you’re a Mex, it matters if you’re from south or north. California, I mean. Their Mason-Dixon Line was Bakersfield, I heard. I mean, EME and Nuestra Familia, they’re both brown, right? But could they ever get together? Fuck, no.”

  I shook my head in agreement. I hadn’t come up with Mexicans, but Puerto Ricans have gone the same route here—they won’t mix Latin Kings and Netas on the same tier at Rikers unless they want a war.

  “And those motherfuckers are all born blade-men,” he went on. “Turned the joint into Shank City. But you know what they all had in common? If you were with one of the crews, any of them, you were safe. Not safe when race war jumped—anyone can die then, you know that. But say you were a seventeen-year-old black kid. Light-skinned, sweet face, skinny little body. You walk the yard alone, you’ve got a daddy by nightfall. Or you get busted up so bad that, next time the wolf barks, you turn right over. But you claim Black Muslim, that’s not going to happen. A lot did, for just that reason.