Terminal

by Andrew Vachss

  She nodded again, but kept her eyes on mine. “So, when you say ‘brother,’ you don’t mean blood.”

  “I do mean blood,” I said, explaining as much as I was going to. “I just don’t mean DNA.”

  She nodded again. Said, “Come.”

  Another room. I expected the row of computer screens, the anaconda cables, machinery I didn’t recognize…but I wasn’t ready for the occupants.

  Kids, they were. Not one of them looked as old as twenty-five. A full-spectrum array, from army-surplus jackets to pineapple-colored spiked hair to unlaced combat boots to what looked like a white tuxedo jacket with red velvet lapels.

  Someone had hand-painted a rust-colored sign across the top of a side wall…

  LUCK is only perceived when results exceed information

  No luck means no BAD luck

  Service is not faith, it is WORK

  …or maybe it was done in dried blood—at least a couple of the girls looked Goth enough to have gone that way.

  “Chill the testiculating!” one of those snapped at a young man with a shaved skull and a hole in one earlobe big enough to put a thumb through. “You’re so 404, it’s a sadness.”

  “Fuck you and your co-signer,” the kid fired back.

  The woman in the lab coat looked the entire room into silence. “Daniel,” was all she said.

  A kid with a fifties flattop with matching motorcycle jacket and engineer boots came over to where we were standing. Maybe he didn’t know the wire-frame glasses spoiled the look. More likely, it was his look.

  “This is the man you were told about,” she said.

  The kid looked at me. His eyes reminded me of a chrome champagne flute. An empty one.

  “Come,” the woman said again, this time including the two of us.

  The air in the next room had a chemical undercurrent. The walls looked like those at Attica, built out of acoustical tile. The carpet didn’t try to hide that it was nothing but a pad over a grid of wires.

  In the precise center of the room was a round table and three chairs.

  The woman in the lab coat made a gesture. I followed Daniel’s example and took one of the chairs. She took the last one.

  I’d sat down with stone killers plenty of times in my life and still been the most dangerous man in the room. Because I wasn’t alone. My family may not have known where I was, but the people in the room, they all knew who I was with.

  Some of them may have known the Prof. They all knew about Max. Some maybe just knew his rep; some may have seen him work. But they all knew there was more where that came from. My family. And what they’d do if I didn’t come back.

  But that was never my trump. There’s plenty who think they could handle the Prof if they caught him without his scattergun. There’s gunmen in this town who think they could take Max down if only they could keep distance between them long enough—shooters think like that. But there isn’t anyone in our world who didn’t fear Wesley. Even today, my ghost brother was always riding my shoulder, like a cape of invisible vipers. That’s because the whisper-stream is always flowing, and there’s currents in there too dark and deep to see. The Prof said it best:

  “You saw the show, but you can’t never really know. And if you can’t be sure, you never knock on his door. Never. Don’t matter what you pack, you can’t chance that Mystery Train coming down your track.”

  This “international assassin” thing is for thriller-writers who think the CIA is an “intelligence service.” Guy gets a phone call, hops on a plane, flies to a country he’s never been to in his life, learns the language on the way over, pops his target, and disappears into the shadows. Then he flies back home, puts on some Mozart, fixes himself—hey, he’s a “loner,” right?—a glass of something special from his wine cellar, and contemplates the meaning of life.

  Wesley? He was the truth.

  But the people in the room with me weren’t from my world. They were specialists—the kind who don’t care about going wide because they live only for going deep. Whoever had ordered them to give me whatever they were going to hand over, they’d know Wesley. But even if they believed he was still around, that wouldn’t make them blink. After all, they were in the same business, just working for different wages. In the parallel universe they occupied, if you weren’t the other man’s target, and he wasn’t yours, it was the same as a truce.

  The woman made a hand gesture, then rapid-fired in something I guessed was Hebrew.

  The kid turned to me, watching my hands.

  “What?” I said. “You don’t think I’d bring a—?”

  “We know you’re not armed,” he said. “What I’m telling you is, no notes, understand?”

  I nodded.

  “There were eleven, eleven,” he said, emphasizing the word in a tone meant to convey reluctant admiration, “separate shells. Like one of those Matryoshka dolls, one inside the other. Some of them existed for less than twenty-four hours; some of them are still alive. But even those are empty—just minor money on their books, sitting offshore and stagnant.”

  I set my mind to Intake, sat with my hands folded in front of me like a kid at school. Which, to them, I was.

  “The check you’re interested in, it was drawn on an American bank.”

  I held his eyes, expressionlessly.

  “Only it was one of those S&Ls that went belly-up during the early eighties. That should have made the records disappear—Reagan was in charge then, and there were a bunch of senators who were pals of the principals. Only it turned into a big enough scandal for a federal audit, because too many people lost their life savings, the media started screaming, and the politicians did what a raccoon does when his leg is caught in one of those steel traps. They chose survival.

  “Of course, those records are sealed. Very interesting cases, some of them. In one, the defendant was a personal friend of Senator John McCain. Didn’t seem to help him much. Or hurt McCain, either, in fact. The judge was someone named Ito.”

  I said nothing.

  “The corporation you’re interested in—DrepTechDepth Drilling—was opened with a cash deposit of thirty-five thousand dollars. A checkbook was issued by the bank. Only two checks were ever actually written, numbers 2077 and 2078, which means the checks were just pulled out at random.

  “The person who opened the account was one Lester T. Ambrose, a licensed private investigator in Nevada. Check number 2078 was made out to him.

  “Ambrose is well known to the local authorities. Suspected—never arrested—of a variety of offenses, from forging documents to wiretapping. Some divorce lawyers use him rather frequently.”

  I sat there, waiting.

  “Two days before the account was opened, the passenger manifest for TWA flight 609 from JFK to Las Vegas shows a Mr. James LeBrock in first class, seat 3B. On that same day, Mr. Ambrose rented a car, a 1997 Cadillac SLS, from Hertz. Both men stayed at the Aladdin that night. Each checked out the next day. You know the Aladdin, right? It’s the hotel that was demolished in 1998, so the owners could build a brand-new one on the same spot.”

  I made a noise that could mean anything.

  “Mr. Ambrose did not rent the car under his own name. However, the credit card he used traces to a separate identity he had established and had in place for several years. Mr. LeBrock also booked his flight—and his hotel stay—to a credit card. A company credit card. And, although its bank account has long been closed, the company itself still exists. It’s a closely held corporation whose stated purpose is real estate investment. The owner of all its shares is one Carlton John Reedy. Date of birth matches the one you gave us; Social Security number squares with his tax returns, home address is—”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  The kid took it as the statement of admiration I meant it as. The woman in the white lab coat turned to me, said, “That is our part, do you understand?”

  I did. It wasn’t the first time a beautiful woman had told me not to come back. Never again.


  “Isn’t that enough?” Claw asked.

  “We bet the Daily Double, Ace,” the Prof answered for me. “So far, we only bagged the first race.”

  The AB man gave him a look. Clarence’s hand flew to his chest—he wasn’t checking for a heartbeat.

  “Easy, son,” the Prof reassured the young gunman at his side. “My man digs our plan; he just wants the time to rhyme.”

  Claw gave the Prof another look. No mistaking this one: respect.

  “Remember what I told you before?” I told the cancer-man. “This is five-card stud, okay? Table stakes. And we only get to sit in for one hand. So we’ve got to come in holding so heavy that we don’t get called behind what we’re already showing, make it so they don’t want to make us show them our hole card.”

  Claw nodded his acceptance. He was a man used to waiting. Used to counting, too. And his chances were down to one.

  “I went your way,” the Prof said, as soon as the AB man left. “But I don’t get the play.”

  “What are you saying?” I answered, signing to Max at the same time.

  “We think we already got enough in the tank to make major bank, Schoolboy? You thinking, let nature take its course, then—”

  “You know I can’t do that, Prof. I gave my word.”

  “To Silver.”

  “Yeah. To Silver.”

  “Okay, so you not just waiting on that Double-H motherfucker to check out for us to score. But you still holding back, Jack. That other stuff you asked the Mole’s people to get…”

  “Yeah?”

  “It could take—fuck, I don’t know—months to set up a job like that. What could the cop shop have on a murder that old that’s going to tie our three pigeons into it? They were never even suspects, right? Never questioned. So no statements. No searches. No…nothing.”

  “What’re we doing this for?” I said. Not flipping the script, just enlarging the type.

  “This scene ain’t about nothing but green.”

  “Yeah. One with three targets.”

  “You want to be sure before you go for the cure,” the man who raised me said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Nobody ever paid,” I admitted. “Now some people want to get paid for that.”

  “That little girl, she really put you back, didn’t she, son?”

  I looked down at the table for an answer. Our last job had turned over rocks I hadn’t even known existed. And shown me things I’d never imagined underneath.

  A child I’d been paid to rescue from a pimp a long time ago turned out never to have been his victim at all. Even at her age, she had been playing the pimp, not the other way around. And I’d returned her to the place where she’d learned those tricks. Yeah, I’d gotten paid for doing it. But what I was really looking for back then was payback. To me, the freaks are a tribe. Anytime I take one from Them, that’s one for Us.

  Beryl had been the little girl’s name. Twenty years later, a man hired me to find her again. Not her father this time: a sucker she had fleeced and released. He wanted me to find a woman he knew as Peta Bellingham, but as soon as I saw her picture I knew who she really was. What her real name had been, anyway.

  A few minutes after he’d hired me, the ripped-off sucker was taken out by a hunter-killer team. One so smooth and professional it was clear that they weren’t paid just for a hit—this one was all about sending a message.

  I figured Beryl was next. So I found her, even though there was no one left to pay me. Figured I could…I don’t know…rescue her one more time. And this time for real.

  But what I finally found was a predatory sociopath so twisted I wanted to stop her viperous heart.

  I didn’t do that. Instead, I fixed it for her to collect reparations in the only coin she wanted: vengeance. Then I bought a baby from her and gave it to a real woman.

  Before Beryl came back into my life, I had dismissed my mother as a teenage whore who carried me until she went into labor, then hung around the hospital just long enough to pop me out and get back to work.

  Me, I was a trick baby. Whoever had planted the seed that became me had wanted to fuck an underage girl, probably paid extra for it. Couldn’t be any other way—no pimp would ever let a moneymaker be out of circulation for that long…especially if his stable held only one horse.

  But the pain of what Beryl shoved in my face opened my eyes to a possibility I’d blocked with such perfection that only one “truth” had ever touched my core. Was my mother the whore I’d always assumed she was? Or could she have been a hero, like Belle’s sister had been, giving up her own life to spare her child’s? What if my bio-father was her father? What if she gave her baby the only chance he ever could have, and went on the run before the freak could start using her again?

  Had I gotten that vasectomy when I was just a young man because, somewhere inside me, I knew?

  Bad blood. That bad blood Belle always said was in her—her big sister, the woman who’d traded her life for Belle’s, had also been her mother.

  When I’d been tracking Beryl, I’d gotten help from the woman I’ve always loved. Wolfe. But she’d given me my chance—twice—and I’d fucked it up.

  Another woman who told me, “Don’t come back.” The one that hurt the most.

  Wolfe had only helped me find Beryl because I swore to her that I was back to being the man she first met—hunting the humans who prey on kids.

  Over the years, I’d slipped away from that. Too many times, I’d found kids who didn’t want to be “saved.” One was working in a low-rent whorehouse. I told her I thought runaways took off to find a better place. She said she had.

  You ever wonder why so many working girls call their pimp “Daddy”?

  I didn’t bring that girl back, but the man who’d hired me still paid for it…just not the way he figured on doing. I never did a legit piece of work in my life. Yes, if one of Them walked across my path, they wouldn’t get to keep walking, but that wasn’t what I was about anymore. It just seemed to…happen, sometimes.

  The Prof knew. I didn’t owe Melissa Turnbridge a thing. But I owed whoever did…what they did…to her. Yeah, I was going to get paid. Everyone was going to get paid.

  But only my crew and Claw were guaranteed to be paid in cash. The others? That’s what I needed those old police files to decide.

  I was just coming back from visiting a guy tall enough to dunk on Wilt and skinny enough to do it through the eye of a needle. That is, if his legs worked. He needed one of those two-handed walkers to get around, but his hands were as good as any surgeon’s.

  I pulled into the chain-link cage behind the two-pump gas station that never seemed to have any fuel to sell. The Plymouth was now a resplendent shade of Mopar’s infamous Plum Crazy, instead of its usual urban camouflage, a mottled pattern of dull black and gray primer.

  That’s what the guy I had visited wanted to show me. He had a way to apply a full-body decal to any car. Looked exactly like paint, even up close. It took him a while to put one on—the less chrome to remove the better, and my Roadrunner was a perfect candidate—but only a few minutes to peel it right off. Especially if you had help.

  “Think of it as a getaway driver’s condom,” he said, smiling with teeth so perfect they had to be replacements.

  My plan was to test it for a couple of days, including running it through a car wash. If it worked, it was worth every dime the man was asking.

  The new color didn’t faze the three pit bulls ambling out of their own two-story condo. I don’t know if dogs can see color, but I know they never rely on it. If they hadn’t recognized me in whatever way dogs do, even the plastic tub of pulled-pork BBQ I brought with me wouldn’t have distracted them from their job.

  As usual, the old male got the first deep snarf of the goods. His humongous head plunged viciously, shook once, and then turned the concrete into a dinner plate. The two females went right for the booty, but one of them, an orca-spotted beauty I’d been courting for a long time, gave me
a look over her shoulder first. I made a “come here” gesture with one hand. She immediately trotted around me, deftly snatching the solid cube of steak I held out behind my back, without breaking stride.

  After I slammed the three-pound padlock closed, I walked back to the flophouse. Darkness was down, and I wrapped it around me the way a rich man’s mistress does her mink. It was mine, and I’d paid what it cost to make it so.

  “The kid’s upstairs, boss,” Gateman greeted me.

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. To Gateman, both Terry and Clarence were kids, but he only called Terry by that title, because Clarence was a fellow gunman. The naked unhappiness in his voice was because Terry had come without his mother—Gateman’s unrequited adoration of Michelle had never been expressed once he found out she was the Mole’s woman. Never expressed to her, that is.

  “Bad?” I asked. Meaning: was Terry on the run? If he’d been down here and got caught in a bad spot, this is where he’d come. Getting past Gateman would be a hard job for a couple of pros, impossible for amateurs.

  “Nah,” Gateman dismissed my worries. “He had a message for you, said he had to deliver it in person.”

  Something happened to the Mole! flashed in my mind, but I let it go just as quick. That was the case, Terry would have been with Michelle, for sure.

  “Why didn’t he wait down here with you, Gate?”

  “Oh, he did, boss. Got here hours ago. We sent out for sandwiches and everything. But I had a little business to do, and I didn’t think you’d want…”

  “You’d make a good father, Gateman.”

  “Probably would have made a good sprinter, too,” the man in the wheelchair said.

  I tapped fists with him, acknowledging his recital of the truth we all learn: you play what you’re dealt.

  Then I hit the stairs.

  “Hey, son,” I greeted Terry as he looked up from his laptop.

  “Burke.”

  “Gateman said you had a—”