Down Here

by Andrew Vachss

  “Did you ever hear of StandaBlok Machine Tools?” she said, stopping me in mid-sentence.

  “No. Is it one of your—”

  “It was a small operation, not so very far from here. You know the area around Liberty Avenue? Anyway, it’s out of business now. The building they used would be just perfect for a conversion like this one. The only thing is the neighborhood.”

  “Sooner or later, there’s no neighborhood in New York that won’t be worth money,” I said, reciting the conventional wisdom.

  “That’s what I think, too. But for now it’s just an abandoned building. After vandals broke all the windows, it got boarded up and padlocked. Tight. Nobody goes there now.”

  “All right,” I said, just to fill the empty space between us.

  “The day after tomorrow, I have to go there. Alone. At midnight.”

  “What for?”

  “To meet my brother,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

  What she told me was, Wychek called her at work Monday afternoon. He asked her for a safe place where they could meet. Said he wanted her to choose it, after what happened last time.

  “That building she told me about? She’s got the key. The way she was talking, I figure she already owns it. Or a piece of it, anyway. Some development deal.

  “All Wychek’s got to do is make sure he’s not followed. If he told her the truth—that nobody knows where he is now— shouldn’t be any problem for him.”

  “And she wants to just bring you along?” Michelle asked. “Like a little surprise?”

  “No. What she wants is just for me to stand by, close. Once she meets him, she’s going to pitch the idea of him doing the interview with me. For the book. If he says ‘okay,’ she’ll call and wave me in.”

  “No chance you make that dance, son.”

  “That’s true, Prof. But she can’t know that.”

  “Why does she do it, then, mahn?”

  “She’s gotten more and more . . . I don’t know the word for it. She keeps trying to ‘prove’ something to me. Like if I thought she was for real I’d . . . be with her, I guess.”

  “So you think all this cloak-and-dagger is so she can say, ‘I tried, honey’?” Michelle.

  “You tell me.”

  “Well, she is a woman. And having a freak in your family doesn’t make you one,” my little sister said. “We all know that song. By heart.”

  “Guy down here, boss.”

  “Seen him before?”

  “Yeah. The lumberjack.”

  “Let him pass, Gateman.”

  “I’m in.”

  “In what, Mick?” I asked.

  “What you’re doing,” he said, his glance covering all of us, seated around the poker table.

  “It’s over,” I told him. “Like Wolfe said.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You looking to join for the coin?” the Prof asked suspiciously.

  “There’s only one thing I care about in all this,” Mick said, eyes just for me. “Same as you.”

  Nobody said anything, waiting.

  “And I don’t trust the fucking feds,” Mick said. “Same as you.”

  Thursday, 3:22 a.m. The building was two stories of solid brick, standing squat and square, as if daring anyone to ask it to move.

  By the time we finished offloading, the Prof had seduced the lock.

  We left him just inside the door, cradling his scattergun. I led the way up the stairs, a five-cell flash in one hand, a short-barreled .357 Magnum in the other. Clarence was just behind me, to my right. As soon as we cleared the area, Max and Mick brought up the gear.

  Except for a thin film of interior dust, the place was immaculately clean, as if a former tenant had swept up before moving on.

  We set up camp on the top floor. Clarence started to unpack methodically. Max and Mick went around making sure we had more than one way out. I took care of setting up observation posts, carefully using a box cutter to make eye-slits in the blackout curtains we hung behind the boarded windows.

  “No people, no food, and it’s nice and warm out,” the Prof muttered, looking around. “So the miserable little motherfuckers got business elsewhere.” The Prof hated rats.

  By daybreak, we were ready to start sleeping in shifts.

  “I say he gets here first,” the Prof whispered to me.

  “Michelle put the padlock back in place behind us,” I said. “And only the sister has the key.”

  “What time’s the meet?”

  “Midnight.”

  “I got a century to a dime the cocksucker gets here by eleven-thirty, minimum.”

  I was still considering the offer when Max slapped a ten-dollar bill on top of one of the duffel bags.

  “Pssst!”

  “You got him?”

  “Got somebody, mahn. This scope makes everything green, but it’s a man, walking.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes,” Clarence said. “Closing now.”

  The Prof snatched Max’s ten and his hundred off the top of the duffel bag in one lightning move. Then he and the Mongol took off downstairs. Mick was already there, waiting.

  Thirteen minutes later.

  “You’re not feds,” Wychek said, despite my dark-blue suit, white shirt, and wine-colored tie. If being stripped, handcuffed to a pipe, and surrounded by the men who had choked him into unconsciousness and carried him up the stairs frightened him, it didn’t show on his face.

  “Good guess,” I said.

  “And you’re not with . . .”

  “With who, John?” I said, pleasantly, not a trace of urgency in my voice.

  “Oh no,” he said, lips twisting in a stalker’s smile.

  “When did you last take your medication, John?”

  “Just before I— What difference does that make?”

  “You know why I asked,” I said, very softly.

  “I don’t—”

  “Ssshhh,” I said, soothingly. “We’re already here. You know what that means.”

  “If anything happens to me—”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to you, John. But we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know who else was coming.”

  “She doesn’t have it,” he said, smoothly. “She doesn’t even know where it is.”

  “One of those is a lie, John. Maybe, maybe it was true that first time, on Forty-ninth. But it’s not true now. Not tonight. So, the way we see it, all we have to do is wait. Soon as she shows up, we won’t need you anymore.”

  “The feds know where I am. If anything—”

  “You said that already, John. That’s why we took your clothes. To make sure you didn’t have any way to stay in touch.”

  Wychek watched me blank-faced, same as he had watched dozens of social workers and therapists and cops and prison guards for a lot of years. His other face only came out under a ski mask.

  He hadn’t been carrying a cell phone. No tape recorder, no body mike.

  But he had his straight razor. And a roll of duct tape.

  I walked around in a little circle, as if I was making up my mind. Finally, said, “You want to know what this is about, John? What it’s really about?”

  “Yeah. Because if you think—”

  “It’s about money,” I said, moving closer to him. “And you’re going to—”

  Clarence stepped into the room, chopped off my speech with a hand gesture. I followed him out of the room, over to where he had an observation slot.

  A silver Audi TT convertible pulled up to the front of the building. Its headlights went out. Just as Laura Reinhardt opened her door, I caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the lot.

  I gestured to Max and the Prof, pointing two fingers down, forked. They took off.

  “Big SUV,” Clarence said, watching through the scope. “Coming on.”

  “I’ll cover you from up here,” I said, and went back to where we had Wychek trussed up.

  “This is so you don’t hear or see what’s going
on,” I said, a doctor explaining a medical procedure to a nervous patient. “Just breathe through your nose,” I told him, very softly.

  “Do not panic,” I cautioned him, just before I fitted a set of sound-canceling earphones in place. “We’re all going to be busy for a few minutes. You have yourself a seizure now, it’s your last.”

  I slapped a couple of turns of duct tape around his mouth, then dropped the black hood over his head, with another quick turn of the tape to hold the earphones in place.

  I heard the downstairs door open.

  A flashlight blazed downstairs for a half-second. Then it went out.

  The SUV was a moving brick, black against the gray night. It came to a shadowed stop about fifty yards from the building. The front doors opened, and a man climbed out of each side. No light went on inside the truck.

  “Can you see anyone still inside?” I asked Clarence.

  “It looks empty, mahn. But someone could be on the floor.”

  “All right. She should be out of the way by now. Go on downstairs. Remember, if there has to be any—”

  “I know,” he said, threading the tube silencer into his nine-millimeter.

  I lost sight of the two men just as they entered the building. I moved over to the top of the stairs. Looked down. Shadows inside shadows.

  The front door opened. Closed.

  A blast! of sudden light.

  “Freeze, motherfuckers!” the Prof barked.

  I heard a harsh grunt. Then the puffft! of a silenced handgun.

  “The broad strolls in. Max takes her from behind, same as he did the freak. She goes right out, never saw a thing. We wait for the two guys following her. As soon as they come in, I light them up, give them the word. One raises his hands, the other goes for his steel. Clarence cut loose, and—”

  “Where’s the sister now?”

  “Sleeping,” the Prof said. “I gave her the hypo the Mole put together. One shot, he said she’ll be out for a few hours. Wake up with a bad headache. Be all fuzzy, too, like coming out of a bad dream. That’s why he needed you to tell him how much she weighs, get the dose perfect.”

  “We’ve got two men,” I said. “One in the room next door, one upstairs. No way to know if the guys in the SUV had backup—”

  “Not in their truck, they didn’t,” Mick said, telling us he had gone out to make sure.

  “—but they both had cells. Don’t know if they’re supposed to call in, how much time we’ve got. . . .”

  “Got to pick one and run, son.”

  “Yeah, Prof. I know.”

  “Which one?”

  “Wychek knows where. But the guys who came in after Laura, they know why, I think.”

  “We came for the green,” the Prof said, settling it.

  The man was in his late forties, tall and rangy, with leathery skin. In the soft light from the candle, his eyes were colorless.

  “I’m not with them,” he said, in that calm, deliberate voice people use when they’re trying to keep an unstable person calm. “I’m a professional. Freelance, just like you, am I right? No reason for anyone to get wild, now. Just tell me what I have to do to walk out of here, and it’s done.”

  “We want the money,” I told him.

  “Sure. Give me the book, and you can name your price.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. It would have been just like that if that fucking Yusef didn’t have to play with his toys.”

  “That’s what took Wychek out the first time?”

  “Yeah. Could I have a cigarette?”

  The Prof fired one up, held it to the man’s lips. He inhaled gratefully. “Thanks. I’m the same as you, okay? A professional. I get hired, do a job, get paid. Only they don’t trust outsiders, so they sent that degenerate psycho along with me.”

  “Yusef?”

  “Right.”

  “He came with you tonight? He’s the one—?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, he’s one of them. You had the drop on us, cold. Stupid asshole must have figured he was going straight to Mecca,” the tall man said, deliberately distancing himself from the dead body at the foot of the stairs. “After what he pulled the first time, I couldn’t believe they’d ever send him again.”

  “The first time? You mean with the girl in that apartment on the Lower East Side?”

  “Right. Fucking sicko. They told me he hooked her up to a car battery. He kept jolting her, but she kept telling the same story.”

  “And later they found out it was the truth.”

  “Not from her. Or from the other one, either. Fucking scumbag morons don’t know from interrogation. All they know is torture. It wasn’t until Wychek contacted them that they knew for sure.”

  “He took the book from her apartment? After he raped her?”

  “Right. When she found it was gone, she panicked. I don’t blame her, seeing what happened.”

  “She couldn’t tell them anything but the truth.”

  “Right. But they didn’t know it was the truth until Wychek started holding them up for money. That was when he was in the joint. By then, it was way too late for her. Fucking half-wits outsmarted themselves. They figured, even if they got busted themselves, nobody’d ever think to look for the book in some white girl’s apartment.”

  “She was the girlfriend of one of the—?”

  “If you mean, was she fucking one of them, yeah, I guess. But that wasn’t why they let her hold the book. She was one of them. One of those rich little ‘revolutionaries,’ you know what I mean? Like shopping isn’t enough of a thrill for them anymore, so they need to go liberate the downtrodden masses.”

  The contempt in his voice invited me to join him, but I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to fill the silence. Maybe me holding Wychek’s straight razor helped.

  “At first, the little weasel didn’t want that much,” the mercenary said. “I handled everything for them. I was the bridge man to get him that protection contract.”

  “From the Brotherhood.”

  “Right. You know what happened next. Fucking Wychek steps it up. He wants a lawyer. Okay. Still within budget. And by then they knew he hadn’t turned the book over to anyone. So they figured, Wychek gets out, they can deal with him.

  “He gets out, all right. Only what he wants is a lot of money. Now, these sand nig—” He pulled himself up short, segued into—“assholes, they got the money,” without missing a beat. “They got all kinds of money. But instead of just paying him, they decide to get cute.

  “Yusef’s got this little pistol. A twenty-five. Custom job. Between the suppressor and the reduced-powder hand-loads, it looked bad enough, but it wouldn’t kill a fucking cockroach. Yusef promises them, no electricity this time. He’ll use fear. Figures, he puts a couple of rounds into Wychek, it won’t kill him, but it’ll scare the shit out of him, make him give up the book.

  “And that’s what Yusef does. He pops Wychek a couple of times. Then he puts the piece right between Wychek’s eyes, tells him ‘Last chance,’ and . . .”

  “Wychek goes out.”

  “Yeah. Fucking Arab assholes. Yusef swore Wychek didn’t have the book on him. Stupid amateur. He was too busy searching the body to check and see if Wychek was even still breathing.”

  The tall man took another hit off the cigarette the Prof was holding for him. “After that, they’re in a panic,” he said. “In case Wychek’s got backup—you know, someone he left it with. But the book never surfaces, so they start to breathe easy.

  “All of a sudden, there’s that story in the papers. That Wychek didn’t die. And they got this woman charged with shooting him. But Wychek’s supposed to be in a coma, and they’re not worried about him talking. Then, a couple of weeks later—bang!—they get another call. Wychek himself. He’s out of the coma. And he still wants to sell them the book. But now, behind what happened, he wants the money in front.”

  I didn’t say anything, watching the play of candlelight on the razor’s edg
e underline the reality of his situation.

  “They figure, pay him, okay?” the tall man said. “But they also figure he makes copies, right?”

  “I would.”

  “Sure. Look, you got the book now. And you’re not some sick-fuck amateur, like him. I could get them to go a flat million, for real. All cash. Or gold, if you want it that way. Any drop you say.”

  “Then I’m in the same place he is,” I said. “On the spot. And I don’t even know who’d be looking for me.”

  “If you’d ever looked in the book, you’d know, man. Those camel-jockeys put it all in there. Names, addresses, phone numbers, codes . . . the whole thing. Most of them are still in place. Once they realized Wychek wasn’t going to do anything but hold them up for money, they got cocky. They’re sitting ducks, man. One call, you could take them all down,” he said. “They have to pay.”

  The tall man was reciting his credentials. A mercenary to his core, keeping it real. One man-for-hire to another. Whatever was in the book he was talking about, his own name wouldn’t be. In the sociopath’s moral compass, true north is always in his mirror.

  “We understand each other, right?” the tall man said. “I’m the same as you.”

  I looked over to the Prof. He shook his head.

  “We’re a lot smarter than the Arabs were,” I told Wychek. “If we wanted, we could keep you alive a long time. Long enough for you to tell us whatever we need.”

  I deliberately stepped back a couple of paces, to lower the threat-level.

  “But I got a better deal for you,” I said. “Fifty-fifty. That’s fair. Come on. You should have hired people like us in the first place. You know what happens if you go anywhere near those psychos yourself. This way, we collect the money for you, split it down the middle. What do you say?”

  “How do I know I can trust you?” he asked, eyebrows raised above his reptile eyes.

  “You can trust us to hurt you bad, if you make us go that way. Go the right way and you walk, with half of the score. Call it a commission.”