Safe House

by Andrew Vachss

  “How do you know you’re not being hosed?” I asked her.

  “What’s ‘hosed’?” Crystal Beth asked.

  “Tricked. Scammed. Hornswoggled. Whatever you want to call it. To really set this guy up, you’d need more than a friendly cop, you’d need a DA.”

  “We have that,” Crystal Beth said. “Guaranteed.”

  “So who’s the Man?” I asked her.

  “Not a man,” she said with a gentle smile. “A woman. Her name is Wolfe.”

  Good thing I hadn’t taken Crystal Beth’s hand. A lifetime of practice could keep my face flat, but she would have felt my pulse jump at the name. Wolfe. Former boss of City-Wide Special Victims, a sex-crimes prosecutor so intense one newspaper said she drank blood for breakfast. She spent years on the front lines slugging it out with every verminous predator they threw at her—rapists, child molesters, kidnap gangs, it didn’t matter. She was a warrior woman, at her loveliest doing her work, a sleek mongoose who could clean out a nest of cobras without breaking a sweat. But a politically greasy DA took her down, sacrificed her to the only god humans like him worship.

  When Wolfe had been on the job, we’d bumped paths a few times. She wouldn’t go an inch over the line, but she’d tightrope it pretty good if it meant dropping a freak. When they fired her, she went outlaw. At least that’s what the whisper-stream that runs under the city said. She ramrods a private intelligence cell. Does it for the money, the way it’s told. But Crystal Beth was doing some telling of her own. And it looked like Wolfe couldn’t stay away from the war.

  Wolfe could get it done, I knew. There were still some prosecutors who stayed true to what she’d stood for. Not in City-Wide—that whole crowd had all rolled over like the knee-pad wearers they were. But there were other bureaus, other operations. And some of them would still work with Wolfe. They couldn’t bring her into the courtroom, but they could bring her information there. And use it.

  She knew cops too. Good, tough old-school cops, most of them members of the KMA—“I already got enough time in to retire, Lieutenant, so Kiss My Ass”—Club and all too clean to be intimidated out of meeting with her. Cops she’d worked cases with for years before they took her off the beat. Wolfe had handled mostly sex crimes, but some of the freaks touched other nerves too: Homicide. Narcotics. Anything gang-related. So she knew cops from all over the city, in every bureau.

  Yeah, Wolfe could get it done.

  I took a shallow breath, thinking that all through in less time than it took to exhale fully. “Okay,” I said to Crystal Beth, “you’ve got him, right? He comes in, he goes down. What’s the problem?”

  “There’s another man,” she said. “Like I told you. The falconer. And he’s after me too.”

  All I could see of Vyra’s face was a pale oval in the dim light. Her chest was easier to focus on—whiter because of the blouse she wore, bigger because of what filled it. But she was quiet, holding Crystal Beth’s hand, waiting.

  I waited too.

  “I know this is complicated,” Crystal Beth finally said. “But I don’t know a simpler way to tell it.”

  “This other man?” I prompted. “He’s with Marla’s husband? One of the Nazi crew?”

  “The opposite,” she said, a tremor in her voice telling me she wasn’t as sure of that as she tried to sound. “He’s a hunter.”

  “After Marla’s husband . . . ?”

  “Lothar, that’s his name. Well, not truly, I guess. His real name is Larry, but he changed it. He said Larry sounded Jewish. Anyway, he’s not really after Lothar either. He’s . . . Oh, I’m not sure, okay? I just don’t know.”

  “You know he’s after you, though?”

  “Yes! That didn’t take any guesswork. He told me—”

  “Who told you?” I interrupted her.

  “The man. Mr. Pryce. Pryce with a “y,” not an “i”—that’s the name he said to call him.”

  “Pryce is the one after you?”

  “Yes!” she snapped impatiently. “Just let me . . .” She stopped herself, pulled a deep centering breath through her nose. Her hand on my knee went limp. Then she spoke slowly, being clear with herself more than with me. “This Pryce said he knew about the plan. To bring Lothar into court. He said we couldn’t do it. We could either call it off, or he could stop us, whatever we wanted. ‘It’s your choice,’ is what he said. But there isn’t a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice,” Vyra piped up.

  “Save it for something you know,” I told her. “This isn’t about shoes.”

  I felt the jolt pass from her all the way through Crystal Beth to me, but she stayed quiet.

  “Vyra’s in this too,” Crystal Beth said, her tone both defending and defensive. “If we go ahead with the plan, he’s going to hurt her too.”

  “How’d he say he was going to do that?”

  “With . . . information,” Crystal Beth said. “That’s what he has, information. Secret information. When I first heard his voice, it was on the phone. On a special line I keep. Unlisted, in someone else’s name. It doesn’t connect to me in any way. We use it for . . . business. He knew my voice. Said he had listened to it on tape enough times to recognize me easily.”

  “So he got a phone number. Pulled a wiretap. That don’t make him James Bond.”

  “He has it all, Burke. Everything. He knows things about my own father that I never knew. About what happened with my mother. Even Starr’s name. He knows how we run our operation, who owns this place. And some things I . . . did. A long time ago. He could close us up, make everything disappear.”

  “He’s just trying to spook you. What would he get out of—”

  “It’s not just me,” Crystal Beth whispered urgently. “He could put Lorraine in prison. And he could hurt Vyra too.”

  “How?”

  “With my husband,” Vyra said, her voice dead.

  “I thought he didn’t care about . . .” I said. Vyra had told me plenty of times that her husband thought it was fun that she slept around. All he wanted to do was listen to the details, take topless photos of her, lick her shoes and pay the bills.

  “He’d care about this,” Vyra said in the same tone.

  I waited, but she wasn’t coming off anything more.

  “Okay, this Pryce guy could take it all down. Fine. What does he care?”

  “Care?”

  “About this Lothar geek. Why does he want to protect him so bad?”

  “We don’t know,” Crystal Beth said, flat-voiced. “That’s the job. The one Vyra said you could do.”

  I was in a room with two women. Within the last few days, one had held my hand in the street, sat on my lap and told me secrets. The other had paraded around in her new shoes and sucked my cock. Now they were together, and they wanted me to do something.

  It wasn’t easy, telling them that I had to get paid for what they wanted.

  So I stalled.

  “I don’t know if I could do it or not,” I told them. “I’m not even sure something can be done. There’s no schematic for a thing like this.”

  “Will you at least talk to him?” Vyra asked.

  “This guy, he’s an information-freak, right? Got stuff on both of you, on other people. That’s his weapon. Me, I’d be going in there without one. And maybe, he gets a look at me, I go on his list.”

  “You scared of him?” It was Vyra talking, but I’d heard that kind of thing from women all my life. And from girls before them. I have the scars to prove it—ones you don’t need a Ph.D. to see.

  “Damn right,” I said. “Add it up. You got some Nazi loon who wants his kid to help seed the Master Race. And you got somebody else running interference for him. Somebody who knows a lot he shouldn’t know. And you want me to ‘talk’ to him. How about spelling that one out?”

  “You know what we want,” Vyra said.

  “No you don’t,” Crystal Beth corrected her, standing up and bending toward me. “Remember what you did for Harriet? Well, maybe something
like that. But not . . .”

  There it was. “I got paid for Harriet,” I reminded her. “And there wasn’t any major risk in it. At least, not like this.”

  “I have money,” Vyra said.

  Crystal Beth rolled herself a cigarette. When she got it burning, she held it out to Vyra . . . who took one short drag and handed it back. Now they were waiting.

  “How do I find this Pryce?” I asked. Thinking, if he’s as good as they were saying, he probably already knew about me.

  “I have to call this number,” Crystal Beth said. “Tonight. Before midnight. Then he’ll call back. I’ll tell him then. And I’ll call you.”

  She left Vyra where she was, took me down the stairs to the back door. Stood on her toes, her lips next to my ear. “I’ll tell you everything soon,” she promised, holding on to the front of my belt with two fingers, keeping me close so I’d listen.

  I stepped into the biting-cold night, eyes on the clear sky. And walked away slowly, the weight of treachery yoking my shoulders.

  It was almost nine when Clarence’s Rover swooped down, plucking me off the corner. I climbed into the front. The Prof’s hand dropped onto my shoulder.

  “You was a long time in there, Schoolboy. You get enough of a look to pull Herk off the hook?”

  “It was never about Herk,” I told him. “He was never the game. The poor bastard just stumbled in.”

  “Figures,” the little man said acidly. “So we’re out?”

  “I’m not,” I told him.

  And then I told him the rest.

  “You can never shed a street-brand, honey,” Michelle said. Sitting in my booth at Mama’s—next to the Prof, facing me and Clarence. She was perfectly coiffed, wearing a red satin jumpsuit with a wide black belt, her lovely face slathered in full war-paint, getting ready to work. I’d asked her once why she dressed up just to work the phones. “It’s all feeling, baby. If you feel it, you can be it.”

  Michelle does tele-sex. She’s the best at it. If you could run fiber-optic cable under a glacier, her honey-silk voice would melt it. And she’s the finest natural hustler I’ve ever known.

  Michelle is my sister. No biology there, something closer to the root. We had the same father and the same bond: the State and our hate. She’d been born a toy. By the time she knew the medical term for what she was—a transsexual—her freakish family had found a dozen ways to use her. So she ran. Headlong, like a man jumping off the top of a blazing oil rig into the black ocean water below, knowing whatever was down there couldn’t be worse.

  She’d known she was a woman trapped in a man’s body even before puberty tortured her from both sides of that twisted line. In the bent-sex underground where Michelle survived, the sadistic trick nature played on her raised the price of the tricks she turned. She climbed into the front seat of cars and dropped to the floor, each time wondering if the driver would be that life-taking psychopath all hookers know is out there somewhere. Always out there, his pounding blood seeking another’s.

  Michelle stole whatever she could, and lived the same way. She kept trying do-it-yourself to make things right. Almost destroyed her body with back-alley implants and black-market hormones. Always saying she was going to get it done—be herself. Become herself. “Going to Denmark, honey. Real soon,” she used to tell me every time our paths crossed.

  I knew Michelle loved me. She’d proved it too many times to doubt—not with conversation, with the way you prove things in the street. But we were never really family until the night I pulled a little kid away from a pimp in Times Square. That wasn’t the job I was hired for, but I couldn’t just leave the kid there—I owed Hate that much. I was going to get him to a shelter or something, but Michelle took him for herself, right then and there. She made me bring him to the Mole’s junkyard. Her baby. Terry, she named him. And she and the Mole raised him, the two of them. They were still doing it.

  It had been a loose network before. Steel mesh ever since. Michelle always told people the AIDS plague drove her off the streets, but that was a lie. It was Terry. Her boy.

  It was Terry who finally took her over the line too. Not to Denmark, to Colorado. But she got it done. A citizen might call her a post-op transsexual. To me, she was as much woman as there could be on this earth. My sister. Terry’s mother.

  What we all wondered was . . . would she ever be the Mole’s wife?

  “You think that’s what they’re playing for?” I asked her. “They want somebody done?”

  “What else could it be?” she snapped back at me, angry and impatient with my slowness. “Those two bitches have a problem, right? Some man. Some men. Whatever. They just want it to go away. I know how that feels.”

  “You scan it different than Schoolboy does?” the Prof asked. To him Michelle was a kid—that’s the way he saw everyone—but he had an awesome respect for her criminal mind. More than he had for mine, that’s for sure—it wouldn’t take much for him to toss out any analysis I tried to offer.

  “This girl—Crystal Beth, what a name, puh-leeze—she went to that little skeeve Porkpie first, didn’t she?” Michelle answered him. “Nobody’d hire Porkpie to middle up a scam. You know how he profiles, like he can get heavy work done. He’s selling muscle, not brains . . . like he’s got any of either.”

  “She couldn’t have known that guy was going to go down,” I told Michelle. “Best she could have hoped for was Porkpie would get him fucked up, scare him off. She wasn’t buying a hit, not for five grand.”

  “Unless Porkpie was lying,” she put in tartly. “Remember the first rule, honey—deviates never deviate.”

  “He wasn’t lying,” I said. “Max was there with me when I talked to him.”

  Michelle nodded, dropping the argument. Nobody lied when Max had them in his hands.

  “So how about she knows another way?” Michelle proposed.

  “Knows what?” I asked her.

  “The street-brand, baby. You’ve had the hit-man tag on you ever since . . .”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t have to. We’d all been there when it started. Except Clarence. And he was there when it got added to. Once it was a mosaic, a landscape dotted with truth if you knew where to look. Now it was a miasma, a junkyard so full of discards you couldn’t find the truth with a microscope.

  But the cops had tried. More than once. In our world, homicide happens . . . so the police are always around. But they never press all that hard. You listen to the PR guys at One Police Plaza, you’d believe the Man takes it just as seriously when someone from our world goes down as they would a citizen.

  Sure.

  I picked up the hit-man label a long time ago. When some Sicilians got into a range war. One of the dons hired a guy I’d come up with. An ice-man so laser-locked to his work that predators cringed in the shadows every time the whisper-stream passed the word that he was coming.

  A man who stood alone, as emotionless as the death he dealt. “Nobody knows where he’s going,” the Prof said once, “but everybody knows where he’s been.”

  A man everyone feared. In our world, that passed for respect.

  A man I wanted to be, once.

  The don double-crossed the ice-man, and the killer did what he was. The Sicilians starting dropping—some alone, some in bunches. Finally, the don came to me. He said he wanted me to talk the killer into a truce. Call it off, go back to the way things had been.

  But if I’d gone to him with a message from the don, the killer would have taken me out too.

  The don thought he had me in a box, but it was only a bottleneck . . . still a narrow bit of exit road left. I took it. And the don’s life paid the tolls.

  But it was too late then. The wheels had come off.

  The perfect killer was gone now. He went out with a sheaf of dynamite sticks wrapped in duct tape held high in his cold hand, standing like a homicidal Statue of Liberty just before the blast took him away. He took a whole mess of citizens with him for company. And left a note warni
ng the cops not to follow him into whatever lesser Hell awaited.

  I have that note. It was his last gift to me, a Get Out of Jail Free Card, if I played it right. But the only place to play it was from Death Row.

  So he’s gone now. And I talk to him sometimes. In my mind. The only place any of us ever say his name.

  Wesley.

  I knew what Michelle meant. The whisper-stream flows everywhere, a toxic blend of rumor, legend and lies—but it always carries a current of truth too. It said there were only two pro snipers working the city—Wesley and El Cañonero. But El Cañonero only worked for the Independentistas, a man with a cause, a soldier under the flag of Puerto Rican liberation. Wesley worked for whoever paid him. A long time ago, I faced some men in a parking lot. One of them was a karateka called Mortay, a death-match fighter who wanted Max. And threatened his baby daughter to bring the Mongolian into the ring. One of the men died in that parking lot, picked off from the nearby rooftop. The whisper-stream said it was Wesley, working for me. It wasn’t. It was El Cañonero, but that’s what the whisper-stream does with the truth.

  Crystal Beth might have tapped into it, thought I was the man for the job. Maybe it was me she’d been looking for all along.

  “But Herk’s the wild card,” I protested. “He doesn’t run with us.”

  “He did,” the Prof reminded me.

  “That was Inside,” I told him. “No way that hippie chick has those kind of wires.”

  “The other bitch, she knows your business?” the Prof asked.

  I didn’t take offense. We don’t talk to outsiders, and I’d had all the lessons, but tight pussy makes loose lips sometimes, and the Prof was within his rights to ask.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Zero. I’m a slumming fuck for her, that’s all. But who knows what kind of bullshit she’s cooked up in her head.”

  “That’s the place for it, all right,” he agreed.

  “What do you think, sweetie?” Michelle asked Clarence. That was her way, always. To build us up, all of us, spread the respect. If she hadn’t asked, Clarence would never have volunteered an opinion.