Everybody Pays

by Andrew Vachss

  “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t go to Quitasol to help the revolutionary movement. I didn’t even know there was a revolutionary movement. All my friends go to Costa Rica for vacation. I wanted to go someplace different. Like discovering a new restaurant, I don’t know.”

  “You say it doesn’t matter, but . . . ?”

  “But I need to say it now. Let everyone know what kind of a ‘man’ he is. I can’t hurt him the way he hurt me, but I can hurt him. And I will.”

  “Is your mother alive?” Cross asked.

  “No. She died when I was seventeen.”

  “Your father, he hasn’t remarried?”

  “No. He has . . . girls still. Our housekeeper’s daughter, for one. But he would never get married again. He told me so himself. Why should he?”

  “Yeah. Okay. I may have a way to fix this for you.”

  “Nobody can fix—”

  “You stay here. Get better. Talk to Doc.”

  “I can’t find out something like that, man. It would be in the safe. Or in one of the files. I wouldn’t even know where to look.”

  “You don’t have to look, bro,” Ace assured the young black man in the pin-striped suit. “All we need to do is get inside. And you, you work late all the time, right?”

  “It’s expected of new associates. But I wouldn’t be the only—”

  “All you got to do is tap this here cell phone when the coast is clear, babe. We got a couple of boys, come in there like ghosts. Man never know we touched his stuff, you got my word.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “You like your mother living like she do? Your baby sister?”

  “They’re not going to be there much longer. I’m saving every dime and—”

  “And you owe about a million bucks on your student loan. But that ain’t what I’m saying, man. And you know it. You from where I from. And you know what it mean, a Rajaz honcho say he gonna brand your sister.”

  “I—”

  “And you know who I am too. You know I make that stop if I want, right? You a lawyer. That’s nice. When I was a kid, I stabbed a man beating on my momma. He died. So they put me in prison. I figured out how things work. You, you ain’t figured it out. You know the law. I know what’s true.”

  “I’m not promising . . .”

  “Just tap the green button,” Ace told him, handing over a mini–cell phone. “It’s all you need to do.”

  “Why must I do this?” the Asian woman demanded of Buddha, her otherwise pretty face marred by an expression of intense hostility that had, after years of steady visitation, been granted permanent residence. She stalked in small, horseshoe-shaped movements in front of the hapless Buddha, who was half sprawled, half sitting on the plastic-covered sofa in the living room of a small house in a modest Chicago suburb.

  “You’re the one that talked to Fong. About the job, right, So Long?”

  “Yes,” she hissed at him. “So my ‘reward’ for trying to help you all earn some money is to risk my life?”

  “Your life? Come on! Fong isn’t gonna—”

  “Not Fong, you fool. Fong is an intermediary. Perhaps you understand the term. The one who tried to set that trap for all of you—that is the one I would have to fear. And not just me, Buddha. We have children here, in case you have forgotten.”

  “So Long, give me a break. I didn’t forget nothing. But Cross says—”

  “Ah, Cross. Of course. How could I fail to heed the voice of the oracle? Let me see if I understand this. Cross, he is your business partner. I am your wife, and the mother of your children. And yet it is Cross who determines my safety?”

  “We get a cut,” Buddha said hopefully.

  “A cut? You mean your usual ‘equal share’?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yes, and you believe that to be fair as well? I am not a member of your . . . organization, am I?”

  You spend the fucking money like you are, Buddha thought to him self, wisely not letting such thoughts past his lips. “No, honey. But, remember, this whole job, it started out as your idea, right?”

  “My idea? Don’t be ridiculous. I merely passed along an opportunity that Fong—”

  “Fong knows if he comes to you he’s coming to us.”

  “How is that so?”

  “So Long, that’s enough, all right? You telling me this snakehead thought you were going to bodyguard his cargo?”

  “You say that because I am a woman?”

  This riposte was wasted on Buddha. Too many years of seeing Tiger in action had disabused him of the notion that there was a gender difference in combat. But he recognized the non sequitur for what it was: So Long was getting winded—now was the time to pounce. “Cross says, we don’t do this, we can’t run the Double X out in the open like we do. Cut the profits way down, people think they can move on us like that.”

  “But it didn’t—”

  “That ain’t the point,” Buddha told her, emphatic now. “He tried. You know what the vulture packs say about Cross’s crew: ‘Many tried, many died.’ It cost us a hundred grand a week just to keep a presence at all the operations while we were gone,” he said, stroking So Long’s only known G-spot. “We can’t pay protection. We’d have to be pulling jobs all the time just to break even. That ain’t the way it works. We got enough money now. From what we just . . . did. But it’s only enough if we plow it over, scrape some of it off, turn it legit. Not just the Double X, we got to buy a couple of parking lots, some vacant land, maybe some rental units, stuff like that. This guy—what’s his name, anyway?”

  “Liu-yang.”

  “Yeah. We know two things: One, he is a smuggler, and two, the feds must have agreed to give him a pass in exchange for setting us up. So what we need to do, we need to show him that it’s all flipped now. See, when the feds came to him, they was telling him, ‘Cross’ crew, they ain’t got no license to drive no more,’ understand?”

  “Yes,” she snapped, impatient now.

  “So that’s why we can’t dust him. He’s gotta be alive. Stay alive. So he can spread the word.”

  “But . . .”

  “But fucking what? You’re the one who met him, you’re the one who’s gotta—”

  “But if I do this, we are entitled to an extra share, no?”

  A young black man in his twenties stepped from the back door of the abandoned building. He was about six feet tall, with a motley splattering of white on his hands and face, wearing a Rajaz jacket. Another man stood about thirty yards away, hands open at his sides. Looked almost like an Indian, but hard to tell at this distance. What the fuck, dope was dope, business was business.

  The Rajaz gave the other man a hard look, then waved him closer. The top of the Rajaz’s head disappeared. He never heard the blast of the double-barreled shotgun, the triggers wired together to release both barrels at once. But men inside the building did. Two charged out the door, both going down immediately from rifle fire by the Indian, who was now on one knee in a rifleman’s stance. The shark car pulled into the mouth of the alley. Ace jumped lightly from his second-story perch on the fire escape. Rhino heaved a firebomb into the door opening. The shark car vanished.

  The cops and newspapers agreed: gang-related.

  “He didn’t worry about anything after he would be gone,” Rhino said, softly. “There was no estate planning, nothing. All to her, in trust until she becomes thirty-five, then she takes it. She doesn’t survive him, various charities and stuff. Some endowments. A chair in his name at the university. A few other—”

  “Bottom line?” Cross interrupted.

  “She takes eight figures. Maybe high eights.”

  “It was all done with sincerity,” the snakehead assured So Long. “I did have a shipment coming. And I did require the services of—”

  “Liar,” So Long hissed at him. “I am not here to listen, I am here to speak. You listen,” she said, and then spoke as if reading a cue card: “You will pay me one hundred thousand dollars in cash. In smal
l bills, no larger than fifties. Used bills, without sequential serial numbers. You will pay this in three days. If you do not pay, you will die. This is a specific threat of death, designed to extort money. I am speaking to you on federal property”—indicating with a wave of one heavily ringed hand that they were standing at the back of the main post office in downtown Chicago. “This is a federal crime. You should report it to the FBI. Please do so. You will notice that they will do nothing. Cross will not be stopped by the federal government. Once you understand this, payment will be easy. For you. Or your death will be easy. For Cross. The exchange of money will take place here. On federal property. I trust you understand this. You made a mistake. In business, there are no free mistakes.”

  “I did not—”

  But So Long was already on her way out the door.

  “We bring him. You do it,” Cross told her.

  “Why are you saying this in front of me?” Doc asked.

  “Had to persuade the others you’d never talk, Doc. You know how they can be . . .”

  “You bastard.”

  “Sure,” Cross said. He turned to the girl: “This isn’t about anything you think it is. You think I don’t know anything about you, what you went through, all that. You’re right. I don’t. But I know this much, and I know it good. It’s you or him. I could probably get a million for your head.”

  “If I disclose first . . . on TV or something . . . it would be too late for—”

  “—him to have you declared insane as a result of the torture you suffered in prison in Quitasol? Buy some doctors who’ll say you’ve got things all scrambled in your brain? Get you civilly committed? Get them to do a fucking lobotomy? Think so? Ask Doc.”

  She turned to the husky man, eyes pleading. He nodded, sadly.

  “Tell him we got her.”

  “You got her out? I don’t fucking believe—”

  “Watch the tape,” Cross said, hitting the remote button.

  “Who is this . . . mercenary to dictate to me?”

  “Nobody, I guess, sir. Want me to tell him that?”

  “No, you fucking idiot. I understand, he wants the rest of his money. Fair enough. Why can’t you just make the exchange?”

  “He says—”

  “I know what he says. And even you can’t come with me? I have to go alone?”

  “I can drive you to the drop point, sir. And wait for you there. That’s all.”

  “I . . .”

  “He said you had—”

  “Let’s go.”

  “You are completely insane,” the immaculately dressed man told his daughter. “I spent a fortune to rescue you, and I find out you’re a raving lunatic.”

  “Relax, ‘Father,’” she sneered at him. “I know I can’t prove anything.”

  “Of course you can’t. It never happened.”

  The girl started to cry.

  The man looked at Cross and Doc, his face indicating helplessness at the young woman’s obvious insanity.

  She looked up. “I thought you would—I don’t know—apologize. Say you were sorry. Say you were . . . drunk. Anything. I don’t know what. Something. You hired these people to kill me, I know that now. I even thought that was what the pills they made me swallow were. And I didn’t care. I . . . loved you. Even when you were doing that to me, I loved you. You’re my father.”

  “You’re not my daughter,” the man said, fully in control. “You’re too crazy to be—”

  The woman brought the pistol from her lap. “I’m not crazy,” she said. “And you’re right. I’m not your daughter. I never was. But the law said I was. And you, you said it too. In your will.”

  “Don’t! I can—”

  The woman fired until the pistol was empty.

  “We have it all on tape,” Cross told her three days later.

  “Why are you telling me such a thing?”

  “I thought you might want it.”

  “Want it? A tape of me killing my own—”

  “Sure. In fact, I thought it would be worth a lot of money to you. Part of a package. A nice package. We take you down south. You stagger across the border a few days later. You say the heroic Quitasolan rebels hid you out and rehabbed you. You read a statement they’ll give you. Fair trade. While you were gone, your father was assassinated. Probably in retaliation, because the head of the Quitasol government—you know, the one that’s fled the country—knew your father had financed the extraction. His body will have been riddled with bullets from a single pistol. Take a few years, but you’ll get all his money. It’s your money, anyway. Then you pay us.”

  The woman’s voice was soft. “Yes. Everybody pays, don’t they?”

  “That’s the way it is,” Cross said.

  for David and Jill

  A hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister’s batterer. An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly. A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own—literally—with a tattoo needle.

  From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes Everybody Pays, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys—where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett—and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty. Electrifying and enigmatic, Everybody Pays is a sojourn into the nature of evil itself—a trip made all the more frightening by its proximity to our front doorstep.

  ANDREW VACHSS

  Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social caseworker, a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including song lyrics, poetry, graphic novels, and a “children’s book for adults.” His books have been translated into twenty different languages and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, The New York Times, and numerous other forums. He lives and works in New York City and the Pacific Northwest.

  BOOKS BY

  ANDREW VACHSS

  Flood

  Strega

  Blue Belle

  Hard Candy

  Blossom

  Sacrifice

  Shella

  Down in the Zero

  Born Bad

  Footsteps of the Hawk

  False Allegations

  Safe House

  Choice of Evil

  Everybody Pays

  Dead and Gone

  Pain Management

  Everybody Pays Copyright © 1999 by Andrew H. Vachss

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.

  Vachss, Andrew H.

  Everybody pays / Andrew Vachss

  p. cm. — (Vintage crime / Black Lizard)

  1. Private Investigators—United States—Fiction. I, Title. II, Series

  PS3572.A33E9 1999

  813’.54—dc21 99-28773

  CIP

  Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-375-71914-1

  v3.0

 

 

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