Choice of Evil b-11

by Andrew Vachss

  “Yes. And good things. That is human nature, to be both bad and good. Or to have that potential within us, anyway.”

  “So it’s a choice?”

  “I don’t follow—”

  “You can be good if you want, right? I mean, nobody *has* to be bad. . .”

  “It’s not that simple, child. But, generally speaking, I believe you are correct.”

  Oh, he was on the money there, the crazy bastard. The first time I really understood it, I was in prison. Reading. I killed a lot of time doing that. I remember something about a “choice of evils.” And it made me think. About the other guys in there. How some didn’t have much choice. The thieves, mostly. If you wanted to live like a human being, if you were culled out of the herd when you were little so you couldn’t earn honestly, what was left? But the ugly ones—the rapists, the child molesters, the torture freaks—they weren’t bad guys the way thieves were, they were stone evil. And it was their choice. That’s what they picked. They didn’t do it for money, they did it for fun. That’s what evil is, when you strip away the crap. It’s choice. This guy wasn’t sick. The way he was telling it, the rules didn’t apply to him, that’s all. He was above it. Above everything. He was killing kids for art. And that was his choice. I snapped out of it and started scrolling again, fast now, to make up for the lost time.

  “Okay. Can we play chess now?” the child asked.

  I agreed. And, as I anticipated, she learned the rudiments of the game with alacrity.

  There was a languid, drifting quality about the next several days. My memory of them is. . . imprecise. Zoë continued to prepare her impossibly elaborate meals. I read. . . I believe I read. . . some technical manuals. We played chess together and I began to introduce her to plane geometry. She worked on her drawings.

  Tuesday night she woke me up, saying she was afraid. She would not elaborate further. I allowed her to sleep in my bed, sitting next to her in a chair. It appeared to comfort her, and she eventually fell asleep. I suppose I did too. When I awoke, it was Wednesday morning.

  Wednesday night, I explained the remainder of the operation to the child. She listened, fascinated as always. Suddenly she looked up at me.

  “I know who you are,” she announced.

  “What is it you know, child?” I asked her. “My name?”

  “No. It doesn’t matter. I have a name I call you, but I won’t tell you what it is. But I know who you are.”

  “And who is that, Zoë?”

  “You’re my hero,” she said solemnly. “You came to rescue me. Just like in the story I read. I was a princess. Sort of. And you came to rescue me.”

  “I do not—”

  “That’s your art,” the child said eagerly. “You’re always saying, we have our art. You and me. Zoë me. I draw. And you rescue little kids.”

  Try as I might, she refused to discuss the subject further. I saw no reason to interfere with her childish coping mechanisms. I detest cruelty.

  Thursday night, Zoë said: “I’m going to tell you a secret.”

  “What secret is that, child?”

  “I know your secret,” she said.

  Friday morning ran like a Swiss watch—pun intended. I returned to the hideout.

  “It’s time to say goodbye, Zoë,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said, eyes shining as though a special treat were in store.

  “Zoë, I have a. . . new art now. One I must practice and learn very well before I can reach the heights of my old art. You are the last of that, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Zoë, you cannot come with me, child. Do you understand?”

  “No!” she said sharply. “I *can* come with you. I’ll help you. Kill her. Kill Angelique. Kill her now!”

  Angelique drank the potion I prepared for her. I held Zoë while Angelique departed.

  As with all art, practice is essential. Someday, I shall achieve the same perfection with my new art as I had with what I have now discarded.

  I will return to this area soon.

  To practice.

  What the hell? What was he telling me. . . that this was the last transmission? There was only one way to read it—I’d seen it coming a while back. But if he changed and started on. . . No, it was just. . . insane.

  “Xyla!”

  She was there before the last syllable of her name left my mouth. Dropped into the computer chair, waiting.

  >>explain last answer<<

  First time he didn’t put a word limit on my response. So I had stung him. “Type this,” I told Xyla. Then I watched it come up on the screen.

  any freak can kill random targets.

  a professional hits only the target

  he is assigned to. *any* target.

  When Xyla tapped one last key, the message vanished.

  “He’s gone now, right?” I asked her.

  “He’s gone every time,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “He can come back anytime he wants, but only if I ask him to. . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way it works, I change my address each time too. Then, later, I send out a message with the new one.”

  “But. . . he knows you’ve got plenty of time to set up. So you could be waiting to trap him every time he sends a message, right?”

  “Sure. He knows. Doesn’t matter. The only time his own modem is actually open is that last little thing at the end—when I send to him. He receives it, and the whole thing comes down. Fingering it would be a waste of time.”

  “But if you don’t send him a new address. . .?”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I see what you mean. He couldn’t reach me. Unless he could. . .”

  “. . . do what I wanted you to do,” I finished for her. “Right?”

  “Right. You think he can?”

  “I think he will,” I told her.

  “How could you possibly—?”

  “Because I know who he is now,” I said.

  “You want what?” Wolfe laughed. “A list of every Family man hit during the past. . . what did you say, ten years?. . . Sure. I can get that for you. Only the printout wouldn’t fit in the trunk of your car.”

  I was standing in the same box I’d been in the last time I’d met with her. Only this time, besides the pistol, the man I didn’t recognize had something else—a honey-colored pit bull on a snap lead. I’d seen that pit before—she scared me more than the gun.

  Yeah, I was standing in the same place, all right. And Wolfe was showing me where I stood with her.

  “There’s that many?” I asked her.

  “It would be ‘that many’ even if you were talking just the metro area,” she said sarcastically. “New York, New Jersey, Connecticut—give me a break. And national, come on!”

  “I just thought. . .”

  “You know what?” she said, shifting her posture to a more aggressive one, dropping her voice just a fraction. “I think you’re in something way over your head. You think there’s a pattern somewhere, that’s obvious. But the database is so huge, you couldn’t find it without some serious computer. . . . Oh! You found yourself some new friends, huh?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And I don’t know what you’re doing. But I really only came here to tell you this. We’re done, you and me. You want to know about dead mobsters, ask your pal—he put more of them in the ground than anyone else.”

  She turned and walked away. Her crew stayed in place until I did the same.

  The sheets on Strega’s bed were silk. The same color as her hair. Her body slid between gleam and shadow, mottled by the candle’s untrustworthy light.

  “Tell me the rest,” she whispered at me. “Quick, before I get hungry again.”

  “Dead guys. Assassinations, not accidents. And they have to have been on the street when it happened, not in the joint. Murders, okay? Unsolved murders.”

  “Wesley did—”

  “Forget Wesley,” I said,
harsher than I’d meant to. “Listen. I know the list would be too long. You—”

  “I’m still working on what you asked me before. You can’t get something like that in—”

  “I know. Forget that too. Come here.”

  She crawled over to me. Looked down. I shook my head. She dropped hers until her ear was against my mouth.

  “This won’t be in any computer,” I told her, speaking soft. “I could do that myself. It has to be a whisper. Dead guys. Mob guys. And they had to have been fucking their own little girls before they—”

  “Aaahhh,” she moaned, her fingernails raking my chest. I could feel the blood. She licked it off her talons, kneeling straight up now, witchfire loose and wild in her eyes.

  “Not Julio,” I told her softly. “That one’s done, remember? All done.”

  She started to cry then. I pulled her down to me, held her against my chest, rubbed her back.

  A long time passed.

  “I can find out,” she finally said, the steel back in her voice. “But you have to tell me why.”

  “You said you’d do anything for—”

  “I will do anything for you,” she hissed. “I already have. You’re in me. Forever. I would never let anyone hurt you. But if he’s doing. . . that—killing them—I don’t want to do anything that would—”

  “He’s stopped,” I said, sure it was the truth. “And he’s moved on.”

  “How do you—”

  I pulled her close to me. And, for the first time in all the years I’d known her, I told her some of my secrets.

  I spoke to the ice-man the way I always do. In my mind. If I told people that Wesley answered, they’d institutionalize me. But regular people don’t get it. We have our own language, the Children of the Secret. It’s garbled gibberish to anyone else. But that wasn’t my link to Wesley. He was my true brother. We had gene-merged in the crucible of the State system for abused and abandoned kids. Even the grave couldn’t silence him when I reached out.

  And when I saw the next message from the killer, I knew Wesley was right.

  >>select target<<

  is all he sent.

  I sat there, smoking a cigarette all the way through, waiting. It got too much for Xyla. “Aren’t you going to answer him?” she finally asked.

  “He doesn’t expect an answer,” I told her. “If I put one in right now, he’d get suspicious.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “I think I do,” I told her. “Just send this”:

  come back. 72 hours.

  She typed it in.

  “This means I have to leave my same addy up there, you understand that, right?”

  “I think I understand it better than you think,” I told her. “Go ahead and nuke your address, girl. My best guess—he’s already found you.”

  “You mean. . .?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be back. Three days from right now.”

  How much did the killer really know? Everyone thought Wesley was a machine, but they had it wrong. Wesley was just. . . focused. Right down to a laser dot. He studied his prey, but he didn’t know anything outside of that. Didn’t matter to him. This guy—this super-killer, how much could he know about Wesley’s jobs? How they worked? The last part of his journal—at least, the last part he’d shown me—said he was going to hunt them too. But. . . “them”? I had to play it like it was a category he hunted, not a group. It was the only thing that made any sense. And if I was right, there’d only be one match.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  “You’re. . . sure?”

  “Absolutely,” I told Lincoln, scratching behind Pansy’s ear. “He’s well away. No chance of getting caught. He’s a million miles from here.”

  “What’s he. . . like?” one of the men in the back of the room asked me.

  “That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “You wanted him safe. You got him safe.”

  “He’s right.” Nadine’s voice cut into the room. She was seated at the same table, but she’d replaced the lank-haired skinny woman with the same chubby blonde pony girl I’d seen in her little home video. “There hasn’t been a killing for weeks. The cops are just blowing smoke.”

  “It changed things, though,” another woman said from across the room. “It’s. . . different now.”

  “Sure,” an older man said, “you can walk down Christopher Street without the back of your neck tingling every time you see a crowd of straights now. There hasn’t been a fag-bashing for a good while. They’re scared. He did that. But what makes you think it’s going to last?”

  “He showed us the way,” Nadine spoke up. Like she was talking about Jesus. Walking to Mecca. Following the Tao.

  “What does that mean?” one of the younger guys asked, the sneer just below the surface.

  “They didn’t stop because they saw the light,” Nadine said, an orator’s organ-stop in her voice, speaking to the whole room. “They stopped because they were afraid. They’re still afraid. They’re afraid of him. And now he’s gone. But he doesn’t have to go. . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” Lincoln demanded.

  “Nobody knows who he is, right?” Nadine shot back. “All they have is two things: letters to the newspapers. . . and dead bodies. It’ll be quiet for a while. Maybe a long while, I don’t know. But when they. . . when they start going after us again, well. . . who says we can’t write letters to the newspapers?”

  “Sure, but they only printed the letters because they were authentic,” Lincoln said.

  Nadine got to her feet. Eye-swept the room a couple of times to make sure everyone there was riveted to her. She took a deep breath.

  “We could make ours authentic too,” she said. Softly. But everyone in the place heard her.

  “This is Tracy,” Nadine told me in the alley outside the room where they’d met, a nod of her head indicating the chubby blonde.

  “Pleased to meet you,” was all I could think to say.

  “Turn around,” Nadine ordered her.

  The blonde did it.

  Nadine stepped over to the blonde, pushed her until the other girl’s face was right against the wall. Then she reached around the blonde girl’s waist, and did something with her fingers. The blonde girl made some sound, too low for me to understand. Nadine yanked down the blonde girl’s jeans and her underpants in one two-handed pull.

  “Stay!” she said.

  Pansy stayed too. Watching. She didn’t know what was going on, but the hair on the back of her neck was up.

  It was dark in the alley.

  “Light one of your cigarettes,” she said to me, just this side of a command.

  I did it, wondering why even as the match flared. She snatched it out of my mouth. Looked at the glowing tip. Smiled ugly. “Want some of that?” she said, pointed at the chubby blonde.

  “No,” I told her.

  “Then go away,” she said, dropping her voice. “I’m going to play with her. Right out here. In public. When I’m done, she’ll carry my brand. Think about that. And remember your promise. I cleared it with the rest of them. You got your money. But you better not be—”

  “I’m still working,” I said.

  Then I snapped my fingers for Pansy to heel and walked out of the alley.

  Why did that crazy girl think she could pull me in with sex games? I couldn’t figure it out. Couldn’t understand the cigarette thing either. That wasn’t me. Ever. It always made me. . . I could never get it, never get the part where people yearned for what other people had done to me. But I guess I did get it after all. The freaks, they set things in motion. Sometimes they make more of themselves. Sometimes they create their own hunters. I guess they don’t. . . know. Or care. I never asked one. Except when I was a kid. I remember crying, “Why?” And I remember him laughing.

  I never knew what to do with all that hate until Wesley told me. A long time ago. “Fire works.” The ice-boy never played, not even back then. Not even with words.

  “Rocco La
Marca,” Strega whispered to me late the next night.

  “You’re sure?”

  “He ran a big crew. Mostly in Westchester. The carting industry. But he lived in Connecticut. New Canaan. Very classy. Not even a whisper about him. Called himself Ronald March.”

  “And he was—?”

  “The cops thought it was a mob hit. An ice pick in the eye. You know what that means—he saw something he shouldn’t have. And they cut his tongue out too. Saying he said something about what he saw.”

  “But how do you know he’s—?”

  “It wasn’t a sanctioned hit. The Family doesn’t know who did it. But they knew about his daughter. He made. . . films of her.”

  “For money? Like—?”

  “No. Just to. . . show off. His. . . power. I mean, he said it was business. Showed the films to a few of the boys who were in that end. You remember Sally Lou?”

  Strega, telling me she knew everything. Sally Lou ran the mob’s kiddie-sex business before Times Square felt the Disney steamroller. I love it. Disney cleans up Times Square, but they hire a convicted child molester to direct one of their movies. People protested, but the studio ranted on about giving people another chance. Sure, once it came down to money, all of a sudden, Disney’s got more faith in “rehabilitation” than an NCAA recruiter.

  Sally Lou had gone down around the same time Mortay did, all part of that same horror show that cost me my love and launched Wesley on his last rampage.

  A lot of thoughts. But all I said to Strega was: “Yeah.”

  “Well, Sally Lou was one of the ones who saw it. But LaMarca never turned it over. So Sally Lou, he asked around; like, what was the guy up to, right? And that’s when the word came back. He had a daughter. So they put it together. The filthy slime. He was—”

  “I know,” I said, stroking her hair. “What happened to her? To the daughter?”