Flood

by Andrew Vachss

  An expression I couldn’t read flashed across her face and she went on, “We went with him and he was nice at first. But that same night, he brought in some other men from his pack. They told us to take off our clothes and dance for them. We wouldn’t. I could have gotten away, but I fought them with Sadie. I broke a bottle and cut one of them in the face. They beat us, badly. When I woke up, there was an old man there with a suitcase. He was arguing with the pack. He said something about how he couldn’t do it—we were too young. One of the pack came over to us and said he was sorry for what the others had done. He said the man was a doctor and he’d fix us up. He gave us each something to drink. I don’t remember anything except reaching for Sadie before I passed out.

  “When I came to, I saw Sadie lying next to me. We still had no clothes on and Sadie was bleeding between her legs. I checked, but I wasn’t. My whole face was swollen so bad I could hardly talk. I think it was another day or so before we both really woke up. There was a dirty bandage on my hip, one on Sadie’s too. I thought it was maybe where the doctor gave us a shot, but it was a big bandage. I crawled out into the hall. The pack was all asleep in the next room. It was like a cave of devils—filthy and smelly. Sadie and I found some clothes and we made it down the stairs. A policeman found us, and took us to a place for runaways because Sadie told him we were sisters from Ohio. She was smart—I couldn’t think of anything to say. When they took the bandages off in the runaway place to give us showers, we saw what they had done, why they brought the old man up there. We each had a tattoo on our bottoms. Just the name of that pack, but a real tattoo. When I saw it on Sadie, I cried for the first time in years. She cried too. The nurse at the runaway place told us that they were permanent—they would never come off. When they left Sadie and me alone, we talked—and we decided what we had to do. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t care anymore after what they did to us.

  “Sadie and I just walked out of the runaway place. They didn’t even try to stop us. Sadie panhandled in the Village until we got some money, then we bought four of those five-gallon cans and went to a gas station and filled them up. We just sat outside that building where the pack was until it was late at night and then we went upstairs. The pack was all zonked out on booze and dope. It was easy. Sadie and I knew what would happen to us, but it didn’t matter. We poured the gasoline all over the place—all over those sleeping devils. Then we each lit matches and threw them into the gas. We didn’t even run out of the building, just walked away. They screamed a lot—I wish I could have been there to see them. The papers said eleven people died. No people died. They weren’t people. It could have been eleven hundred for all we cared.

  “Then Sadie and I went to this flophouse. We paid for the room with what was left of the panhandling money and walked right upstairs carrying one of the cans with a little gasoline left in it. In that room, we kept our promises to each other. We took off our clothes and we laid down on our stomachs and we poured gasoline over each other’s bottoms. We had the sheets all soaked in water, like a swamp. We said that we loved each other. We knew we couldn’t make any noise or it wouldn’t work. I kissed her. We were crying, but we did it. We put some of the wet sheets in our mouths, and we held hands and we lit the matches and put them on ourselves. We said we would count to ten before we rolled over onto the sheets. Sadie tried, but she pulled away before I got to three in my head. I held onto her like I promised—she fought me, but I held on. We rolled onto the sheets and spit the mess out of our mouths and it was okay to scream then. The cops got us when they came to the flophouse. They said we were too young to be tried as adults. We knew that before, but it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  “The ambulance man was this big fat black guy. He looked so fierce, but he cried when he saw me and Sadie. After we got out of the hospital we went to some court and they put us away like they had before. I had a lawyer—some young kid. He asked me why we killed those devils and I told him, and he said if I pleaded insanity maybe they’d send me to a state hospital instead of the institution. I tried to get at him too, and they kept me handcuffed after that.

  “We were good in the institution. Nobody bothered us anymore, not the other girls, not the matrons. Nobody. Everybody’s afraid of fire—everybody has respect for revenge. And they all knew we were stand-up people—I told the judge the whole thing was my idea and I made Sadie do it, but she told them the same thing, it was only her, so we both went to jail. We always said that when we got out we would never come back—we would do things. Sadie was so smart, so charming, even after the fire. I wanted to be a gymnast. Sadie read books all the time. They let us out when I was twenty-one. She was older than me but she stayed so we could leave together.

  “We got an apartment and jobs. Sadie went to college. I met someone who began to teach me the martial arts. Sadie got married, she was going to teach school when she graduated. I lived with her and her husband, saving my money to go to Japan. My teacher said there was nothing more for me to learn here—I had to go to the East to finish my studies.”

  “Sadie had a daughter. She sent me pictures in Japan. The baby was named Flower because that was the only part of my Japanese name she could translate into English—the other part means fire. She and her husband were doing so good—only he had cancer and they didn’t know it. I was with Sadie and Flower when he went. She was strong. She still had her child and she had her work. I helped her cry it out and then I went back.

  “She found a daycare center for Flower, at a church that was active in all kinds of stuff—gay rights, peace marches, welfare reform. There was a man, a Vietnam vet, who worked in the center. He was a very violent man, but gentle with children, they said. A man damaged by the war, but good inside. This man also did babysitting for some of the church members when they wanted to go out.

  “One day the police came looking for this man. He had sodomized some of the children he was supposed to be caring for—they got him when he tried to sell some of the pictures he had taken of the children. He wasn’t at the daycare center that day, he was taking care of Sadie’s child. He must have known the police were getting close to him. Later they said he was under great psychological pressure. Sure. While the police were looking for him, he raped Flower and he choked her to death.

  “Sadie sent me a wire, but she was dead before it arrived—a car crash—nothing to do with Flower. The man who raped and tortured Flower to death gave the district attorney a lot of good information about the child pornography business. At least that’s what I was told. He was found incompetent or something. He never went to trial. He went into some hospital for a year and he’s supposed to get outpatient therapy. He doesn’t talk about how he sodomizes children, but he does talk about his military skills and how he expects to hook up with a mercenary outfit and fight in Africa.

  “His name is Martin Howard Wilson.”

  9

  FLOOD DIDN’T SEEM to have anything more to say. By then it was so dark in her place that all I could see was her outline, the highlights from her hair, and the glint from her eyes. She must have been breathing but you wouldn’t know it from looking at her chest. She sat like someone waiting, but waiting without expectations. Like when you’re in the joint and it’s years to parole.

  It was a lot of information to absorb. I needed time to think, so I said, “You said I could ask questions.” She nodded. I lit another cigarette. It wasn’t nervousness—they always taste better after a jolt of adrenalin, which is my own particular euphemism for fear. “I need to know how you know some of the things you said.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to rely on information that might be no good.”

  “All right. What do you want me to tell you?”

  “You said that he was a Vietnam vet, that he made a deal with the D.A.’s office, that he was in a hospital, and that he wants to hook up with a mercenary outfit, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, who told you all that?”

  “O
ne of the other women at this church group. She said she knew Sadie, so she told me what she knew.”

  “You believed her?”

  “I knew she was telling me the truth because I told her I would come back and see her if she did.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me. I could understand if you told her you’d come back to see her if she didn’t, but—”

  “She saw a different side of me than you have, Mr. Burke.”

  “You mean she never saw you crack people’s skulls?”

  “I mean she was a lesbian.”

  “And you?”

  “I said I would come back to see her—a promise that I will keep. That’s the only promise that I made.”

  “But maybe she didn’t see it like that.”

  Flood shrugged her shoulders so slightly that her breasts didn’t even move. “I don’t know what she saw. Some people wouldn’t see a shark in their own swimming pool.”

  “How did this woman know about the court stuff?”

  “The mother of one of the other children—another child that this devil raped—she was planning to sue the church for negligence or something. She hired a lawyer and this lawyer did an investigation. He paid some money to a detective, and the detective paid someone in the court, and they put all this together.”

  “The lawyer took a case like this on spec?”

  “On spec?”

  “Without any money up-front—you know, like in a contingency arrangement where he doesn’t get anything unless he wins—like with a car accident or something.”

  “Oh. Yes, he apparently did.”

  “It doesn’t add up. A case like that’s awful hard to prove in court. Besides, those churches never carry any decent insurance. Now if it was the archdiocese . . .”

  “The lawyer just said he wanted to help this woman.” Flood shrugged her shoulders again, just the way she did before. I was beginning to understand what it meant.

  “So this clown thought he was going to have a very grateful lady on his hands?”

  “Yes, I think he did.”

  “But you found out about it through this woman who was a friend of hers, who told you because she liked you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that woman and the woman who went to this lawyer are good friends?”

  “Very good friends.”

  “So the lawyer isn’t going to get any luckier with the second woman than the first got with you?”

  Flood chuckled. It was too throaty to be a giggle, but it was close—and her breasts moved, bounced this time. Finally: “I don’t think so,” she said.

  I sighed. “Nobody’s honest, huh?” Flood started to make a hard face to disagree but figured it wasn’t worth it and went back to another shrug.

  “Okay, let’s assume this information is all true for a minute. Do you have a good description of this Wilson? A picture would be perfect.”

  “I have a description but not a really good one. And I have no pictures. I know they must have taken his picture when they arrested him—a mug shot, right? So I thought maybe you could get a copy.”

  “I might be able to if the D.A.’s office didn’t arrange to have it destroyed.”

  “Could they do that?”

  “Sure. But they probably wouldn’t unless he was in the Witness Protection Program. You know, like if he gave the federales some dynamite information and they gave him a new identity, relocated him and all that. But it doesn’t sound like they would for this guy. He’s still around, trying to link up with a mercenary team, you said?”

  “Yes, that’s why I came to you in the first place. I heard that you were a recruiter for one of the mercenary armies, that people who wanted to go overseas and fight had to be cleared by you first.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “There’s a bar in Jersey City, just on the other side of the river, a really weird place. It looks like a roadhouse in West Virginia or something. They play country-and-western music up front and I know they have all kinds of strange meetings in the back rooms.”

  “Strange meetings? Like dope deals, guns, what?”

  “No—like the KKK or the American Nazi Party.”

  “Oh—that kind of strange.”

  “Does that scare you?”

  “Yes and no,” I said, and it was the truth. The freaks individually don’t scare me—they’re usually terminal inadequates. But the idea scares the hell out of me. It’s unnatural, you know what I mean? Freaks are supposed to stay by themselves—in furnished rooms, with their picture books and inflatable plastic dolls. We’re in bad shape when they start forming fucking affinity groups. “But I have done business with them in the past. I know a few of them.”

  “What kind of business could you do with people like that?”

  “Purely professional, nothing personal,” I said. No point telling her about the genuine recordings of Hitler’s speeches I sold them. Real expensive, exclusive stuff, pirated out of the bunker where Adolf the Asshole waited for his final reward. Only one other like it in the whole world, and that (of course) was in the archives of a neo-Nazi party in West Germany. Yeah, I had it on the best authority from an old Nazi who escaped to Argentina, where he’s recruiting mercenaries to attack Israel. I couldn’t sell the defectives on that particular venture, but they lapped up the tapes and paid the going rate. They apologized for not being able to understand German, (although one of them told me he was studying it by correspondence) but they said they had the exact translation of Adolf’s final speeches which they had purchased from some other enterprising businessman. What the hell—Yiddish sounds a lot like German anyway, and the six hours of Simon Wiesenthal’s address to the German crowds at a Holocaust memorial rally only cost me twenty bucks. A little reel-to-reel work, some Iron Cross lettering, a swastika or two, and I was ahead well over two grand. I gave them a discount price, of course, because after all; they were true believers. But Flood would never understand what a man has to do to make a living.

  She gave me her shrug. “Like the professional recruiting business you do with mercenaries?” Maybe she did understand.

  “Yeah, exactly like that. What about that bar?”

  “I went there a few times and listened. Your name came up more than once.”

  “Just about the mercenary scam?” There was no point in euphemisms anymore.

  “Yes, nothing else. You’re quite a legendary figure to those people, Mr. Burke.”

  “Yeah—to others too. I’m surprised you didn’t use your famous interrogation tactics on them to get more information.”

  Another shrug. “I guess I did with one of them. He told me he had your telephone number in his car. I went out to the parking lot with him to get it and he tried to be stupid.”

  “What happened?”

  “I left him there.”

  “Alive?”

  “Certainly he was alive—do you think I walk around murdering people?”

  “That action in the alley when you grabbed that kid’s family jewels is liable to stay on my mind for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s not your everyday act, right? Would you really have given the kid the chop?”

  “That’s not important. It was important that the others understood they had to move, had to obey. It took away their will to fight any more.”

  “It almost took away my will to hold on to my lunch. Would you really have done it?”

  “Do you remember what the one with the bushy hair said he was going to do to me? Do you think he was just trying to frighten me?”

  “He was trying to frighten you.” I paused, recreating the scene in the alley. “But he would have done it, that’s right.”

  “So I would have done it—but only because I threatened to do it and those are promises you must always keep. I would rather have just killed him.”

  “Yeah, what the hell, a few more killings shouldn’t be any big deal.”

  “Why do you try to sound sarcastic, Mr. Burk
e? I was willing to kill to live, not for the pleasure of it. You killed those three vermin just to kill them. They couldn’t have come after us.”

  That knocked me over. “What? I didn’t kill anybody. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Those people we put into that room—you fired the gun so many times, right at them. You must have killed them.”

  And that started me laughing. I must have kept laughing for a while, because the next thing I remember was Flood holding the lower part of my face in one hand and pressing the other against my stomach. I looked up at her—she was only inches away. She asked, “Okay now?” and I let out a breath and tried to explain.

  “I was just laughing because . . . well, it’s not important. But I didn’t kill anybody in that room. The pistol was full of a special mixture a friend makes up for me. Look,” I said, and pulled out the .22 and the spare clip. “Here’s the gun I used, and here’s the bullets.” I popped them out of the clip one at a time and showed her the tiny mini-flares, the teargas cartridges, and the flat-faced slugs with the birdshot inside. Flood opened her mouth slightly in concentration as I explained.

  “Watch. First you use a couple of the mini-flares so it looks like rockets are going off inside the room, then some birdshot for the stinging effect, which they think is shrapnel. They usually hit the floor and use up all their air holding their breath or screaming. Then you fire some teargas to start them choking and then some more mini-flares and birdshot to keep them down. It turns any closed space into hell, but it’s all in the mind—you can’t die from it. I wouldn’t kill anybody like that—that’s not my game. You couldn’t kill anybody with this gun anyway, loaded the way it is, even if you blasted them right in the face. It’s just to keep people where they are for a while, that’s all.”

  Flood fingered the cartridges carefully, then smiled. “You’re just a man of peace, aren’t you, Mr. Burke?”

  “That’s me. I’d have to be damn scared to kill anyone—it’s not worth it. I survive. I’m not looking for a whole lot more.”