Safe House b-10

by Andrew Vachss

  “It’s not that simple,” Pryce said. “Too much time has gone by. He—Lothar—is getting nervous. Not about the others—he’s very confident there. About me. He wants something from me. A show of strength.”

  “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “He wants to see his son.”

  The weather changed in the room. The baby. I felt little dots of orange behind my eyes. My hands wanted to clench into fists. I pictured my center. Saw it start to fracture. Pulled it into a latticework, holding it with my will. I turned the blossoming rage into ugly green smoke, let it pass through the lattice. To somewhere else. Tested my voice in my head until it sounded calm, all the jagged edges rounded into smoothness. Then I let it out.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said, checking the audio on my voice to be sure it was calm and peaceful. “He can’t take the kid into the cell. Even if he has someone who’d take care of the baby, he’d never get him back once the wheels come off.”

  “He doesn’t want to take him,” Pryce replied. “Not now. He just wants to see him.”

  “To be sure you can deliver?”

  “Yes. He knows I can handle the . . . other part. After all, we need his cooperation, so he can expect to be treated very well. But the . . . government doesn’t know where his wife and baby are.”

  “And neither do you,” I said, getting it for the first time.

  He shrugged, as if it were a minor problem. One he could expect to have solved sooner or later.

  “And that’s what the threats were all about, huh? It was never about delaying some scam divorce. That was the deal you made with him—that you’d find his kid. And maybe—yeah!—and deliver the kid when he goes away. Hand him right over.”

  He shrugged again.

  “But if he brings Herk in, he’s skewered. You’d have your own source. If he rats Herk out, he goes down too.”

  Another shrug.

  “Very nice,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can get what I want without doing anything now. You might have threatened Crystal Beth into getting the woman to drop the divorce thing, but you know you don’t have enough horsepower to make them give up the baby. Let’s go back to where we started. Forget the divorce. It’s not gonna happen, okay? Lothar won’t come in. He won’t get busted. You play out your own string.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Pryce said. “I have to have that baby. For an hour. Two hours, tops.”

  “Can’t do it,” I told him.

  “You said you had total control of—”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone has limits. That would be hers.”

  “I don’t care about hers,” he said quietly. “Only about yours. We have a deal. What you get is your friend Hercules. Vanished. With full immunity.”

  “That’d be good. But we can live without it.”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “What murder?”

  He idly fingered the photo of the dead man, not saying a word.

  “That’s a guess,” I told him. “Not an indictment.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, like he was seeking divine guidance. “Everybody’s been lying to you, Burke,” he said. “When you see your girlfriend, ask her about Rollo’s.”

  “What about Rollo’s?”

  “You think she was a stranger there? They’re all part of it.”

  “Part of what?”

  “Her network. This Mimi, the one who runs the place. Her. The bouncer, T.B. Rusty, the big guy who sits in a corner and draws pictures. Even her husband.”

  “Crystal Beth has a—”

  “Not her, Mimi. Her husband is the owner of the place. He never goes there, but he owns it. And half a dozen others like it, all around the country.”

  “So he owns a few bars, what—?”

  “Not bars. Nerve centers. He’s one of the bankrollers, like this Vyra person. But it’s Crystal Beth who’s in charge. This stalking thing, it’s out of control. So many people just living in terror. It was only a matter of time before they banded together. Your friend Crystal Beth, she’s running a lot more than you think.”

  “So she’s a liar,” I said. “So they’re all liars. It doesn’t matter. I’m out of this now. Why should I help you get your hands on that baby?”

  “This immunity thing, it’s really quite wonderful,” Pryce said smoothly. “You can always trade up. Give prosecutors a homicide, they’ll give you a pass on a whole bunch of other stuff.”

  “So?”

  He picked up the photo of the dead man again, held it like it was a delicate shard of spun glass. “So it’s all a chain. But I hold the link that can snap it. If you don’t believe me, maybe you should ask Anthony LoPacio.”

  “Who the hell is Anthony LoPacio?”

  “Ah, that’s right. You probably know him by some other name. Try ‘Porkpie.’ ”

  I lit a cigarette to buy time, not surprised that my hands didn’t tremble—I was dead inside. My brainstem felt clogged with all the messages. Only one came through clearly, acid-burning all the others out of the way.

  Murder would fix this.

  A pair of murders. Right here. Right now.

  I looked up at Pryce, feeling my eyes go soft and wet. My eyes were Wesley’s now, watching prey. I was born a motherless gutter rat. And when I’m cornered . . .

  He saw where he was walking. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. The muscle jumped under his eye. “There’s another way,” he said softly, playing for his life, putting his hands flat on the table, palms down. “We can be partners.”

  I listened to every word he said, pushing killing him and his boy Lothar behind a door in my mind. But I left the door ajar. Then I went over the deal. Again and again.

  Summed up:

  Even if he was telling the truth, even if he was the only one who was, he’d walk away with all the cards.

  And he could always come back and play them again.

  “Why should I trust you?” I asked him.

  “Because you know what I want . . . and because I’m the only one in this whole thing you can say that about,” he told me. “The rest of them all have their games. Whether they want to save the world or destroy it, what difference? You and I, we’re professionals. I can’t do this without you, okay? And you can’t get what you need done without me either.”

  I kept his eyes, but my mind went walking. Years ago, I did time with an Indian. He had some tribal name, but he never used it Inside. We called him Hiram. He told me a lot of stuff, and I always listened. Hiram told me that there was no separate Chickasaw tribe—“Chickasaw” was just the Cherokee name for “once were here, now are gone”—those who chose war as a way of life. The last to fall to the white man’s guns—but the first to “adapt,” which was why the BIA began calling them one of the “Civilized Tribes” as they walked the Trail of Tears. But Hiram said they were just biding their time then, waiting.

  And some of their children’s children still were.

  Hiram told me there was no tribe called Seminoles either. That was just a name laid on them by Andrew Jackson . . . before he shipped them out to Oklahoma, where they could join the survivors from the Trail of Tears. What they really were was part of the Creek nation Jackson drove down into Florida from the Georgia border.

  He said some of their children were still waiting too. Maybe, if the tribes hadn’t warred with each other, if they’d ever joined forces, the whole thing would have come out different.

  Hiram told me something else too. He said the badger and the coyote sometimes hunt together. In the high Northwest, in winter, when game gets scarce. The coyote has the better eyes, but he can’t penetrate the rock-hard ground. And the badger can only see close-up. So the coyote would spot the prey, and alert the badger. Then the badger would dig it out, and they’d share the kill.

  And go their separate ways, until the next time.

  A temporary alliance of predators.

  I had called Pryce a lone wolf,
and he hadn’t argued. But professionals never correct mistakes you make about them. And what had Wolfe called him? A bounty spotter? Maybe . . .

  I kept his hands pinned to the table with my eyes, waiting.

  When he couldn’t wait any longer, he said: “And then there’s the money.”

  “Which you can’t front,” I responded, back to where I was.

  “How could I front it? I work on spec. All the risk is on my end. There’s no contract. Strictly COD. You know how that works. It’s all on the come, but I’ll go fifty-fifty when it shows. What could I do to convince you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Name it and it’s yours,” he said. “But I have to have that baby.”

  “Any surprises?” I asked Herk. We hadn’t talked all the way down on the subway, but now we were in the Plymouth. Heading north.

  “Nah. He’s a weak little punk, Burke. All that stuff about being a warrior and dying for the Race. His fucking ‘brothers.’ Like I don’t know he’s gonna give them all up, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence after that as the Plymouth ate up the miles.

  “You ever know any of them?” he asked suddenly.

  “Nazis? Sure. When I was in—”

  “Not them. Jews. You ever know any Jews?”

  “Herk, for Chrissakes. Who do you think put that tattoo on your chest?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I wasn’t—”

  “Vyra’s Jewish,” I told him.

  “Vyra?”

  “Yeah, Vyra. The girl with the shoes.”

  “She’s Jewish?”

  “Sure. What’s so—?”

  “I dunno. I never thought about . . . I mean, listening to that Lothar and all. Reading them books you got me. I never thought about girls being Jewish.”

  What do you say to that?

  “Can you do it?” I asked the Mole.

  “It wouldn’t be precise,” he said calmly.

  “But you could make it look like this?” I asked, pointing to a sheet of graph paper on which I’d roughed out a sketch. “And it would work?”

  “Yes,” he said, giving me a look of mild surprise.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him.

  “It’s very . . . intelligent,” the Mole said.

  “What’s this?” Pryce asked, taking the thin flesh-colored wrap from my hand. It was three days after I’d gone to see the Mole.

  “It’s an ankle cuff,” I told him. “The latest thing. Weighs less than a quarter of what the old ones did. Space Age plastic with titanium wire. For monitoring pedophiles in those outpatient programs. You put it on, I seal it, it stays on until I take it off. If you have it cut off yourself, that’ll break the signal.”

  “And you expect me to wear this?”

  “That’s the deal,” I said. “You wear this, I know where you are. Not precisely, but close enough.” He couldn’t know how much of a lie that was. The major dope cartels use satellite tracking systems that can show the precise location of a tiny boat in hundreds of miles of empty sea. But they have the millions to hire Silicon Valley whiz kids to write the software, and billions’ worth of product to protect. Me, what did I have?

  He thought it over for a minute. “And what good would that do you?” he finally asked.

  “If you try and run with my money, I’ll know it. And I’ll find you easy enough.”

  “How do I know you won’t just—?”

  “Take you out when you deliver the cash? I don’t expect you to trust me either. You can mail it. I’ll give you an address. The cash shows up, you’re off the hook.”

  “But you’ll still be able to track me.”

  “Only for about thirty days—that’s all the battery’s good for. You can have it cut off as soon as you’ve sent the cash. The transmitter doesn’t have that much of a range. I’d know you ran, but I wouldn’t know where to.”

  “But in the interim . . . ?”

  “I already found you,” I reminded him. “I found you tonight. Every time we’ve been alone, it’s like I found you, right?”

  “So I wear this bracelet and you give me the baby?”

  “You wear this bracelet and I let Lothar see the baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “And one more thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “I need an address.”

  “Yes?”

  “Porkpie hasn’t been around lately,” I explained it to him.

  “Once Hercules goes in,” he said quietly. “And Lothar sees the baby.”

  “Deal.”

  He took a breath. “You don’t expect me to put this on now?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not an engineer, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither am I. It isn’t that I don’t trust what you said, but I’d like to have this . . . device examined before I put it on.”

  “Take it with you,” I told him.

  “See the baby?” Crystal Beth said. “No way.”

  “It’s the only way,” I told her. “Lothar won’t be able to snatch the kid—we’ll have him covered. But without that card, he’s not gonna play. And if he doesn’t, then Pryce . . .”

  “You believe he’d do it?” Vyra asked me. “Bring everything down?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I do.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Crystal Beth said. “I’d never trust him. He doesn’t have to do this. He’s a pig. A filthy, lousy pig.”

  Vyra stood up. Walked near the window, bending her left hand at the wrist so the afternoon sun would fire the big emerald-cut diamond on her hand. She admired it for a minute. Turned to Crystal Beth like I wasn’t in the room. “That’s the only way you get truffles, honey,” she said.

  Crystal Beth walked over to where Vyra was standing. Put her hands on Vyra’s neck and pulled her close. Whispered something.

  Vyra walked to the door, swinging her narrow hips hard. She slammed it behind her.

  Crystal Beth left the window and plopped on the bed, face up. She patted the covers for me to lie down next to her. I did it. She tugged at the back of my head. “What?” I asked her.

  “I want to tell you a story,” she said, guiding my head into her lap, twirling her hands in my hair. I closed my eyes. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was afraid of heights. Not great heights, like in a city. There wasn’t anything all that tall on the land we had. But we had a shed. For storing machinery. It was probably only ten feet off the ground, but I was afraid to go up there. On the roof, I mean. We were playing, and the ball got stuck up there. It happened all the time. We took turns going up there to get it. But when it was my turn, I wouldn’t go. I was afraid. . . .

  “Nobody made me go. But I felt bad. On the farm, everybody had to take turns doing stuff. But climbing that shed, I could never take mine. I never told my parents. I was . . . ashamed, I guess. Anyway, one day, one of the other kids teased me about it. And my mother heard.

  “So she made a jump pool. Like a swimming pool, but out of blankets. And mattresses. And some bearskins she had. It was huge. It took hours and hours to make it, everything piled so high and soft. Then she got a ladder. I went first. She was right behind me, arms wrapped around me so I couldn’t fall. Then we just sat up there. Everybody was watching. My mother told me we could sit up there as long as we liked. She told me stories. The kind I loved. About polar bears and sled dogs and seals and whales. And after a while, it was time to jump.

  “We stood up and we held hands. My mother said we would be polar bears, jumping into the water from a little cliff. She was the mother bear and I was the cub. We did it, holding hands. Everybody cheered. It was so great. I was never afraid of heights after that.”

  “Your mother knew how to do it,” I said.

  “I thought that too. For a long time. Then my father told me the real story. My mother was afraid of heights herself. Where she was raised, it was all flat. Going up scared her. My father said she didn’t even like to go in ele
vators.”

  “She had a lot of guts.”

  “Enough to give me some. I know how to jump into things now,” she whispered.

  Then she reached down and tugged at my hair, pulling me up to her.

  “Got him,” the Prof’s voice barked over the cellular.

  I cut the connection. Pryce was about four blocks away, rolling toward the meet in the same white Taurus he’d used at the airport. I’d told him the meet was coming a couple of days ago, told him to have a cell phone handy and to get me the number. I rang him an hour ago, asked him how long it would take to get to an address in East Harlem. He said to give him an hour. We had a spotter up there too. I rang in on his cellular as soon as the Taurus turned into the street I’d given him, told him about the change of plans. It was just a short hop over the Willis Avenue Bridge to the new address, twenty minutes ETA.

  Finding an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx is no great feat. Securing the premises was another matter, but we’d had people in place since noon the day before, thirty-four hours ago.

  From my vantage point on the second floor, I could see the white Taurus pull up. Pryce was all-in now—he couldn’t know this wasn’t a hit, but he couldn’t get to the baby unless he ran the risk. One of the Cambodian trio stepped out from the shadows and walked toward the Taurus, right hand in his coat pocket. He motioned with his empty hand for the window to come down. It did. He walked right up to the driver’s side, leaned in and said something. Pryce and Lothar got out. The Cambodian slipped behind the wheel and the Taurus took off.

  I looked over to where we’d rigged a pool of light, using a generator to drive a single hanging overhead fixture. The floor had been swept in a ten-foot circle. Two milk crates were the only furniture in the artificial island. One of the Cambodians came up the stairs first, nodding to me to indicate the speed-search had gone okay—no weapons. Then Pryce. Then Lothar. Then the third Cambodian. “That’s for you,” I said to Lothar, pointing at one of the milk crates.