Safe House b-10

by Andrew Vachss

  Back at my place, I tried to think it through.

  Mousetrap. Box. Closed-end tunnel. It all came up the same on my screen.

  Pryce had me cornered. He had too many pieces on the board.

  My mind ached with the strain from trying to slip out of the maze. My face hurt—sharp, spiking pain in the nerve cluster below the cheekbone. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I realized how tightly my teeth had been clenched. When I finally fell asleep, fever-dreams snapped me wide awake.

  I knew what to do then. Stared at the red dot on my mirror until I fell into it. Stayed down there, safe and dissociated.

  When I resurfaced I was calmer.

  But still trapped.

  “Are you afraid?” Crystal Beth asked later, lying next to me in the dark.

  And that’s when I knew what was wrong. Why I couldn’t think my way out.

  I wasn’t afraid.

  The first thing I remember about being a baby is terror so total that fear became my one true friend. Always with me, never leaving my side. Warning me, keeping me vigilant. Distrustful. A layer of protection between the terror and me—the little tiny bit that was me then.

  Fear never abandoned me. I took it with me everywhere I went. Everywhere they sent me. The State—my true parent—sending me to surrogates who continued its vicious work. The orphanage. Foster homes. Reform school. Prison looming as inevitable in my future as college was in the lives of the privileged.

  Fear came there with me too. A friend I internalized so deep the wolf packs that ran wild through the joint couldn’t smell it. That’s because it wasn’t on me, it was in me. I cherished it, nurtured it, encoded it into my own DNA. My face flattened, my hands stopped shaking. My heart went slow and cold.

  I came into prison with a life-taker’s rep. They test reps in there. I kept mine. It cost a lot, but it wasn’t me who paid.

  I got to where I never broke a sweat. My voice stayed within a tight, narrow range. I could stare down a cobra. But the fear-bolts always roamed loose in my body, firing off bursts whenever danger was around.

  In prison, I lived in danger, adrenaline crackling through my synapses like turbo-boosted cocaine. It kept me alive.

  My one goal, then.

  Out in the World, I kept the fear. But I played it different. I learned to show the fear when it would do me some good. Trained myself to act, role-playing along the tightrope of survival.

  Fear never left me. Until now.

  I felt abandoned all over again. Deserted. Without my old friend, I couldn’t plot, couldn’t plan.

  So why wasn’t I afraid? I was boxed, all right. Couldn’t see a way out. So why . . . ?

  “Burke! Burke, wake up. Are you all right?”

  Crystal Beth, shaking my shoulders, gentle but serious. I opened my eyes.

  “Are you all right?” she asked again.

  “I’m fine,” I told her. “I must have drifted off, that’s all.”

  “Drifted off? You were . . . not here. I mean, you weren’t actually sleeping, I could tell. Just . . . zoned out or something.”

  “What’s the big deal?” I asked her, wondering why she didn’t recognize the same thing she did herself.

  “It’s been hours you’ve been like that,” she said, answering the question she didn’t know I’d asked. “I didn’t want to . . . disturb you. I didn’t know. But then you finally fell asleep. And I got scared.”

  “I’m fine,” I told her again. “It happens to me sometimes. When I have to think.”

  “My mother said the shamans . . . Oh, I don’t mean you. . . . I mean, you were . . . in a trance, like. Awake, but not here. One minute we were talking, the next you were gone.”

  “Can I have a glass of water?” I asked her, more to shut her down than because I was thirsty.

  “Sure, baby.”

  She came back with a cone-shaped paper cup. The water was cold and clean. “Thanks,” I said.

  “You want anything else?”

  “A cigarette?”

  She lit one of mine, handed it to me, not saying a word. I smoked it all the way down in the darkness, my spinal cord crawling with snake-twisty nerves. Alive now.

  Alive with fear.

  Where I’d gone, it had come to me. I wasn’t afraid of Pryce. I wasn’t the target. He couldn’t really hurt me. Yeah, he might know some stuff I wouldn’t want shouted around the town, some old ID might be blown, crap like that. But there was nothing in it for him to try for me. If he knew enough to hurt me, he knew enough to know that he wouldn’t live long if he did.

  Maybe that was the difference. In prison, it’s not how tough you are that keeps you safe, it’s your capacity for revenge. Prison is icy hell. Feelings are the enemy. Showing them is a crippling illness—sometimes a fatal one. You get raped, you’re a cunt. And every con in the joint is free to use you like one. You kill the rapist, you’re a man. Everything squared. Vengeance is the only true religion in there. And if you have backup, even killing you won’t make the killers safe . . . so they step off.

  The first time I went down, it was for a good, high-status beef. Shooting a guy. Attempted murder, they called it, and they were right on the money. I did it because he scared me, but that wasn’t how I profiled it once I was inside. In my version, I did it because he disrespected me.

  It helped protect me. I watched plenty of others who couldn’t stay safe. It was ugly, what happened to them. But even before I crewed up, the predators stayed away. Everyone knew—Burke would get even. Next to me, elephants had Alzheimer’s.

  If Pryce knew so much about me, he had to know that. He had to know that, whatever I was, I wasn’t alone. I’d die for that, and that would die for me.

  So I was safe from him.

  But Herk wasn’t. He was hung out to dry. Without the immunity, he was barbecued beef. Without the immunity, he was going back Inside. He’d never be a gardener. Never be a person, like he wanted so bad.

  Doc, the prison shrink—I was his inmate clerk, a real sweet spot—told me once that the only thing that really distinguishes a sociopath from the rest of the world is that the sociopath lacks empathy. He feels only his own pain, cares only for his own needs. Selfishness squared. All sexual sadists are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are sexual sadists. All sociopaths are the same thing, but they don’t all want the same things. Take politicians—the way they breed is to fuck the rest of us.

  All sociopaths are encapsulated. Always have every feeling they need right inside themselves. Nobody else counts.

  The plague of the Nineties isn’t AIDS, it’s self-absorption. Sociopaths always crank the revs right to the redline. And keep the hammer down.

  Amateurs think prisons are full of sociopaths. A pro would tell you the truth—the only sociopaths in prison are the failures. The rest of the population is all the result of the “Just Us” system. Flops and fools, weasels and weaklings. Lazy lames. Most of the convict population today is in there for drugs.

  It’s like we learned nothing from Prohibition.

  I was safe from Pryce and Herk wasn’t. So what?

  I knew the answer to that: Herk would die for me.

  That’s an easy thing to say, but I knew it for true. A feeling and a fact. Herk had only been down with our crew for a few weeks when it happened. I was rat-packed in the long corridor between D Block and the commissary. Four black guys, three with shanks, one working lookout. It wasn’t me they wanted. Not me in particular. A race war had been raging inside for almost a week. When that happens, color is the only target.

  It wasn’t a heist. They weren’t looking to rough off some commissary goods. No, the next white convict who walked into their trap was going to die. They wanted a body. Any body, so long as it was the right color.

  That was me, that day.

  If it had been years earlier, when I was still on my first bit, when my image was more important than my life, I would have done it different. But that day, as soon as I spotted the first two, I turned and
ran. That’s when I saw the other one, sharpened rat-tail file wrapped in black electrical tape held low against his hip, moving in. He was the hit man—the others were carrying steel too, but they didn’t look as professional, just there to drive the prey onto the killing ground.

  I was unarmed. And out of time. I rushed the hit man, charging at his chest. He came up to meet me. I twisted my right shoulder like I was going to try and slide past on his right, exposing my back for a second as I planted my right foot and spun quickly, flattening my chest against the opposite wall away from his knife hand, firing my right elbow at where I thought his face would be as I scrambled crab-style toward safety. I almost made it. I felt the shank punch through my denim jacket and take me just below the shoulder. I went down, rolling away as fast as I could. Heard the pounding footsteps as the other two charged, knives held high.

  That’s when Hercules hit them from behind like a runaway train, taking them both into the wall. The lookout shouted something. I kept rolling, covering up as best as I could, kicking out at the hit man every time he got close. Guards piled into the corridor, the riot whistle blowing loud. Sweeter than church bells on a wedding day.

  One of the hacks clubbed me right where the hit man’s shank had gone in. When I came to in the prison hospital, my head was bandaged too.

  If you can get to the hospital in prison, they can probably save you—the docs there have plenty of practice. Herk took almost seventy stitches, but they were slash wounds, not deep. I got a heavy tetanus shot, then they cleaned the wound out and packed it. Told me how lucky it was that it hadn’t been lower—if he’d gotten a kidney, I was gone.

  They did a prison investigation. Which means a body count. This one was zero, so they called it off. Herk and I told the same story. We were walking down the corridor and got jumped. No, we didn’t see who did it. No, we didn’t know if they were black or white—they had masks and gloves on. No, we didn’t know how many of them there were.

  The black guys told the same story.

  The shanks were somebody else’s. No prints . . . if they even checked.

  Herk and I got thirty days’ keep-lock. The black guys got six months in the bing. Except for the lookout. They cut him loose. An innocent bystander.

  When the hit man died from eating a rat-poison-laced candy bar in solitary, the Man put it down to the race war. That had been Wesley’s work, although I didn’t know it then.

  The other two sent word to me that there had been nothing personal—they’d mistaken me for somebody else. I was okay with them. Sorry about what happened. How about if they send a few crates of smokes over to my wing, make it up to me?

  I sent word back: Sure. No hard feelings.

  A couple of months later, the race war was over. For then—the only way it’s ever over in there. One of the two guys who’d sent me the smokes was watching a softball game on the yard when someone came up behind him and played a one-swing game of T-ball with his head.

  The hacks figured it for debt collection—the black guy was a known gambler. Like always, they got it about half right.

  Less than a week later, his partner went off a high tier all the way down to the killing concrete floor.

  The investigation was quick. After all, a lot of suicides don’t leave notes.

  The lookout was the sole survivor. He smelled the wind, took a voluntary PC. Refused to eat any food that the hacks didn’t taste. Which meant he was starving to death. He became convinced microwaves were being sent to give him cancer. Heard voices telling him he was going to die. They gave him medication—held him down for the needle. It calmed him, let him relax. After a while, he started to trust again, so they switched to oral meds. He always took them, no complaints. It wasn’t so bad in there for him after that. He got tranquil, started to eat again. But he never came out of his cell.

  That’s where they found his body, burned to a crisp. If he’d screamed, nobody had heard.

  Herk would die for me.

  He was my brother.

  My brother was in a box, not me.

  But my family is me. My brother was in danger, and I was afraid. For him, for me. Same thing.

  I had my old partner back. Fear was in me, alive.

  And it would keep my brother that way too.

  I guess I’ll never qualify as a sociopath. But you don’t have to be a sociopath to act like one.

  I started to plot.

  “Are you okay?” Crystal Beth asked me again. “You keep . . . going away.”

  “I’m back now,” I told her.

  In this city, some of the rats have wings. There’s parts of Brooklyn where pigeon-racing is a bigger sport than baseball. And if you’re tired of having your house covered in pigeon shit, professional exterminators will lay a covering on your roof to solve the problem. It’s really a carpet of tiny little face-up nails—pigeons can’t land on it.

  But starlings live in this city too, and they need places to roost. For their tribe to survive. So what they do is they carefully gather twigs and paper and other stuff, drop it on the carpet of nails and then stand on that.

  I don’t know how they do it in other countries, but in America, people call themselves “friends” and it means about as much as when they sign their letters “Love.” All their letters.

  Down here, it’s different. I have no friends. There’s people I know, people I wouldn’t hurt if I could help it. There’s people I like, and maybe they like me. But it really comes down to Us, Them . . . and non-combatants.

  Us is the deepest blood of all. And it only takes volunteers.

  In your world, you ask a friend to get something for you, he’d probably ask what you wanted it for. And then he might say yes and he might say no.

  When I asked Clarence to get something for me, he didn’t ask me what I wanted it for.

  And he didn’t just say he’d get it for me—he asked if he could use it himself.

  “What’s the point?” Pryce asked.

  “I don’t want to say on the phone. Especially without a land-line,” I told him.

  “You want to meet, I can do that. But why does . . . my friend have to be there too?”

  “I learned something,” I said. “It could change the game, understand? Change everything.”

  “I still don’t—”

  “Change everything,” I said, letting an organ-stop of pressure into my voice.

  He was silent for a minute, but the cellular’s hum told me he was still on the line. “The last time we met, it was all yours,” he finally said. “This time, it has to be mine.”

  “Time and place,” I said. “You call it.”

  “I can’t just reach out and—”

  “When you have it, let me know,” I said. “But there isn’t a lot of time.”

  “You trust me?” I asked Hercules in the bedroom of Vyra’s hotel suite.

  “All the way, brother,” he said, no hesitation.

  “Up to now, they been the players, we been the game, got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re gonna change the game,” I told him.

  Two days later. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Rain banging against Crystal Beth’s dark window.

  “You know where River Street is?” Pryce’s voice, over the cell phone.

  “What borough?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “I can find it,” I told him. Lying. I know River Street. It only runs for a couple of blocks, parallel to Kent Avenue, right off where the East River flows under the Williamsburg Bridge.

  “Go there now,” he said. “You’ll see my car parked.”

  “I’m moving,” I promised.

  “Are you inside?” I asked Vyra. Meaning: Are you in the suite, not the street?

  “Yes.” Her voice over the cell phone was clipped, precise. Not like her.

  “You alone?”

  “No.”

  “Your car is there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do this now. You both meet me at the Butcher
Block. Now.”

  “I don’t know where—”

  “Your friend does. Now.”

  I cut the connection.

  I spotted the burgundy Mercedes 600SL coupe coming down the block, moving slow. I stepped out so they could see me. “Get in my car,” I told Hercules.

  “What’s going—?”

  “Tell you later,” I cut Vyra off. “Go back to the hotel. Stay there, girl, no matter what. If you don’t hear anything in a couple of hours, call the number you have for me. Tell whoever answers that I went to meet Pryce. And I didn’t come back.”

  “Why does Hercules have to—?”

  “Not now,” I said, turning my back on her and moving off to the Plymouth.

  “It’s gotta be this way, huh?” Herk asked me.

  I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, heading toward Queens. Exited at Metropolitan Avenue and swung back toward Brooklyn.

  “Yeah. When you play cards, the ace is boss, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “We need the king to be boss, Herk.”

  He nodded soberly, watching the miserable weather. The sky was turning prison-gray.

  “Burke?”

  “What?”

  “Vyra. Are you . . . like, with her?”

  “With her? Like I’m with you? No. She’s not one of—”

  “Nah, I don’t mean that. I never say things like I mean them. I mean, I say them straight, but they don’t come out the way I’m thinking. You understand?”

  “Yeah, I do. What do you want to know?”

  “You and her. She was . . . like your girlfriend, right?”

  “No. She was never my girlfriend. We . . . got together once in a while. That’s all.”

  “You like her?”

  “I don’t know what I think about her. Never thought about it at all, I guess.”