Safe House b-10

by Andrew Vachss

  “I like her.”

  “You mean you’d like to fuck her,” saying it bluntly to take the edges off.

  “Nah. I mean . . . I would. I mean . . . I already . . . Burke, I really like her. She’s real smart. And real sweet. I can talk to her about things.”

  “Like what? Shoes?”

  “Man, you don’t know her. She’s really a . . . good person.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means: okay. Whatever you want to do, it’s up to you. But, Herk . . .”

  “What?”

  “She’s got herself a real good gig where she is, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Her husband? He ain’t—”

  “He’s rich. Major-league rich. Remember what the Prof told us about women once? ‘Some play, some stay.’ Vyra, she’s a player, all right?”

  “You don’t know her,” the big man said, sullen and stubborn.

  I shrugged my shoulders, concentrating. It wasn’t time to worry about Herk being such a sap—we were a couple of blocks from River Street.

  The white Taurus was parked on the street. No other car was close, but the block wasn’t deserted: People walking around, maybe from the change-of-shift at some of the nearby factories, maybe locals. Cars crawled by too.

  I pulled in behind, leaving myself room enough to drive away without backing up first. “Let’s do it,” I said to Hercules.

  Pryce must have been watching us in the rearview mirror. The back doors of the sedan popped open as we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce put his right arm along the back of the seat, turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead.

  “All right, let’s hear it,” Pryce said.

  “I want Herk to have his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”

  “That wasn’t the—”

  “That’s the deal now,” I said. “I got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together.”

  “You can’t expect to have that sort of deal in front,” Pryce said in an annoyed tone. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time.”

  “I think Lothar’s already taken care of.”

  “That’s different,” Pryce said in the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”

  “So’s Herk now.”

  “But they don’t need him,” Pryce said in a patient voice. “They don’t even know about him yet.”

  “But you can do it?” I asked him. “You got that much juice with the feds?”

  “Guaranteed,” he said. “But what does this have to do with Lothar?”

  “How do I know you’re going to come through for Hercules?” I said, ignoring his question.

  “I’ve done what you wanted, haven’t I? You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  I sat there quietly as a woman trundled past, pulling one of those little grocery carts behind her. Then I took out the fat tube of steel Clarence had gotten for me, said “Lothar?” and, when he turned sideways to listen, put a nine-millimeter slug in his temple.

  It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.

  “You got it wrong,” I told Pryce. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

  Lothar’s head slumped forward, his body held in place by his seatbelt. I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him backward so it looked like he was just sitting there. There was no blood, just a round little black dot on his temple—the opposite of a birthmark. Some of the powder had been removed from the cartridge to keep the sound down—the bullet was still somewhere in Lothar’s brain.

  “You—”

  Pryce cut himself off, out of words.

  I wasn’t. “Now we’re gonna find out,” I told him, watching his hands in case we had to do him too. If it came to that, Hercules would have to snap his neck from behind—I didn’t have another bullet. Clarence’s connection made custom pieces—this one was a one-shot derringer with a thick core of silencing baffles. “Look,” I said, my voice as calm as a Zen rock garden, “Lothar was stalking his wife. That’s a fact, well documented. There’s an Order of Protection. You know that too. Well, what happened was that he got spotted breaking into his wife’s house. She isn’t there anymore, but he didn’t know that. He had implements with him—handcuffs, duct tape, like that. He was gonna kill his wife and kidnap the baby. Or both of them. Who knows? The cops came on the scene, and Lothar decided to shoot it out. Gunfire was exchanged. There’s the result, sitting right next to you. That’s the story that needs to getin the papers. So the others will see what happened. It won’t surprise them either—they knew Lothar was a torture-sex freak with a major hate for his wife. Okay, that leaves Herk. He’s your inside man now. And he needs that immunity. Or the faucet gets turned off.”

  “You’re insane,” Pryce said, looking through the windshield. The street was quiet.

  “People could argue about that,” I told him. “Nobody’s gonna argue about Lothar being dead.”

  “You expect me to drive around with a dead body and—”

  “I don’t care what you do. I know people can’t see through these windows from outside. You want cover, I’ll drive point until you get clear. To wherever you want—we can stay linked on the cellulars. But I don’t think you want me to see where you’re going.

  “It’s time to prove,” I told him. “If you’re the real thing, if you’re down with ZOG, you can do this. If you’re not, it’s all over. You got no more cards to play. You thought you knew me. Now you do. You take down Crystal Beth’s network, you dime out Vyra to her husband, you turn Porkpie loose on Hercules, you’re done, pal. You’ll never find all of us. And one of us will find you.”

  “Get out of the car,” he said in a tight, controlled voice. “Get out now. I’ll call you.”

  We watched the white Taurus drive away. Smooth and steady.

  I crossed the bridge into Manhattan. Pulled up to a deli on Delancey. A Latino in an old army field jacket was leaning against the wall, just out of the rain. He walked over to the Plymouth. Herk rolled down his window. The guy stuck his head inside, nodded at me. He went into the deli, came back with a paper bag full of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of apple juice. I glove-handed him the empty, wiped-down steel tube and five one-hundred-dollar bills. He pocketed both and walked off.

  Herk dialed Vyra from a pay phone on the street. Told her he’d be there soon.

  Back in the car, he turned to me. “Burke, I’m with you, okay? No matter what. I mean, I don’t gotta understand why—”

  “You know what happens when a raccoon gets his leg caught in one of those steel traps, Herk? You know what he’s got to do, he wants to live?”

  “Bite the leg off?” the big man said.

  “Yeah. There’s two kinds of raccoons get caught in those traps. The ones with balls enough to do what they gotta do. And dead ones. A bitch raccoon gets in heat, she wants a stud that’s gonna give her the strongest babies, understand? You know what she looks for? Not the biggest raccoon. Not the prettiest one either. A smart bitch, she looks for one with three legs.”

  “I get it, bro. Okay, we got three legs now. I’m in. But . . . we got a problem. I think, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a meeting. Tonight.”

  “Damn. Why didn’t you—?”

  “I forgot. Until just now.”

  “Jesus, Herk. Even if Pryce goes for it, he can’t make it happen right now. He’s gonna need a day or so, minimum. The best we can hope for is the newspaper story. I thought we’d watch—he makes that happen, I believe he can do the immunity thing. And then I was going to have this lawyer I hired go in and tighten that up for you. But if you go to that meeting and Lothar isn’t there . . .”

  “He wasn’t supposed to be there, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “I me
an, he’s supposed to be stalking his wife, right? And he gets smoked doing it, okay? No way I know about that. Or any of them either. Unless it’s on the news. Why shouldn’t I just go on? It ain’t like me and him was supposed to be cut-buddies anyway.”

  “Herk, that’s if Pryce goes along. That’s if he can do it even if he wants to. That’s if he hasn’t already decided to cut his losses and down the whole fucking crew. If you know about the meeting tonight, Lothar did too. And he probably told Pryce.”

  “What else am I supposed to do?”

  “You could jet,” I told him.

  “I was gonna do that, what’d you take Lothar off the count for? I ain’t that stupid. I know what you was talking about. Lothar was the ace, right? Now I’m the top card. The only one that cocksucker Pryce’s got. I thought we was gonna play this to win.”

  “I should have asked you about the next meeting.”

  “I’m going in there,” he said. “And if that little motherfucker Porkpie dimes us out, I’ll take the weight. For everything. I did that guy in the alley, I did Lothar, what’s the difference? Life is life.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t going back.”

  “If it was just me, I wouldn’t,” Hercules said. “But if it goes bad, the only way I can take the heat offa everyone is to stand up, right? So I’ll do it.”

  “If that happens, I’ll get you out,” I promised him. “Not through the courts, over the wall. It’ll take some time but—”

  “I’ll have the time, brother,” the big man said, down but determined. “Now I gotta go say goodbye to Vyra.”

  “Did I do something to make you angry?” Crystal Beth asked meekly. Lying on her stomach, her body picking up bronze highlights from the candle’s flame.

  “Why’d you ask me that?”

  “Because you . . . hurt me. When we made love. You were so . . . rough. Storming in here. Holding me down. Pinned down. I felt like I was in a steel vise. I couldn’t move. And you didn’t . . . wait for me. You just—”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Not to me, anyway.”

  “I said I was sorry, Crystal Beth. I . . . got something on my mind.”

  “Pryce?”

  “Pryce is a dead man,” I snapped at her.

  She gasped.

  “I mean, if he doesn’t come through, he’s dead,” I said quickly. “It’s really tense now, little girl. I shouldn’t have . . . done what I did. To you, I mean. I’m sorry. If there’s any way I can make it up to you, I’ll—”

  “We could try it again,” she said softly, a little smile playing around her full lips. “From the top.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked later.

  “Out.”

  “Why can’t you just stay here for the night?”

  I could have told her I had to get back to take care of Pansy, but it would have been a lie. I have it all set up so Pansy can get food for herself when I’m gone. Not the food she loves—just dry dog food—but if she got hungry enough, she’d eat it. And a fresh water supply too. With the plastic garbage bags I’d laid out for her, she was good for a nice long time, although it wouldn’t smell too great when I got back. And if I didn’t come back, Max knew what to do—there was always room for one more mutt in the Mole’s junkyard. I told Crystal Beth the truth. “I need a TV set. And you don’t have one.”

  “Yes we do,” she said. “Right downstairs. The one you had for Hercules. It’s still in the basement. It’s just a little portable, not cable or anything. But we could plug it in and—”

  “Go get it,” I told her.

  It was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news. The male anchor read the copy as the camera panned over footage of a lower-middle-class house surrounded by yellow POLICE tape, using that ponderous tone they all go to when they think there’s a chance anyone will mistake them for real journalists.

  A Queens man long sought by the authorities for violation of a court Order of Protection has taken his own life after a shoot-out with police. Lawrence Bretton, age thirty-six, an unemployed printer, apparently invaded the home of his estranged wife and infant son, unaware that she had been living at another location.

  The camera switched to Lothar’s mug shot, probably from when he was first arrested for domestic violence.

  Bretton was armed with a nine-millimeter automatic pistol and several clips of ammunition. He also had a pair of handcuffs and a roll of duct tape with him, leading to speculation that he planned some sort of kidnapping or torture. According to police sources, Bretton had threatened his wife with death on numerous occasions and was considered extremely violent.

  The camera switched to a copy of the Order of Protection, with Lothar’s true name in the caption.

  When ordered to surrender, Bretton fired upon police at the scene and attempted to barricade himself in the house. Reinforcements were called in as well as the Hostage Negotiating Team, but a brief telephone conversation ended with a shot from inside the home. Ironically, Bretton was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he took his own life with a single shot to the head rather than surrender. Details of this astounding case, so emblematic of the domestic violence which has infected this city for so long, are still coming in. Stay tuned to this channel for . . .

  “Oh my God,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

  “That’s him all right. But it’s not over.”

  “It is for Marla,” she said. “And the baby.”

  There was more at eleven-thirty. A beautifully woven web of lies, with such a heavy marbling of truth that digesting the whole meal wouldn’t be a problem for any media-watcher. They threw in a whole lot of lovely professional details . . . including an excerpt from one of the wiretapped calls Lothar had made to Marla. Even with the profanities bleeped out, it was explicit enough to make the hairs on your forearm stand up.

  I watched the show with Crystal Beth sitting next to me. Knowing Pryce could get it done now, knowing he had the juice.

  And wondering who he really was.

  The phone didn’t ring all night long.

  In the morning, I went back to my office. Exchanged a half-pound of boiled ham and a plump custard cream puff for the present Pansy had left for me to clean up.

  The joint where I’d gotten the ham also sold cooked stuff—mostly chicken and beef, spinning on a rotisserie. I had bought a nice-looking hunk of medium-well steak, planning to split it with Pansy, but it was as tough as a Philadelphia middleweight, so she got all of that too.

  I settled for some toasted stale bread and a bottle of ginseng-laced soda, wishing I hadn’t duked the cream puff on her so quickly.

  Soon as I was done eating, I tried Mama’s. Drew a blank.

  I remembered I’d never gotten Porkpie’s address from Pryce. And realized it didn’t matter anymore.

  The day crawled. I went out to get the newspapers. More of the same. Except for the hostage team at the scene, it wasn’t that big a story in New York. Man abuses woman. Woman—finally—leaves man. Man swears if she won’t have him she won’t have anyone. Court issues Order of Protection. Man beats the crap out of her. Back to court. Man is given low bail, if he qualifies . . . which means: woman not hospitalized or media not paying attention. Another Order of Protection issued, this time with a pompous warning that impresses only the autoerotic judge. Sooner or later, woman is found dead, with that useless piece of paper in her purse. Man nearby, dead by his own hand. Happens all the time. Only this time, the intended victim had flown the coop before the fox broke in.

  If the papers had gotten hold of the Nazi angle, it would have been front-page for days. But not a word of that slipped out. The usual round of neighborhood interviews, ranging from “I can’t believe it” to “I knew he’d do it.” Pious editorials about “junk justice” and the need to get tough on domestic violence. Somebody who didn’t want to be identified said it was a terrible thing all right, but he could understand a man being driven crazy by not bei
ng allowed to see his own child.

  And the usual always-good-for-a-quote collection of exhibitionistic “experts”—every TV producer worth his sleazy job has a Rolodex full of them.

  The papers ran a bunch of teasers like: “The whereabouts of Bretton’s wife and son are unknown,” but nobody took the bait, even when one of the slime-tabloids offered a hundred grand “reward” for “the whole story.” And without a victim the media could wring their hands over, the whole story would be as dead as Lothar in a couple of days.

  I slapped a fresh battery pack into the cellular and hit the streets, looking for the Prof. Left word in a few places for him to call Mama’s.

  I rang Vyra from a pay phone down the street from the hotel. She was in.

  When I walked in the door to her suite, she was barefoot, wearing a big white fluffy bathrobe, her face scrubbed clean but bloodless and haggard. “Have you—?” she asked.

  I shook my head no, sat down in one of the plush chairs, placing the life-line cellular carefully on the arm. She sat on the couch across from me, hugging herself inside the robe. “I’m scared,” she said.

  “Me too,” I told her. “But all we can do is wait for word now.”

  “Did you have to make him . . . do that?”

  “Do what?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she almost wailed. “He wouldn’t tell me. But I know it was very dangerous. I begged him not to, but he just . . .”

  “It all had to be done,” I told her. “All of us, whatever we did.”

  “He said . . . he said you were all doing it for him.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And I know better, don’t I?” she said, eyes snapping at my face. “It’s not for him. Not just for him, anyway.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m one of them, aren’t I? I’m one of the people he’s . . . doing it for. Me. If anything happens, I’m responsible too.”