Andrew Vachss: The Weight

It was even fair, sort of. I had dropped that other guy. I didn’t set out to kill him, but he was just as dead.

Only I knew it wouldn’t go that way again. Even with the DA already talking about a plea, I knew I was looking at felony time. All I cared about was keeping that as short as possible without giving anyone up.

I already missed smoking-I’d had to trade my whole first commissary draw for a decent shank. Rikers is no place for a white man, especially one with no Nazi ink.

“Could I see your right forearm?” the lawyer asked me.

I pulled back my sleeve to the elbow. He motioned for me to turn my hand so he could see the underside. He couldn’t be looking for track marks-otherwise, he’d have wanted to look at both arms.

“I knew it,” he said, nodding like he was agreeing with himself.

“What?”

“No tattoo. The victim said the man who raped her had one. Big one. Right forearm. She didn’t get a close look, but she remembered it had a lot of red in it.”

“So I’m off the-?”

“Experienced rapists always use them. Decal tattoos, I mean. It’s the kind of thing victims remember.”

“Yeah. They’ve got an answer for everything,” I told him, remembering what the black cop had said about me wearing a rubber.

“But you still want to roll the dice?”

“What’s the difference?” I said. “I’m going anyway. I was carrying when they grabbed me.”

“Operable?” he asked. Showing me he’d handled carrying-concealed cases before. But telling me something else: that the DA hadn’t exactly opened their files for him, like he thought they had.

“Yeah,” I said. “With one in the chamber.”

“You know they’re going to write it up that the safety was off, right?”

“For once, they wouldn’t be lying if they did. But I guarantee you there’s nothing on that gun. Brand-new. Never been fired.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Bet my life,” I told him.

That would have been a safe bet. Solly always supplied the hardware on his jobs. I remember one time when one of the crew Solly put together wanted to bring his regular carry piece. Said it was his lucky lady. “That’s no lucky lady,” Solly told him. “In fact, that’s no lady at all.”

Before the guy could say anything, Solly snatched the piece out of his hand and held it up under the lightbulb hanging in the basement where we were meeting. “What’s this hold, about nineteen rounds? Where’re you even gonna carry it, fucking monster like that? You’re planning on a gunfight, swell. But this job, it goes right, nobody shoots at all.”

“Sometimes-” the guy started to say.

“Sometimes isn’t this time. That’s what I get paid for. On my jobs, every man carries the same. Show him, Sugar.”

I took out the one Solly had given me. Short-barreled, kind of ugly.

“Ruger in forty-five,” Solly said. “Whatever you hit with this, it’s not getting up. The only thing that ‘lady’ of yours would be good for is a firefight. You want one with a SWAT team?”

“I still don’t see why we all have to carry the same-”

“Because one guy also carries a little bag with him. That’s Sugar. Soon as you start work, Sugar puts the bag down, opens the zipper. There’s two hundred full magazines in there.

“You all carry the same, so you all got your ammo supply right there. Every round checked before it went into a clip-you’re not gonna have to worry about jams. Even better, nobody has to worry about what the other guy’s carrying. That’s because none of mine got a past. Pure virgins, every single piece.

“See, that’s no lady you’re carrying, my friend; that’s a whore. And you know whores: if she’ll sell her pussy, she’ll sell you. Get it now ?”

I wasn’t going to tell the lawyer about that. But there was something he’d need to know. I figured I might as well get it over with. “Only thing is, the serial numbers were-”

“Not good,” the lawyer said. “Even worse if they make a call to ATF.”

“You on the panel for the Federal Court, too?”

He gave me a look. I just looked back.

“I am on the CJA Panel,” he finally said. “But that’s not the point. Whatever you know about that gun, they know, too, by now. No matter how you play it, being caught with it wasn’t a good thing for you. But it’s not good enough for them, either.”

“How come?”

“Carrying, that’s a felony hit all by itself, sure. But it’d be a long way to turn it into another violence beef. You didn’t do anything with that gun,” he said, making it a question.

“I never even pulled it,” I said. “But it was ready to go.”

“Maybe someone had been threatening you?”

“That’s it, all right.”

He was quiet for a minute, making a thing out of reading some papers he had with him. He looked up, said: “That gun, it was a regular carry piece?”

“You mean, did I walk around with it, or just happen to have it that particular day?”

“Okay,” he said. Meaning, he wanted to see if I could guess what the right answer should be. If I was going to tell a story, it’d have to be a good one.

“Ever since I started getting those threats, I never left home without it,” I said. “I’ve been shot before; it’ll be on my records.”

He flashed me just enough of his teeth for me to see he took real good care of them. Then he started looking through a bunch of papers he had with him, like he had all the time in the world.

I guess he did. They pay these 18-B guys by the hour. And it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

Finally, he made a little motion for me to put my face close. He wrote something on his yellow pad. I looked: NEVER VOUCHERED is what it said, in tiny letters.

I moved my lips real slow, so I could say what I wanted without making a sound: “The piece?”

“It’s not anywhere in all this,” he said, running his pen over what he’d shown me. He really worked at it, crosshatching the words into a black blob, but he made it seem like he didn’t realize what he was doing. “Of course, it doesn’t have to be. Like I said, I haven’t filed any motions-they gave me all this without me even asking. And now I think I see why.”

“It’s a card they’re holding back?”

“No. Listen.” He leaned toward me again; I did the same toward him. He spoke so soft I could barely hear him: “The rape, it wasn’t gunpoint; the guy put a-”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up!” I said. Just moving my lips like before, not making a sound. But he heard me. Heard me good.

“What’s your problem?” he said, backing off. “I’m just trying to-”

“Yeah, I know. But right now I could walk in and pass any polygraph they got. Sure, the operator’s going to tell me I failed, see if that gets me to confess. But they’ll see I’m not lying. That’s why I talked to the cops for so long after they picked me up. I figured, sooner or later, they’d ask me, since I was innocent and all, would I mind taking the test? I had the surprise all ready for them, but they never took the bait.”

“That wouldn’t be admissible-”

“I know. But it’s something , right? They started with the registered sex offenders. Stupid fucks: every joint’s got plenty of rape artists who pleaded to burglary, so there’s all kinds of sex fiends who wouldn’t even be on that list. I figure, if she stopped when they got to my picture, they probably didn’t show her any more pictures.”