Jeffery Deaver - Hell's Kitchen

“How’d you know about me?”

“Just did.” The boy caressed the glossy cover of the book with a filthy hand.

“How?” Pellam persisted, as curious as he was suspicious.

“You know. Like, you hear things.”

“Tell me what you know. I’m not a cop.”

His laugh said he already knew this about him.

The Word. On the street.

The boy’s attention returned to his book, like a child’s Golden Book, just a photo laminated on a cardboard cover. The type was large and the words sparse. The photos were terrible.

Pellam prompted, “So who set the fire? Who hired him?”

In a very young face, the very old eyes narrowed. Then the boy broke out into a laugh.

Gear-greasing is expensive work.

Pellam mentally totaled his two savings accounts and an anemic IRA, penalty for early withdrawal, and some remaining advance money from WGBH. The figure eighty-five hundred floated into his mind. There was a little equity left in the house on Beverly Glen. The battered Winnebago had to be worth something. But that was it. Pellam’s lifestyle was often liquid but his resources largely were not.

The boy wiped his nose. “A hundred thousand.”

He thought a grunge-stud like this would have more modest aspirations. Pellam didn’t even bother to negotiate. He asked, “How’d you find out about the fire?”

“The guy who did it, I sorta know him. He’s hatter. Crazy dude, you know. He gets off burning things.”

The pyro Bailey had told him about – the one A.D.A. Lois Koepel, whom Pellam already detested, was so eager to track down.

“He told you who hired him?”

“Like, not exactly but you can figure it out. From what he told me.”

“What’s your name?”

“You, like, don’t need to know it.”

You, like, know mine.

“I could give you one,” the boy continued. “But so what? It wouldn’t be real.”

“Well, I don’t have a hundred thousand bucks. Nowhere near.”

“Bullshit. You’re, like, this famous director or something. You’re from Hollywood. Of course you got money.”

In front of them the police cruiser eased down the street again. Pellam thought about tackling the skinny kid and calling the cops over.

But all it took was one look into Pellam’s eyes.

“Oh, nice try , you asshole,” the boy shouted. Clutching the precious book under his arm, he burst down the alley.

Pellam waved futilely at the police car. The two cops inside didn’t see him. Or they ignored the gestures. Then he was racing through the alley, boots pounding grittily on the cobblestones, after the kid. They streaked through two vacant lots behind Ettie’s building and emerged onto Ninth Avenue. Pellam saw the boy turn right, north, and keep sprinting.

When the kid got to Thirty-ninth Street Pellam lost him. He paused, hands on hips, gasping. He examined the parking lots, the approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, the rococo tenements, bodegas and a sawdust-strewn butcher shop. Pellam tried a deli but no one in there had seen him. When he stepped out into the street Pellam noticed, half block away, door swinging open. The boy sprinted out, lugging a knapsack, and vanished in a mass of people. Pellam didn’t even bother to pursue. In the crowded streets the boy simply turned invisible.

The doorway the kid had come out of was a storefront, windows painted over, black. He remembered seeing it earlier. The Youth Outreach Center. Inside he saw dingy fluorescent-lit room sparsely furnished with mismatched desks and chairs. Two women stood talking in the center of the room, arms crossed, somber.

Pellam entered just as the thinner of the two women lifted her arms helplessly and pushed through a doorway that led to the back of the facility.

The other woman’s pale, round face was glossy with faint makeup, barely hiding a spray of freckles. She wore her red hair shoulder-length. He guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She wore an old sweatshirt and a pair of old jeans, which didn’t disguise her voluptuous figure. The long-sleeved top, maroon, bore the Harvard crest. Veritas .

Pellam had a fast memory of the Cubano Lord. Verdad , he recalled.

Primero con la verdad.

She glanced up at him with some curiosity as he stepped inside. She glanced at his camera bag. He introduced himself and the woman said, “I’m Carol Wyandotte. The director here. Can I help you?” She adjusted a pair of thick tortoiseshell glasses, break in the frame fixed with white adhesive tape – shoving the loose glasses back up her nose. Pellam thought she was pretty the way a peasant or farm girl would be. Absurdly, she wore a choker of pearls.

“A kid left here a minute ago. Blond, grungy.”

“Alex? We were just talking about him. He ran inside, grabbed his backpack and left. We were wondering what was going on.”

“I was talking to him down the street. He just ran off.”

“ Talking to him?”

Pellam didn’t want to say that the boy knew about the arson. For the youngster’s sake. The Word on the Street traveled far too fast. He remembered the gun in Ramirez’s hand and how the whole world seemed terrified of Jimmy Corcoran.

“You can,” Carol said dryly, “tell me the truth.” Shoved her glasses onto her nose.

Pellam cocked an eyebrow.

“Happens all the time. One of our kids cops a wallet or something. Then somebody comes in, blushing, and says, ‘I think one of your boys “found” my wallet.’ ”

Pellam decided she was a smart, rich girl turned social worker. Which was probably a very tough category of person to deal with.

“Well, he might be a great thief but he didn’t steal anything from me. I’m making a film and-”

“A reporter?” Carol’s face went ice cold – much angrier than if he’d accused Alex of “finding” his wallet. He thought: her eyes are remarkable. Pale, pale blue. Almost blending into the surrounding white.

“Not exactly.” He explained that West of Eighth was an oral history.

“I don’t like reporters.” A bit of brogue slipped into Carol’s voice and he had a clue to the feistiness inside her – a grit that the director of a place like this undoubtedly needed. A temper too. “All those damn stories on preteen addicts and gang rapes and child prostitutes. Makes it hard as hell to get money when the boards of foundations turn on Live at Five and see that the little girl you’re trying to rehabilitate is an illiterate hooker with HIV. But, of course, it’s exactly kids like that who’re the ones you need to rehabilitate.”

“Hey, ma’am,” Pellam held up his hand. “I’m just a lowly oral historian here.”

The hardness in Carol’s round face melted. “Sorry, sorry. My friends say I can’t pass a soapbox without climbing on top. You were saying, about Alex? You were interviewing him?”

“I’ve been talking to people in the building that burned down. He lived there.”

“Off and on,” Carol corrected. “With his chicken hawk.”

Me and Ray.

She continued, “You know Juan Torres?”

Pellam nodded. “He’s in critical condition.”

The son of the man who met Jose Canseco.

Carol shook her head. “It just kills me to see something like that happen to the good ones. It’s such a damn waste.”

“You don’t have any idea where Alex took off to?”

“Ran in, ran out. Don’t have a clue.”

“Where’s home?”

“He claimed he was from Wisconsin somewhere. Probably is… I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Pellam.”

“First?”

“John Pellam. Go by the last usually.”

“You don’t like John?”

“Let’s say I don’t lead a very Biblical life. Any chance he’ll come back?”