Andrew Vachss - Flood

There was nothing to say to that-I knew what Michelle meant by biological parents. Once I had a teenage girl come to my office and offer to pay me some money to find her “real” parents. She said she was adopted. It made me sick-these folks adopted her, paid the bills, took the weight, carried the load for her all her life, and now she wanted to find her “real” parents-the ones who dumped her into a social services agency that sold her to the highest bidder. Real parents. A dog can have puppies-that doesn’t make it a mother. I took her twenty-five hundred and told her to come back in a month, when I gave her the birth certificate of a woman who had died from an overdose of heroin two years after the girl had been born. The phony birth certificate said “Unknown” next to the space for “Father”. I told her that her father had been a trick, a john. Someone who paid her mother ten bucks so he could get off for a few minutes. She started to cry and I told her to go talk it over with her mother. She wailed, “My mother’s dead!” and I told her that her mother was home, waiting for her. The woman who had died had just been a horse who dropped a foal, that’s all. She left hating me, I guess.

Mama still hadn’t called, which meant Max wasn’t at the restaurant. I told Michelle I’d drop her wherever she wanted, and we packed up the stuff together.

When I pulled the Plymouth up in front of her hotel Michelle leaned over and kissed me quickly on the cheek. “Get a haircut, honey. That shaggy look went out ages ago.”

“You always told me my hair was too short.”

“Styles change, Burke. Although God knows, you never do.”

“Neither do you,” I told her.

“But I’m going to, honey… I’m going to,” she said, and bounced out of the car toward the steps.

Michelle had a place to live, and so did I. But we had the same home. I drove past mine to the place where I live.

YOU CAN WALK out of prison and promise yourself you’ll never be back, but it’s not such an easy promise to keep. You always take some of the joint with you when you go. The last time I got out, I told myself it would be great to get up when I wanted to-not when the damn horns went off in the morning. But it’s still hard for me to sleep late. Besides, Pansy isn’t the kind of cellmate who’s willing to sleep in and forget about hitting the chow line.

While she was out on the roof I looked out the back door toward the river. It was quiet up there, but I knew things were happening on the street. I’d never be able to live high enough up to not know that.

I went back into the living space next to the office and put together the stuff I’d need. All the firepower went back into the compartment in the floor of the closet except the.38, which would go back into the car. I put the clip-on car antenna into the breast pocket of an old tweed sportcoat, put it on over a plain gray sweater. Some tired corduroy pants, a battered felt hat, and a pair of desert boots completed the professor’s outfit. The hat didn’t really fit in with all the other stuff, but I don’t like to play stereotypes too rigidly.

I put the microcassette recorder inside the special pocket in the lining of my leather overcoat and connected the long flexible wire the Mole had made for me to the remote microphone sewn into the inside of the sleeve. Then I connected the remote-start wire to the switch in my overcoat pocket, the same one that would hold my cigarettes. I used a handy police siren from down by the river to test the recorder for treble, patted Pansy’s head until she purred to test for bass-it was as sensitive as the Mole had promised. I had ninety minutes of uninterrupted recording time-voice-activated, although it was so sensitive that it would run all the time once I touched the switch. I’d have to pay attention when I started it working.

I got Pansy all set up, activated the security systems, and went downstairs. The desert boots don’t have steel toes like my other shoes, but they’re rubber-soled and I don’t make a sound.

I let myself into the garage, put the.38 back where it belonged, and got out some old chamois cloth. The Plymouth had to be thoroughly cleaned before I put on its disguise. A couple of concealed hinge pins the kid had installed were all I needed to remove the entire front outside section. Next I took the precut sheets of heavy vinyl with gum backing and proceeded to turn the Plymouth from a faded blue to a brilliant two-tone red and white. I smoothed the vinyl on very carefully, like the guy I bought it from showed me, then went over the whole thing with a soft rubber block to get rid of all the little bubbles. It wouldn’t pass a serious inspection, but I wasn’t planning on anyone getting a close look.

Then I put on new license plates. They’re perfectly legal dealer plates from a junkyard in Corona. I own a ten percent interest in the junkyard, which I paid for in cash. In return, the old man who runs the thing carries me on the books at minimal salary so I have something to show the IRS, and lets me carry a set of dealer plates with me in case I see something worth salvaging. I cash the checks every month and get the cash right back to the old man. No problem. I suppose if some citizen got a reading on the plates the cops could trace them back to the junkyard, but they’d collect their pensions before I ever showed up there. And finding Juan Rodriguez (I told the old man that my parents were Spanish Jews, not that he gave a damn) in the abandoned building on Fox Street in the South Bronx would be a hell of a feat too.

I still had some time before I had to meet Flood, so I guided the Plymouth, resplendent in its new clothes, over to the warehouse to check on the mail. It looked empty as usual, but I rolled the car inside, turned off the engine, and waited. Max materialized at my window. I never heard him coming-they don’t call him Max the Silent just because he doesn’t speak. He twitched a muscle in his right cheek, parted his thin lips about a millimeter-that’s his idea of a friendly smile-and motioned for me to follow him into the back room. He gestured to the old wooden desk to indicate that there was some mail. I scooped it out and pulled a cigarette out of my pocket, offering Max one.

You ever watch an Oriental smoke a cigarette? They really know how to get something out of it. Max touched the butt to his lips with his palm facing in, drew a deep breath and reversed his grip so that he was holding it with his thumb on the bottom and his first two fingers on top. Then he gradually pulled the cigarette away as he inhaled, a gesture that meant I should tell him what was going on. I pointed to my eyes, then spread my hands wide to show I was looking for somebody but didn’t know where he was. Max touched his own face, held his hand in front of his eyes to show me a mirror, then gestured as if he were describing someone’s physical characteristics. I pretended I was taking a picture, then beckoned as if I were inviting someone to enter. Max understood that I was expecting to get a photograph of the target soon. Then he held his hands out in front, turned them slowly back and forth, and looked up expectantly. I pointed to my eyes again and made a no-no gesture with my palms down-I only wanted to find the guy, not hurt him. Max shrugged, then made a glad-to-see-you-pal gesture with his hands and face to ask me if the guy would be happy when I did find him. I made a sad face, indicating he would not. Max looked at his hands again. I shrugged my shoulders to show that maybe he was right, or would be right when this all came down.

Grabbing an elbow with each hand as if I were rocking a baby, I crossed my arms-did Mama Wong have anything for me? Max picked up an imaginary telephone, spoke into it, touched his finger to his forehead like he was making a mental note to remember something. So I had gotten a call at Mama’s, someone very insistent. Okay.