Andrew Vachss - Flood

All the D.A.’s answer their phone the same way. “Mr. Ringer’s line.”

“Good morning, Toby. I got a present for you.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Your friend from the Gonzales matter, remember? I don’t want to talk on the phone, okay? But I got a gold-plated chance for you to nail a baby-raper, and I’ll throw in a homicide to boot.”

“In exchange for what?”

“For justice. I don’t want anything-I just want to tell you something that I can’t tell the cops.”

“This is Mr. B., I presume.”

“I’m your man. Can I meet you someplace tonight?”

“My office. That’s it-no other place. Deal?”

“Deal. What time?”

“Make it around eight. Everybody’s gone home by then and the night crew will be downstairs working the Complaint Room.”

“Want me to see the man at the front desk or just bypass him?”

“Go to the desk. I’ll leave word-what name?”

“Tell him Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“You’ll see, Toby. Tonight, right?”

“Right.” And we hung up simultaneously. I keep all my calls on this phone under one minute; this one had barely qualified.

I sat down at my desk planning to compose a suitable recruitment ad for the mercenary journals. It might bring the Cobra around but that would be a last resort, especially since it takes three or four months for the ads to get into print. He might be long gone by then-forget it. I locked the place up and aimed the Plymouth for the docks, figuring Michelle would be easier to find in daylight.

I backed into my usual spot facing West Street, lit up, and waited. There were plenty of hustlers working, but no Michelle. Waiting isn’t hard for me, though. Different people use different tricks to make the time go by, but it all comes down to the same thing. You can’t make anything happen, you just have to be ready when it does. Sometimes you have to hide the fact that you’re waiting so you use something like a taxicab and sometimes you find yourself a job to do while you’re waiting so if someone is looking they see the worker, not the watcher. Some places you stand out only if you don’t look like you’re watching, like in the cesspool-Times Square. If you’re tracking a man in that pit, the only thing to do is really gawk around and be obvious as hell about it. Then they only wonder what you’re looking for, not who. This job was like that. All the freaks parading by knew I was waiting for something or somebody. And after I was there a half hour or so, word would get around; they’d talk, compare notes. They’d know I wasn’t law, but they couldn’t be sure I wasn’t trouble.

In some neighborhoods, especially Italian or Hispanic ones, the young bloods would try their luck with a stranger just to be doing it. Not down here-everybody down here already knows their luck is permanently bad, and the nice-looking man in the cashmere topcoat coming down the block might just have gotten so bored reading muscle magazines every night after his frigid wife went to bed that now he’s stalking the streets with a handgun in his pocket and exorcism on his mind.

When I wait like this I usually listen to some of my tape collection. I started it by accident. I’d gone to a meeting that I wanted to record and the Mole had rigged me up with one of his devices, using sequential blank-tape banks with minicassettes. It was voice-activated and would record for six hours straight. I kicked it in before I even got out of the car, but I forgot to turn it off. So when I dropped by this cellar club later to unload a couple of gross of phony tickets to a rock concert, the tape was still running. They had a kid playing at the club that night who looked like he left Kentucky to work in the Chicago steel mills, but he was a blues singer, pure and simple. Someone once said the blues are the truth-maybe that’s why I listen so close when I hear that music… truth’s in short supply in my line of work. Anyway, when I got back to the office and played the tapes I found a couple of the kid’s numbers at the tail end. The Mole was right about the perfect fidelity-listening to the tape was exactly like being back in the club. And listening to the music was exactly like being back in my own life, like the blues are supposed to be. The blues don’t make you think-they make you remember. If you’ve got no memories, you can’t have the blues. I avoid physical pain like a vulture avoids live meat, but I call up the past sometimes and let it wash over me on purpose. Maybe it helps me survive. Maybe it makes me believe that survival isn’t a waste of time. I don’t know.

When the tape broke into the cellar club’s sounds I heard the rattle of glasses and the voices of the waitresses hustling drinks and the muted electric hum that meant nobody was listening to anyone else. The kid fronted a classic Chicago-style blues band: he sang and worked a mouth harp off the same microphone, a piano, a slide guitar, rhythm guitar, electric bass, drummer. The kid didn’t have much of a rap-he didn’t have the years and confidence for that yet. But he understood that if you could make people in a basement club stop boozing and snorting and hustling long enough to listen, you had something real. Whatever that something was, the kid wanted it-bad. He leaned a bit into the microphone, said “This is ‘Bad Blood Blues,’ ” and the piano man started into a series of rolls and falls, going with just the bottom line from the bass player. It wasn’t loud, but it was intrusive, insistent-impossible to ignore. So much so that by the time the guitarists and the drummer were there, too, the crowd was waiting to hear what the kid had to say. He cupped the harp around the microphone, then appeared to change his mind and just got to it. Unlike most white blues singers, the kid didn’t try to sound black. The words came out firm and clean, not covered by the band:

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I always tried to do right,

But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

I didn’t mean to stay with that woman,

At least not for very long.

and you could hear the crowd shut down and shift over to a listening stance. By the middle of the second verse the kid was getting shouts of agreement when he sang:

Oh I knew that she was evil,

People told me she was mean.

Yes, I knew that she was evil,

And people told me she was mean.

I knew that she was evil…

But I always thought that she was clean.

Then the kid bridged into a hard, anticipative harp solo, taken against the bass and rhythm guitar, letting the crowd know he was going to explain the mystery to them in just a little while. And he did:

Well, she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

You know she never gave me nothing,

She just about ruined my life.

And when she finally gave me something…

(By then, we all knew what he was talking about.)

I brought it home to my poor wife.

And behind shouts of “That’s right!” and “Had to be!” the kid picked up the harp again and the blues came out. Just that simple, and damn-near perfect. By then the people knew where he was going, where a story like his had to go:

Now my life is so empty,

My wife don’t want to see my face.

My life is so empty,

And my wife don’t want to see my face.

I got to walk this road alone,

Bad blood, it’s my disgrace.

And the kid rolled the harp down with the rest of the band and finished. He had them all moving now and he went uptempo but stayed with the blues. The harp barked into a fast lead, the piano floated off the top, and then the kid sang his own road song:

I got a long way to travel, honey,