Andrew Vachss - Flood

“And the working girls don’t tell her nothing about the Life, you know-they just try and pull her into one of their old man’s stables. But JoJo’s not going for that-she’s going to do a solo act. So one night this freakmobile shows up on the corner-two punks in front, another pair in the back. Ain’t no working girl with any smarts getting in that car-but the other bitches play like it’s no big deal and old dumb JoJo goes for it and they take her away to some room one of them had and they keep her there for three whole days-tie her up and fuck her and do a bullwhip number on her and make her spread for some Polaroids-they just go the whole freako hog. And after they pull a couple of trains on her they send out for pizza and let the delivery man have a shot. They call up all their friends and invite them too. And when they’re finally going to leave, JoJo’s a bloody mess and she ups and asks them for the money. Can you believe that? Well, one of them just goes nuts behind that and he takes a baseball bat to her and when the cops find her half her skull is caved in.

“They take her to the hospital and put a steel plate in her head and get her patched up and then some detective comes in with one of those mug-shot books and shows them to her and she starts screaming, “That’s them,” and points to all of them and jumps right out of the bed and they have to knock her out with the needles… JoJo ends up in the psycho ward for a year or two until she learns how to play the game and they spring her. Now she just gets even-every day, every way. Baby, you show her anything that even looks like a mug shot and it’s Psycho City.”

“Yeah, yeah, I saw that for myself. She doesn’t recognize any of the pictures?”

“JoJo doesn’t recognize anything period. She runs a fifty-fifty blend of hate and crazy. I can’t even tell you some of the things she’s done to johns. You go into a hotel room with JoJo and you’re not walking out under your own power.”

“I think she’s not waiting for hotel rooms anymore, Michelle-she’s packing. I think she would’ve blown me away right in the car if she’d had the chance.”

“It’s so sad. I talk to her sometimes, Burke, but I can’t help her. Those freaks put her on another planet, what they did to her.”

“Pass the word on the bounty, okay?”

“It’s for real?”

“You bet your ass,” I said, opening the door for her.

“Baby, please, not for a lousy thousand dollars,” said Michelle, stepping out of the Plymouth to do her work.

I set out to make a few more stops, spreading the word. I wanted every dope addict, every hustler, every take-off artist in our area to be looking to score on this one.

As I rolled back uptown I looked across the highway and saw JoJo, still sitting on the same piece of concrete, smoking her cigarette and waiting for her connection. I thought about the steel plate in her head and got another chill. I’d never show her another picture-of anybody-ever.

I found the industrial building on West Twenty-fifth Street, took the freight elevator to the roof, walked across to what looked like a pair of greenhouses stacked side-by-side. The hand-lettered sign on the door said PERSONALIZED GRAPHICS: SAMSON/LTD. I rang the bell and waited. I heard the click that told me the door was open, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Two men working at individual drafting tables-one in his late thirties, very short hair, tight tanned skin with prominent cheekbones and delicate clean hands, wearing a blue oxford-cloth buttondown shirt with narrow rep tie-the other, shorter and heavily muscled, long blond hair and an earring in his left ear. He was wearing a cut-off dungaree jacket with no shirt underneath, showing a giant tattoo of a daisy on one bicep. The clean-looking one said “Burke?” and I walked in and laid the photo of the Cobra on his drafting table. “He been in here?”

“I never talk about my clients.”

“Neither do I.”

He looked back up at me, down again at the picture, and said no in a quiet voice. I said, “Call me if he does,” and walked out. One of the “personalized graphics” they did was passports.

The next stop was a print shop I know where they would let me use their machinery and pay for whatever I did without looking at it-they didn’t want to know. One of the few legitimate things I’d learned in reform school was how to run a printing press. Making up some WANTED posters with enlargements of the Cobra’s mug shot was no problem. The photo blew up nice and clean, hard to miss. I set the type so the posters read WANTED FOR GENOCIDE AGAINST HISPANIC CHILDREN in bold red type and added a long list of the Cobra’s alleged rapes.

Pablo’s people would put them up all over town, especially in Times Square. Una Gente Libre wouldn’t put their own name on anything like this, especially after Goldor, but the word would get around and the Cobra would know there were some serious people on his trail.

I threw the bundle of posters in my trunk and bought a paper-nothing on Goldor yet, so I went to a pay phone and called Toby Ringer. I told him that I’d heard Wilson had snuffed Goldor so I was giving up my search for him. The harsh intake of breath at Toby’s end told me that he knew Goldor was dead. My phone call would make sure there’d be an APB out on Wilson.

Over to another phone, where I called my preppie reporter pal and gave him the hot scoop on a genuine mercenary recruiting operation right in the middle of Manhattan-putting together a string of soldiers of fortune to fight in Rhodesia and South Africa. A terrible scandal and an affront to black people everywhere, he agreed. I promised to call him back in another day or so with names and locations and he said he would go in there undercover and expose the situation for his readers. Christ.

It was getting into the late afternoon by then, so I rolled the Plymouth back toward the warehouse looking for Max before I made the call to the phony gunrunners. I pulled in, killed the engine, and waited. Before I was halfway through the first cigarette Max dropped onto the hood. I vacated the front seat and we went into the back room to talk.

I pulled the lapels of my jacket to show Max I was talking about clothes, made the sign of something falling softly through the air, bowed deeply to show my appreciation of the robes he had given to Flood.

Max dropped his own head in the briefest of bows, flowed into his own version of Flood’s crazy kata and ended with a two-finger strike, his hand darting in and out so quickly that only the rush of the silk sleeve ripping through dead air alerted me. He looked the question at me-could Flood do that? Could she finish the job, or was she just a dancer? So I told him about Goldor and the Cobra and what I wanted to do, how I wanted it all to end-a hiss came from Max. He was warming up.

He followed me to the workbench where we cooked up another stencil out of some cardboard we kept lying around. I found a dozen or so of the little spray cans and pointed toward the car, made signs to show all the doors opening at once and people jumping out, walking down the street looking straight ahead-walking like warriors. I explained what the spray cans were for as Max smiled.

It was still about a half hour before six so Max and I got out the cards and we played gin until it was time. My mind was on other things but I still beat him-Max is too superstitious to count cards like I had showed him. I hooked up the on-line phone set and dialed the gunrunners. James answered on the first ring-I guess he does all the public speaking for the two. “Yes?”

“It’s me. I have a proposition for you. I’ll pick you up in two hours, right where you are, and we’ll talk, okay?”