Andrew Vachss - Flood

“You know what a transsexual is, Mole?” Michelle asked him.

“Yes.”

“What?” demanded Michelle, looking intently at him. For her, I wasn’t in the room anymore.

“A woman trapped inside a man’s body,” said the Mole.

“Do you understand that?” asked Michelle.

“I understand trapped,” said the Mole, not blinking so much now.

“Thank you, Mole,” said Michelle, getting up and kissing him on the cheek. I thought the Mole blushed, but I couldn’t be sure. He faded out the door and was gone.

Michelle sat there for a long time, tapping her long fingernails on the cover of her compact. I lit a cigarette, smoked in silence. A tear gathered in the corner of her eye and rolled down her face, leaving its track against the soft skin. I lit another cigarette, handed it to her. She took it, held it absently for a minute, gave me a half-smile and pulled in a deep drag. She exhaled, shook herself. “I’m going to fix my face,” she said, and went into the bathroom.

It was another couple of smokes before she walked out-fresh, new, and hard again.

“Let’s go to work, baby,” she said, and sat down in front of the bank of phones.

I called the preppie reporter, told him I had located the mercenary recruiting outfit but my info was that they would only be there for another day or so and he said he’d move on it that afternoon. He thanked me for the tip, said he would make it up to me.

Then I called the ATF-that’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, with heavy emphasis on the last-and told them I couldn’t give my name but a guy answering Wilson’s description was making the rounds of the after-hours joints offering a half-dozen.45-caliber machine guns, complete with silencers, for immediate sale. When I said “silencers” I could just feel the excitement build on the line-a silencer bust to the ATF boys is like ten pounds of pure heroin to the narcotics cops. They kept pressuring me until I finally told them, “Look, I said all I’m going to. This is a bad fucking guy, he’s nobody to play with. You know who he is-the Cobra, right? He said he’s dealt with you all before.”

I broke the connection and headed to the restaurant, where I found Mama in the kitchen.

“Max here twice already. He come back soon, okay?”

“Okay, Mama. Thanks.”

“You want some soup?” came the inevitable question.

“Sure.”

I sat down, the waiter came and Mama and I had some soup and hard noodles, eating in silence, thinking our thoughts.

Max floated in from the back before we were finished. He bowed to Mama, who bowed back. Mama offered him some soup. Max shook his head no-Mama insisted, grabbed his shoulder, and pushed him into the booth. A faint smile twitched over Max’s face as he submitted.

Max showed me the racing form and I shook my head to tell him I was under pressure. I made the sign of squeezing a wound-gritted my teeth to show I was putting on all the pressure I could, clenched my fist. Max understood.

I showed him my watch, moved my fingers to indicate seven o’clock, then showed him the Cobra’s picture, shaded my eyes like I was looking into the sun, twisting my head from side to side. I made a want-to-come-along? gesture.

Max reached his hand behind his back, slapped himself hard-he wasn’t interested in hunting the freak, but he would come along to watch my back. Okay. I tapped my heart to thank him-he did the same to say we were brothers and it was expected of him, no big deal.

I said I would pick him up later at the warehouse, but for now I needed some sleep. In the movies tough guys never sleep. Maybe Flood was right, I wasn’t so tough.

BACK AT THE office I took care of Pansy by opening the back door and she took care of her business topside. The phone was still open and I called Flood. Told her nothing would be happening until tomorrow and I wouldn’t be able to see her until then. Then I called Michelle, saying I’d stop by much later to bring her some food and spell her at the phones.

“Burke,” she said, “the cub reporter made his move downstairs.”

“Sound like he knew what he was doing?”

“Not hardly.”

“That’s my man. I’ll call in later on, okay?”

“Okay, baby. Not to worry, everything’s fine here.”

I couldn’t get to sleep, so I deliberately overloaded my brain, knowing I could force it to kick out and spin into overdrive that way. I loaded it with names, places, pictures, faces, schemes, plans, tricks, hoaxes. I used to try this in prison but it never worked there. In prison the world is narrow and you can hold all the information you need to survive in a small part of your brain. Out here it’s different. I’ve tried to make my world as small as possible, but every once in a while someone like Flood comes along to screw it up. Soon I felt my eyes close and the room go away… When I woke up a few hours later I didn’t feel any better but I knew the sleep would help me later. I dressed slowly, loading up with a bunch of bullshit private-eye gear. If we got popped by the police tonight I’d tell some story about working on a case for the father of the kid I’d delivered to McGowan. He’d back me up on anything less than a felony-in-progress charge. He’s done it before.

Max was waiting just inside the warehouse. I showed him the picture of the Cobra again and he nodded to show it was already in his memory bank. Max wasn’t so good with faces (did all us Occidentals really look alike?), but once he saw a man move he could pick him out of a crowd at fifty yards.

It was dark by the time we turned the Plymouth toward Times Square. Where else to look for a freak with no address? We cruised Eighth Avenue, from the upper thirties to the fifties. The cold neon flashed on and off across Max’s face, his eyes hooded against the street’s night glare, with the sun-shield Lexan film on the inside of the windows, you’d need X-ray vision to see inside the Plymouth. That kind of stuff is illegal on the Coast but it’s okay here in New York. Cops hate it. It makes it hard for them to claim that the pistol (or bag of dope, or human head, or whatever) was in “plain view” when they stopped the car for a broken taillight.

We didn’t expect to spot Wilson just bopping down the street. He was moving now-out of his hole and running hard. But I already had the government to watching the airports and the bus stations for me. I had to do something, at least be in motion.

Garbage floated all around the cruising Plymouth-teenage girls working the streets with their built-up shoes and their broken-down spirits; the younger ones, the children who hadn’t had their first periods yet, they worked the inside-the massage parlors and the hotels. The older ones worked the bars and the clubs. Even the pit has its own sense of order-rough-off teams stalking the sidewalks and lurking near the corners, looking for an excuse to take a wallet or a life; gaudy pimpmobiles parked all around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, dumb iron horses that ate human flesh, waiting for the pilot fish in their zircon rings and fake-fur hats to bring them new little girls; the videogame parlors with their load of little boys waiting for the chicken hawks to come calling. Those little boys were just for rent-if you wanted to buy one for keeps you had to see a man in a brownstone office and pay heavy cash. No deposit, no return. Very little heroin for sale down here; uptown’s the stop for that stuff. But the streets were full of dirtbags in long filthy overcoats selling their methadone from the nearby clinic, and young hustlers were hawking ’ludes and speed everywhere. If you knew where to go, you could buy genuine prescriptions for Valium, or Percodan, or whatever travel ticket you wanted. The gold-buying shops stayed open late to accommodate the chain-snatchers. The gleaming windows of the electronics stores displayed giant portable stereos, the better to achieve self-induced retardation. And in the back rooms the same joints sold gravity knives and fake pistols to smooth the passage of the stereos from the retardates to the muggers. There were theatrical supply houses that would sell you all the goodies you’d need to disguise yourself if you were into armed robbery or rape. And little shops that sold “marital aids” that looked like tools for felonious assault. Bookstores sold crash-courses in achieving orgasm through torture, and films-documentary proof of things that shouldn’t exist.