Andrew Vachss - A Bomb Built in Hell

The woman was no longer “my wife,” Wesley noticed. “So what? She won’t be around long enough to do anything about it.”

“I need a week. Can I meet you right here next Tuesday night?”

“No. Stay by your phone; I’ll call between nine and nine-thirty one night, tell you where to come.”

“But ... well, I guess that’s the way you—”

“I’ll call you then.”

Wesley slipped back into his car and drove off. He thought the whole thing over. Maybe Norden’s car was wired; maybe they were picking up his conversation with a shotgun mike from behind that stone fence; maybe...

But they’d never play that square with him. Wesley knew he’d never die in prison, because he’d never come to trial. He thought about the mark’s “code” and wondered where Pet had gotten the cojones to shovel that much crap. He remembered Carmine telling him about the “code.”

“What fucking ‘code,’ kid? Here in prison? Shit! The ‘code’ that says skinners can’t walk the Yard? You know DeMayo? That miserable slime fucked a four-year-old girl until she died from being ripped open. He walks the Yard and nobody says nothing. Why? Because he carries and he kills. That much for the fucking ‘code’! You know why cons always target baby-rapers? Because they’re usually such sorry bastards—old, sick, weak ... or young and fucked up in the brain, you know? The kind that can’t protect themselves. And this bullshit that the cons fuck them up because they love kids, or ‘cause they got kids of their own’ ... crap! They kill them and they rip them off because they are fucking weak ... that’s the only rule in here. There’s no ‘code.’ There’s no fucking nothing ... except this,” a tightly balled fist, “this,” a flat-edged hand, “this,” the first two fingers rubbed against the thumb in the universal symbol for money. “And you handle it all with this!” tapping his temple.

“What about this?” Wesley asked, smacking his fist against his chest.

“Kid, all the heart does is pump blood,” Carmine told him. “Listen, take this racial shit, right? A nigger can’t walk certain places, right? So how come Lee, he walks where he wants?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because he won’t be fucked with, that’s why. He don’t mind dying. That’s the only thing they respect, kid ... in here and out there.”

“You said a few things with your hands.”

“They’re all the same thing: power . You got it and you don’t use it, it goes away. You do use it, it grows. You don’t have it, you better get some.”

“Who do you get it from?”

“Power in America is money. You can steal money, but you will never be able to join their fucking rich-man’s club. You could steal a billion fucking dollars and not run for senate ... but you could buy a senator, you see?”

“So what kind of power could I get? My freedom?”

“Not free dom , Wes, free doom . People like us are never free to say how we live; but some of us can say how and when we die. That’s the only thing really free for us out there ... or in here. And those are the only two places in the world—in here or out there.”

“Is the whole ‘code’ really fucked up that bad? When I was in the reform school, we—”

“It’s all gone, now. Look around the Yard, what do you see? Me, I see maggots—motherfuckers that would sell your life for a carton, never mind a parole. I see junkies, walking around dead. I see colored guys in here for being colored and little kids in here for bullshit beefs, ‘cause they had no coin. The only real criminals are outside anyway. Things have changed ... you don’t see the man who steals anymore, the good clean thief, the professional. No, it’s all ragtime, Wes. It’s all sick and dead....”

Wesley realized that Norden didn’t know any of this—the stupid movie-mythology was gospel truth to the mark.

71/

The kid was waiting for Wesley when he pressed the horn ring and slipped the car inside. He had the grease gun leveled—it didn’t flicker until Wesley stepped out into the soft glow of the diffused spots.

“Okay?” the kid asked.

“Only thing may be a make on the plates and the car color. We can’t use those plates again, but otherwise...”

“I’ll take care of it.”

It took Wesley only fifteen minutes to reach his own place, shower, dispose of the clothing, snap a leash on the dog, and return to the garage. He led the dog to a spot right in front of the garage door, unsnapped the leash, said, “Guard!”

“You got the right kind of clothes for the roof?” he asked the kid.

“This time of night?”

Wesley nodded.

“Yeah. In the chest of drawers over there.”

“Get dressed and meet me up there, okay?”

The kid walked over to the chest, still carrying the grease gun.

“I’m going to meet a guy from Pet’s old client book,” Wesley told the kid later. “A week from tonight. He wants me to hit his wife. I told him to lay fifty K up front and that I’d call him and tell him where to bring it. I figure he’ll be looking for the same car. You follow me with the Caddy. I’ll have him meet me in a field out there. You bring the nightscope and a quiet rifle. Anything happens, you hit him and split ... okay?”

“Why we going to hit his wife?”

“For the money.”

“There’s a risk, right?”

“Always a risk.”

“So why risk? I could just as easy pop him soon as he gets out of his car. Then we got fifty thousand and no risk.”

“That’s good thinking, kid. There’s no code, we don’t owe the sucker anything. But if he’s got cover and you hit him, we’re in a firefight. And that’s a bigger risk, right?”

“Yeah,” the kid said. “I see.”

“So what we do is take the weasel’s money and just don’t make the hit on him ... or his wife. We just disappear.”

“And we get the fifty thousand.”

“Yeah.”

“Somehow it don’t seem right.”

“Not to hit the wife?”

“Not to hit him . It don’t seem safe to leave him alive.”

“Don’t think like a sucker. This is no hit on a mob guy. What’s he gonna do, run to the Law, say we cheated him? Right now, he wouldn’t begin to know where to look for me. A trail of bodies is easier to follow than a trail of fucking rumors.”

“But he’s seen your face.”

“Kid, he never saw my face.”

72/

After the kid went back downstairs, Wesley stayed on the roof to focus on the choices he had: if he took the money from Norden and just walked away without fulfilling the contract, the overwhelming odds were that Norden would never be in a position to retaliate—he would never see Wesley again, or hear of him. But Pet’s established business had been based upon two foundations: regular employment by the conservative old men who formed an ever-loosening and sloppy fraternity ... and occasional jobs from an even sloppier and far hungrier group of wealthy humans. The latter group depended on their own telegraph for information, and Wesley’s distinct failure to carry out the contract might curtail future employment.

It wasn’t nearly as simple as he had represented it to the kid. But the kid had to be taught to think a few steps in advance, and this was the best way to teach him. Wesley calculated the cash he and Pet had hidden in various spots throughout the building, in stashes elsewhere in the city, and in various banks and safe-deposit boxes around the country. Wesley could put his hands on almost half a million and never leave the building, but he could hardly bank the whole thing and expect to live on the interest. Even this huge sum of money was nothing compared to what they had actually earned in their profession. Pet routinely discounted all payoffs from employers against the possibility that the money was somehow marked, in special serial sequence, or just plain bogus. The discounters charged seventy percent for brand-new money with sequential serial numbers all the way down to twenty percent for money that looked, felt, and smelled used. They, in turn, deposited the money with a number of foreign banks—banks of friendly South American governments ran a close second to those in the Caribbean. Pet had laughed out loud once before reading Wesley a Times article about the “unstable” governments in South America: