Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

I slipped the rubber band with my left thumb. A Kansas City bankroll: a single hundred on the outside, with a bunch of singles at the core.

“Where’s the rest?” I said, gently.

“Ain’t no ‘rest,’ man. I’m still working on my stake.”

The girl walked over to the closet, head down, as if some instinct told her not to look at my face. She opened the door, gasped, and jumped back. I glanced in her direction. Inside the closet was a single straight chair. Draped over the back were several strands of rope and two pairs of handcuffs. On the seat of the chair was a thick roll of duct tape, and one of those cheap Rambo knives they sold all over Times Square.

“Get the picture?” I said to her, nodding my head at the other item in the closet—a Polaroid camera.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

But she just kept saying “I’m sorry,” over and over again.

So much for my big score.

“Turn around,” I told the pimp.

“Look, man, you don’t gotta—”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “I’m a professional, just like you. Thought you’d be carrying heavy coin. Now I’ve got to get out of here. So I’m going to put those handcuffs on you. Your friends will get you loose soon as they show up.”

“I ain’t got no—”

“Friends? Yeah, that’s right, you probably don’t. But you’re expecting some company, aren’t you, Prince ?”

“Shit, man,” he said, resignedly. He turned around, put his hands behind his back.

The Magnum was a heavy little steel ingot in my right hand. I stepped close to him, tipped his floppy hat forward with my left hand. He was still saying “What you—?” as I chopped down at his exposed cervical vertebrae with all my strength. He dropped soundlessly—his head bounced off the wood floor and settled at an angle that looked permanent.

“Come on,” I said to the girl.

She followed me without a word.

On the walk back to the Port Authority, I said, “You know what was going to happen to you, right?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I—”

“Don’t say another word,” I told her. “Not until you get back where you came from.”

“I don’t have any—”

“Where did you come from?”

“St. Paul. I thought I—”

“Shut your stupid fucking mouth,” I said.

Inside the terminal, I bought her a one-way ticket to St. Paul, handed her two ten-dollar bills, said, “I’m going to watch you get on that bus, understand? If you ever come back here, you’re going to get hurt worse than you ever imagined.”

“I’m—”

“I told you to shut up. Don’t say another word until you’re talking to someone you know. ”

I watched the bus pull out. She didn’t wave goodbye.

I never got paid for that one.

L ike I said, that was back in the day. In Times Square, you could buy anything on the back streets, from a hooker to heroin, and some of the stores sold magazines with photos so foul you wanted to find the people who took them and make them dead. Today, Times Square is another planet: Disney World.

You can’t buy porn from Disney. They’re all about family. Of course, they’ve got no problem hiring a convicted child-molester to make horror movies…about kids. Tourists think things have changed. People who live here, they know all that ever changes are the addresses.

But even back then, freaks had to know their way around to find a baby pross. A girl pross, anyway; the little-boy hustlers were pretty much out in the open, working the arcades.

You won’t find kids hooking in Times Square now. But it’s just like what happens anytime the cops crank up the heat on a drug corner—the traffic just moves to another location. You want an underage girl, there’s always Queens Plaza after dark, and dozens of other spots.

A while back, two dirtbags grabbed a fifteen-year-old runaway, raped and sodomized her until she had nothing left, then put her out on the street. She wasn’t working back alleys, either. Last arrest was on Queens Boulevard, in a nice section of Elmhurst. They took the girl to Florida for the winter, where the local cops grabbed her…and probably saved her life.

Extradited to Queens, the dirtbags got the usual sweetheart deal from the tough-talking clown who calls himself the District Attorney. He threw out the rape, sodomy, and kidnapping charges, let them plead to “promoting prostitution.” Now they can prance around the yard Upstate, jacketed as pimps, not kiddie-rapists. When they get out, they won’t even have to register as sex offenders. With all the heavy cred they’ll have accumulated—what’s more max than being a player and an ex-con?—they’ll probably start their own rap label.

I didn’t know where Beryl was, but I had a good idea of where she wasn’t. A snatched-up runaway wasn’t going to end up in a high-end house. Kiddie sex is a specialized business, and—back then, before the Internet—that meant a lot of risk for the money.

I had the girl’s picture, half a dozen different shots. And a one-two punch: not only the promise of heavy coin if you turned her up, but the guarantee that, if you saw her and I didn’t get word, you better be carrying a lot of Blue Cross.

It wasn’t me that scared anyone. It was Max at my side. And Wesley in the shadows. On top of that, the city was full of bad guys who thought kiddie pimps were a disgrace to their good name, and I knew a lot of them.

I was a different man then. I was just making the transition from armed robber to scam artist, and if you pushed me anywhere close to a corner, violence was still Option One. I was still learning how to sting freaks: promising everything from kiddie porn to mercenary contracts, never delivering. Once I took your money, good luck finding me. And bad luck if you did.

This part never changes: The best way to track someone down is to plant the word, burying the trip wires under sweet promises. Then you put on a lot of pressure, and wait for whoever you’re tracking to stumble over one of them. But when you’re looking for a kid who’s in the wrong hands, too much patience can be fatal.

So I started in Hunts Point, the lowest end of the scale for working whores, then. They were all turning scag-tricks. Their only customers were truckers who had dropped off their cargo at the Meat Market, or serial killers who liked the odds of a desolate piece of flatland where you could find anything on earth except a cop.

Getting any of that sorry collection of broken-veined junkies to talk was easy—for money they’d do anything you could imagine, and plenty that would give you nightmares if you did—but getting them to talk sense was near impossible.

So I just cruised, with the girl’s photo taped to my dashboard. I came up empty a few days in a row—Hunts Point was a daylight stroll. Nights, I worked lower Lex, which was racehorse territory then. Fine, young, sleek girls, with much stronger, smarter pimps running them.

I didn’t waste time down there, just showed Beryl’s picture around, told every working girl who came over to my rolled-down car window about the bounty, and moved on.

Next stop, under the West Side Highway. Back then, it ran all the way downtown, and below Canal was Hookerville. Michelle worked that stroll in those days, when she was still pre-op. She got into the front seat of my car, listened to my story, and promised if Beryl showed she’d make sure she didn’t leave until I got there.

That should have sounded like big talk, coming from a small, fine-boned little tranny. But Michelle hated humans who fucked kids as only a kid who’d been fucked could, and she’d learned a lot since prison. Now she was snake-quick with the straight razor she never left home without.