Andrew Vachss - Down Here

I let the whisper-stream declare me dead and gone, and just . . . waited.

I was home only a short time before I got involved in a case. A case for real, like I used to have when I first was trying to make it as something other than what I am—a criminal in my heart. Wolfe helped me on that one. Oh, she got paid. Said that was why she did it, for the money.

But I never believed her, not completely. That case was a lot of things for me, but, for me and Wolfe, I thought it was a test. The prize I was playing for wasn’t as big as a promise, just something to let me know I could get back in the game.

And I brought it home. Got it done. Found out who had killed the teenage daughter who was a gangster’s darkest secret. I did it all the right way. Investigated, interrogated, interviewed. Came up with a plan. Put together a team. And spooked the truth out of the shadows.

Along the way, some people got dead.

They didn’t die for justice, and they didn’t die for money. I’m no vigilante, and I’m not a hit man—although the whisper-stream has made me out to be both over the years.

Wolfe knew about some of it. Figured it out for herself. But I never got the chance to tell her the ending.

An hour later, I was walking down Hudson toward Chambers. Dressed in a worn leather jacket over a dark-blue hooded sweatshirt, jeans, scuffed ankle-high boots on my feet, a pair of canvas gloves in my back pocket. A man going to work.

I couldn’t do anything about my face. Once, I was so generic-looking that I could get past almost anyone who wasn’t raised where I was. But now I had two different-color eyes, which no longer tracked exactly parallel. One bullet had made a keloid beauty mark on my right cheek; another had neatly sliced off the top of the opposite ear. Now I had a face people would remember.

Worse, they could see me coming.

Burke had never had a tattoo. Most guys who start to jail early end up covered with ink by the time they’re on their second or third bit, but that depends on who schools you—gang kids or pros.

With kids, it’s all about owning something. Something they can’t take away, even when they beat you for the fun of it, and toss you in a tiny dark room with only the stink of sorrow for company. Some kids know who “they” are from birth—only the faces change.

There’s other reasons to ink up. Jailhouse tattoos aren’t painless. And a tattooed tear for each time you’ve been down marks you as a veteran.

When you’re done with the juvie joints, when they put you Inside for real, sometimes you have to take a mark just to stay alive. The White Night crews make you fly their flag on your body, and the Latins are even harder about it. Some of their bosses are so heavily inked, it takes over their skin, makes them into some different race.

But the Prof had pulled my coat early. “You ain’t got but one trick for when you hit the bricks,” the little man had counseled me. “You’re going to do crime, all the time. That stuff you see motherfuckers put on themselves? That’s ’cause they going to stay here, understand? But you, you’re still a young boy. The gate’s in your fate. You know what you going to do, so do it true,” he said. “Body art ain’t smart, Schoolboy. It’s like using vanity plates on a getaway car.”

But the man walking down Hudson that morning had a tattoo. A tiny blue heart, between the last two knuckles of his right hand. A hollow heart.

That was for Pansy, my partner. A Neopolitan mastiff I’d raised from a tiny pup. She had taken some of the bullets meant for me when I walked into that ambush. Taken one of the enemy with her, too, before she went over.

“You’re still the same,” my people kept telling me.

Maybe I was.

Iwasn’t worried about recognizing this supposed cop. A lot of waterfront bars open early, to catch the crowd who hadn’t been picked in the morning shape-up. But this joint wasn’t close enough to any of the working piers, and the crews prepping the Twin Towers site for new construction would already be on the job by seven.

The caller had told Pepper whoever she sent would recognize him by his white hair . . . and he’d be sitting in the corner booth farthest from the door. I checked my watch: 6:58. Close enough.

As soon as I walked in the place, I understood why the cop had picked it. To my right was a flat wall, broken only by the clearly marked doors to the toilets. Dead ahead, a long, straight bar with a murky mirror behind it. Only four of the stools were occupied. To my left, running almost the full length of the window, a row of booths—all wood, no padding anywhere in sight.

The second booth and the last were the only ones with people in them. A guy nursing a beer while studying the Racing Form was closest to me. All the way in the back was a man in a dark-tweed sports jacket. He had a thick mop of white hair, and eyes I could feel even at that distance.

I walked over to where he was sitting. Noticed the last booth was just beyond the length of the window. A nice precaution, even though it would have taken a radiologist to read anything through that grimy glass.

I sat down, uninvited, my back to the door. No point being cute—if it was a trap, it was already sprung.

“What do you have?” I said.

“I’ve got mine,” he said, holding up a double shot glass of something amber.

“Not what will you have,” I said. “What do you have.”

He nodded, as if I’d given him some secret code word.

“How do I know you’re from—?”

“That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “I don’t have any questions. You said you wouldn’t have any, either. All I had to do was listen. That’s what I’m doing.”

The cop tossed down his drink, rapped his glass on the table. “You want . . . ?” he asked.

I just shook my head.

A man in what looked like a butcher’s apron came over. He took away the cop’s shot glass and replaced it with another. Neither of us said anything until the barkeep had gone back to his post.

“My name’s Sands,” the cop said. “Molton James Sands, Jr. My friends call me Molly.”

I didn’t call him anything.

“I worked with Wolfe,” he continued. “For years. Best prosecutor I ever knew. She was one of us. In Sex Crimes, I mean. One of the squad. She’s getting railroaded by that candyass DA. Not the Manhattan guy—the head of City-Wide. The same faggot who fired her.”

I hadn’t come there for an editorial, especially from a lush. “Tell me something we can use,” I said.

His blue eyes darkened as he narrowed in on me. The veins in his slightly spread nose got redder. “ Here’s fucking something,” he said. “That mutt who got shot, he’s no more in a coma than I am.”

“Wychek?”

“Wychek. Oh, he was unconscious all right. But as of a few hours ago, he’s come around. Whoever’s representing Wolfe . . .”

“Davidson.”

“Good! That’s a man. Now, listen. This should get her bail dropped all the way down to—”

“Her bail’s covered,” I said, cutting him off. “This Wychek, he’s conscious now, right? You telling me he changed his statement?”

“I don’t know about that,” the cop said, leaning closer to me. “But I do know this. He doesn’t want to be discharged.”

“The wounds—”

“—are bullshit,” he finished for me. “He got hit three times. Front of the right thigh, upper left arm, and right shoulder.”

“That could still be—”

“—with a fucking twenty-five,” he said. “What does that tell you?”

“Nothing by itself.”

“You don’t want to say, a twenty-five, that’s a woman’s gun, right? Well, it’s also a punk’s gun. Little piece-of-shit nothing, make a Saturday Night Special look like a Glock. Street Crimes probably confiscates more Raven twenty-fives a year than all the other pieces put together. Anyway, they got the bullets out like pulling a bad tooth, big deal. Cocksucker won’t even be walking with a limp.”