Andrew Vachss - Down Here

“Yeah. So—we’re quits?”

“You’ll never see me again,” I said, cutting the connection.

Iwas in my booth when Michelle came in, dressed in that princess/slut style only she can bring off.

She sashayed over and took a seat. Mama was only a few steps behind her, clapping her hands for more soup.

“I took care of it,” Michelle said. “Turns out I was right. Anyone tried to hurt Wolfe out there, it would have been a major mistake. I got that just off the first phone call.

“Then I found that they’d brought Hortense down from Bedford Hills to testify in some other case. As if. So I went out and visited her myself. No problems after that, guaranteed.

“On my way out, I left money on the books for ’Tense. I didn’t do the same for Wolfe, just in case anyone was . . .”

“Thanks, honey. You’re perfect.”

“This is true.”

“And Wolfe’s already sprung.”

“Yes! They dropped that bogus—?”

“No. Not even close. But Wolfe’s got friends on the other side, too.”

“Sure, friends?” Mama asked.

“Looks like, so far, anyway,” I told them. Then I filled them in on what I’d gotten from Sands, and what happened when Davidson went back to court.

“Have you looked through all that paperwork yet, honey?” Michelle asked.

“Just a quick glance. That cop must have spent all night at the photocopier. Took some big-time risks.”

“If the stuff’s real, he did.”

“Wolfe’s out,” I reminded her. “Soon enough, we’ll get a straight answer. And—I had an idea. Remember when we had all that paper, on that girl who got killed out on—?”

“Yes,” Michelle interrupted. “You want Terry to scan it all into a computer for you again?”

“That, and maybe do some sorting programs. . . .”

“Well, let’s go get him,” she said, flashing her gorgeous smile.

“Michelle, he’s all grown up now, remember? He drives his own car. We don’t need to go all the way up to the Bronx. Why can’t he just—?”

“You know why,” she said, winking at me.

I’d been out to the Mole’s place so many times, my eyes didn’t even register the burnt-out buildings, or the burnt-out humans who staggered between them, pipe-dreaming.

They say real estate in the city is so precious that every square inch of it is going to be gentrified someday. If that ever happens in Hunts Point, I’ll believe it.

Michelle’s cat’s-eye makeup didn’t mask her excitement. She was going to people she loved.

Terry was her son. I had street-snatched him from a kiddie pimp years ago, and Michelle had adopted him in that same minute. Back then, she was still pre-op, and still working car tricks, fire-walking with freaks every night. Michelle came from the same litter I did. Our hate made us kin.

Michelle had claimed Terry for her own. But it was the Mole—a for-real mad scientist, living in an underground bunker beneath the junkyard he owned—who really raised the kid.

For years, Michelle and the Mole orbited around each other, never touching.

Finally, she had the operation. She had been talking about getting it done for as long as I’d known her, but it wasn’t until the Mole became Terry’s father that Michelle became his wife. I remember, a long time ago, when she asked the Mole if he could ever understand how it felt, to be a woman trapped in a man’s body.

“I understand trapped,” is all the Mole said. It was enough.

The surgery didn’t change Michelle to any of us. She was always my sister, from the beginning. Always Terry’s mother. But maybe it meant something between her and the Mole. I don’t know.

The Mole doesn’t like to leave his work, and his work isn’t portable. Michelle didn’t even like visiting the junkyard.

None of that mattered.

I pulled up to the entrance, a wall of razor wire, growing like killer ivy through the chain link. The pack of feral dogs that inhabit the place assembled quickly, but I knew the Mole’s sensors would have announced us way before I brought the Plymouth to a stop.

The dogs watched, too self-confident to bark, except for a few of the younger ones, who were still learning.

“Looks like Terry’s not here, honey,” I said. “He would have been out to pick us up in the shuttle by now.”

“Then Mole will just have to come himself,” she said. “The exercise certainly won’t kill him.”

Not being clinically insane, I didn’t say anything.

Eventually, we spotted the Mole’s stubby figure, making his way toward us. He was wearing his usual dirt-colored jumpsuit, Coke-bottle lenses on his glasses catching the late-afternoon sun. He shambled over to the sally port, threw open the first gate, then moved aside to let us through.

I drove the Plymouth in, extra-slow. The Mole locked up behind us.

He came around to my side of the car, standing in the river of killer dogs like a kid in a wading pool.

“Mole!” I said.

He answered me the way he usually does—a few rapid blinks behind his glasses, waiting for me to get to the point.

“We’re looking for Terry,” I said. I could feel the cold heat from Michelle’s ice-pick eyes at the back of my neck, but I knew they weren’t aimed at me. Mole had gone to the wrong window, and the poor bastard would have to pay that toll by himself.

“Not here,” he said.

“Right. But I’ve got Michelle with me—”

“Oh,” he said.

“—and I thought we could hang out a bit, while we wait for Terry to show.”

“Where is that . . . Jeep thing you use?” Michelle demanded, over my right shoulder.

“Back at the—”

“Well, go get it,” she said, tartly. “I’m not going to—”

“I can drive this one back there,” I told her, trying to pinch off the burning fuse before it reached the dynamite. “Mole, you want to—?”

But he was already moving. Away from the firing line.

Idrove gingerly around the obstacle course of mortar-sized craters and rusted chunks of metal. The Plymouth was no off-roader, but its Viper-donated independent rear suspension and gas shocks handled the trip easily enough. Even the occasional thunk didn’t upset the rollbar-anchored chassis with its heavy subframe connectors.

I pulled up to the Mole’s lanai—a set of cut-down oil drums with haphazard cushions and a sisal mat big enough to play shuffleboard on.

The Mole was waiting for us, sitting down. He was awkwardly smacking a scarred old beast on top of its triangular head, in what the two of them had mutually decided constituted “patting the dog.”

“Simba!” I said.

The dog’s ears perked, a lot more trustworthy than his ancient eyes. A bull mastiff–shepherd cross, Simba was still the reigning king of the pack, despite being somewhere around twenty years old. “Hound’s so bad, probably even scares off Father Time’s ass,” the Prof said once.

Michelle pranced over on her four-inch ankle-strapped burnt-orange stilettos. She bent to give the Mole a kiss on his cheek, which turned him the same approximate color, and said, “Well?”

The Mole looked at her the way he always does—stunned and strangle-tongued.

“Mole! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am always—”

“You like my new shoes,” Michelle said, torturing him unmercifully, making him pay. Asking the Mole if he liked a pair of shoes was like asking a cat if it liked algebra.

“They are . . . very nice,” he tried.

“Nice? Nice! They are absolutely gorgeous, you dunce! They are stunning. Magnificent. Perfect. Yes?”

“Yes. I—”