Andrew Vachss - Down Here

“You don’t carry,” I said. “And if you did, it wouldn’t be a toy like that one.”

“You’re so sure?”

“Oh, I’m a lot surer than that,” I said. “A person can change their habits, but not their personality.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You don’t walk around packing, although I suppose you could, if you thought you had to. But one thing I know you’d never do.”

“Shoot?”

“No. Panic.”

“Ah,” she said, smiling for real now.

“Besides, there’s one other thing that seals the deal,” I said, pointing at the Rottweiler. “Him. Maybe those little bullets didn’t have enough to get the job done, but no way Bruiser didn’t.”

“You’re right,” Wolfe said. “ If I had sent him.”

“A situation like that, I don’t think he’d give a damn whether you sent him or not,” I told her. “He’s a dog, not a robot.”

“He’s also a big bully, aren’t you, Bruisey?” Wolfe said, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “He gained ten pounds in the few days Pepper had him.”

“Pepper probably stuffed him because she felt bad for him,” I said. “Besides, she’s an actress, so she appreciates a good performance, and he probably went around pretending he was starving.”

“Maybe . . .”

“I need to ask you some questions,” I said.

“And I need to ask you some,” she shot back.

“Go,” I told her.

“Why are you in this? Still in this, I mean. I know Pepper . . .”

“You want me to tell you a story about my religious conversion? How I’m going to devote the rest of my life to protecting the innocent? You know why. You’ve always known.

“If you had drilled the miserable little fuck, you think that would matter to me? If you didn’t have a dozen better ones, I’d be your alibi. And if I had known about him threatening you, this never would have happened at all.”

“You’re not my protector,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Self-appointed or otherwise.”

“I’m not anything to you,” I told her. “You think I don’t know that? But what I do, I’m good at, and you know that, too. Tell me you want me off this thing, and I’ll walk out of here right now, never say another word about it.”

Wolfe tapped a cigarette from her pack, lit it with a long-flamed butane lighter.

I just stood there, watching her.

The Rottweiler watched me.

Wolfe took a deep drag, blew a jet of smoke at the ceiling.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“ Sands, he’s for real?” I asked her, finally breaking the silence.

“Molly? He’s a piece of gold. When he first made detective, he was assigned to my squad. He loved the job. Loved making cases against the dirtbags that my bureau specialized in putting away.

“He didn’t come with any bullshit cop prejudices. Or, if he did, he left them at the door. He got it, right from the start. In my shop, we didn’t play the ‘good victim, bad victim’ game. If a hooker got raped, if a retarded girl got molested—same as if it were a nun, or a Mensa member. He was a real man on the DV stuff, too. And cold death on child molesters.”

Wolfe took a hit off her cigarette, gray gunfighter’s eyes watching me through the smoke. When I kept quiet, she picked up her own thread.

“Molly worked his cases. Double- and triple-checked everything. Turned over every rock. He never played TV detective on the stand, never tried to out-cute the defense. But there wasn’t one jury that didn’t believe him.

“And then the job broke his heart,” Wolfe said, her voice thick with sadness. “When they fired me, everything changed. All they wanted was stats.

“You know what that means. Some of the ‘shaky’ cases don’t get pursued, so you never get the chance to make them solid. The last thing they needed was a cop like Molly. He went from thinking he was a soldier in a holy war to feeling like a report-writing fake.”

“That’s when he started the heavy drinking?” I asked.

“When he went back to it, yeah,” she said, her eyes daring me to make judgments.

“You know he had copies of every single one of Wychek’s cases. Possible cases, I mean. Every case in which Wychek was a suspect.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I can’t even figure out where he got all that stuff from. There never was a ‘task force’ thing, right?”

“Right,” Wolfe said, disgustedly. “Wychek was a classic pattern-rapist, but he stayed so far off the screen that he never even got himself a press nickname. You know, a ‘Night Stalker’ kind of thing. No media pressure, no task force; simple as that. But we were working him, preparing for trial, and we grabbed every scrap we could get our hands on. After the trial, the whole package must have gone into dead storage.”

“Still, if they ever found out he was making copies—”

“They won’t,” she said, flatly.

“He got other stuff, too,” I said. “The most important thing of all, in fact. Davidson told you—?”

“That Wychek’s not in a coma anymore? And that he doesn’t want to leave the hospital? Yes.”

“So the DA knows it wasn’t you, no matter what bullshit ‘statement’ Wychek supposedly made, am I right?”

“How does that compute?”

“Come on. Wychek believes you’ve got a hit squad out looking for him? No way the DA buys that. There has to be another reason for them playing along. You got anything on them?”

“On City-Wide? Sure, there’s stuff they wouldn’t want to get out. Sexual harassment—not pressure to have sex; trading sex for promotion—stuff like that.”

“That’s not sexual harassment,” I said. “That’s a whore and a trick.”

“Not alw— Never mind, it’s not important. Not right now. Anything else I know—politicians’ kids getting guaranteed jobs over better-qualified applicants, special treatment for celebrity defendants, ADAs being pushed to work in re-election campaigns, how a judge gets ‘made’ in this town—everybody else knows, too.

“Sure, I’ve made them look like the clowns they are a few times over the years. But if they went after everyone who’s done that, they’d have to frame more people than they’ve got cells.”

“So, if the answer isn’t you, there’s only one other thing it could be,” I said.

“What?”

“Wychek,” I told her. “It’s not you they want. It’s him.”

In the next hour, we held everything we knew up to the brightest light we could find—a pair of diamond-cutters, looking for the perfect place to start our work.

But all we found were flaws.

“What in hell could a lowlife piece of garbage like Wychek do for the DA’s Office?” I asked the empty air.

“Maybe they do believe him?” Wolfe said, dubiously.

“What if they did?” I put it to her. “What if they actually fucking believed you put a few rounds into that freak? They reserve the kind of protection they’re giving him for witnesses who can take down a mob boss or the head of a drug cartel. You sure you haven’t been working anything that could blow up all over them if it came out?”

“Nothing,” Wolfe said, with an undertone of regret. “I haven’t worked a real investigation in years. You know the kind of stuff I do now.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But you deal in information. . . .”

“You think I didn’t go over that in my mind a thousand times since they grabbed me?” she said. “And, trust me, that was hard work. Lockup’s supposed to be good for deep thinking, but the noise level is ungodly. And it never stops. You’d need the concentration of a yoga master just to read a newspaper in there.”