Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

“But if the police locate—”

“The parents will just say they never saw the note, sorry to have troubled you . . . but thank God our precious baby is back home, and we’ll be sure to write a nice letter for your personnel file.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, only it’s not just the parents who are gaming. The cops might have the kid’s photo posted; she might even make a milk carton or a few Internet sites. But no way they’re bringing out any of their big guns on this.”

“Big guns?”

“Extra officers, heavy overtime authorized, squeezing informants, putting out the word that they’re offering a felony walkaway for a solid lead . . . like that.”

“Why do you believe the parents told you the truth, then?”

“They didn’t. I already said—”

“No, no. I don’t mean the truth about the . . . things you said. But why did they tell you the truth about her running away?”

“People like that, they see the cops as public servants, but not necessarily their servants. Me, they’re sure of—I’m bought and paid for.

“Besides, they know I’m not exactly comparing notes with the law. That’s what they hired me for. Most PIs are ex-cops. That’s what people pay them for; they can get information by just walking down to the precinct and spreading a little goodwill. That’s great if you’re a defendant, or even a suspect. But if you’re coming across as a victim, you don’t need all that. And the firm they hired—the ones the cops touted them on—you can bet it’s full of ex-cops, too. So they could never trust them, either. Me, I’m an outlaw. No question about my loyalty . . . at least in their minds.”

“You sound as if you despise them.”

“I don’t know what I feel about them—yet. I guess I’d have to find the girl to know for sure. But I don’t like them; that part’s true enough.”

I parked behind the strip club, in the vacant spot Gem said would be waiting for me. It was the kind of joint where every button on the speed-dial is set to 911. Gem was at a little table in the back, as far from the action as you could get and still be hit with the cover charge.

“Anything?” I asked her. Before I went out into the street,it was worth seeing if the girl had made headlines in theunderground newspaper—the one that isn’t printed. Gem had a subscription.

“Nothing. Not by her name, anyway. And the description is almost . . . meaningless. It could fit so many.”

“About what I figured,” I told her, not disappointed.

One of the house features swivel-hipped her way over to us, asked Gem if she wanted to buy a lap dance for me. Even standing still, the woman was in motion, packing enough silicone to grease a battleship through a car wash.

Gem looked a question at me. I shook my head no. The woman licked her lips at Gem. “No, thank you,” Gem told her, politely.

“What’s your problem?” I asked Gem as soon as the handjob hooker took off.

“My problem?”

“Yeah, your problem. You have to ask me if I want some fucking slot machine to sit on my lap?”

“Oh. So sorry.”

“Cut it the fuck out, all right, Gem? You’re about as Japanese as I am. And you’re too bossy to be a geisha, anyway.”

“She was just—”

“Never mind. You ready to go?”

“You didn’t like her . . . looks?” Gem asked me that night in bed.

“Who are you talking about?”

“The dancer. With the big chest.”

“I didn’t pay any attention.”

“How could you miss them?”

“What?”

“Her breasts. Do you like such big ones?”

“Ahhh . . . they’re like . . . I don’t know, red silk sheaths.”

“Because you can buy them?”

“No. Because they look good on some people, and not on others. I don’t like red silk sheaths all by themselves. If I saw one on a hanger, it wouldn’t race my motor, okay? On some women, they look perfect. Really gorgeous. On others, they look . . . ridiculous. You don’t look at the trimming, you look at the tree, understand?”

“Oh yes. Certainly. Would you like me in such big breasts, then?”

“No.”

“Why not? Do you not think I would—?”

“They’d look all out of proportion. Like they were stuck on with glue.”

“That is the way they looked on her, too.”

“Maybe.”

“Oh? You do not agree?”

“I didn’t pay any attention.”

“Huh!” is all she said. For the rest of the night.

I tried it in daylight first. Invested a lot of cigarettes and a few dollars, but I didn’t come up with anything other than a few numb attempts at shining me on. I collected some stale info, a few bad addresses, a couple of street names. I didn’t push it; why squeeze when there’s no juice?

Pioneer Square was the downtown see-and-be-seen place, preening and posturing the order of the day. There were a few skateboard artists, a juggler, a threesome doing a little close-up Frisbee, music blasting from a dozen boom boxes, some “Look at me!” dancing. A guy made the rounds, flexing an upper body that must have looked a lot better in his own mirror. Anarchists handed out leaflets about some demonstration coming the next day. They seemed pretty organized about it. I watched people watching people for a while, getting nowhere.

It wasn’t a particularly good spot for buskers, but a few tried. None that looked remotely like Rosebud.

A young, pretty, nicely put-together girl walked by, slowly. The black Lab at her side sported a set of saddlebags—a working partner, not a pet. I flashed on Pansy and drove the thoughts away before they hurt me. The girl had a toolbelt of some kind around her waist, and a backpack that looked homemade. She wasn’t panhandling, she was scavenging, carefully checking the ground for anything of value, occasionally putting something she picked up into the Lab’s saddlebags.

There’s plenty of street kids in Portland, but no single street culture. And I was way too old to try fitting in, so I went looking for a guide. I finally ran across one of their halfass gurus in a coffeehouse, but all he wanted to do was rant about the Internet.

“If you deconstruct it, the whole thing is a sham. A fake. The Internet is supposed to be all about personal freedom, but, if you think it through, you see that the whole Net culture is about invasion of privacy. It’s just a ruse to register us all, man.”

I was running into this all the time, that intersection thing—where the extremists on both ends of the political continuum looped back onto each other until you couldn’t tell them apart. This guy wasn’t any great distance from the gun loons who’ll tell you that banning private ownership of armor-piercing bullets or rocket launchers is just the opening salvo in ZOG’s plan to disarm all American citizens.

The guru may have been a little slow in the synapses, but he had his finger on the pulse—if there’s one common cause between the hyper-right and the ultra-left, it’s that they hate the very idea of Registration.

“This girl I’m looking for . . . ?” I opened, trying to get him off his topic and onto mine.

“She has to find you, man. It can’t go the other way,” he intoned, as the two stick-figure kids at his table nodded sagely.

“Fair enough. But she can’t find me unless she knows where to look, right?” I said, handing him a business card with my name and cell-phone number on it, wrapped around a twenty.

“Right, man,” the guru said, pocketing the offering. “The Internet is all bullshit, you know. I mean, even the fucking anarchist Web sites send you cookies!”

I don’t think he noticed me leaving.

The black guy couldn’t have been out of the joint long. The prison weight-room muscles were still chiseled, the eye-lock was race-war hostile, and my color still made him glance behind me to make sure I was alone. “Who asking about Odom, slick?”