Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

“How little?”

“Very little. I don’t have a PI license. That’s no big deal; it’s not against the law to be asking questions on the street. But you know how the fucking cops are,” I said, taking the cues from my conversation with his wife and what Gem had told me about him, “they could roust me for nothing, especially if I start getting closer than they are.”

He nodded knowingly, but said, “What do you think I could do about that?”

“Not you. The lawyer. See, you hire the lawyer to represent you in this whole matter of your daughter going missing. Maybe you’re thinking about suing her school for negligence or whatever. It doesn’t matter, that part’s all camouflage. What does matter—okay—is that anyone working for a lawyer as an investigator doesn’t need a PI license. That’s what I want now: a little more cover.”

“I . . . I can do that. I have a friend who does a lot of criminal-defense work, as a matter of fact. I’ll ask him, how’s that?”

“Good. And what I also need is some money. Not the actual money,” I said quickly as he opened his mouth to . . . I don’t know what. “But there’s got to be a bounty put out; a reward, understand? There’s people who wouldn’t do anything for love, but they’d move quick enough for money.”

“I’d thought of that myself. But I didn’t want to attract—”

“Sure, that’s the whole idea. It would be me offering the money. For information, see? My own idea, not yours. But if someone actually comes up with your daughter, I’d have to pay it off.”

“How . . . much are we talking about here?”

“Ten grand should do it, at least for now.”

“Ten thousand dollars?”

“Yeah.”

He pretended to be thinking it over. People with money always see themselves as consumers, and their road maps through life are always marked by brand names. When they rant about corruption, all you’re really hearing is jealousy. They want a friend on the force, an insider contact, a political connection. All that crap about a level playing field always comes from people who’d be happy to stand at the top of the hill if they had the chance. And pour boiling oil down the slope.

“All right,” he finally said.

By the time the lawyer agreed to meet with me, I knew a lot more about him than he’d ever know about me. His office was in a big-windowed townhouse. Whitewashed walls lined with posters of Che, Chavez, and other visionaries whose convictions had been stronger than their support. Delta blues growled its way out of giant floor-standing stereo speakers.

The lawyer was a short, chubby man with thinning blond hair that turned into a ponytail past the collar of his blue-jean sports coat. He sat behind a free-form desk with what looked like a bird’s-eye maple top under fifty coats of clear varnish. I selected a straight chair from a motley collection arranged against one wall, carried it over so I could sit right across from him.

“Kevin said you were doing something for him?”

“He tell you what that was?”

“You’re a cagey man, Mr. . . . ?”

“Hazard. B. B. Hazard.”

“Sure,” he said, making it clear he wasn’t buying it.

“But I’m using different ID for this job,” I said, sliding the driver’s license Gem had gotten made for me across to him.

“So I’d be hiring Joseph Grange,” he said, reading the plastic laminate of my photo, “DOB 10/19/52. Is that right?”

“Not ‘hiring,’ “ I told him. “I’m what you’d call an independent contractor.”

“I see,” he said, chuckling to let me know he was hip. “But you’ll need a . . . document of some kind, to verify that you’re on assignment to this office, yes?”

“No. I just need whoever answers the phone here to vouch for that. If anyone should ever call.”

“That isn’t difficult. But . . . Kevin didn’t tell me very much about you. . . .”

“So?”

“Well, I was thinking . . . we might know some people in common.”

“I don’t run dope,” I said, dismissing any chance we had mutual friends.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“The way I hear it, it comes to weight busts around here, you’re the man.”

“Lots of people hear that. Where did you hear it?”

“Inside,” I said. Softly.

“Not many of my clients there.”

“Exactly.”

He laughed. “I like you, Mr. . . . Grange.” He leaned back in his chair, lit a long white cigarette. The scent of cloves wafted over me. I looked at a spot behind the middle of his pale eyebrows. “Kevin tells me you did some work overseas,” he said, blowing a smoke ring at the ceiling.

“Does he?”

“We don’t just defend people who have run afoul of the draconian drug laws here. A lot of our work is . . . political, I suppose would be the best way to describe it.”

“Cool.”

“Probably not. At least, probably not your politics.”

“I don’t strike you as a liberal?”

“No. No, you don’t.”

“Your receptionist didn’t like me either.”

“We don’t make judgments here. And we’re very good at what we do. You might want to keep that in mind if you run into any trouble while you’re working for Kevin.”

“I will. You know what that work is, right?”

“You’re looking for his daughter.”

“Yeah. You ever meet her?”

“Buddy? I’ve known her practically since she was born.”

“She ever work here?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Well, the kind of office this is, I figure it’d be like heaven to an idealistic kid. Free Huey one generation, Free Willy the next, right?”

“I appreciate your sarcasm. But Buddy isn’t that kind of idealist.”

“What kind is she?”

“She’s more . . . introspective, I would say.”

“Okay. Any idea where she went?”

“Not a clue.”

“Or why?”

“That’s an even bigger mystery. She had an . . . I almost said an ‘ideal’ . . . life. I know that’s not possible for a teenager; at least not in their minds. But I never knew a happier, more well-adjusted young woman.”

“You have kids?” I asked him.

“No. You?”

“Four,” I told him, just keeping my skills in practice.

Being a teenager in America is a high-risk occupation. They’re the most likely to get shot, stabbed, sexually assaulted, beat up, bullied, turned on to chemicals, turned into zombies—and used and abused by the people who “counsel” them after all that.

And their peer-pressured cynicism makes them the easiest to trick, too.

It wouldn’t have shocked me if Rosebud had been driven to a remote area and killed by some other girls who didn’t like the way she spoke to one of their boyfriends. Or was snuffed out because some freakish boys wanted the “experience.” Or didn’t survive a gang rape.

But those kinds of crimes always seem to pop to the surface, like a river-disgorged corpse. Back in the sixties, there was a young guy in Tucson who killed a couple of girls for the fun of it. Buried them out in the desert. If he’d been a nomadic serial killer, the crimes might still be unsolved. But he had to tell some of his groupies about his feats. And when they scoffed, he showed them where the bodies were buried.

When teenagers commit crimes, they tend to talk about it. Today, they even make videos of it.

But the wires were quiet.

Or maybe Rosebud had been in a secret romance with a guy who killed her in a rage when she said she was going to tell his wife.

It never takes much.

But if she’d had a boyfriend, the guy had to have been sneaking into her room at night. Because it turned out that Rosebud had led a tightly scripted life . . . and one that made Mother Teresa look like a slacker. Two nights a week at the hospital’s children’s ward, visiting kids with cystic fibrosis. Saturdays, she volunteered at a shelter for battered women. That was when she wasn’t reading books into a tape recorder for the blind, or collecting signatures to abolish the death penalty, or delivering canned goods for a local food bank.