Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

If Rosebud had been younger, I’d have looked elsewhere. I didn’t know if the local cops swept for underage hookers, or kept tabs on their pimps, but I figured it was like anywhere else—if you’re pushing kiddie sex, you do it indoors. In America, anyway.

Sure, Rosebud was underage, but just barely so. She could tart up legal easy enough, if that’s the way she was earning. And even gutter-trash pimps know where to get passable ID today.

My own ID was top-shelf. A Beretta 9000S, chambered for .40-caliber S&W. You might think a handgun would be the opposite of a walkaway card if you got stopped by the cops . . . if you didn’t know how things work. A passport may be the Rolex of fake documents, but all it will do is trip the cop-alarms if you flash one around anyplace but the airport.

An Oregon carry permit is a better play. Just possessing it tells the law you’ve already been printed and came up clean: no felony convictions, no NGIs, not even a domestic-violence restraining order to mar your record. Who could be a better citizen than a legally armed man?

Oregon’s one of the few states that closed the gun-show loophole; you want to buy a firearm here, you are going through a background check. The piece I was carrying had been purchased new from a licensed dealer in a small town in eastern Oregon a couple of years ago. Then the dealer had gone out of business. But a back-check of his records would show that he’d sold the piece to the same Joseph Grange my driver’s license said I was.

In some towns, winos sell their votes once a year. In the more progressive jurisdictions, they can sell their prints once a week.

Some of the working girls were more aggressive than others; nothing special there. Nothing special anywhere. I spent a couple of hours, crisscrossing, not making any secret of the prowling, as if I were looking for something a little different. In some cities, the legal-age girls act as steerers for the indoors-only stuff. I didn’t know if they did it that way in Portland, but I wasn’t going to ask around until I got a better sense of who was hustling.

“You looking for a date, honey?” the high-mileage blonde asked. She leaned into the passenger-side window I’d zipped down when she’d approached. Her partner was dark-haired, but with the same tiny arsenal of seductiveness; she was licking her lips with all the passion of a metronome.

“No thanks, Officer,” I told her.

Her giggle was juiceless. “Oh, please. Do cops come right out and tell you they’ll gobble your cock for twenty-five?”

“Nope. But I’ve had them promise to look the other way for fifty.”

Her laugh was a snort. “You’re a funny guy. But I’m not out here to be talking.”

“Fair enough,” I told her, feeling for the power-window switch with my left hand.

“Wait!” the blonde said. “What makes you think I’m a cop?”

“Cops work in pairs,” I said, nodding my head at her partner.

“Oh, man, come on. We’re just selling sandwiches. And you look like you got just the right meat. Try some three-way; you’ll swear it’s the only way.”

“Some other time,” I told her, and pulled away.

I spent a lot of time listening to approaches, alert for the right girl—one who’d been out there for a while, kept her eyes open, wouldn’t mind making a few bucks doing something that didn’t require penetration. But no matter where I went, the approaches were mostly by pairs.

It rang wrong. Sure, pimps would put a new girl out with a more experienced one. And some hookers—lesbians who knew that most of the action would be them playing with each other while the trick watched— only worked three-ways. But this was happening much too widely for those thin blankets to cover.

After four nights, nothing had changed. It wasn’t a one-time spook, so I knew what it meant. What it had to mean.

There hadn’t been anything in the papers or on the news. But down where hookers stroll, the whisper-stream flows especially deep. And if they got scared enough, they’d play it for pure true.

But while I was thinking it through, another couldn’t-be coincidence flowed across my path like a shark in shallow water. A big black car with a smooth shape, chromeless, its running lights banked. I’d seen it a dozen times over the past few nights, always in motion, moving unhurried but slippery at right angles to where I was going.

I knew it was the same car—a Subaru SvX—because of its window-in-window mortised side glass, like the DeLorean once sported. The SvX had been a techno-triumph, an all-wheel drive luxury barge that cornered well and ran strong, but it never caught on, and Subaru stopped making them years ago. Couldn’t be that many of them still around, even in the Pacific Northwest, where most of them had been sold.

The Subaru was only vaguely menacing. It didn’t follow me when I finally left the grids late every night, and it didn’t seem to frighten the girls any more than the cops who rolled by on bicycles every once in a while did. A pimp, maybe? Checking his traps? But the car was the opposite of flash, and any pimp big enough to have girls working a half-dozen different spots on the same night wouldn’t be driving anything but ultra. Maybe a “documentary”-maker who’d learned how to work his videocam one-handed? Or a screenwriter trying to pick up a little “noir”?

Ah, whatever. Trying to figure out every reason people scope hooker strolls would give a mainframe computer an aneurysm.

“You know a cop?” I asked Gem one morning.

“I know many police officers.”

“Any you can trust enough?”

“Enough to . . . what? There are degrees of trust.”

“Something’s going on. In the street. I think I know what it is, but I can’t be sure.”

“Does it have anything to do with the girl you are looking for?”

“I . . . don’t know. Don’t think so, in fact. But it may affect the way I look.”

“Do you have something to trade?”

“Trade?”

“Yes. Something in exchange for the information you seek.”

“I always have the same thing. Just depends on how much of it he wants.”

“He?”

“The cop. Or ‘she,’ I guess. It doesn’t matter. And I’m talking about money, Gem. What else?”

“I am not sure. But . . . not money. There is one policeman I know who is a detective. He is not . . . I would not say he is unhappy, perhaps that is wrong. But he could do more than he has been . . . given the opportunity to do. I know what he would want; and it is not money, it is information. I just don’t know what kind.”

“I’m not a—”

“Burke, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“That does not seem correct, ‘nothing.’ You thought I was suggesting you become a police informant?”

“I . . . no, I didn’t think that. It’s just that . . . you can’t speak for this cop you know. It may not be in your mind, or in mine, but it could be in his, understand?”

“Understand? Yes, I understand. I am not as stupid as you seem to believe, sometimes.”

“Gem . . .”

“Never mind. You will meet my police officer, then you will decide for yourself.”

By the time I took off that night, Gem still hadn’t said another word to me. But she’d been on her phone a lot.

The stroll I tried was one of those streets that always seem wet at night, as if the violence shimmering beneath the surface had popped out like sweat on skin.

I caught the Subaru’s chromeless flicker as it came up on my flank like a moving oil slick, then veered off into a side street. By that time, I had enough of a sense of the car to be able to pick it up on my own radar. The Subaru was a streak of light-eating matte against the sheen of the street, running through Hookerville as steady and mysterious as a midnight train.