Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

Nobody spun around on their stools when we entered the bar, but the current shifted just enough to tell me our presence was noted.

The booth was the last one in a row of maybe a dozen. The man waiting there was mixed-race Asian, surprisingly tall when he got up to greet us. His hair was jet black, carefully spiked. His face was too rounded to be Chinese. Samoan? Filipino? Mama would have been able to decode his DNA in ten seconds. I just filed it away with the million other things I didn’t know. He wore a slouchy plum-colored silk jacket over a black shirt and tie made of the same material, and a heavy silver ring on his left hand with some sort of symbol cut into the top.

Gem kissed his cheek hello. Even in her four-inch spikes, he had to bend forward to let her reach his face. He did it so smoothly I could tell they’d done it before.

We shook hands. His grip was dry, without pressure. “Henry Hong,” he said.

“B. B. Hazard,” I answered him.

He waited for Gem to slide into the booth before he sat down across from her.

“Gem says there is something you want to know that I might be able to help you with?” he opened.

“Maybe. Depends if what I’m picking up is on your teletype.”

“Could you be a little more specific?” he asked politely, taking a gunmetal cigarette case out of his jacket, opening it to make sure I could see what it was. He offered me one with a slight gesture.

“Thanks,” I said.

He lit his smoke from a slim lighter the color of lead, then handed the lighter to me. I fired up, blew some smoke at the ceiling.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time on the hooker strolls,” I began. “Looking for a teenage girl. Runaway.”

“Where, specifically?”

“Burnside, MLK, Upper Sandy . . .” I said vaguely, implying even wider coverage.

“All right,” he said, validating my choices. “What makes you think she would be hooking?”

“Nothing. In fact, I’ve got good reason to think she wouldn’t. But she has to be earning money somewhere, and I wanted to just . . . rule it out, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“All right. What I’d do, normally, is spread her photo around with my phone number on the back. Tell the girls there’s a reward out for good info.”

“Normally?” he asked, mildly.

“Yeah,” I replied, ignoring the question he was asking. “But these girls are on the hustle. You want to work with them, you have to make sure they aren’t working you. So you try and get one of them alone, make your pitch.”

He dragged on his cigarette gently. I was letting mine burn out in the ashtray.

“That’s where I picked it up,” I said. “I’m using a flash car—nice new Caddy, no rental plates, clear glass. Nothing that would spook them; anyone can see inside. But they pretty much approach only in pairs. I’ve even seen three of them at a time. And the ones who don’t come off the curb, they’re still watching . . . a lot closer than from idle curiosity.”

“No offense,” he said softly. “But your face . . . Maybe you’re just—”

“It’s not that,” I told him, so he’d know I wasn’t being sensitive. “No way they react to my looks from that distance. Maybe some types of rides would make them edgy. I could see it if I was driving a van, even a station wagon. But I even tried it with a top-down convertible, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

“You try any of the escort services?”

“Why would I do that? I’m looking for street info, not the high-priced spread.”

“You said she was underage. . . .”

“Oh. Okay. You got any suggestions?”

He looked over at Gem, boxing me out as if he had wedged a wall between us in the booth. I couldn’t see her expression without turning sideways, and I wasn’t about to do that. I reached over and ground out what was left of the cigarette I hadn’t smoked past the first drag. The cop’s eyes were downcast, as if he was thinking something over. Or maybe he was looking at the tiny blue heart tattooed on my right hand, between the knuckles of the last two fingers. A hollow, empty heart. My tribute to Pansy.

Burke’s NYPD file shows a lot of scars and marks, but no tattoos. They’d never had a chance to photograph this one.

“What do you think it means?” he finally asked me.

“Girls have been disappearing. Girls who worked the streets. Maybe in Portland, maybe somewhere down I-5; word like that moves with the traffic.”

“This is a guess?”

“At best. I haven’t seen anything in the papers about a serial killer. . . .”

“There was the guy they caught up north.”

“Yeah. And he preyed on prostitutes, too. But that’s nothing new—they’re the easiest targets.”

“They are,” he conceded. “But that’s all you have—that the hookers are working doubled up? Maybe three-way’s the hot ticket out there right now.”

“You start a sentence with ‘maybe,’ anything you say after that has to be true.”

Gem kicked my ankle. A lot more sharply than she would have needed to get my attention.

“So what do you think?” Hong asked.

“I think you’re playing with me,” I told him. “There’s lots of other reasons I’ve got for thinking there’s a killer on the road, but what difference? Either you already know it, or nothing I can say would convince you.”

He put his cigarette case flat on the table, helped himself to another. I passed.

“Could you not say what else you—?” Gem started to say. That time I turned and looked her full in the face. She shut up.

Hong smoked another cigarette in silence. I didn’t know what Gem had told him about me, but if he thought waiting was going to make me nervous, he was misinformed.

Finally, he snubbed out the butt, leaned forward, and spoke so softly I had to concentrate to get it all.

“There’s thirteen of them known gone. Between Seattle and the California line, nine of them in Oregon. No bodies. No missing-persons reports, either. None of them listed as runaways. All but one have priors.”

“And habits?”

“It’s a safe bet, but not a sure one. We don’t think that’s any kind of link.”

“Their pimps said they ran off? Or just didn’t come back one night?”

“Both. A couple of them claimed they knew where their girls ran off to. They pull girls from each other all the time.”

“Or sell them.”

“True. But the trafficked girls, you wouldn’t expect to see them on the street right away. The pimps would want to stick them indoors, get their money out of them as quick as possible.”

“No bodies, right?”

“No bodies,” he confirmed. “No crimes, as far as we know.”

“But the girls, they know different.”

“They think so, anyway.”

“Much obliged.”

“Sure. If you pick up anything, I’d appreciate—”

“Bur— My . . . Uh, B.B. could help you,” Gem stumbled out.

Something was very wrong with all this. Gem doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

“How would that be?” Hong said smoothly, as if trying to spackle over a suddenly appearing crack in a plaster wall.

“B.B. is an expert,” Gem told him confidently. Like I wasn’t there. “He knows more about this . . . kind of thing than anyone.”

“Is that right?” Hong asked me, deliberately neutral.

“I know freaks,” I promised him.

“And you scan this as . . . ?”

“I don’t. I needed to verify what I picked up on with you before I spent any time on it.”

“And why would you spend any time on it?”

“If there was something in it for me,” I told him, making it clear that was the only motivation that worked.