Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

“Why was that so—?”

“That night, the late run went down.”

“Ah,” she said, accepting. That was the real Gem. A child who had developed fatalism to keep the fear from stopping her little heart. Grown now. But with the same core.

“I have to meet someone,” I told Gem later.

“On your case?”

“Supposedly. I’ve been digging—well, maybe not digging, little girl, scratching around the edges, more like—for a while now, and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot I found that I’d take to the bank.”

“You believe she is here, though?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Because . . . ?”

“She’s in touch with her little sister. Leaves her notes.”

“She could be using a—”

“Sure. And if she is going through a cutout, I’ve got a candidate for that, too,” I told her, seeing Jenn’s calm, strong face in my mind. “But, the big thing, I’m sure she’s alive.”

“You had doubts, then?”

“Sure. The streets eat their young. Vampires at one end, vultures at the other. And I thought maybe her father . . .”

“What?”

“That he killed her. And hired me as a red herring for the cops. But I don’t think that anymore. I think he believes she’s out there. Close. He’s been feeling me out.”

“For . . . ?”

“He’s just touching the edges. Nothing that would incriminate him even if I was wired,” I said, flashing on the elaborate phone-recording system in his private den. “But he’s real interested in my capacity for . . . violence.”

“Some wealthy people seem to be excited by such things.”

“I know. It doesn’t feel like that to me. Ah, maybe a little bit . . . But I think he’s really asking if I’d cap his daughter, if it comes to that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, miss. It’s almost as if he wants the option, you know? A ‘just in case’ kind of thing.”

Gem got up and stalked over to the kitchen table, her movements agitated. “Burke, this is not a good thing for you to do.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You are not known here. Not truly known. But, on the streets now, it is getting around. You are a man for hire. You are looking for this girl. If she turns up dead, your true identity would quickly become known. And once the police learn of your . . . background, it would be bad. Very bad.”

“Detective Hong tell you that?”

“What?” she snapped, her voice sharp. “Is that your interest, then? Not what I know, but how I know it?”

“Not mine,” I lied. “But this ‘man for hire’ stuff on the streets . . . you didn’t pick that up. These streets, they’re not your territory. So I figured maybe your—”

“My what ?” She chopped off my sentence. “My . . . boyfriend? My secret lover? Is that what you really want to know?”

“That’s your business,” I told her.

Gem turned her back and walked out of the room, not a trace of wiggle in her hips.

I went out to meet Ann.

I called her from the car, went through the voice-mail routine, got her on the line. She told me where to park.

Ten minutes after I pulled in, the Subaru rolled up. It sat next to the Caddy, idling. I couldn’t see into the car: the window glass was too heavily tinted.

As if reading my thoughts, the passenger-side window whispered down. Ann was in the driver’s seat. She made a “Come on!” gesture.

I climbed into the Subaru’s bucket seat and we moved off.

I didn’t ask where we were going. It turned out to be a black-windowed storefront on a narrow side street. It looked like a porno outlet that hadn’t gotten around to painting the “XXX” on the windows yet. When I followed Ann inside, I saw that the place was actually a triple-wide, extending out on either side into what looked like a blank wall from the street. It was a used-book store of some kind, with floor-to-ceiling shelves made up out of whatever some after-hours scavenger had found lying around on a construction site.

And it was full of kids. All kinds of kids, dressed all kinds of ways. A boy who looked about eighteen, and straight off a farm in Iowa, stood next to a girl whose age I couldn’t guess under all the Goth makeup. If they even noticed each other, they gave no sign. Cheerleaders mingled with the multi-pierced. If there was a shade of human color not represented, it was one I’d never seen. Some of the kids pawed through stacks of books, others sat in battered chairs or flopped down on the floor. Nobody was smoking, or drinking coffee.

In a far corner, a pale, skinny young guy with long hair was bent all the way over a battered twelve-string, strumming so softly I couldn’t pick up the notes.

I was scanning for Rosebud, focusing hard on each girl’s face, putting it on the left-hand side of the screen in my head, comparing it with Rosebud’s photo on the right. I had gone through about a dozen when I felt Ann pulling on my coat sleeve.

I followed her lead . . . over to where a heavyset mixed-blood Indian woman in a red caftan sat behind a counter.

“Hello, Choma,” Ann said to her.

“Ann,” the woman said back. I could see the shutters open and close in her black camera eyes.

“This is a friend of mine. B. B. Hazard.”

“Yes?”

“He’s looking for Borderland.”

“We don’t use the Dewey Decimal System here.”

“I know,” Ann said patiently. “That’s why I brought my friend over to ask you.”

“Does he speak?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I was trying to be polite.”

“What does a hunter want with a book?” she asked.

I didn’t waste time denying what she already knew. “There might be something in it of value to me.”

“Might be?”

“I didn’t know Borderland was a book. Not until a few seconds ago.”

“Ah. It is an expression you heard?”

“Yes.”

“So it is you who made the connection?” the Indian woman asked, head swiveling to Ann.

“It’s no secret,” Ann said, shrugging.

“Not to some. It was to him,” the woman said.

“He is not a danger to any of your—”

“He is a hunter.”

“I do other things,” I said gently.

“Yes. I am certain you do. I was saying not what you do, only what you are.”

I bowed slightly, the way Mama taught me a million years ago. Done properly, the gesture crosses cultures, conveying respect without submission.

She focused hard on my good eye. Finally, she nodded, said: “Ask Berto. . . . Ann knows him, he’s right over there. Ask Berto where he’s got the Charles de Lint books.”

“Thank you,” I said, keeping my face blank as the synapses fired in my mind, looking for the connection. Crow girls? Was that it?

The Indian woman gave me a look that said, “You better be telling me the truth,” and turned away just enough to be a dismissal.

Berto turned out to be a Latino kid—I guessed Panama, but it was a guess—maybe sixteen years old. As soon as Ann said “Borderland” to him, he led us over to a whole wall of paperbacks, and deftly plucked a copy of Life on the Border from a high shelf. It showed a young man and a girl dressed in a combination of street gear and club clothes, leaning against a telephone pole in front of an ancient Cadillac sedan with a taxi light on top and bullet scars all over its doors. It said the author was Terri Windling, and I was beginning to think the kid had confused the title when I saw Charles de Lint’s name up top, next to the title.

“How much?” I asked the kid.

He gave Ann a glance, his eyebrows raised in a question.

“Give him twenty,” she said to me.

I did it. The kid didn’t offer me a courtesy shopping bag. Or a receipt.