Andrew Vachss: Pain Management

“I have a goal,” she said. “A certain sum of money. When I have it, I will stop what . . . I do. Is it the same for you?”

I caught her depth-charge eyes on me, didn’t even make the effort to lie. “No, child. I’ve had money. Not now, but once.” Thinking of the fortune I’d spent tracking the humans who’d killed Pansy. Down here, where I live, people don’t save their money for a rainy day. They save it for revenge. “And it didn’t make any difference,” I told her.

Days passed. I felt like I’d spent the night on a bench in a Greyhound terminal . . . and woke up without the cash for a ticket to anyplace else.

Gem found some occasional work for me. You’d think you have to know a city real well to do what I do, but that’s not true. Take New York—you can’t ever really know it. Sure, some of the old-time cabbies can find addresses City Hall doesn’t even know exist—although most of the new ones can’t find any street above Ninety-sixth or below Fourteenth. But that’s not the same as going into the buildings. Or, worse, into their basements.

New York’s a shape-shifting demon, never letting you get your bearings before it morphs again. A slum block turns into six-figure co-ops overnight. A neighborhood vanishes like a migrant laborer moving on to the next harvest. A mini-city rises out of the river, built on landfill. Times Square still sucks tourist dollars, but now they come to take pictures, not to buy them.

Don’t get me wrong. New York is still one place where you can buy or sell anything that exists on this planet. But the trading posts keep moving around, and the maps are useless before their ink dries. You’re always starting from scratch.

And always scratching.

I had tracked the Russian couple whose kid had been kidnapped—the one I was supposed to exchange the cash for—from Chicago to a mail drop in Vancouver. But I needed a note written in Russian to spook them into the open. And someone fluent enough to dialogue with them if the trick worked.

I found Gem through Mama’s network. She signed on. Did the job. But instead of walking away, she’d stayed with me all the way to the end . . . out past the twelve-mile limit.

Somewhere along the trail, Gem decided she was my wife. I’d never heard that word from a woman before. Love, yes. Two women had died for my love, and another had taken it with her when she went back to Japan. Even babies, women I’d been with had talked about. But I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago.

Gem knew I wasn’t going anywhere near any license. I’d been registered since birth. Born a suspect, then tracked by the fucking State until I learned how to live under its radar. Gem didn’t care. Sometimes she called me Burke, sometimes “husband.”

The ID I have says I’m Wayne Askew. I’ve got a full set—passport, driver’s license, Social Security, credit cards . . . all perfect. I’ve never used them around here. Got them from Wolfe, the beautiful ex-prosecutor with white wings in her long dark hair and gray gunfighter’s eyes. She’d gone outlaw when her ethics got in the way of the DA’s ass-kissing. Now she was an info-trafficker, with some of the best contacts in the business.

What she’d never been was mine. I’d had my chance there. And, being myself, killed it.

Another reason not to go back to New York.

Gem had her own business, and I stayed out of it. I never worried about her. She’d survived the Khmer Rouge when she was a little girl, learning Russian from the strange men visiting the opium warlord, who’d kept her alive because she was so good at math. Making her plans, waiting. When the window opened a crack, Gem slid through like smoke, made her way here, and did . . . whatever she did . . . ever since.

I don’t know where Gem found customers for the kind of stuff I got hired for. Like Kitty, the stripper whose boyfriend wanted her to work a different circuit. Harder work. More money. Kitty wasn’t a genius, but she was smart enough to be scared.

Gem was the cutout. The stripper never met me. And the boyfriend probably thought it was a random mugging that hospitalized him—if he could think at all; those head injuries are tricky things.

The cops wouldn’t spend a lot of time on the case. The victim was such a nothing, who’d hire muscle just to fuck him up? Besides, the guy was black. With a white girlfriend. And with those roving gangs of skinheads in certain parts of town . . .

By the time the hospital kicked him loose, his property was long gone.

Gem found other work for me, and I did it. But when she first told me about the runaway, I pulled up short. They’re a different game, runaways. One of the things I did—a thousand years ago, when I still believed I could be something more than what I am—was find people. When someone pays you to do that kind of work, you have a lot of choices. You can take the money and never look—just make up some nice stories for your “progress reports” until the mark calls it off. Or you can find the target, ask him what it’s worth for you to go Stevie Wonder on whoever asked you to look.

Hell, you can even do the job, straight.

With kids, I always looked for real. I was young myself—still didn’t get it, how things worked. People who hired me, they had nice homes, nice cars, nice lives. I knew why I’d run away myself when I was a kid. It’s a POW’s duty to escape. And to keep trying when they recapture you.

But, the way I figured it at first, kids from the nice homes, they ran away for the adventure. Their parents were worried about them. The streets were ugly. Things could happen. So I really looked.

When I found the kids, some were happy to see me. Relieved. They’d made their statement. Things would be different when I brought them back, they told me. But other kids, they told me different things.

Those kids I didn’t bring back.

I found other places I could bring them. Some of the kids stayed. Some of them testified. And some of them went back to The Life.

After a while, I stopped doing that kind of stuff.

But I still knew how to do it. And I needed the work. So, when Gem told me about the money these people were putting up, I said okay.

Most of the clients who hired me for tracker jobs had no illusions. They knew what they were buying, and me not having a PI license was part of what they paid for. This thing Gem had set up was a different game—the clients had started at the other end of the tunnel.

Their kid was missing. A teenager. Soon as they figured out she was gone, they’d played it by the numbers. The cops had marked the case as a runaway, not a career-making abduction. Said they’d keep looking, but more than likely she’d already left town. . . .

When the parents took that bait, the detectives recommended a high-tech investigative firm, heavily staffed with ex-cops. Not a kickback, you understand. A “referral.” Just another way the Man protects and serves. And some citizens are more grateful than others for the service.

But, despite all their licenses and contacts and computers, the firm drew a blank. Then the parents tried looking themselves. The father, anyway. The way it came back to me, he thought he had some special rapport with street kids. Never picked up his daughter’s trail, but he got close enough to the whisper-stream that Gem picked up his.

So, when she told him I didn’t have a license and had to be paid in cash, he not only didn’t balk, he snapped at it.

People with money love the idea of men with shady connections and no particular aversion to violence working for them. Telling their golf buddies that they “know a guy” raises their status a lot higher than a new luxo SUV. But citizens can’t tell a working pro from a two-bit loudmouth, and Consumer Reports doesn’t rate working criminals. So the buyers rely on the one standard of truth they’ve come to trust over the years—the movies.