Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

“Honey, we got a lot of information. Everything you said you wanted. But there’s no way we’re going to know in front if that man likes women. Don’t believe everything you see in beer commercials.”

“Fair enough. Besides that, can you—?”

“Oh, spit it out, mister. I can do anything for those damn drugs. And I will, okay?”

“Okay.”

“We have about a six-hour window. Maybe a little more, depending on what time we get on the road. But once it’s docked, the whole thing has to be empty and gone, fast.”

“That’s covered,” Clipper said, emotionless. It was the first time I’d ever seen him without Big A.

“And you’re sure about the information?” I asked Ann, for maybe the third time. “If any little piece of it’s off, so is the deal.”

“Yes,” she said, patiently, “I’m sure. It’s not as if they ever take precautions with this stuff. It might as well be a load of TV sets, the way they set up security.”

“I’ll handle my end,” the old man said.

“Pop, you know all you’re supposed to do is—”

“Create a little diversion for the County Mounties. Don’t worry about me, gal. It’s going to be fun.”

Ann shook her head sorrowfully. “If anything happens to you . . .”

“I asked Sherry,” the old man said.

“That is what you want me for now? To be your alibi?” Gem said, sneering the last word. “That is not how you treated me before. . . .”

“This is different.”

“So you say, master. I hear and obey.”

“Gem, you don’t want to do it, just—”

“Just . . . what? Get out of your life completely?”

“I’m not saying that.”

“You are not saying anything, Burke. And you have not for a long time.”

“When this is over . . .”

“Ah.”

I took a deep breath. Let it out shallow and slow. “Are you going to do it?”

“You are a fool,” she said.

Hong watched me approach his table like I was a bad biopsy result. “What are you looking for this time?” he asked, when I sat down.

“I’m not sure I get your meaning.”

“You’re not sure you like my meaning. Your little ‘trades’ seem to have a way of causing more problems than they solve.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. For example, Kruger’s stock has gone way up in the past couple of weeks. Any idea why that would be?”

“Not me.”

“Right. Not you. Only there was this gutter-punk who’d been shaking down hookers. And now he’s out of business.”

“What’s bad about that?”

“By itself, nothing. In fact, we didn’t really put the whole thing together until we showed him some pictures.”

My face didn’t reveal anything—I was confident of that. But if Hong had my sheet, I was . . .

“Not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Not a mug shot. A morgue shot.”

“I’m not with you.”

“Oh, I know you’re not. If there’s anything I’m sure of in this whole mess, it’s that you’re not with me. ”

“And I was supposed to be?”

“Let’s stop playing, okay? The punk—you know, the one with the missing fingertips—he wasn’t saying a word. But when we showed him a picture of his boss on a slab, he went into a panic. Can’t stop him from talking now. He’ll cop to anything we want, if we promise him PC on the Inside and the Program when he makes the gate.”

“What’s he got to trade?”

“A lot of crap about his big ‘operation’ he was fronting. Not much use to us, seeing as how the fucking ‘kingpin’ is dead. So the only thing he can give us is whoever did the job on him.”

“You mean, like an assault?”

“An assault-with-intent, pal. Pounding on him is one thing. But mutilation, that’s what we call an ‘enhancer’ in these parts. Whoever goes down for it is looking at a long bit. And if that person had priors . . . well, you know the deal in Oregon, don’t you? He might never see the street again.”

“So you know it was a man?”

“Ah, you’re a piece of work, Hazard . . . or whatever your name is. Yeah, it was a man. And, no, we don’t have a description we could do anything with. Except . . .”

I raised my eyebrows, like I was getting bored with his pregnant pauses and wanted him to get on with it.

“Like I said, this is one scared boy. We put a bunch of guys in a lineup, whisper ‘Number Three’ in his ear, guess which one he’d pick out?”

“Sounds like a defense attorney’s dream,” I said, still bored.

“It does,” he conceded. “But that doesn’t change the truth.”

“Tell it to O.J.”

“You ask me about Kruger. A favor gets done for Kruger. So I figure Kruger must have done a favor for you.”

“Kruger didn’t do a goddamned thing for me,” I said. “And you can take that one to the polygraph.”

“Maybe. But now you come here on another visit. What do you want this time? And who’s going to get themselves dead?”

“More hookers are,” I said, taking everything out of my voice but the truth I needed him to hear. “It’s not one man. Like I told you before, remember? It’s a team.”

“Two men? You’re trying to tell me that the little degenerate with the missing—”

“No. A man and a woman. You’ve run every sex offender who’s been released in the past, what, five years?”

He nodded, listening now.

“What you want to look for is a man who’s been either married or living with a woman for some time. Either he’s using her to pull hookers, like she wants to bring the girl home for a three-way, or she’s right there in the car with him. Something like that Bernardo case.”

“Yeah, you mentioned it before. In Canada, right?”

“Right. The freak made torture videos of some of the girls they captured. When he got popped, the search didn’t turn them up. He told his lawyer where they were. The lawyer kept quiet, so his girlfriend got to cop to light time in exchange for her testimony against him. If the cops had found those tapes first, she’d have been buried as deep as he is.”

“That might be the scenario, but it doesn’t narrow things down much.”

“I’m sure it’s a man-woman team. Not two men, like the Hillside Stranglings, where those two dirtbags played cop to get girls in their car. It wouldn’t work up here.”

“I’ll buy that. What makes you think it wasn’t that guy from Spokane? Robert Lee Yates. He just copped to a whole ton of hooker killings.”

“Any of the missing ones on the list?”

“Two.”

“Sure! So why would he leave out the others? He made his deal; all the details, plus he showed the cops where a couple of the bodies were buried. Took a life sentence in exchange. What would he have to gain by not mentioning some of them? Freak like that, the more kills he can claim, the more letters he’s going to get in prison. Better chance some asshole will set up a Web site for him, too.”

“Okay. But even if you’re right, we’ve got no starting place to look.”

“You might. You already have the lists of men who were released. Go back and check, see which of them ended up marrying a woman who met them through some kind of prison correspondence, or even a prison visiting program.”

“That happens a lot.”

“Sure. And most of it’s straight-up legit. People get together for all kinds of reasons, and some of them are righteous. But what you’re looking for is any of those women you can’t find now.”

“I’m not sure I . . .”

“The women, they were the citizens, right? Not the outlaws. So why would they go missing?”