Andrew Vachss - Pain Management

“You wouldn’t hurt—?”

“No. Is she on any medication?”

“Medication?” he said, on the thin edge of hostility. “What are you talking about?”

“Medication. Like you get from a doctor. Anti-depressants, stuff for allergies, insulin . . .”

“Oh. No. No, she isn’t. But what diff—”

“Some medications don’t mix.”

“Look, Mr. . . . Hazard, I’m not following you here.”

“You want her brought back, whether she wants to come or not, right?”

“I . . . yes.”

“One way is physical force; one way is with . . . medicine.”

“You mean like a Mickey Finn?”

“Something like that,” I said, watching his eyes. “And if she was taking other stuff, the combination could be dangerous. Even chloroform could—”

“Maybe you’d better not . . . I mean, isn’t there some way you could just . . . hold her wherever you find her? I’ve got a cell phone. You could ring me any time, day or—”

“I couldn’t hold her in a public place.”

“But you could follow her and—”

“Sure. And if she’s staying somewhere permanent, that might work out. But if she’s crashing different places, or sleeping outside, or with a crew, or . . . well, thing is, I may only get the one shot. And if she knows she’s been located, she might bolt. There’s a lot of roads out of Portland.”

“I don’t like this,” he said bitterly, throwing his cigarette down, grinding it dead with his heel.

“Look, I’m not promising anything,” I told him. “Only a crook would do that. It’s long odds any way you look at it. But what I can do, I can see if I can pick up her trail but keep in the background, all right? If anyone’s going to make a pitch, it shouldn’t be me, it should be you or her mother.”

“It should be me,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, this is complicated,” he said into the silence. But that was all he had to say.

“You paid me for ten days,” I told him. “If I turn her up in that time, I’ll call you. Then you decide how you want to play it.”

“And if you don’t?”

“It’s still your call. If you want me to keep looking past that, it’s the same rate.”

“What are you saying? If you don’t find Buddy in ten days, you won’t be able to at all?”

“I’m not saying anything until I start looking. I don’t know if the trail is cold, or even if there is a trail. I’ll have a better idea after I’ve poked around.”

He told me the number of his cell phone. “Don’t you want to write it down?” he asked.

“I’ll remember it,” I promised him. “Writing certain things down, it’s bad for business.”

“I . . . All right,” he said, sounding more depressed than convinced.

He walked back to his architecturally unique house. I started up my commonplace car and took off.

Driving back, I ran through it in my mind. Even adding up everything I’d seen and been told, there was a lot I didn’t know. Nothing so strange about that. But I guess what bothered me the most was why they had all lied to me. Every one of them.

“She wrote music,” I told Gem the next morning. “I’m dead sure of it, especially since her little sister ran out of the room when I brought it up.”

“But why would her parents—?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not all of it. No way a girl her age, living in that kind of room, wouldn’t have a backpack, but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t tell if any of her clothes were missing; there were too many of them. But . . . no guitar, no backpack, no menstrual . . . stuff. The notebooks, you could tell they were part of a series, but the only ones she left behind were blank. Like the music-composition paper. This was no snatch. Wherever the girl was going, she planned it. And she figured on staying, too.”

“That ‘Borderlands’ reference . . .”

“ If she wrote that note herself, yeah. It was just a computer printout—anyone could have done it.”

“Why would anyone—?”

“Pro snatch artists would have something like that prepared in advance—it can buy them a lot of time. And the parents could have written it themselves, after . . .”

“After she left?”

“After they killed her. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Burke. If they killed their own daughter, they would hardly be hiring private assistance to find her.”

“You mean O.J.’s not spending his NFL pension on private investigators to find the Colombian drug dealers who killed his ex-wife?”

“Sometimes your sense of humor is offensive,” she said, eyes level.

“And sometimes,” I told her, “you just don’t get the joke.”

Hours later, she came into the room where I’d been sitting with my eyes closed.

“Have you learned anything?” she asked in a neutral voice. Gem knew where I went when I searched with my eyes closed, but she didn’t like to talk about it.

“I thought the comics might have a clue,” I said, “but they’re all about a girl dealing with MPD.”

“MPD?”

“Multiple Personality Disorder. Only now they call it DID—Dissociative Identity Disorder. Madison Clell—the one who writes and draws the comic—she has it herself. This Cuckoo is kind of . . . harsh. Right on the nerve endings. Powerful stuff. But I think Rosebud was just interested in it . . . artistically . . . not because she herself had the same thing.”

“Perhaps one of her friends?”

“I don’t think so. If that was it, she might’ve had one of the comics, but not the whole set. Some kids collect comics, but these were the only ones in her room, so I don’t think that was it, either.”

“Did this . . . Cuckoo person run away, too?”

“Damn! I didn’t think of that. Not in this issue, anyway. Doesn’t say anything about her writing music, either. But I just don’t think that’s it.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because she left the comics behind, Gem. And it looked like she took along everything that was precious to her when she ran.”

“What will you do, then?”

“Everybody’s lying,” I told her. “Those people, they never showed the girl’s note to the cops. Probably just handed them a pile of bullshit. A lot of rich people, they think the cops work for them personally. Like servants.”

“Truly?”

“Sure. Say their kid wants nothing to do with them, okay? But the kid’s of age, so the parents can’t turn her in as a runaway. What they do, they call the cops, tell them the kid has been really depressed lately, they haven’t heard from her . . . and she always calls regularly, so they think she may have done something to herself.

“The cops go pound on the kid’s door, probably scare the hell out of her. Just what the parents want: they prove to the kid that they’ve got the power; the law will do what they tell it to.”

“That is disgusting.”

“Sure. Sometimes the kid doesn’t panic. She proves to the cops that she’s an adult, and that her parents were just playing them because she wants the parents out of her life and they don’t know how to take no for an answer. And sometimes the cops get angry about being used.

“But, most of the time, they just play the role—tell the kid she really should sit down and talk with her parents, all that crap. It’s none of their business, they shouldn’t be doing it; but, the way they figure, a little gratitude from people who have money never hurts.”

“Do you believe that is what these people are doing?”

“Well, aren’t they? Let’s say the note’s for real—the kid’s a runaway, then, and they know it. Why would they keep that from the cops?”