Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

Nobody said anything. I took their quiet the wrong way. “I couldn’t have made it to my place,” I told them. “Not without a car. The buses don’t run enough at that hour … and people watch too close on them, anyway. I had to stay underground. This was the closest place I could …”

“You came alone, homes,” the Prof assured me. “They knew you was here, they’d have made their move. Been three days. No way.”

“I’ve been here three days?”

“Four, counting today, bro.”

“I don’t …” I cut myself off before I could say the word “remember.” It was all an act, goddamn it. You fucking “remember” that, don’t you? I kept my bitter sarcasm inside my thoughts, wondering if my face was flat to match.

Max came close to me. Tapped his heart. Used his finger to draw a circle around it. Then he spun his hands into that same circle, the fingertips touching, an impregnable barrier. He closed his two hands into fists, watching my eyes.

I nodded. Got it. Nobody had come close since I’d shown up. Max’s temple was never unwatched. Even Mama never understood the Mongol warrior’s relationship with the mixed-Asian street gang that poached off the more established shock troops of the Tongs. But everybody knew about the vacant-eyed boys in their fingertip-length black leather jackets and silk shirts buttoned to the throat. And that they would kill for Max as casually as a suburban kid would click the mouse on his computer.

“I have to—”

“You don’t have to do anything for a while, baby,” Michelle said, patting my forearm. “You’re going to need some serious rehab. And some medication.”

“What medication? I don’t remember which—”

“Oh, pul-leeze,” she mock-pouted. “How long do you think it took my man to get into their little computer?”

“You mean the Mole—?”

“What other man would I be calling mine?”

“Michelle, give me a break, okay? You’re saying the Mole hacked into the hospital computer, right?”

“Right. And we know every single medication you’ve been taking, every single little report they logged.”

“What’s my name on their machines?”

“Well, they don’t have a name. You’re a John Doe to them. But we still put it together in two minutes. We had the physical description, time of admission, nature of … injuries. You know.”

“Sure,” is all I said, wondering why the cops hadn’t put something into the computer themselves. Maybe the insurance companies wouldn’t let them. This is New York. Money doesn’t just talk here, it’s Dictator-for-Life.

“Do you need …?”

“What?” I asked her, too sharply, put off by something in her voice.

“The … drugs, honey.”

“If you mean antibiotics or whatever other kind of crap they were giving me in those pills … I guess so. But if you’re dancing around the morphine, don’t. I haven’t had any for weeks.”

I told them how I’d done that. The Mole nodded like it made sense. The Prof chuckled. Michelle just watched me.

“I’ll be fine,” I told my family. “But there’s something I’ve got to know first. And only Mama will know the answer.”

“I’ll roll on by and say hi,” the Prof volunteered.

“Thanks, brother,” I said, closing my eyes.

“No, bro,” is all the Prof came back with.

“No what?”

“No show, no go. Man hasn’t said word one.”

“Dmitri thinks I’m … what, then?”

“No way to tell. Depends on where he stood at the beginning.”

“These Russians—the parents—they didn’t get their kid back.”

“Right.”

“And they didn’t get their money back, either.”

“True.”

“And it was real money, Prof. Remember, I went through it myself. Told Dmitri I wasn’t handing over some Chicago bankroll for the kid, take a chance on the wheels coming off.”

“Sure. All true, I’m with you.”

“So they took the money. Must have—the one guy had his hands on it when the kid came up blasting.”

“Okay …”

“What about our end?”

“Huh?”

“We … I was supposed to get a hundred large, for the whole deal. We were going to whack it up, like always. Dmitri paid half up front. To Mama. You ask her if he ever paid the other half?”

“No, son, I didn’t. She was supposed to be the go-between, that’s all. They don’t know nothing about our …”

He let the sentence drift away. None of us said the word “family” out loud if we could help it. Not because stupidass Godfather movies had perverted the term, but because we’d all known the truth of its perversion way before we were old enough to be watching movies.

Mama was in business. Dmitri wanted to do business. He fronted half; that was the usual deal. Why would he pay off the other half for a job that never got done?

“All right, so he hasn’t come around with the other half. But no way he can blame anyone but himself for what happened. We didn’t set it up. He put us in contact and we took it from there.”

“I don’t see where you’re going, Schoolboy.”

“Let’s say Dmitri got all that cash from the parents of the missing kid, okay? Now he shows them … what? Nothing. They lost their money, and they don’t have their kid. So I guess it’s on them for trusting whoever made contact. Unless they just turned it over to Dmitri and asked him to handle it. Then they’d be pushing him. And he’d be pushing, too.…”

“So you think …?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I told him. “But I know how to find out.” I looked over at the Mole. “How much longer before I can get up, move around, do some work?”

The Mole opened his mouth to spout a bunch of biomedical stuff. Then he thought better of it and pointed at Max.

I nodded. Sure, that was the only way to find out.

We started the next morning. Max doesn’t have any weights in his dojo, but it’s full of all kinds of things that take muscle to move. Before we went near any of that, Max took a stance opposite me and gestured that I should do whatever he did. He kept it simple at first, just basic stretches, probing for my range of motion. I could see him marking the limits in his mind, matching them up against whatever he’d be satisfied with at the end.

I looked longingly at the heavy bag. Max shook his head. Spread his hand wide, inviting me to do the same, then adjusted until his fingertips met mine. And pushed, slightly. I pushed back. Nothing. I pressed harder, felt a tap on my shoulder, caught Max’s eye. He breathed through his nose, filled his lungs, then exhaled as he pressed his fingertips against mine. My hand crumbled. Yeah, I’d forgotten everything.

It was about three weeks before Max let me try some light sparring, his hands heavily gloved so that he wouldn’t hurt mine when he caught the punches. And he did, every one. But he could have done that no matter what shape I was in, so I wasn’t discouraged.

The depth-perception thing did discourage me. I couldn’t judge distances, kept going way short with my jab. And anything that came from my right side—well, now it was my blind side.

The Prof came by to watch once in a while, keeping up a running fire of commentary the way he had when he was training me, years ago. But this time, none of it added up to what I had. Max finally shook his head at the Prof. Then he stepped forward with his left foot, sliding his right behind it, closing the gap between us. Showed the move to me.

“Max got the facts, Schoolboy,” the Prof conceded. “You ain’t gonna keep nobody at the end of your jab no more. Got to get close. No need to guess when you inside his vest.”