Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

“How could they know it would be you?” Wolfe asked, her years as a prosecutor overriding anything she was feeling. Or not feeling.

“Not what you’re thinking,” I said. “The … dead guy … he didn’t pick me. The people whose kid got kidnapped, they picked me. That was one of their conditions, I found out later: it had to be me to deliver the money.”

“You checked the—?”

“There was a kidnapping. It was in the papers. And the transfer-money was all there. Every dime.”

“How many were on the set?”

“At least four, counting the kid. If he was a kid. I think he was. But it was dark, and I wasn’t that close.”

“Just you. And four of them. And still you …?”

“When the kid popped me, I took the rounds in the Kevlar … and whatever that stuff was that the Mole wove over it. I dropped. Pansy charged out of the car. She went for the kid. The guy behind me, the one picking up the money, he shot at her, but he missed. Pansy got the kid. Brought him down. Two others came out of their truck. My people opened up. The leader—the guy with the money in his hand—he told them to clear out. But to finish me first. That’s when I got … this,” I said, touching the right side of my face.

“So they John Doe’ed you at the hospital?”

“Yeah. Only this happened in Hunts Point, right? But I was transferred. When I came to, I was in Manhattan.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did your people drop any of them?”

“Pansy got one,” I said, my voice strangling on pride and pain. “She got the kid. They … killed her. Right there. Right in front of me. They killed her and there was nothing I could …”

My face was leaking. Just on the right side. I wiped it away with my palm, hard.

“Another one of them got it, too. But they took their dead with them. And my people took Pansy. There’s nothing left there but blood in the ground.”

“So you went back to … the person … to find out … what?”

“A lot of stuff. But once I found out that the people whose kid was taken made it part of the deal that I be the transfer-man, all I wanted was how to find them.”

“And he wouldn’t—?”

“He killed my dog,” I cut her off. “He killed Pansy.”

Wolfe took a sip of her coffee, her pale eyes steady on me. “People say things like that all the time. ‘If anyone ever hurt my dog, I’d kill them.’ But they don’t mean it. It’s just their way of saying how much they love their pet.”

“Pansy wasn’t my—”

“I know,” she said, gently. “But what do you have now?”

“You mean, without that … person, right? Here’s what I have: The names and last known address of the people who hired him. And the knowledge that somebody wants me dead bad enough to pay a whole ton of money to get it done.”

“You’re well away,” she said. “It’s been months. Whoever wanted you, they don’t know how to find you. If they could, they would have made their move already.”

“I’m not going to spend the rest of my life as a target.”

“What’s the difference, if you’re a target they can’t hit?”

“Because there’s other things I’d rather be.”

“For instance?”

“At the other end of the sniper-scope,” I said.

She looked into me. I wanted to reach across the table and just … touch her hand, maybe. But I froze. It was her call.

“I need a few days,” she said. “And your passport.”

I handed it over. Wolfe got up and walked away. Pepper flashed me her trademark grin, telling me to stay where I was. I could feel someone standing just behind me. I sipped my cold hot chocolate, alone.

When I was a kid, I thought there was a way not to hurt. I wanted to be like Wesley. Ice. So cold inside that I wouldn’t feel a thing. Wesley was the only one I ever knew who actually got past it all. He had no hate in him. Nothing made him angry. All he wanted was to get paid.

But he got tired. So tired that he checked out.

Wesley taught me the difference between sad and depressed. People never get that one. I was born sad. I probably knew my mother didn’t want me even before she climbed out of that bed in the charity ward and strolled back to wherever I’d been spermdonored. I’m what happens when the trick tricks the hooker.

My birth certificate may not have had a full name on it, but it did have a number—and I’ve had one or another of those ever since. I’ve been a file, a case, a subject, a foster kid, a mental case, a JD, a convict. None of the endless agencies ever knew me. They always got it wrong. But that didn’t matter to them—they always had my number.

When you’re depressed, it all slips away. You stop caring, about anything. A depressed person, he can’t feel anything for anyone else. Empathy dies first.

That’s the way they labeled Wesley. Killer sociopath. He wasn’t a man; he was a machine. You gave Wesley a name, you got a body. And Wesley got paid. A never-miss, platinum-proof perfect assassin. No friends, no family, no lover, no pets. No apartment, no house, no home.

And what it finally came down to was … no reason to be here anymore.

He went out with a bang. A big bang, taking a couple hundred along for the ride. Those kids at Columbine? They weren’t the first. Wesley was. He walked into an exclusive high school in the suburbs, carrying enough munitions to smoke every living human in the joint. And the truck he drove up in was full of some kind of poison gas, too. He went in there to die. And, like every other murder he planned, it worked.

Crazy. Maybe that’s what you’d think. Depressed, suicidal. It wasn’t any of that. He was tired, that’s all.

He left me something. A note. A suicide note, the way the cops saw it. For me, it was an escape hatch. In that note, Wesley took the weight for a lot of stuff I did. Signed it with his own fingerprint … the only part of him that the world ever recognized.

If he’d been depressed, instead of just DNA-deep sad, he wouldn’t have looked out for me that one last time. We were brothers. Came up together.

Wesley was ice, even then. I wanted to be just like him, once.

It was Wesley himself who told me the truth. He had no fear in him. And it wasn’t worth it.

So I knew. I wasn’t depressed; I was sad. I don’t know what other people who are sad do to fight back. I know some of what they do. Drugs, booze, sex—risks. I don’t know if it works for them, or for how long. But, for me, I could BASE-jump on cocaine and it wouldn’t change a fucking thing.

The only thing I ever can do is let both the monsters in. Fear and Rage. One keeps me alive and the other makes people dead. If you took them from me, I’d just be sad. Nothing else. Empty and sad. That’s when the Zero calls. That’s when I want to go and be with Wesley.

Maybe it would be like when we were kids. Leaning up against an alley wall, sharing a cigarette, eyes scanning, on full alert. Waiting.

Depending on who showed, we’d run, fight, or rob them.

But I don’t really believe that. I know where Wesley is. I know why they call it the Zero.

But it pulls me, still.

Max got back from Mama’s, came upstairs to my room, signed “telephone.” Then tapped his heart, pointed at me.

I shrugged a “Huh?” back at him.

He made the gesture for “Wolfe.”

I called at eleven, like she’d left word to.

“It’s me.”

“Immigration has them still at that address.”

“Illinois?”

“Yes.”

“Could it just be lag-time in getting the records updated?”

“It could be,” Wolfe said softly, “if I were relying on their records.”

I got the message. “Last contact?” I asked. “Almost a year ago. They made an application to sponsor a relative.”