Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

“I’m missing a piece. More than one.”

“We’ve got someone out there.”

“INS?”

“Chicago PD.”

“You said … Never mind. He’s with you? Or just someone who can be worked with?”

“The former. And you and he have mutual interests, anyway.”

“How could that be?”

“He wants the missing kid,” Wolfe said.

Even if the DEA wasn’t lurking around every big-city airport, fitting passengers into their lame “profiles,” everyone on my side of the line knows better than to buy a ticket with cash. That one’s a guaranteed red flag. They want photo ID now, too, so slipping through the cracks isn’t as easy as it used to be.

I didn’t know how far my new face would take me. Didn’t know if they had an alert out. My old mug shots wouldn’t match up. I knew they’d photographed me in the hospital more than once, but never without the bandages. Still, the two Bronx detectives had seen the new face enough times so a police sketch artist could probably get pretty close.

It had been a long time. Happened in late August; now it was the tail end of January. Wolfe said there were no wants-and-warrants out on me. But that didn’t mean they weren’t looking—you don’t need a warrant to bring someone in for “questioning,” especially a two-time felony loser with no known address.

I wasn’t worried that anyone loyal to Dmitri was looking. I didn’t think there was anyone loyal to Dmitri still alive. If they were, they were holed up somewhere, waiting for their chance to get out of town. Or for a clear shot at Anton.

But whoever set the whole thing up, they were waiting. Or thought I was dead. And I had no way to tell which.

I shook my head, as if the movement would clear my thoughts. There were too many possibilities. And not enough data. Maybe whoever set it up did think I was dead. The shooters would have reported that I’d been hit. And that they’d put a round into my skull to make sure. An unidentified guy found dead in the Hunts Point wasteland wouldn’t have been enough to make the papers.

There would be a record, though. Homicides get investigated, even if not all equally. There’d be an attempt to identify any dead body. And if whoever tried to cap me knew anything about me, they’d know my prints would fall in five minutes.

So they had a tight time-frame, a location, and plenty of resources. And with Dmitri getting blown away, more than enough to add it up. I had to play it like a hand of five-card stud, now down to the final bet. I couldn’t see their hole card, but there were enough other gamblers at the table so that I had a pretty good count of the deck. I was betting they knew they hadn’t finished the job.

Wolfe had returned my passport. Some guy nobody recognized dropped it off at Mama’s. It was the same one I’d given her in the restaurant: the beautiful forgery she’d had made for me a while back. The new one had the same phony name. Only now the photo matched my new face.

But that didn’t mean I should be quick to use it. No matter how big the organization that had tried to kill me was, they couldn’t have been watching all the ways out of town—especially this town—for the past few months. So they couldn’t trap me at the border. But they could follow my trail … if I was dumb enough to leave paper footprints.

Clarence drove me to Philly. Only took a couple of hours, even with the sporadic snow. I shouldered my duffel bag and stepped into the terminal at Thirtieth and Market, where I grabbed an Amtrak for D.C. It was about ten minutes by cab from Union Station to the bus depot. I was on a Greyhound to Chicago by a little past midnight.

We hit Pittsburgh by morning, changed buses in Cleveland, made a rest stop somewhere in Indiana, and rolled into Chicago around three-thirty in the afternoon. Going by bus, it takes quite a while. And you have to do without a lot of features the airlines provide. Like metal detectors.

“You know this town?” The voice on the phone was cop-hard, but with an unmistakable Irish lilt.

“Been here a few times is all.”

“You’re not far from Wells Street. Just walk south—away from the lake—a couple of blocks. There’s a bookstore in the twelve-hundred block. Big one. Called Barbara’s. They’re used to all kinds of people in there. I’ll meet you outside at nine tonight. Just stand outside, to the left of the door as you come out. You smoke, right?”

“No.”

“Well, just carry a cigarette, then. Explains why you’re standing outside in this weather.”

“Okay.”

The bookstore was much bigger than a first glance would tell you. When I walked in, I saw a long narrow corridor with a counter to the right. But it spread out to my left, and just kept going. I wandered through the stacks, passing time until the meet. Walls of books. I thought about how much reading I’d done since … it happened. When I realized how close I’d come to losing my sight, I turned as indiscriminately greedy as a just-paroled prisoner in a whorehouse. I read everything I could get my hands on. Once I settled down, I kept up the reading but got more selective.

The last few months had been a lot like being back Inside. Reading, lifting weights … getting ready. And most of the time spent scheming about what I was getting ready for.

I spotted a new Joe Lansdale novel, one I hadn’t read. I almost grabbed it, but I checked myself in time. Maybe they wouldn’t remember every customer, but they were much more likely to remember someone who’d actually made a purchase. Independent bookstores aren’t like the chains. The people who work for the indies, most of them really love books. They’ll use any purchase to engage you in a conversation, find out what you like, try to hand-sell you something they like.

My cheap plastic electronic watch said it was five minutes to the meet. I knew it kept better time than the Rolex I had stashed in my duffel. I stepped outside and stood with my back to the building, cupping my hands around the flame from the butane lighter as I got a cigarette going. As soon as I did that, a flashlight blinked on and off from inside a white Nissan sedan parked at the curb. The passenger window moved down in sync with my approach. I leaned in.

“How’s Wolfe these days?” the driver said.

I got in.

“Clancy,” he said as he pulled away, holding out his right hand.

Askew,” I told him, shaking his hand. “Wayne Askew.”

“Wolfe’s?” he asked. Meaning: he knew my true name, and was the new ID one of Wolfe’s creations?

“Yeah.”

He nodded, satisfied. Wolfe’s papers were the best in the business. If I got popped in his jurisdiction, odds were I’d get past the screens—as long as they stopped short of printing me.

The Nissan was overflowing. One cell phone was recharging from the cigarette-lighter outlet in the console, another sat on top of the dash, next to a small tape recorder, two pagers, and a notebook. There were a half-dozen pens clipped to the dash, and a sheaf of papers bulged from behind the sun visor. The windshield featured a series of hairline cracks. The ones in the dash were well past hairline, deep scars that showed the foam padding underneath. The back seat was covered with cartons, their tops cut off to make a filing system. Books were stacked haphazardly throughout the car, like pebbles from a carelessly tossed I Ching reading.

“You got a place?” he asked.

“No. I figured I’d wait until—”

“Okay. Where’s your stuff stashed?”

“Bus station. Twenty-four-hour locker.”

He nodded, not saying anything, letting the fact that we were heading for the depot speak for itself. He stopped outside. I went in, opened the locker, grabbed my duffel. When I got outside, I saw his trunk was open. I tossed the bag inside and climbed back into the passenger seat.