Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

“You got a change of clothes with you?”

“Sure.”

“I mean a change , not fresh clothes. If you want to work the area I think you do, you have to dress the part. Can you go upscale with what you’re carrying around?”

“I can if I can get into a decent place for a few hours, take out the creases, clean up, and all; no problem.”

“All right. What about cash?”

“How much do you—?”

I interrupted myself when I saw the look on his face. Mumbled, “Sorry.”

“You think we’re all a pack of bribe-taking slobs?” he said, chuckling.

“No,” I said truthfully. “A lot of cops aren’t slobs.”

“Hah! All right, look, the thing about money is this: you’re going to need money if you want to poke around in the ritzy suburbs. That homeless-guy look you’re wearing, the only thing it’ll get you in the places you need to visit is rousted.”

“Fair enough.”

“And you’ll need transport, too.”

“I can pay whatever it costs. But I don’t want to book this ID if I don’t have to.”

“I can get you a car. But not Hertz rates.”

“I’m fine with that.”

The hotel was right off the lake. We walked straight over to the elevators. The security man at the entrance to the elevator bank opened his mouth, then shut it without a sound when Clancy grabbed his eyes.

The room was on the twenty-first floor, with a view of a driving range below.

“It’s three hundred a night,” Clancy said. “That includes the room showing as vacant on the computer.”

I handed him twelve C-notes, saying, “For the car, too,” as I did.

“Be downstairs tomorrow morning,” he said. “Six a.m., okay?”

“I’ll be there,” I told him.

I unzipped the duffel, started laying out my stuff carefully.

Especially that shark-gray alpaca suit Michelle had insisted I spend a fortune on.

“This will never show a hint of a wrinkle, honey,” she’d said. “Just hang it in the bathroom and run the shower full-blast hot for an hour or so—it’ll be new every time you put it on.”

Remembering her muttered threats about never allowing a wire coat-hanger to invade the sacred alpaca, I located a wooden one in the closet and got the steam working.

Everything I had with me was new. Michelle had measured me herself, done all the shopping. That way, she got to do all the selecting.

“You need a look , sweetheart,” she said, talking quick and nervous, the way she does when a topic upsets her. “With that face … until it heals, I mean—then you can have plastic surgery and it’ll all be … Anyway, in an Army jacket, you look like a serial killer. But in these clothes, baby, you’ll look exotic, I swear it.”

So I’d kept quiet while she spent my money on all this new stuff. Didn’t bother to bring up that I already had a place full of new clothes, an abandoned factory building near the Eastern District High School in Bushwick. That had been about Pansy, too. I’d watched her being carried out of my old place on a stretcher, the whole place surrounded by NYPD. I thought they’d killed her, but they’d only tranq’ed her out. We managed to spring her from the shelter, but I’d had to find a new place. And leave everything I had in the old one.

When that happened, Michelle had said what a great opportunity it was—I’d needed a whole new wardrobe, anyway. Now that was gone, too.

NYPD had come calling because my old landlord had 911’ed me, saying the crawl space in his building where I lived was being used by a bunch of Arabs as a bomb factory. I’d had a sweet deal with him for a lot of years. His son was a rat who loved his work. I’d run across the little weasel hiding in the Witness Protection Program when I was looking for someone else, and I traded my silence for the free rent. It was unused space up there anyway; didn’t cost the owner a penny.

But when his kid got smoked in Vegas, the landlord decided I was the one who’d given him up, and dropped a ten-ton dime on me. Pansy might have been killed then, but the cops had heard her threats when they’d started battering the door down. So they’d called for Animal Control instead of going in—no way to tell a dog you’ve got a warrant.

I tracked the landlord’s unlisted phone and rang him one night. Told him I’d had nothing to do with what happened to his kid—the punk was addicted to informing, and Vegas was the wrong town for that hobby. I also told him that my dog could’ve been killed by his little trick.

He said he was sorry. He’d just assumed it was me who fingered his son. He said he’d make it right.

I told him he’d never see it coming.

Lying on the hotel bed in the Chicago night, I told myself the truth. The people who’d tried to hit me, they were pros. No question about it. Just a job. The ones I wanted were the string-pullers, not the puppets.

But the puppets had killed Pansy.

I thought about the setup I’d had for her, back at my place. The huge stainless-steel bowl anchored in a chunk of cement so it could withstand her onslaughts, the inverted water-cooler bottle, the dry dog food she could get for herself if I wasn’t around, the tarpapered roof where I’d take her so she could dump her loads without my having to walk her on the street. The giant rawhide bone that she adored so much she’d never annihilated it the way she had every other toy I’d gotten her, the heavy velour bathrobe she used as a blanket, the sheepskin she slept on …

Training her with reverse commands, so that “Sit!” meant attack. Poison-proofing her so she wouldn’t take food unless she heard the key word. Working with a long pole and a series of hired agitators until she’d learned to hit thigh-high, not leave her feet and make herself vulnerable.

Playing with her in the park. Coming home to her and never being alone when I did.

Looking out at the dark, my hand on her neck, together against whatever might be out there.

The vet telling me her arthritis just meant she was getting old. Telling me she didn’t have forever; at seventeen, Pansy was way past the limit for her breed.

Knowing that I might prolong her life with a special diet, but that she’d rather go out earlier and keep getting the treats she loved so much. The only change I’d made was that I never let her near chocolate anymore. The vet told me chocolate was toxic to dogs, could even be fatal. So I’d switched her to honey-vanilla ice cream.

Glad I had made that decision now.

But so fucking sad that, some nights, I was afraid to sleep.

I was getting used to my reflection in the mirror. Michelle had made all the cosmetology decisions. “Your hair changed color, baby. I was going to touch it back to black for you. But you know what? I think steel’s your color. And keep it very short—that’s so very severe.” I never got it together enough to ask her what the hell that meant.

I was going to grow a beard, just to let it cover the bullet-scar. But it was a failure. The damn thing grew in black, streaked with red and white—called a lot more attention to my face than the scar would.

Michelle fixed that, too. She gave me some stuff that came in a tube like lipstick, but once on, it blended with my complexion. “One girl’s scar is another’s beauty mark,” she had explained. I never asked her what that meant, either. I’d heard enough when she said that I was lucky to have lost an eyebrow to the surgeon’s pre-op razor because it would grow back in neat and clean and men never pay attention to their eyebrows and they’re what set off the eyes and …

The outside sky was dark. Couldn’t get a clue about the weather. Checked my watch, the white-gold Rolex now. “It’s not ultra-ultra, like Patek Philippe or Piquet,” Michelle had counseled, “but it goes with the look. Yellow gold would be tacky, and stainless would be too down-market. This is perfect.”