Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

“Privacy Please” sign on the door. Trying to think it through. Byron said he had someone he wanted to hook up with, gave me his pager number, and told me to beep him if anything jumped off.

Options. The Post Office used to have a form for tracing people who left a forwarding order with them. A stalker used this public service to find a woman once. And killed her. The Post Office doesn’t use that form anymore, except for businesses. Besides, those forwarding orders expire after a year or so. No good.

I could send them an oversized envelope and tag it in some way—a giant red sticker would do the job—and then try and spot it in the hand of someone leaving the drop. But it was February. People wore coats. And carried bags. No good.

I could probably get a photo of the Russians—INS would have them on file. Or maybe Clancy could sweet-talk a snapshot out of Marushka. But that could dead-end easily enough. They could be paying someone to fetch the mail for them. Or even be using the mail drop as a way station, forwarding it from there to somewhere else. Anywhere else. No good, squared.

I had to go with the bang-dye idea. And play it for a delayed explosion.

The phone rang at ten that night.

“What?” I answered.

“You have car?” Mama asked. I could tell she was talking on a cellular, guessing the outgoing lines on the bank of pay phones in the back of the restaurant were tapped. Everyone in my family is a player in different things, but one thing we all play is safe.

“I can get one.”

“Okay. You go tomorrow. Wear ring.”

The directions she gave me weren’t that specific, but all I really needed was the town. And the name of the boat.

“We looking at a hot LZ?” Byron asked later that night.

“No. It’s just a meet.”

“With a stranger, right?”

“Right.”

He gave me a look. I nodded agreement. Then I asked him, “Can you fix me up with a car? I don’t want to rent—”

“Sure. I got a special one I’ve been dying to try out, anyway.”

“Byron …”

“Like you said, it’s not hot, right? I heard the Oregon coast’s beautiful. And it’s two-lane blacktop all the way down. Can’t wait.”

“What the hell is this?” I asked him the next morning as I climbed into an electric-blue coupe bristling with scoops, spoilers, and fender flares, riding on tires that bulged like steroided biceps.

“This, partner, is a Subaru.”

“Not like one I ever saw.”

“Not like one anyone in America’s ever seen. Vancouver is the Subaru port—it’s where they ship their cars from Japan. This one’s an Impreza 22B-STi, a homologated rally car. They only sell them over there—they don’t meet emissions requirements, and, anyway, they only build a few hundred every year, and those are snapped up immediately. This one’s destined for a gray-market conversion.”

He slid the car through the light downtown traffic. It snarled like a pit bull on a too-short leash.

“What you’ve got here is a two-point-two-liter boxed four, with a mega-boost turbo and aluminum intercooler. Makes well over three hundred horses. See this?” he asked, touching a heavy knurled knob on the center console. “It controls a locking-center differential. This is full-time four, but you can dial the split yourself. It locks at fifty-fifty.”

“It’s not exactly subtle,” I said.

“Where’ve you been, man? This is the West Coast. They don’t drag-race Mustangs and Camaros out here—it’s all rice-burners.”

“Front-wheel drive?” I asked, skeptically.

“Yep. With micro-motors, boosted to the max.”

“And on the bottle.”

“Now you’re getting the picture. This beast, trust me, we’re hiding in plain sight.”

“Fair enough.”

A light, misty rain started to fall. Byron grinned, and gunned it out of a long left-hand sweeper, kicking the tail out just a notch, his hands delicate on the small padded steering wheel. “It’s an easy spot to find, don’t worry. Besides, it’s daylight.”

I thought of the landing lights on that dirt track in Biafra a million years ago. Byron nodded silently, as if he was right in sync with me.

“See any whales yet?” he asked, tilting his head toward the ocean on my right.

“Whales?”

“Whales for sure, partner. This coast is like the whale-watching capital of the world. That’s why the tourists come.”

“Can’t imagine a whole lot of tourists this time of year. Won’t be summer for a while yet.”

“Maybe not, brother. But the whales don’t come for the tourists, right? The tourists come for the whales.”

“Sure.”

“You’re not even curious, huh? You ever see a whale?”

“No.”

“If you ever did—up close, I mean—you’d never understand why anyone could kill one.”

“All you mean is you couldn’t kill one. The people who do it, they probably get as close as any whale-watching tourist. Closer, even. And they still pull the trigger.”

“Evil motherfuckers.”

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “If they did it for fun, maybe. Or if they made the things suffer before they killed them. Tortured them, I mean. But it’s just food to some people, right?”

“Food? Those things, I swear to God, they’re practically human.”

“And those kids in Biafra—what were they?”

He was silent for a few miles, concentrating on his driving. Then he said, “And what was I, Burke? A nigger queer. In a jungle a million miles away from civilization, in a place where there’s no laws. No affirmative action. No hate-crimes legislation. A free-fire zone. You remember some of the mercs … not the guys who thought they were fighting Communism or liberating a country. You know the ones I mean—the ones who thought being a mercenary meant having a license to kill niggers, and getting paid for it. You don’t want to say why you saved me over there; you want to say you got no idea, you were just a kid yourself; that’s okay. But you had to have asked yourself why you went in the first place.”

I looked over at Byron. He downshifted just before a series of serpentine curves, his face set, mouth a straight line.

“I haven’t asked myself questions about why people do things since I was a little kid.”

“What happened then?” he asked.

“Nobody answered,” I told him.

The Ly Mang looked like a Hudson River scow with a shack growing out of it. I left Byron in the car, made the approach myself. A short, muscular man with the face of an Inca was doing something to a net on the deck, working at a slow, deliberate pace. He raised his head as I came closer; watching, not moving.

“Is Gem around?” I asked him.

“Who are you?” he responded, his accent more in the rhythm than in the sound.

“She’s expecting me.”

“Today?”

“Yes.”

“Stay there,” he said, flicking the knife he had been using closed with one hand.

I slouched against one of the massive posts holding up the pier, patting my pockets for the pack of smokes that wasn’t there. A mistake. Habits are patterns, and patterns are paths. Trails for trackers. I was somebody else now, and I had to stay there.

A girl in a pink T-shirt and blue-jean shorts came out of the cabin. She said something I couldn’t hear to the Mexican, then vaulted over the railing to the pier, landing as lightly as a ballerina.

Her hair was jet black, framing a delicate Oriental face. A slim, leggy woman with a tiny waist, she could have been sixteen or thirty-five. But when she got close enough for me to see her eyes, there was no chance of mistaking her for a teenager.

“I am Gem,” is all she said. If standing out in the cool weather dressed like that bothered her, it didn’t show on her face.