Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

Less than half an hour later, she was kneeling on the floor next to my chair, scraps of paper spread out before her.

“There are many choices,” she said. “Several different carriers, all going at different times of the day.”

“Any of them get in with plenty of margin before two in the afternoon?”

“Oh yes. All leaving from Portland. Let me see.…” She crawled around on all fours from scrap to scrap, oblivious to the sweet show she was putting on. Or not—I know less about women than I do about stamp collecting. “Ah! You have … one, two, three … at least four separate choices. It just depends on how you want to be routed.”

“Routed?”

“Yes. None of the airlines have direct flights. You can change planes in Phoenix, Oakland, Denver, or Salt Lake City.”

“I don’t care which airline. It’s not like I’ve got frequent-flyer mileage to worry about. All I need is something that gets me in there around noon or earlier.”

Gem took a very close look at one of the scraps on the carpet. A long look. I guess I do know a little more than I do about stamp collecting. “All right, then,” she finally said. “Let us make it Phoenix.”

“Great. Do you have a safe credit card you can use to make the reservation? I’ll pay you in cash.”

“Yes, of course. But you will need a—”

“I’ve got all the documents I’ll need to show them at the airport, girl. That’s not a problem.”

“How many days will this take?”

“I don’t have a clue. What difference does it make?”

She looked at me over one shoulder. “How could I pack intelligently if I do not know how long we will be gone?”

“I can pack my own—” I started to say. Her depth-charge eyes stopped me cold, and I realized what she was really saying.

“Do you like it?” Gem asked me on Monday.

I looked at the inch-and-a-half color photo she was holding in her palm. Gem, staring straight ahead, the barest hint of a smile on her face. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Not exactly a glamour shot.”

“But it looks like me, does it not?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” she said. And disappeared.

“Chantha Askew?”

“Of course,” she said, holding the passport with her picture and that name open so I could see it clearly. “Chantha is a good Cambodian name. And Askew, that is yours. Or the one on your passport, yes?”

“Yeah. But—”

“You don’t want to drive to Albuquerque,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have asked me about flights, much less to book one. There is some risk in flying. It’s not as … anonymous. You have not ever used your own passport before, have you?”

“No,” I told her, wondering even as I spoke how she could know that.

“And you have no fear of the people who constructed it for you revealing—?”

“No!” I cut her off sharp. “Not a chance.”

“All right,” she said, so softly that I realized I must have shown something in my face. Wolfe sell me out? She’d die first. And I’d rather be dead than to ever know about it if she did.

Gem was quiet for a minute. Then she gently pushed at me until I sat down, and followed me down until she was in my lap.

“They don’t have your name, the one on your passport,” she said softly, not having to spell out who “they” were. “And they don’t have your face, either. They don’t know who you are. Or where you are. You are hunting them; not they, you. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know you.…”

“What are you trying to say?”

“They wanted to kill you because they knew you. We do not know why. Assassins kill when they are paid. But those who hire assassins, it is always for one of two reasons: it is either what you did, or what you are. What you described, it was too intricate for simple revenge. Too expensive. And it has become very, very complicated. So it must be that whoever wants you dead also fears you.”

“Look, Gem, all this … logic of yours is fine, but—”

“Indulge me, please. Assume they know you. Or know about you, anyway. They do not know where you are. Or even if you are alive. But one thing I am certain they would not expect—that you would be married.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, I do not mean you could not marry. Have you ever—?”

“No.”

“Yes. All right. What I meant was, you would not be … traveling as a married man. With a wife, see?”

“So you’re coming along as cover?”

“I am coming along because I am your woman.”

“You keep saying that.”

“That?”

“That you’re my woman.”

“I am.”

“My ‘woman’ … What does that mean in Cambodian, my boss?”

“Don’t be silly!” She giggled. “I am very obedient.”

“So long as—?”

“So long as the orders are sensible,” she said, climbing off my lap.

Gem sat quietly next to me in the back seat of Flacco’s Impala on the way back up to Portland. Maybe being a married woman required more decorum.

“I am going to build one for myself, very soon,” Gordo said to me. I figured Flacco had heard this a few hundred times.

“Which way are you looking to go?”

“Like this one,” he said, patting the Impala’s padded dash. “But not no Chevy, that’s for sure.”

“Because …?”

“I need my ride to be … I don’t know, man … like no other one on the road. But I want to stay with the factory look,” he said, with a nod in Flacco’s direction. “That’s what’s happening now.”

“Me, I like the fifties better than the sixties for that,” I told him.

“Fifties? I don’t know, man. The sixties, the shapes were … wilder, you know?”

“Maybe. Maybe too wild. If I was doing it, I’d want something people’d have to look twice at just to figure out what it was.”

“Hey, hombre,” Flacco threw in, “there’s no way to do that when they made millions of each model then. What you mean? Something like a ’55 Crown Vic? Or a ’57 Fury? They’re cool, all right, but you could pick one out at a hundred yards if you leave them looking near-stock.”

“You’re right. But the one I was thinking of, it’d slip right by, you did it right.”

“So which one, man?” Gordo wanted to know.

“Picture this,” I told them. “A ’56 Packard Caribbean. The hardtop, not the convertible. Strip all the chrome, even that fat wide strip down the sides. Then you slam it all around—not put it in the weeds, just a nice drop. Give the top a subtle chop … maybe only a couple of inches. I see it with some old-style mag wheels, like American Racing used to put out. Paint it about twenty coats of the deepest, darkest purple-black—you know, that Chromallusion stuff that changes color depending on how you look at it.”

“I never seen one of those,” Gordo said.

“I did,” Flacco said. “It had those giant taillights, right? Cathedrals?”

“That’s the one.”

“The man’s nailed it, compadre,” Flacco told his partner. “That would be the biggest, bossest, most evil-looking ride on the whole coast. And those suckers had some serious cubes. Mucho room for anything you wanted to do with the rubber, too.”

“Problem is finding one,” I reminded him.

“Oh, they’ll be out there,” Flacco assured me. “This part of the country, people keep their old cars. There’s always Arizona, too—we got plenty people down there could keep a lookout for us. And you should have seen this one when I first got it. Just a rusted-out shell.”

“You went frame-off?”

“Sí!” he said, proudly. “Me and my man, here, we got about a million hours in it. Gordo’s the mechanic, I’m the bodyman.”