Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

I reached toward her face. She was unflinching, eyes wide. I tangled my left hand in her hair, pulled her across me, and smacked her bottom a couple of times. Harder than she had slapped me.

When I let go of her hair, she stayed where she was.

“Gem. If I—”

“Feel me,” she said, softly.

I fell asleep with Gem lying across me. And woke up to her mouth on my cock. Full. She pulled away, held my cock in her fist, said, “See, stupid man!,” and climbed on top of me.

Instead of a gigantic corkboard, Lune now used some sort of projection system—whatever one of his crew typed into the notebook computers they all had on their laps showed up on a broad expanse of pristine white wall. Lune connected to the individual words with some kind of electronic pointer—changing their color and moving them around to construct his patterns.

Every day, more facts passed their “authentication” test. And the list grew:

“What’s that all about?” I asked Lune, pointing to a spot on the wall where Nazi Lowriderswas displayed in green.

“Supposedly another hate group,” the Latina answered for him. “But they operate as roving gangs—the Aryans call them ‘street soldiers.’ They’re not into turf at all. They’re younger than most white-supremacist crews, and they tend to focus on blacks, rather than Jews, for as-yet-unknown reasons.”

“So Inside …?”

“Yes. They often ally themselves with Chicanos against the blacks,” she finished for me.

“So how do they connect to …?”

“They may not,” Heidi put in. “But, even though they wear the kill-tattoos—they use lightning bolts instead of spiderwebs—and do the whole Hitler thing, their raison d’être is drug-dealing. And crystal meth is their product. So, when you look at Ruhr and Timmons …”

“It’s time to plug in the personals,” Lune announced.

Nobody said anything. But they were all looking at me.

“It’s up to you,” Lune said.

“Take your best shot,” I told them all.

It took the better part of four full days, and Lune’s crew weren’t nine-to-fivers—every time I looked around, there was still another one I didn’t know. Working. The new wall they created finally got filled. With my life.

I’d never have thought there was that much to it. And, when they put it all down, I could see there really wasn’t.

Father unknown. Orphaned-by-abandonment when my teenage mother gave a phony name and then checked out of the hospital ward without me. The whole trail from there. Always dropping, never climbing. Tighter and tighter levels of custody as I aged. Both my long prison jolts—the hijackings and the shootings—and all the short stays in jail. The madness in Biafra. All my scams, hustles, and cons. Kiddie porn that never got delivered. Crates of guns that did.

I went all the way with them, leaving nothing out except for when I’d been with Lune—that part had to be his call.

All the way down , trampolining off the Zero itself. Even the kid I’d killed by accident in a gunfight in that basement in the South Bronx. The basement where they were making the kind of movies where the star dies at the end. But that truth had never erased the guilt I’d carried ever since. Other killings—ones I still felt good about. Belle’s daughter-raping father. Strega’s Uncle Julio. Mortay, the karate-freak who wanted a death-match with Max—and got ambushed by me instead. All the things I’d done with Wesley.

I kept going through the swamp of my life, dredging up memories with every name. So many dead. So many gone. It was like a thirtieth high-school reunion, where everyone looks around to see who’s going to show up this time. Or not.

I wasn’t proud of what they put up there. But I wasn’t ashamed of it, either. When you make a Child of the Secret, sometimes he comes back “home” for a visit.

Lune flicked his pointer. One word popped up on the wall, in bright blue letters: Pedophile(s).

“It’s the single common thread,” Lune said to all of them. “Burke makes his … living in a variety of ways, all of which could motivate enemies to the sort of assassination that was attempted on him. But the resources necessary to orchestrate such an attempt … No, it has to be someone who believes Burke is pursuing him.”

“Or her,” the Latina added.

“Yes,” Lune said. “Certainly. Our own research indicates that Burke’s reputation is … mixed. Some see him as a mercenary. Others as a hired killer. There are even those who believe him to be some sort of private investigator. But most know him professionally as a contraband-dealer. The one unifying thread on which we can rely is … Aydah?”

Aydah, a tall, slender black woman, got to her feet to speak. “In New York,” she said, in a faint French accent, “when it comes to pedophiles, Mr. Burke is considered a homicidal maniac. An irrational, dangerous individual who is blamed—or, depending on the source, credited—with virtually every type of violence against them—assaults, murders, arsons, explosions.”

“Personality as perceived?” a guy from the far corner asked. He was white, medium-height, slim build—a good-looking kid with very close-cropped hair.

“Single most distinguishing characteristic is pathological vengefulness,” she answered him.

“Thank you, Aydah,” Lune said formally.

“But the operation itself,” an Asian kid with cold eyes offered, “… the way it was coordinated, the assassins were certainly professionals. So it isn’t just a question of money, then. Whoever hired them had to know where to find them.”

“That’s right, Minh,” Heidi said, “and you can’t just find a contract killer in the Soldier of Fortune want ads anymore.”

“Maybe the connect is to Timmons and Ruhr,” Aydah said.

“That doesn’t authenticate,” the Latina argued. “Those white supremacists aren’t even good at killing, never mind gunfighting. It smells more like the government.”

“Oh, they’re real experts, all right,” Aydah shot back.

Lune held up his hand for silence.

“Burke, it’s your time now,” he said. “You have to sit down and start making out a list. It doesn’t matter how long it is, but it has to be as complete as you can possibly make it.”

“A list of …”

“Pedophiles who might want revenge for something you did. Or who might have had reason to believe you were hunting them.”

“That could be any—”

“You’re safe here,” Lune said. “Take all the time you need.”

I knew better than to do that kind of work without a break. Your body gets tired, it moves slower. But when your mind gets tired, it turns on you.

There was a heavyweight-championship fight on the giant-screen TV they had in one of the common rooms. Not many were watching: the white kid with the close-cropped haircut, the Asian they had called Minh, the Indian, the Latina, and a couple of others.

“Clint,” the white kid said to me, holding out his hand for me to shake. “This is my partner, Minh.”

I shook both their hands—they were the first ones I’d met there who offered them.

The fight was pitiful. One boxer spent most of each round leaning against the ropes like a wino using a wall to prop himself up. The other guy slapped at him as if he were trying to keep flies off a corpse.

“If I hit a guy like that on the street in front of a dozen witnesses, I wouldn’t even get arrested,” I said.

Clint laughed, offered me a high-five.