Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

ALSO BY ANDREW VACHSS

Flood

Strega

Blue Belle

Hard Candy

Blossom

Sacrifice

Shella

Born Bad

Down in the Zero

Footsteps of the Hawk

False Allegations

Safe House

Choice of Evil

Everybody Pays

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2000 by Andrew Vachss

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publishing Data

Vachss, Andrew H.

Dead and gone / Andrew Vachss. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-375-41361-2

1. Burke (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private

investigators—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

3. Missing children—Fiction. 4. New York

(N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3572.A33 D42 2000

813′.54—dc21 00-040565

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

v3.1

for Alicia Jimenez:

jibara, abused child, migrant laborer, garment-district worker, defender of her family, protector of her neighborhood, savior of damaged creatures, nurturer of a revolution, mother to my brother … heroine.

all your days on this earth were without rest. always you waited for it to be your time. always waited in vain.

and now you wait for us.

en nuestros corazones nada ha cambiado. serás adorada y respetada para siempre. trabajaremos sin descanso para que te sientas orgullosa de nosotros.

espera pacientemente, Mamá. pronto será como antes fue, todos juntos.

pero sin dolor.

Technical assistance:

Lieutenant Paul Nolin Berthelotte, USN

Professor James Colbert, UNM, USMC (1970–1971)

Sergeant Mike McNamara, Licensed for Life

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

First Page

About the Author

You know what it takes to sit across the table from a man, listen to him talk, look into his eyes … and then blow his brains all over the wallpaper?

Nothing.

And the more of that you have, the easier it is.

“You pick a spot yet?” The voice on the cell phone was trying to come across as bored with the whole thing, but I could pick up little worms crawling around its edges. Impatience? Nervousness? No way to know for sure.

“No,” I told him. “And if I can’t find one in a few minutes, we’ll have to do it next time.”

“Hey, pal, fuck you, all right? There don’t have to be a next time.”

“Up to you.”

“Hard guy, huh? I guess that’s right—it’s not your kid.”

“Not yours, either,” I said, my voice level and unthreatening, sending my calmness out to him. “We’re both professionals—how about we just keep it like that? This is a trade. You know how trades work. Soon as I find a safe spot, I’ll pull in, just like we agreed, okay? We’ll hook up, do our business, and everybody gets paid.”

“You don’t find a spot soon, nobody gets paid.”

“I’ll get back to you,” I said, and killed the connection.

It had taken weeks to get this close. A missing kid. Too young to be a runaway, but there’d been no ransom note. Just a … vanishing. That was almost ten years ago. It wasn’t a media story anymore. The cops told the parents they were still looking. Maybe they were.

The parents were the kind of people the cops would put out for, that was for sure. She was a gynecologist; he did something in biochemistry. But they were also first-generation Americans; Russians. So, when they got a call from a man who spoke their language, a man who said he ran a “recovery service” on commission, they took their hopes and their fears to Odessa Beach. Not the one on the Black Sea, the one in Brooklyn.

In the Russian mob, even the grunts have a hierarchy. You can read their rank right on their bodies—the specialists mark themselves with prison tattoos. The symbols tell you who’s the thief, who’s the assassin, who uses fire, who does bodywork. But they didn’t have anyone who does what I do. So Dmitri, the boss, reached out across the border. To a Chinatown restaurant run by a Mandarin matriarch who trafficked in anything except dope and flesh. She didn’t sell food, either.

“Half a million dollars?” I asked her, seated in my booth in the back, the third bowl—of a mandatory three—of hot-and-sour soup in front of me.

“They say,” Mama answered. Meaning: she wasn’t endorsing it herself; she wouldn’t vouch for anyone involved at the other end.

“And a hundred for me?”

“For whole trade,” she said, reminding me that I hadn’t found this job on my own—they’d called her. The whisper-stream knows a phone number for me. After it bounces around the circuits, it eventually rings at one of the pay phones in the back of Mama’s restaurant.

“Six hundred,” I added it up. “And Dmitri, he’s going to taste, too, right?”

“He say, same country, he help for nothing.”

“And you say …?”

Mama just shrugged. We’d never meet the parents. What they wanted was a middleman. The hundred large was all there was as far as we were concerned, no matter who else was getting what.

“Why come to me, then?”

“Cossacks know I find you. Say you know … these people.”

“You mean they think—?”

“Not same people. Those people.”

“Ah.” Sure. Who knew the freaks better? They raised me. Recaptured me every time I ran, aided and abetted by the only parent I ever had: the State. I learned from the freaks, did time with them. And, when I got the chance, I hurt some of them.

Never enough of them, though. Those scales would never balance.

Mama was silent, letting me decide. Work was money. This deal wasn’t a retirement-size score, but it was strong cash.

Any other circumstances, she would have been all over me to take it. Instead, she looked a question at me.

I knew what she needed to hear. “I can do it,” I told her. Meaning: I could trade cash for a stolen kid and just walk away. Keep it professional.

Mama gave me a sharp look, then nodded slowly.

Whoever they were, they knew their business. I was waiting at the corner they’d had the Russians send me to, standing next to a pay phone. It rang. I picked it up.

“You’re going to hear me say a 917 number. I’m only going to say it once. You walk away from that pay phone. Far away. When you get far enough away, you call the 917 number. Don’t bother writing it down—it’s going to disappear after this one call. That’s the way we’re going to work this, until we get it all sketched out. A new number each time, understand?”