Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

“Yes.”

She went quiet again. I shoved in a cassette, turned one of the dials to crank the bass heavier toward the rear of the car—Pansy likes the bass lines best.

“Who’s that?” she asked after a couple of minutes.

“Judy Henske.”

“Oh, wow. She’s. . . great. I never even heard of her. Is she, like, old or something?”

“How old does she sound?”

“Like she’s about thirty-five. . . and like she’s lived a couple of centuries.”

“Good call,” I told her, letting Judy’s fire-and-velvet voice roll over us both. That particular tape was all estrogen—KoKo Taylor, Katie Webster, Etta James, Marcia Ball, Irma Thomas, Little Esther, Janis, La Vern Baker, Big Mama.

“I never heard any of that,” she said toward the end. “Ever.”

“Then you’ve been cheated, girl.”

“Are any of them. . . alive. I mean. . .”

“Marcia Ball was in town last week. Judy’s on the coast. KoKo’s still working. Sure.”

“Would you take me? I mean, take me to hear some of that. . . what is it, anyway?”

“It’s what you call it. To me, it’s the blues.”

“But it doesn’t make you blue. I mean, the songs are. . . sad. Some of them. But that one, the engineer one, that was. . .”

“Raucous?” I asked her. Magic Judy’s “Oh, You Engineer” puts it right in your face—you want her to ride your train, you better have one hell of a motor.

“Yeah. She sounds so tough.”

“She’s a mean woman, no question.”

“Not like. . . nasty, right?”

“No. One who can take care of herself.”

“And you like that? In a woman?”

“That’s all I do like,” I said, telling her the truth for once.

“What you said to me before. . . when I told you to kiss my ass.”

“Yeah?”

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

I didn’t say anything, thinking of where my line had come from: a stripper I knew a long time ago, standing in front of a mirror, looking back over her shoulder to make sure the black seams on her nylons were straight. . . “My butt is my best feature. The only time a man ever really fell in love with me was when I was walking away from him.”

Silence filled the car. I didn’t switch tapes—we were only a few blocks from the joint where I was going to drop her off.

“You don’t know what to do with an apology, do you?” she finally asked.

“Sure.”

“No, you don’t. I apologized for what I said. Now it’s your turn.”

“I got nothing to apologize for,” I told her, pulling to the curb.

She opened the door, turned to face me, said, “You know you lied,” and slammed the door behind her.

Things were quiet for a few days. I invested a lot of time trying to put a sweet little sting together, but it wouldn’t mesh. So I passed. That’s the way I do business—safely or not at all. Impatience imprisons.

The city stayed edgy. Then the director of one of the above-ground pedophile organizations turned the key to start his pretty new car and drove straight to hell. The radio report said the car exploded right in the freak’s driveway.

First Amendment absolutists wrote frenzied letters to newspaper editors, bemoaning a country where a person could be executed for expressing unpopular opinions. They didn’t sign their names. Talk shows were loaded with pious pigs droning about the wages of sin. The cops said they had some suspects, but no prime ones.

For all that, the smart money was that the hit was personal, not political. The major pedophile organizations love to publish their little “Enemies Lists,” especially on the Net. But if they knew how long that list really was, they’d spend the money on bulletproof vests instead.

Still, the group the dead man had headed decided they needed it to be political, milk it for the mileage. So they announced a candlelight vigil would be held outside Gracie Mansion—the Mayor’s house.

They were standing there, mourning their loss for the TV cameras, when somebody who knew how to use a grenade launcher took seven of them out with one blast.

The snuff film was a big hit on the networks. But nobody put it together—in fact, most of them were a hundred and eighty degrees off—until the next letter arrived.

There are many ways to oppress gays. Fag-bashing is the most obvious, but not the most devastating. Physical attacks on homosexuals are not only tolerated by the general community, but covertly encouraged. These are known facts. What is not known is that much of the animosity against gays is fueled by the utterly false belief that a pedophile is a homosexual run amok. Journalism has been complicitous in this fraud. The very newspaper in which this is being printed is a prime example. Remember the headline: “Teacher Arrested in Homosexual Child Abuse”? That story involved a kindergarten teacher and a five-year-old boy. Ask yourselves—and this is addressed to the journalism community as well—if the victim had been a little girl, would the headlines have screamed “Heterosexual Child Abuse!”? You know the answer. Much of this is ignorance, but some of it is by design. Pedophiles have carefully self-styled as “gay,” seeking to extend the continuum of tolerance for homosexual relations between consenting adults to the rape of children. How many pedophiles have camouflaged themselves as “gay activists” in order to use the old “First they came for the Jews” canard to terrify gays into some “common cause” nonsense? Gays hate child molesters as much as straights do. Some of us, more so. Some of us victims much more so. After careful consideration, I have concluded that pedophiles who insist on being labeled “homosexual” are equally guilty of fag-bashing. Now they will pay the same price. Watch your language!

It was signed with the “Homo Erectus” tag. Nobody questioned its authenticity—the body count had wiped out any doubts.

The city reeked of fear.

I missed not paying taxes. Juan Rodriguez died in the attack on my office. Sooner or later, IRS would go looking for him. That wasn’t a problem, but the No Visible Means of Support was. Or it would be, if I got popped again. And I felt that coming—IRS wasn’t in a hurry, but the cops were. They would have paraded one of the outpatients who confessed in front of the cameras by now, doing the whole Perp Walk thing, but they knew what would happen next—the killer would show the world that it was phony. And who knows? Maybe he’d decide that promoting a bogus confession was a kind of gay-bashing too. Nobody wanted to walk into that minefield. But arresting me was no big risk. They wouldn’t have to tell the papers I was suspected of the actual murders, just recite any lame routine about “conspiracy” or “aiding and abetting” and it would take the heat off them for a while. With my record, I’d qualify perfectly for remand without bail—history of violence, no roots in the community, significant risk of flight to avoid. . .

The best way to lock in a bogus ID is to have it keep up its tax payments while you’re someplace where you couldn’t. I figured I was going down soon as the cops found me, and I wanted the new name in place first. That way, I could start the withholding and Social Security and all the other government crap rolling first, and let it build while I was Inside. Davidson would spring me sooner or later—it’s happened before—and I could get something out of it.

But I couldn’t hunt from Inside, so I couldn’t stay there too long. My plan was to have Davidson walk me in again, soon as Wolfe came through with the ID. Pansy can get her own food. I have this six-foot-high metal box with a lip at the bottom that she can shove with her snout to make the dry dog food drop. And a hundred-gallon water bottle inverted in place so she can drink, too. It’d be good for a couple of months, minimum, and there’s plenty of space for her to roam around. It’s not perfect, and I felt bad the last time it happened, but there’s nobody to leave her with. I mean, she wouldn’t go after Max, but she wouldn’t go with him either.