Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

“Yeah, well, maybe you should put your ear a little closer to the ground. If you did, you’d hear something real interesting.”

“Like what?”

“Like a body-count fund.”

“Are you for real? What kind of—?”

“All I know is they call him the Trustee.”

“Like in prison? One of those guys who—?”

“No. Like from an estate. The word is, some crazy rich old queen left a fortune in cash to this ‘Trustee,’ all right? And his only instructions were he wanted fag-bashers murdered. So the Trustee reached out to Wesley and. . .”

“Offered him so much a head? Change your medication.”

“ You explain it,” she challenged. “And you may have to. . . in court. Watch your back, Mr. Askew.”

“Huh?”

“Your new ID,” she said, handing over the briefcase. “If your. . . partner is back in town, or back from the dead, or whatever. . . it doesn’t matter. The way they’re thinking, they already know who’s doing all this. And you’re the only connect. Don’t worry. You’re about as bust-proof as a diplomat. For now. They’re letting you dangle. Understand?”

“Yeah. But I—”

“Don’t even tell me,” Wolfe said, voice cold. “If it’s not what it looks like, I’ll have plenty of time to apologize.”

I just stood there while she got back in her car, her face grim. As the Audi pulled away, the Rottweiler looked at me like he was just waiting his turn.

“From where I sit, I like the fit,” the Prof said. “You want that kind of fun, Wesley’s the man to get it done.”

“He’s dead, Prof,” I said. Tired of saying it.

“What do we know, bro? I mean, we wasn’t there. All we saw was a bunch of stuff on TV. Explosions. That green cloud of whatever crap he let loose. Wesley, he was never like. . . people, you know? There’s an old hoodoo. . . ‘Reaching Back,’ they call it. But even if you believe in that stuff, someone has to want you to come back. And they have to bring one to get one too.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Just what it sounds like, son. The legend is there’s supposed to be a Gatekeeper. Could be a man, could be a woman. Could be anyone, anyplace. And nobody knows how to find ’em either. But, if you look hard enough, they’re supposed to appear. Anyway, you want to bring someone back, you got to bring some to get some, understand?”

“No.”

“The way it’s told, you can’t bring no good people back, okay? Just the evil ones. And the way you got to do it, you got to bring them one soul for every soul the evil one took, see?”

“No,” I said. And not because I couldn’t understand what the Prof was saying.

“Burke, mahn, my father is telling you true,” Clarence put in. “There is the same legend in the islands. If a man has killed many times, and you want to bring him back across, you too must kill as many times as he has. So the Gatekeeper will allow the passage. A trade, understand?”

“Yeah, I understand. Bujo bullshit is what I understand. I want that, I’ll go shopping in a botanica. You ever see it happen?” I asked him.

“See this? No, mahn. It is not to see. Not for me. My loss was my. . . mother, mahn. And if I thought I could return her by taking a life, I would have done that. You know I would. But it cannot work that way. My mother was good. In her heart and in her spirit. Where she is, the Gatekeeper has no power.”

“If that was true. . . and it isn’t, for chrissakes. . . but if it was, somebody’d have to kill a whole ton of motherfuckers to bring Wesley back.”

“And this Homo Erectus guy, he ain’t doing that?” the Prof challenged.

“Not enough. Anyway, why would he want Wesley back?”

“Sometimes, if the killer dies too easily, the family. . . the family of the people he killed. . . they want him back,” Clarence said.

“So they can—?”

“Yes, mahn. So they can send him over again. But with much pain.”

“That would make them as bad as. . .”

“Sure,” the Prof cut me off. “That’s why it so crazy. Don’t make no sense. I ain’t arguing with you ‘bout that. Not saying it true. But I know this. Some people believe things. And if they believe things, then they do things.”

“So you think this maniac is trying to raise Wesley from the dead? Because he wants him to die all over again? Only. . . hard this time?”

“It ain’t strong,” the Prof conceded. “But it may not be wrong neither. What we gotta do, we gotta find out more about the guy who died.”

“You mean the guy in the park? With Crystal Beth?”

“Yeah. That’s the one. Not the others, that’s not Wesley. Some of those guys this new guy did, they died slow. Wesley did a lot of hits, sure. But they was like. . . surgery, okay? He wouldn’t torture nobody—he was a killer, not a freak. Except for that one. . . on Sutton Place, remember?”

I did remember. Impossible to forget an image that I never saw but that was still whispered about. This was back when Wesley had the only kind of dispute he ever cared about—he hadn’t gotten paid. So he started killing people. When that wasn’t enough, he decided to spook them, start them running wild. Same way a stalking cheetah shows itself to a herd of antelopes—the stampede reveals the cripples. He got into the Sutton Place apartment of a connected guy’s daughter. When her husband came home from work, he found what was left of his wife. . . arms and legs spread wide on their bed, wired to the posts. With her severed head propped up between her legs, staring at him. They say he’s still in a padded room.

That started the stampede Wesley wanted. He’d left a message—on the bedroom wall, in the woman’s own blood—saying the butchery was the work of some lunatic cult, but that was just to dazzle the cops. The wiseguys knew he was promising a whole lot more.

And he kept it up, right to the end. They never found him. Wesley went out by his own hand. Not because they were closing in—they were too busy hiding to look for him. And not because he was afraid—the ice-man didn’t have any of that in his once-in-an-eon DNA. He left because he was tired. Sick and tired. He didn’t want to be here anymore, it was that simple.

A lot of us felt like that. Some of us all the time. And some of us went out that same way. But only Wesley decided he knew who the “them” was that we—all of us State-raised kids—blamed for what had happened to us.

Wesley was pure hate. The kind that metastasizes, year after year. The kind that never goes away, no matter what treaties are signed, no matter whose hands are shaken, no matter who intervenes. Permanent. As deep as your father’s father’s father’s father’s firstborn.

Only difference is, Wesley’s father was the one he hated. The one we all hated—the State. That viciously uncaring, humiliating, experimenting, lying, exploiting, torturing, unstoppable juggernaut. Wesley’s hate was a match for all that. He was us—distilled, crystallized, hardened beyond comprehension, focused past megalomania.

When Wesley went out, he wanted company: the seeds “they” were cultivating for the next generation.

So even if the poor insane bastard on Sutton Place who’d come home to that horrible greeting wanted to bring Wesley back, to give him a greeting of his own. . . and even if the legend was true, and even if he could find this Gatekeeper. . . he couldn’t ever bring enough for the tolls, like the Prof said.

It didn’t leave me anywhere.

Wolfe wouldn’t help me anymore. Maybe she wasn’t sure. . . but I could tell, from the way her gray eyes looked at me just before we parted, that the weight was mine to carry. And I’d have to carry it a long way before we could ever be. . . whatever we were to each other. . . again.