Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

“He knows,” Lorraine said. “Crystal Beth told me she told him about ours.”

Xyla nodded. “Okay. Anyway, this one isn’t actually his, okay? I mean, he didn’t set it up or anything. And it’s not a true domain, just a personal home page. Like a fan page, I guess you’d call it. They’re all over the Net. Some cyber-guy thinks a horror writer is hot stuff, so he starts a fan page for him. They usually post a few pictures, maybe some news about upcoming books or appearances. Like that. But the big feature is the message board.”

I gave her a puzzled look, but quickly figured out she was just drawing a breath before she went on: “You can leave messages, okay? Sometimes the star. . . or the writer, or the singer, or whoever the cyber-guy set the home page up for. . . actually answers, but that’s like a big thing. . . real rare. Usually it’s just fans of whoever the home page is for—talking to themselves, you know? Like who should play what character in the movie, like that.”

“And this guy has one of these home pages?” I asked her.

“Yeah. In fact, there’s about a half-dozen of them. One’s even in Japanese.”

“And people write to these message boards with stuff for him?”

“Sure. Mostly it’s like ‘Right on!,’ you know? I mean, they’re fans, right?”

“Of a serial killer?”

“Oh, please,” Xyla said. “First of all, that’s nothing new. Charles Manson has a website. Plenty of people get turned on by serial killers. Go to the movies, read a book—serial killers are hot stuff. But this one, it’s. . . different. I figured, at first, it was mostly gay guys writing, just being. . . encouraging, you know? But once he started blasting those child molesters, it’s like everyone’s on his side. You can see it everywhere. They call him HE. For his initials, I guess it meant, once. But now it’s like ‘he,’ understand? Like ‘He said so,’ see?”

I did see. I’d sure seen

graffiti’ed all over town. Thought it was another of those religious-nut organizations pasting their crap up the way they always do.

“Anyway, so, I got a bunch of hit-backs, like I said,” Xyla went on. “But only three even opened up the encryption, and two of those were obviously from geeks.”

“How’d you know that?”

“ ‘Cause it worked just like you said,” she replied. “That velociraptor bit. The other two, they started in with Jurassic Park. The movie, right? And they wanted me to send them a gif, and—”

“A what?”

“A picture. Digitized photograph. Just wanted to see if I was a boy or a girl, my best guess. So lame. . . like anyone couldn’t send someone else’s picture. Anyway, I knew it couldn’t be them. But this one. . . it’s him, I bet. Take a look for yourself.”

She hit some keys again. The screen blinked, went all blue, then flicked back into white. Xyla pointed at the lettering:

>>Send proof. One (1) word. No more.<<

“Jesus Christ!” I said. “That has to be him. You’re right. Can you get an address from what he sent?”

“Not a chance.” Xyla laughed. “The guy’s way ahead of me. It’s not just his addy that got nuked, it’s the whole ISP.”

“Huh?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, an undercurrent of impatience in her voice at having to explain such simple stuff to the older generation. “Look. No, I can’t trace it. Nobody could. He built it himself, from scratch. And he’s probably got more. . . that he’s only going to use one time and do the same thing. It probably only existed for a few seconds. It’s gone forever. Very, very slick,” she said, admiringly.

“But if you can’t find him. . . if his address is gone. . .?”

“I can’t find him, ” she said. “That’s true. And I could never find him if I couldn’t at least get into the server. I can’t believe he actually built one just to send one lousy message. He’s not just smart, I’ll tell you something else about him—he’s rich. Whatever he’s got, it cost more than all this,” she said, sweeping her arm to indicate the bank of machinery in the room, “times a hundred.”

“So what do we—?”

“Well, I don’t have his address, but he has mine. At least, he did. I nuked it myself, soon as I heard from him, like I told you I would. I figure, we keep playing, right? Send out another message, just like I did before. He must have known what was going to happen. That’s why he said ‘one word only,’ see? I’ll put it out there again. He does lurk. He’ll see it. And, if it works, he’ll reply to whatever new addy I send it from, then nuke himself off again, see?”

“Yeah,” I told her.

“So,” Xyla asked, her fingers poised, “what’s the word?”

I told her, playing the only card in my deck, watching the name of the ice-man pop up on the giant screen:

wesley

I tried the radio on the drive over to my place. No music that didn’t belong in elevators. No surprise. The all-news station was all-crime. No surprise there either. I tried talk radio. Mistake. Some “expert” was saying depression is America’s number-one mental illness. Chump. You want to know about America’s number-one mental illness, consult a proctologist.

Pansy was glad to see me anyway.

The next morning was so bright and crisp it made the badlands look pretty through my window. Until you looked close. Like those magazine photos of Tibet. The ones that don’t show the Chinese troops.

I thought maybe I’d start looking for the witch I needed, playing it that Nadine’s friend would come through. Then I realized. . . I didn’t know anything about the witch but her name. The name they gave her, and the name she took for herself. I knew her daughter’s name. . . but that kid would be a teenager by now. She could have moved. Disappeared, even. The only one I could have asked was the guy who got me involved with her in the first place. Julio. The one she watched die, gleeful witchfire crackling in her eyes. I still had her phone number, but it had been so long. . . .

I thought it through. Nothing. Then I worked with the singing bowl Max had given me. I never wondered why he had such a thing himself. Max can’t hear, but I know he can feel vibrations—better than anyone else I know. So, when he held it in his hands, maybe. . .

Pansy liked the sound too. I was getting pretty good at it. When I came back around, I made the decision. If she was still there, okay. If not, I’d try and trace her through her daughter. But I wasn’t going to open that coffin unless I had something to ask for.

So I went back to waiting.

Part of the waiting was sex I had with a girl named Lois. I wasn’t looking for her—she just turned up in a place I was and we went back to her apartment. If the action had been in a movie, the critics would have called the whole scene gratuitous.

“Just like old times,” she said, when we were finished.

That was the truth. She’d greeted me with “Hello, stranger,” and that’s the way I left.

I stayed down in the whisper-stream, sifting and sorting, looking for anything that could get me what I needed. That “message-board” thing Xyla told me about was nothing new. It works that way down here too. At the intersection of a few wires, I picked a rumble from a finger—someone who sets up jobs but never does them himself. Some fingers are amateurs—cable-repair guys, utility company workers, deliverymen—anyone who gets access to a house and has a chance to look around, check the security, see if there’s a dog, anything worth stealing, like that. But this particular guy was a pro, and he only fingered big jobs. An armored car, this one was supposed to be. And the finger didn’t just have the route, he had an inside man. A driver who wanted a piece of whatever haul he got “robbed” of—willing to take a few good knocks to make it look real too, and guaranteed to hold his end of the take for no less than five years before spending a penny. Sounded like gold. Unless you listened close. The way I saw it, the finger had finally gotten popped himself. And instead of diming out people who’d worked opportunities he’d pointed out in the past, the cops were using him to catch the crew who’d been doing cowboy jobs on armored cars all over the East Coast the past year or so. The cowboys didn’t seem all that organized—they’d just cut off the armored car with their own jalopy, jump out wearing ski masks and body armor, rake a full-auto burst across the windshield to get the driver’s attention, then hold up a grenade. . . high, so the driver could see what would happen if he didn’t open up. Sometimes they scored—one take was near a million—sometimes they struck out. In fact, the one driver they killed was piloting an empty truck, on his way back from a dropoff. So the FBI probably figured the hijackers for some of the White Night crowd, refinancing their coffers after so many of them had been captured last year.