Andrew Vachss: Choice of Evil

“He didn’t warn them about my dog?”

“Not a word, pal. But as soon as they started with the battering ram, they could fucking hear about it, so they waited for the Animal Control guys to get there before they finished breaking in.”

“There weren’t any fucking bombs—”

“Uh, I know that, all right?” he cut me short. “What they found was. . . well, bottom line, that you lived there. I mean you, Burke, okay? Not from the papers, from the prints.”

“The papers. . .?”

“Yeah. You better forget about Juan Rodriguez, pal. That ain’t you no more. Not this Arnold Haines guy either. Or any of the others. Man, you sure had yourself some serious ID.”

“ ‘Had’ is right.”

“Yeah, well. . .” He dismissed my problems with a short chop of his stubby hand. “Look, the guys who tossed your joint said it was clean as a prison cell. It wasn’t till your prints came up that they made you.”

“And. . .?”

He shrugged. “And you ain’t been on parole for years. No wants, no warrants. They found a bunch of letters—somebody’s been stinging freaks, promising them kiddie porn, stuff like that—but it was all run out of some PO box in Jersey. . .”

That one’s gone too, I thought to myself.

“Only thing they found that looked like a crime they could connect to you was the tapped lines,” he continued, “from Con Ed and all.”

“I never did that. Probably the landlord himself.”

“Yeah. That’s the way they figure it. Probably an off-the-books rental. You paid him in cash, right?”

“Right. Speaking of cash. . .”

“They didn’t find any,” Morales said, flesh-pouched eyes steady on mine. “Didn’t find no guns either. You got a problem with that?”

“Not me,” I assured him.

“That motherfucking landlord,” Morales muttered. “Coulda gotten a couple a good cops killed, they’d a broken in there with that dog of yours. . . .”

“And they didn’t find any bombs.”

“That too. That piece of shit’s lucky they didn’t charge him. But the punk-ass ADA said the cocksucker had a ‘good-faith belief’ or some other such crap. Still, little weasel deserves to be fucked up.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t even think about it,” he warned me. “Right now, you walk away. Start over, I guess. Something happens to that one, Ray Charles could see through any alibi you come up with.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to find him,” I said truthfully. “He sure doesn’t live in that building.”

Morales nodded, not speaking.

“Funny how people look at things,” I said softly. “This landlord, he never said a word about my dog. You guys, you’re mad because a couple of cops could have gotten chewed up. Me, I know what would have happened if it went down like that—they would have shot her.”

“Whatever,” Morales said, standing up to leave. He stuck out his hand for me to shake. That isn’t his usual thing, but I went with it.

As soon as he was out the door, I read the little piece of paper I’d palmed when we shook hands. Just a phone number, Westchester area code.

“He would have killed my dog,” I said to Crystal Beth later that night.

“Burke. . . stop it! You’re so. . .”

“Why did he have to do that? Pansy never did anything to him. We had a deal. A square deal. I always kept my piece of it.”

“Maybe he didn’t—”

“Didn’t what ? He had to know I wasn’t around when he made the nine-one-one call. If the cops had knocked on the door with me inside, I would have let them in, let them look around, whatever they wanted. Or told them to come back with a search warrant, if I thought I could have gotten away with it. Or called Davidson, anyway. A lawyer comes over, the cops have to watch what they’re doing. He knows I would have told them something, and he didn’t want to take the chance. So he must have been watching, made sure I wasn’t there. But Pansy was. And he knew what she’d do. He was trying to get her killed.”

“Honey, you can’t know that.”

“I do know,” I told her. “What I don’t know is why. Not yet.”

“¡B uenos días!” the cheery voice at the other end of the line greeted me.

“You a Latina today, Pepper?” I asked her. “Pretty good.”

“Thanks, chief,” she answered. “It’s a lot easier than being an alien, like I was in the last show.” Pepper works with Wolfe’s crew. She’s an actress, among other things. When she’s not teaching kids gymnastics. Or singing in a choir. Or working the lifeline between Wolfe’s outlaw-info outfit and the players who pay for her services.

“I don’t need a meet for this,” I said. “Just some answers.” Then I gave her the landlord’s son’s name. “He’s in the Program,” I told her. “Can she get me—?”

“Okeydokey,” Pepper said, as if I’d said something else entirely. Then I was listening to the fiber-optic hum of a dead phone line.

“Call for you,” Mama said, nodding her head toward the bank of pay phones between the kitchen and my booth in the back.

“Who?”

“Girl. Say you know her.”

I walked back, picked up the phone. “What?” is all I said.

“He’s gone,” the woman said. Wolfe—I’d know her voice in a subway tunnel, even with the train coming.

“Disappeared?”

“Dead.”

“From?”

“The feds didn’t need an autopsy. He was Swiss cheese.”

“Ah. Any suspects?”

“ Too many. He must have been big-time stupid to go into business for himself in Vegas.”

“Thanks. How much I owe you?”

“Two large will do it.”

“I’ll have Max drop it by.”

“No rush.”

“You think I ratted him out?” I asked softly.

“How did you get this number?” the landlord wanted to know, his voice trembling.

“Oh, I always had your number, pal. Just answer my question.”

“It had to be you. You were the only one who knew—”

“He went into business for himself. Out there, I mean. Your kid, he had a disease. He liked being an informant, even when his own case was over. I had nothing to do with it. You wanted me out of there, all you had to do was ask.”

“I. . .”

“You knew my dog was there,” I said quietly.

“Look, if I was wrong, I’m sorry. I mean, we can still work something—”

“You’ll never see it coming,” I promised him, cutting the connection on my last word.

That was it, then. Humans are the only pack that tolerates predators of its own species. Most think “family” is a biological term. Not my family. My family is my choice, and I belong to them like a wolf cub does to a pack. Only I’m grown now. All of us, grown. Only babies—some lucky babies—get that “unconditional love” the talk show psycho-flashers are always bleating about. We know better. For adults, there’s always conditions. And one of them is that the pack survive, that the house stay safe.

We had killed to do that, all of us, together. And when it was over, Crystal Beth asked me if I was going to stay. Not here, not in this cesspool of a city where I was born—stay with her.

I told her the truth then: I didn’t know.

But I was there now. Me and Pansy. Trying. Living in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, seeing if it could maybe be my house too. That’s when it started.

People don’t kill for no reason. What the cops don’t get is that sometimes no reason is the reason.

They thought it was random, that first one. A target of opportunity. Like the victim of a bomb dropped from above the clouds, the pilot certain everything down below was the enemy. Killing things, not people. Following orders.