Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

blowgun dart

“Any idea why he only wants such short messages?” I asked as soon as her fingers left the keyboard.

“It could have something to do with his security software, but it’s too much for me to figure out,” she replied. “You’d think it would be the other way, right? I mean, he’d want to keep his transmissions as short as possible, limit his exposure. Are they longer?”

“Much longer,” I told her.

“It couldn’t be something as simple as an attached file,” she mused. “Maybe. . . I don’t know. You want me to poke around, see if I can—”

“No!” I interrupted her sharply. “Don’t look for him at all. Stay away. Just get word to me anytime he makes contact again, okay?”

“Okay. Sure, if that’s what you want. Lorraine said—”

“Sure. Thanks, Xyla. I really appreciate this.”

“You don’t look so good,” she said.

“Little girl, I never look good.”

“Stop that! I mean, you look. . . I dunno, drained or something. Was it his message?”

“Oh yeah,” I told her.

I thought I had it then. Organized crime—no, preying on organized crime—that was going to be his specialty. . . if whatever thing he was doing at the time he wrote his journal worked out. Which it obviously must have, if he was still out there somewhere.

I wondered if any of it was true. Any of anything.

“You heard me,” I told the voice on the phone. “Every kidnapping which resulted in the kid not being returned. Ransom kidnappings, money successfully changes hands, kid never found, nobody ever arrested. Got it?”

“Sure. But you’re probably asking the wrong man.”

“How so?”

“I can get all the reported cases that meet your search criteria.”

“Meaning?”

“Look, I’m a journalist,” Hauser’s gruff voice came back over the phone, “not a cop. I can work Nexis easy enough, but that’s a media database; it won’t get you anything that didn’t make the papers, see?”

“Sure. I got that other part covered.”

“And what’s in it for me?”

“I just told you,” I said, hanging up on him. Hauser was only going through his reporter’s dance. He’s an info-trader, so under any other circumstances, I’d have to promise him access to something—a story, an exclusive. . . whatever. But I’ve known Hauser for a long time. Being a father is the most sacred thing in his life. Telling him I was looking for a child-snatcher was enough, and we both knew it.

“Let me write this down,” Nadine said. She turned her back on me and left her living room, to return in a minute with a grid pad like architects use and one of those gel-handled pens that’re supposed to conform to your fingers as you hold then. She looked at me expectantly.

“Kidnappings,” I told her. “Successful kidnappings. From organized-crime bigshots. Not reported to the cops, but known to them anyway, okay? And the kid is never returned.”

“Murdered?”

“What word didn’t you understand?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, meekly.

“Look, this is no risk to your friend. Just computer access. She can always say she’s ambitious—looking to step up, work a cold-case file on her own time, score a promotion—if they ever tie anything to her.”

“It doesn’t matter. She’ll do—”

“Yeah, I heard that speech,” I told her. “Got it memorized.”

“Do you hate me?” she asked suddenly.

“Hate you? For being a pain in the ass? Don’t be stupid.”

“I wasn’t. I mean, I know I—”

“Hate. You got any idea what that word really means, you spoiled bitch? The way you people talk. . . Someone’s mad at you so you say, ‘Oh, he’s going to kill me,’ right? We don’t speak the same language.”

“ ‘You people.’ What does that mean?”

“It means, not my people,” I told her.

I was with my people when I told them the next piece the killer had sent me.

“He kills kids?” the Prof asked, jolted.

“Yeah. He says so, anyway. Not for fun. Like. . . cleaning up after himself. Or maybe just some techno-glitch, to a guy like him.”

“You know guys like him, mahn?” Clarence asked.

“Sure. So do you. People aren’t human to them. They’re just objects. Pieces on a chessboard. The only thing that holds guys like that in check is fear. They think they can get away with something—anything—they do it.”

“Sure, mahn. There are plenty like that. But this—”

“He’s just. . . better at it,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Nah, bro, there’s more we know,” the Prof said.

“What’s that?”

“He wouldn’t be so loud if he wasn’t so proud,” the little man said.

“I don’t know,” Strega whispered. She was in my arms, me carrying her. She wanted that, sometimes. I never knew why, but I always did it, walking her through that spooky house like she was a child I was trying to cuddle-coax back to sleep.

“But you could find out,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“I can find out anything from. . . them. They have no secrets from me.”

“Nadine said she had no secrets from you either.”

“Ah, that one. She lied to you, Burke.”

“About what?”

“She told you some fairy story, right? She didn’t start out gay. . . .”

“Yeah, she said something like that.”

“You know how guys—the ones who don’t get it—say lesbians hate men?”

“Sure.”

“She’s not lying about that,” Strega said against my neck. “She hates men.”

“That wouldn’t make her a—”

“I don’t know if she likes women either. She likes sex. And women are the only ones she’s going to have it with.”

“Yeah, I know. I heard all about—”

“She’s not a dom either,” Strega said softly. “Not in her heart. The role’s playing her, understand? She’s just building walls. Like the way she builds her body.”

“What?”

“It’s safer where she is. Like I’m safe now,” she whispered against me.

I rubbed my thumb in small circles at the base of the witch’s neck, quieting her while I thought about what she said. Walls. Prison. In there, everyone has to have a role. Predator or prey. No Switzerland option. You don’t have to fuck some kid to mark your territory, but some went that way. “Shit on my dick, or blood on my knife,” is what the wolves greet you with when you’re a young fish, a first-timer. That’s what drives so many of them into gangs Inside. That’s a role too. By the time I went in, I already knew the truth I later heard the Prof tell to so many new kids: “If they try, they got to die.” I had a shank in my waistband when I hit the yard for the first time. Being raised by the State in those prison-prep schools teaches you all that. But why would this woman need to. . .?

“I get it,” I lied to Strega. “It’s not men she hates, just sex with—”

“She’d have sex with you. She wants to, you know. Bad.”

“I don’t know. She’s a game-player. I don’t know her game. It doesn’t matter.”

“Because you don’t want her?”

“Because I’m not playing.”

“But you want to play with me, don’t you?” she asked, witchy.

I knew who it was even as the phone was ringing at Mama’s. And I was on my way in a couple of minutes more.

We had it down to a routine by now. I hardly had the match to my cigarette before he showed again:

I have the child now, here with me. Her name is Angelique, but her school records indicate she prefers “Angel.” She is 10+ years, in apparently excellent health.