Andrew Vachss: Choice of Evil

The reason the cops knew that, they found the victim’s phone had been tapped into. And rerouted. When the third one had dialed 911, he’d been talking to his doom.

And while the cops were wasting time grilling the family and friends of the gay man who’d been murdered, some “Christian” organization took out a full-page ad saying homosexuals needed to “convert” or burn in hell.

That night, every TV news show ran clips of the organization’s spokesman saying, “AIDS is God’s cure for homos,” and other, similar sound bites.

The next day, the spokesman was napping in a hammock in the backyard of his estate when a long-distance rifle shot opened his left eye. Opened a bigger hole in the back of his head.

One of the picketers at the funeral of the murdered gay man—the one holding the sign saying his death was God’s Good Riddance—got a UPS package. And got a real bang out of it.

But it was the poisoned black-market steroids that killed the bodybuilder—the one who kept in shape with fag-bashing—that finally persuaded the cops.

They managed to keep the connection between the victims out of the papers. But the killer trumped them by going public.

Be warned! These attacks have not been indiscriminate. All the targets were predators, and homosexuals were their prey. Queer-bashing is no longer a risk-free sport. For too long, the gay community has tolerated assaults in the vain hope that protection would come from outsiders. Be warned: now we hunt.

The first radio station to receive the tape with the machine-altered voice had played good citizen and turned it over to the cops. But it wasn’t long before another station decided it couldn’t pass up the chance for a ratings score. Once it went out over the airwaves, the dam was breached. The flood followed.

A short time after I met Crystal Beth, we got into a war. A war to keep our house safe. It took all of us. And all we had. Just before I left for the showdown, Crystal Beth said she wanted to have my baby. That last time, as we parted before I went out to do my work, she asked me. Of all the women in my life, she was the only one who’d ever asked. Flood had told me she’d thought about it, had been thinking about it, but she went back to Japan and I never saw her again. Belle loved me. Died for me. But she knew her blood was bad—she was her sister’s daughter, and she’d never pass that along. I’ve had sex with so many women. I liked some of them; some of them had liked me. But it was only Crystal Beth who’d wanted my child.

I’d told her the truth then. I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago. Not because my blood was bad, like Belle’s. I don’t know my blood. “Baby Boy Burke” is all it says on my birth certificate. It’s not my blood that stopped me—it’s that I know blood doesn’t mean anything.

But the cops had this much right: when Crystal Beth was taken from me, I needed to spill some.

Only I couldn’t find the shooters.

And while I was looking, this other guy kept killing the tribe they came from.

Trolling for freaks in this city is no different from poling a skiff through a swamp, hunting for gators. They don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. And you better not fall in the water.

The gay community already had one of the usual arrest-and-conviction bounties out on the drive-by killers. There was government money too. The lame Mayor caught so much heat the last time he opened the public coffers for reward money—for that “gay serial killer” who’d never even crossed our borders—that he was an easy mark. But even a total of more than a hundred grand didn’t turn up a trace. Oh yeah, the pay phones were clogged with quarters from informants, but not a single tip proved out.

Then a skinhead clubhouse in Queens blew up. The whole thing. Maybe a half-dozen of them inside. Impossible to tell—too many body parts to match into complete sets. The radio stations played his tape right away this time. Short and sweet:

Skinheads all hate fags. This was always stupid. Always a mistake. Now it’s a mistake to be a skinhead. A fatal mistake. See you soon, boys.

They should have known what would happen at the gay-pride parade. The cops, I mean. It takes them longer because they act as a herd.

Or maybe they thought he’d only react to actual violence. When the first two drunks jeering at the queers dropped like they’d suffered heart attacks, the cops started running toward them. But by the time they figured it was him— had to be him, firing from a rooftop, scoped and suppressed—he was gone.

So were the two drunks—heavy-caliber hollowpoints tend to do that to you.

A pervert who ran something called Homo-Haters Gazette —a website featuring news of “successful actions” against gays around the world—must have thought the letter he got was fan mail. The cops couldn’t determine from the few fragments that they found. And they couldn’t interview a guy with a severed brainstem.

“They want you for it.” Morales, on the phone, voice like a bulldozer in a garden.

“Get real,” I told him.

“Just did,” he said. “Straight up. They don’t know where you are, but they’re looking.”

“So. . .?”

“You should come in. I know this one ain’t yours.”

“Thanks.”

“For what? You not slick enough to be sending no letter bombs, pal.”

“I can find out,” Davidson said, puffing on his cigar. “But if I make the inquiry, that alone will. . .”

“I know,” I told him. “Do it.”

“Give me a call, uh, tomorrow. Before ten.”

“Done.”

“Burke. . .?”

“What?”

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“I got nothing to do with this one. Any of them.”

Davidson nodded, not doubting. If I’d killed anyone, I would have told him. He was sure of that—I’d done it before. He was a good lawyer, knew all the tricks. He wanted to get paid, but he did the work. Better than most, that last part.

“You can’t stay here,” Lorraine said, the second she crossed the threshold to Crystal Beth’s place.

“I know,” I replied.

She didn’t know what to say to that; a look of surprise froze on her face. “I. . . didn’t mean you had to get out this minute,” she said stiffly. “I just meant. . . I mean, you know why we set this place up. You know what we do. Having a man here. . .”

“I understand. I’ll be out in twenty-four hours. It’s not like I got a lot of stuff to pack.”

Pansy’s enormous head swiveled back and forth, following the conversation but dismissing the woman as a threat.

“Burke. . .”

“What?”

“I never liked you,” Lorraine said. “But I know what you did for. . . us. Before, I mean. And I know you loved. . . her.”

“Crystal Beth. You can say her name.”

“Maybe you can. It. . . hurts me just to. . .”

“All right. Never mind. I told you, I’ll be out in—”

“Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”

“The guy who killed her?”

“No. The guy who’s killing all of. . . them .”

I shrugged.

“You don’t care?” she asked, an extra-aggressive tone sliding into her already hard voice.

“What are you asking me, Lorraine?”

“If he were to. . . kill them all, he’d get the one who killed. . . her, right?”

“Kill every fucking fag-basher in the city? Right. That’d do it.”

“I wish he would. I wish I could.”

“So why don’t you give him a hand?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why? Because it’s a gay thing?”

“It’s a woman thing.”

“Yeah? Then how come you keep saying the killer’s a man? It’s easy enough to alter a voice on tape.”