Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

I don’t like fighting, maybe that’s the problem. I can’t see hitting someone to hurt them. And if someone’s going to hurt me, I can’t see hitting them at all. Wesley told me he once killed a guy in the joint when he was just a kid. The guy was part of a crew, and they’d told Wesley he had a choice: give up some head to one of them, or get gang-banged by them all. Wesley picked the easier one. That made sense to them, but they didn’t know what “easier” meant to Wesley. He got on his knees, but then he rammed the guy in the stomach and got his hands on his throat. And held the guy’s head in place while some anonymous guard at the other end of the tier threw the switch that racks the bars on all the cells. The guy’s skull crumbled like it was papier-mâché.

The reason Wesley did it that way was because there’d been a shakedown, and the hacks had taken the shank he had stashed in his cell. Didn’t matter—he always got it done.

So I thought about dying. But even if I could get enough explosives past whatever security he’d have set up, I couldn’t be sure .

My hands, then. All I had. But not for his throat. To push a button.

I hit the post with a perfect two-knuckle strike, driving through it, not at it. . . the way I’d been taught. I hardly felt my hand. My mind was right.

“That’s mine,” Strega said. “Don’t touch it.”

I turned and saw her in the corner of the shadowy basement. “Where’s—?”

“In the bathtub,” Strega said. “With no towels. And if she steps out of it wet, she’ll fry like an omelet.”

“Jesus,” I said, looking down at my hand.

“I said don’t touch it,” Strega ordered, coming toward me. She was naked, her hair tied back with a black ribbon. She grabbed my hand. It was bloody around the knuckles. “Mine!” she said, like a two-year-old just learning the word. She licked the blood off. Then she squeezed my hand, hard. Some new drops blossomed. She pulled my knuckles into her mouth, sucked until she came, spasming, me with one arm around her to keep her from falling.

The bathroom door on the second floor was standing open. Strega stepped in. I looked over her shoulder. Nadine was in the tub, lying back, her eyes closed. Strega pulled a pair of plugs from their sockets, disconnecting the red-coiled heaters which were standing sentry on the soaked tile floor. Then she tossed a heavy black mat down, dropped to her knees, and started gently rubbing Nadine with a bar of soap, crooning to her.

Nadine’s eyes never opened. I couldn’t tell if she even knew I was there.

After a minute, I wasn’t.

I spent a lot of time waiting, some of it at the joint where Xyla had her war room in the back. I watched Rusty draw, wondering how he could do that and scan the room at the same time. Listened to the table-talk around me. Drifted. Knowing the answer was somewhere in me. Knowing I couldn’t force it out.

I went back Inside. When we were all doing time together. Maybe not together. I mean, Wesley was in there with us, but he wasn’t with us. Wesley wasn’t with anyone. But we were close enough so that we wired anything back to him that he’d need.

That’s when we found out this guy was looking to take Wesley off the count. Tower. I don’t know if that was his name or his handle. Didn’t matter—his true ID was tattooed on his forearm, the swastika dripping blood. That was years ago, before they announced their kills with the spiderweb on the elbow. He wanted a shank, and he wanted it from Oz. That’s because Oz made the best shanks in the whole joint. Only problem is, he wanted it for five cartons of smokes, and the going rate was ten. Oz was a very pale guy. Not prison-complexion pale, his natural color. Even his hair was almost white. He was some kind of Scandinavian, about as Aryan as you could get, but Tower didn’t see him that way. Tower wasn’t bargaining—although that’s what it would sound like to you if you only heard the audio and didn’t get the implied threat in the way he loomed over Oz. That’s when the Prof stepped in:

“Where you been, chump?” the little man asked Tower. “You know nothing’s on sale in the jail. You want a shank, you tap your bank. Far as I’m concerned, ten crates for one of my man’s pieces—hell, that price is nice , Jack.”

Tower looked down at the Prof, making up his mind. Big mistake. I was in position by then. And I’d already paid my ten cartons. “Tomorrow, motherfucker,” Tower said to Oz, saving face. “Bring the best you got.” Then he stalked away.

Oz was there the next day, but Tower never showed. That stirred the whisper-stream, but it wasn’t until later that I learned the truth.

“Damnedest thing I ever heard of,” Doc mused in his office. He liked an audience. And I liked to listen. “They find him dead in his cell. Looked like he went in his sleep. Not a mark on him. But the tox was bad—I mean, deadly bad.”

“So he OD’ed?” I asked.

“Not on curare!” Doc snorted. “But once they saw that , then they really did the job. They found it in his ear.”

“What?”

“A little dart. Beautiful piece of work, fluted and everything, like you’d make in a lab.”

“Somebody threw—?”

“No way, Burke. It was deep . Cruz said he recognized it. You know what he said it was? A fucking blowgun dart! Can you believe that? Last time I checked, we didn’t have any rain-forest pygmies here.”

“So how come the Man didn’t shake down the whole place?” I asked him. That’s what happened every time there was a stabbing and the weapon wasn’t recovered at the scene.

“What would be the point?” Doc responded. “It was weeks old by the time they found it. Whoever did it certainly got rid of it by then. Or took it apart, turned it back into whatever he made it from. Who knows?”

“Who cares?”

“You got a point,” Doc agreed. “No way this’ll kick off a race thing—Tower locked in H Block.”

I just nodded. H Block was all white. Not all AB, true, but all white, for sure. Everyone in there didn’t have the same politics, but they had the same color.

Same color as Wesley.

And when I’d sent “blowgun dart” to this super-killer, he’d just nodded from his cyber-hideout. He knew. So I had to play it like he knew it all.

I was going to get close to him soon. But there’d be bars. Some kind of bars. My hands wouldn’t do it.

A muscular guy with deep-glazed eyes staggered past us. He bumped into Rusty, knocking the big man’s drawing tablet onto the floor. Rusty didn’t say anything, just bent to pick it up.

“You got a fuckin’ problem?” the guy asked, speech slurred but fists clenched.

“There’s no problem,” I told him.

“I wasn’t talking to you, motherfucker,” he said to me, eyes only on Rusty.

Before he finished, Trixie was standing next to him, off to the side. “What’s he been drinking?” she asked the waitress.

“V and V,” the girl said.

“You’re out of here,” Trixie told the muscular guy.

“Fuck you, butch.”

“Step off!” she warned him.

“I’ll fucking step—”

Rusty shoved the heavy wood table he was sitting at right into the guy’s knees, driving it so hard you could hear bone snap. The drunk dropped.

“Goddamn it, Rusty!” Trixie yelled at him. She reached down, hooked the guy’s belt, and dragged him off somewhere. The waitress went with her.

“What’s a ‘V and V’?” I asked Rusty.

“Vodka and Vicodin,” he told me. “Lots of fools taking that now. Really gets you wrecked.”

Freddy Fender’s “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” mocked me from the Plymouth’s speakers as I headed back to my place.