Andrew Vachss: Safe House

The meet was set for just off Frankfort Street, under the Brooklyn Bridge. The downtown subway system was a disease incubator in winter, and I’d be damned if I was going to walk in the miserable weather. I hadn’t set the meet up, and I couldn’t change it. When I’d called in, Mama had given me the done-deal message.

“Man call. Say name. Herk Kew Leeze. Say friend. From Upstate.”

Hercules. Big strong good-looking kid. I’d done time with him, years ago. Solid as a railroad spike. And just about as shrewd. He was stand-up all the way. Dead reliable. Inside, those two words intersect a lot. But we couldn’t let him crew up with us on the bricks. The Prof had cast the veto. “Boy can’t go pro,” the little man told us. “Heart don’t count the same as smart.” I’d heard Hercules was heavy-lifting for hire. Not a made man, not even part of an organization. He was a disposable samurai, and whatever he wanted to tell me wouldn’t be good news.

“What did he say, Mama?”

“Say meet. Second shift. Butcher Block. Okay?”

Meaning: did I understand what he meant?—because Mama sure as hell didn’t.

“Sure. It’s all right. I’ll take care of it.”

“You need Max?”

“No, Mama. He’s a friend.”

“I not know him?”

“No.”

“Sure,” Mama said, cutting the connection. I wondered what I’d done this time.

The second shift meant prison time—three in the afternoon to eleven at night. When you set up a must-come meet the way Hercules had, you always give the other guy a wide margin for showing up. The Butcher Block is an abandoned loading dock under the Brooklyn Bridge. It got its name because thieves used to meet there to cut up the swag from the trucks in the nearby Fulton Fish Market. Hercules didn’t know where I lived. Guy like him knows that, he drops by one day, just to say hello. Maybe brings a six-pack. Or the cops.

I slid the Plymouth to a stop on Broadway, just across from the outdoor homeless shelter the politicians call City Hall Park. In another few seconds, the passenger door popped open and the Prof climbed in.

“If it’s Herk’s game, you know it’s lame. Gonna be some motherfucking sorryass shame,” the little man greeted me, his voice sour with disgust.

“You want to pass?” I asked him.

“You know I can’t do that, Schoolboy. Man was with us, right? He took the weight, we got to pay the freight.”

That said it all. We’d hold up our end. Obligation and honor, same thing. But that was no middle-class citizen’s one-way street. What drove us was the certain knowledge that, if we called Hercules from a pay phone in Hell, he’d drop right in.

You can’t buy loyalty like that. But you have to pay what it costs. In installments.

“Where’s Clarence?” I asked him.

“Clarence? That boy don’t have nothing to do with this, whatever it is. He don’t owe, so he don’t go.”

“Fair enough,” I told him, meaning it.

Ihooked left just before Vesey Street, doubled back up Park Row, ignored the entrance to the bridge and forked to the right, staying low like I was heading for the FDR. When I spotted the opening, I nosed the Plymouth inside, peering through the windshield.

“I got him,” the Prof said. “Over there.”

A man was approaching the car. A big man with long dark hair, looking even bigger in an ankle-length yellow slicker like traffic cops wear. The Prof jumped out and slipped into the back seat, leaving the front door open, a clear invite. The big man piled in, shaking himself like a damn Saint Bernard, showering me with icy water.

“Burke!” he said, extending his hand to shake.

“Herk,” I greeted him back, my voice low, sending him a message. Which he promptly ignored as soon as he spotted who was in the back seat.

“Prof! Hey, this is great!”

“Be cool, fool,” the Prof told him. “This ain’t no reunion. You got business, right?”

The big man shook his head again. Hard, like he was trying to remember something. Something important. “I’m up against it,” he finally said.

“Spell it out,” I told him.

“There was this girl. . . .”

“God damn it, Schoolboy. What’d I tell you? This chump is a bull, and gash is the pull.”

“Easy, Prof. Whatever it is . . .” I let the sentence trail away, turned to Herk, opened my hands in a “Tell-me” gesture.

“There was this girl,” he said again, like he was starting the tape from the beginning. “She was getting . . . stalked, like. You know what I mean?”

“No,” I said, edging my voice just enough to tell him to get on with it.

“Okay. Her boyfriend used to beat on her. All the time. For nothing. Then he’d say he was sorry and she’d take him back. Finally, he puts her in the hospital. Not just the E-Ward, like he did before—they had to operate. On her face. I guess she was too fucked up from the drugs they gave her to cover for him, I don’t know. Anyway, the rollers took him down. He went easy,” Herk said, his voice veined with a hard-core convict’s contempt for anyone who doesn’t automatically resist arrest. “Anyway, she says she ain’t gonna press charges, and you know what the Man said? You ain’t gonna believe this, Burke. They don’t need her—they could just go ahead and lumber him anyway, no matter what she wants. I mean, they could make her come to court. Jesus.”

I took a pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, offered one to Herk. He shook his head. Same way he was in the joint. A serious bodybuilder, the only drug Herk would play with was Dianabol, and he’d stopped the red-zone steroids when we’d pulled his coat to the cold light at the end of that tunnel. But the Prof snatched the butt out of my hand before I could light it. I heard a match snap into flame behind me. “Thanks, bro,” he said sarcastically. I lit another one for myself. “What’s the rest?” I asked the big man.

“He gets some bullshit baby-time. Six months on the Rock, out in four. She gets one of them Orders of Protection, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“But that don’t mean nothing. He calls her. Right from the House, calls her. Collect, okay? After a while, she don’t take the calls. Even changes her number. So he writes her letters. Real weird shit—like he loves her and he had a dream that he sliced her face into ribbons.”

“He’s still locked up when he does this?” the Prof asked.

“Yeah.”

“She show them to the cops?” I wanted to know.

“Sure. But dig this: there’s nothing they can do, right? I mean, this time she wants to prosecute his ass, and they don’t do nothing. They told her those letters, they wasn’t threats, just talking about his dreams and stuff. Stupid mother—”

“—and then he gets out . . . ,” I prompted, cutting off the flow.

“Uh-huh. And he starts it right back again. Calling her on her job, leaving notes in her mailbox, all like that. He’s got her scared now—”

“And you’re dipping your sorry wick, right, sucker?” the Prof stuck in.

“No, Prof. I swear,” Herk said in a hurt tone of voice. “I mean, I never even met her, okay? It wasn’t like that.”

“So what was it like?” I asked him.

“You know Porkpie?”

“Yeah,” I told him, nervous now. Porkpie was a minor-league fringe-player. One of those maybe-Jewish, maybe-Italian, Brooklyn-edge boys. He didn’t have muscle or balls or brains, so he played the middleman role. A halfass tipster and two-bit tout—he wouldn’t touch anything with his own hands, but he always knew a guy who would. Or so he said. He wasn’t mobbed up. Didn’t have a crew, worked out of pay phones and the trunk of his car. Only a citizen or a stone rookie would do any business with him.