Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“We have that,” Crystal Beth said. “Guaranteed.”

“So who’s the Man?” I asked her.

“Not a man,” she said with a gentle smile. “A woman. Her name is Wolfe.”

Good thing I hadn’t taken Crystal Beth’s hand. A lifetime of practice could keep my face flat, but she would have felt my pulse jump at the name. Wolfe. Former boss of City-Wide Special Victims, a sex-crimes prosecutor so intense one newspaper said she drank blood for breakfast. She spent years on the front lines slugging it out with every verminous predator they threw at her—rapists, child molesters, kidnap gangs, it didn’t matter. She was a warrior woman, at her loveliest doing her work, a sleek mongoose who could clean out a nest of cobras without breaking a sweat. But a politically greasy DA took her down, sacrificed her to the only god humans like him worship.

When Wolfe had been on the job, we’d bumped paths a few times. She wouldn’t go an inch over the line, but she’d tightrope it pretty good if it meant dropping a freak. When they fired her, she went outlaw. At least that’s what the whisper-stream that runs under the city said. She ramrods a private intelligence cell. Does it for the money, the way it’s told. But Crystal Beth was doing some telling of her own. And it looked like Wolfe couldn’t stay away from the war.

Wolfe could get it done, I knew. There were still some prosecutors who stayed true to what she’d stood for. Not in City-Wide—that whole crowd had all rolled over like the knee-pad wearers they were. But there were other bureaus, other operations. And some of them would still work with Wolfe. They couldn’t bring her into the courtroom, but they could bring her information there. And use it.

She knew cops too. Good, tough old-school cops, most of them members of the KMA—“I already got enough time in to retire, Lieutenant, so Kiss My Ass”—Club and all too clean to be intimidated out of meeting with her. Cops she’d worked cases with for years before they took her off the beat. Wolfe had handled mostly sex crimes, but some of the freaks touched other nerves too: Homicide. Narcotics. Anything gang-related. So she knew cops from all over the city, in every bureau.

Yeah, Wolfe could get it done.

I took a shallow breath, thinking that all through in less time than it took to exhale fully. “Okay,” I said to Crystal Beth, “you’ve got him, right? He comes in, he goes down. What’s the problem?”

“There’s another man,” she said. “Like I told you. The falconer. And he’s after me too.”

All I could see of Vyra’s face was a pale oval in the dim light. Her chest was easier to focus on—whiter because of the blouse she wore, bigger because of what filled it. But she was quiet, holding Crystal Beth’s hand, waiting.

I waited too.

“I know this is complicated,” Crystal Beth finally said. “But I don’t know a simpler way to tell it.”

“This other man?” I prompted. “He’s with Marla’s husband? One of the Nazi crew?”

“The opposite,” she said, a tremor in her voice telling me she wasn’t as sure of that as she tried to sound. “He’s a hunter.”

“After Marla’s husband . . . ?”

“Lothar, that’s his name. Well, not truly, I guess. His real name is Larry, but he changed it. He said Larry sounded Jewish. Anyway, he’s not really after Lothar either. He’s . . . Oh, I’m not sure, okay? I just don’t know.”

“You know he’s after you, though?”

“Yes! That didn’t take any guesswork. He told me—”

“Who told you?” I interrupted her.

“The man. Mr. Pryce. Pryce with a “y,” not an “i”—that’s the name he said to call him.”

“Pryce is the one after you?”

“Yes!” she snapped impatiently. “Just let me . . .” She stopped herself, pulled a deep centering breath through her nose. Her hand on my knee went limp. Then she spoke slowly, being clear with herself more than with me. “This Pryce said he knew about the plan. To bring Lothar into court. He said we couldn’t do it. We could either call it off, or he could stop us, whatever we wanted. ‘It’s your choice,’ is what he said. But there isn’t a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Vyra piped up.

“Save it for something you know,” I told her. “This isn’t about shoes.”

I felt the jolt pass from her all the way through Crystal Beth to me, but she stayed quiet.

“Vyra’s in this too,” Crystal Beth said, her tone both defending and defensive. “If we go ahead with the plan, he’s going to hurt her too.”

“How’d he say he was going to do that?”

“With . . . information,” Crystal Beth said. “That’s what he has, information. Secret information. When I first heard his voice, it was on the phone. On a special line I keep. Unlisted, in someone else’s name. It doesn’t connect to me in any way. We use it for . . . business. He knew my voice. Said he had listened to it on tape enough times to recognize me easily.”

“So he got a phone number. Pulled a wiretap. That don’t make him James Bond.”

“He has it all, Burke. Everything. He knows things about my own father that I never knew. About what happened with my mother. Even Starr’s name. He knows how we run our operation, who owns this place. And some things I . . . did. A long time ago. He could close us up, make everything disappear.”

“He’s just trying to spook you. What would he get out of—”

“It’s not just me,” Crystal Beth whispered urgently. “He could put Lorraine in prison. And he could hurt Vyra too.”

“How?”

“With my husband,” Vyra said, her voice dead.

“I thought he didn’t care about . . .” I said. Vyra had told me plenty of times that her husband thought it was fun that she slept around. All he wanted to do was listen to the details, take topless photos of her, lick her shoes and pay the bills.

“He’d care about this,” Vyra said in the same tone.

I waited, but she wasn’t coming off anything more.

“Okay, this Pryce guy could take it all down. Fine. What does he care?”

“Care?”

“About this Lothar geek. Why does he want to protect him so bad?”

“We don’t know,” Crystal Beth said, flat-voiced. “That’s the job. The one Vyra said you could do.”

Iwas in a room with two women. Within the last few days, one had held my hand in the street, sat on my lap and told me secrets. The other had paraded around in her new shoes and sucked my cock. Now they were together, and they wanted me to do something.

It wasn’t easy, telling them that I had to get paid for what they wanted.

So I stalled.

“I don’t know if I could do it or not,” I told them. “I’m not even sure something can be done. There’s no schematic for a thing like this.”

“Will you at least talk to him?” Vyra asked.

“This guy, he’s an information-freak, right? Got stuff on both of you, on other people. That’s his weapon. Me, I’d be going in there without one. And maybe, he gets a look at me, I go on his list.”

“You scared of him?” It was Vyra talking, but I’d heard that kind of thing from women all my life. And from girls before them. I have the scars to prove it—ones you don’t need a Ph.D. to see.

“Damn right,” I said. “Add it up. You got some Nazi loon who wants his kid to help seed the Master Race. And you got somebody else running interference for him. Somebody who knows a lot he shouldn’t know. And you want me to ‘talk’ to him. How about spelling that one out?”

“You know what we want,” Vyra said.

“No you don’t,” Crystal Beth corrected her, standing up and bending toward me. “Remember what you did for Harriet? Well, maybe something like that. But not . . .”