Andrew Vachss - Safe House

There it was. “I got paid for Harriet,” I reminded her. “And there wasn’t any major risk in it. At least, not like this.”

“I have money,” Vyra said.

Crystal Beth rolled herself a cigarette. When she got it burning, she held it out to Vyra . . . who took one short drag and handed it back. Now they were waiting.

“How do I find this Pryce?” I asked. Thinking, if he’s as good as they were saying, he probably already knew about me.

“I have to call this number,” Crystal Beth said. “Tonight. Before midnight. Then he’ll call back. I’ll tell him then. And I’ll call you.”

She left Vyra where she was, took me down the stairs to the back door. Stood on her toes, her lips next to my ear. “I’ll tell you everything soon,” she promised, holding on to the front of my belt with two fingers, keeping me close so I’d listen.

I stepped into the biting-cold night, eyes on the clear sky. And walked away slowly, the weight of treachery yoking my shoulders.

It was almost nine when Clarence’s Rover swooped down, plucking me off the corner. I climbed into the front. The Prof’s hand dropped onto my shoulder.

“You was a long time in there, Schoolboy. You get enough of a look to pull Herk off the hook?”

“It was never about Herk,” I told him. “He was never the game. The poor bastard just stumbled in.”

“Figures,” the little man said acidly. “So we’re out?”

“I’m not,” I told him.

And then I told him the rest.

“You can never shed a street-brand, honey,” Michelle said. Sitting in my booth at Mama’s—next to the Prof, facing me and Clarence. She was perfectly coiffed, wearing a red satin jumpsuit with a wide black belt, her lovely face slathered in full war-paint, getting ready to work. I’d asked her once why she dressed up just to work the phones. “It’s all feeling, baby. If you feel it, you can be it.”

Michelle does tele-sex. She’s the best at it. If you could run fiber-optic cable under a glacier, her honey-silk voice would melt it. And she’s the finest natural hustler I’ve ever known.

Michelle is my sister. No biology there, something closer to the root. We had the same father and the same bond: the State and our hate. She’d been born a toy. By the time she knew the medical term for what she was—a transsexual—her freakish family had found a dozen ways to use her. So she ran. Headlong, like a man jumping off the top of a blazing oil rig into the black ocean water below, knowing whatever was down there couldn’t be worse.

She’d known she was a woman trapped in a man’s body even before puberty tortured her from both sides of that twisted line. In the bent-sex underground where Michelle survived, the sadistic trick nature played on her raised the price of the tricks she turned. She climbed into the front seat of cars and dropped to the floor, each time wondering if the driver would be that life-taking psychopath all hookers know is out there somewhere. Always out there, his pounding blood seeking another’s.

Michelle stole whatever she could, and lived the same way. She kept trying do-it-yourself to make things right. Almost destroyed her body with back-alley implants and black-market hormones. Always saying she was going to get it done—be herself. Be come herself. “Going to Denmark, honey. Real soon,” she used to tell me every time our paths crossed.

I knew Michelle loved me. She’d proved it too many times to doubt—not with conversation, with the way you prove things in the street. But we were never really family until the night I pulled a little kid away from a pimp in Times Square. That wasn’t the job I was hired for, but I couldn’t just leave the kid there—I owed Hate that much. I was going to get him to a shelter or something, but Michelle took him for herself, right then and there. She made me bring him to the Mole’s junkyard. Her baby. Terry, she named him. And she and the Mole raised him, the two of them. They were still doing it.

It had been a loose network before. Steel mesh ever since. Michelle always told people the AIDS plague drove her off the streets, but that was a lie. It was Terry. Her boy.

It was Terry who finally took her over the line too. Not to Denmark, to Colorado. But she got it done. A citizen might call her a post-op transsexual. To me, she was as much woman as there could be on this earth. My sister. Terry’s mother.

What we all wondered was . . . would she ever be the Mole’s wife?

“You think that’s what they’re playing for?” I asked her. “They want somebody done?”

“What else could it be?” she snapped back at me, angry and impatient with my slowness. “Those two bitches have a problem, right? Some man. Some men. Whatever. They just want it to go away. I know how that feels.”

“You scan it different than Schoolboy does?” the Prof asked. To him Michelle was a kid—that’s the way he saw everyone—but he had an awesome respect for her criminal mind. More than he had for mine, that’s for sure—it wouldn’t take much for him to toss out any analysis I tried to offer.

“This girl—Crystal Beth, what a name, puh-leeze—she went to that little skeeve Porkpie first, didn’t she?” Michelle answered him. “Nobody’d hire Porkpie to middle up a scam. You know how he profiles, like he can get heavy work done. He’s selling muscle, not brains . . . like he’s got any of either.”

“She couldn’t have known that guy was going to go down,” I told Michelle. “Best she could have hoped for was Porkpie would get him fucked up, scare him off. She wasn’t buying a hit, not for five grand.”

“Unless Porkpie was lying,” she put in tartly. “Remember the first rule, honey—deviates never deviate.”

“He wasn’t lying,” I said. “Max was there with me when I talked to him.”

Michelle nodded, dropping the argument. Nobody lied when Max had them in his hands.

“So how about she knows another way?” Michelle proposed.

“Knows what?” I asked her.

“The street-brand, baby. You’ve had the hit-man tag on you ever since . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t have to. We’d all been there when it started. Except Clarence. And he was there when it got added to. Once it was a mosaic, a landscape dotted with truth if you knew where to look. Now it was a miasma, a junkyard so full of discards you couldn’t find the truth with a microscope.

But the cops had tried. More than once. In our world, homicide happens . . . so the police are always around. But they never press all that hard. You listen to the PR guys at One Police Plaza, you’d believe the Man takes it just as seriously when someone from our world goes down as they would a citizen.

Sure.

I picked up the hit-man label a long time ago. When some Sicilians got into a range war. One of the dons hired a guy I’d come up with. An ice-man so laser-locked to his work that predators cringed in the shadows every time the whisper-stream passed the word that he was coming.

A man who stood alone, as emotionless as the death he dealt. “Nobody knows where he’s going,” the Prof said once, “but everybody knows where he’s been.”

A man everyone feared. In our world, that passed for respect.

A man I wanted to be, once.

The don double-crossed the ice-man, and the killer did what he was. The Sicilians starting dropping—some alone, some in bunches. Finally, the don came to me. He said he wanted me to talk the killer into a truce. Call it off, go back to the way things had been.

But if I’d gone to him with a message from the don, the killer would have taken me out too.

The don thought he had me in a box, but it was only a bottleneck . . . still a narrow bit of exit road left. I took it. And the don’s life paid the tolls.