Andrew Vachss: Safe House

Herk wasn’t either one, but he was just thick enough so it didn’t matter.

“Okay, so Porkpie tells me about it,” he continued. “The job, I mean. He says they need someone to lean on this guy, give him the word, tell him to get in the wind, let the broad alone, understand?”

“Sure.”

“A grand for a few minutes’ work, that’s what he told me.”

“You was gonna move on this guy, do work on him, let them turn the key for one lousy G?” the Prof snarled. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, boy? You been down twice. You can’t ride that train—it ain’t nothing but pain. You go bone-busting, you get called to the Walls. That’s your idea of good pay for a few minutes’ work?”

“It wasn’t that, Prof. Honest. Porkpie said the guy was a stone pussy, okay? All I hadda do was muscle up on him, maybe bitch-slap him once. Porkpie said he’d give it up in a minute, kinda guy beats a woman. . . .”

“All kinds of fucking guys beat on women,” the Prof told him. “That don’t tell you nothing. You been enough places to know that, Herk.”

“It don’t matter now,” the big man said sadly.

“Bottom line,” I said. “Let’s get to it. Come on.”

“Porkpie gives me a picture, okay? What the guy looks like and all. And he drives me to the spot where the guy gets off work.”

“You braced him in daylight?” I asked, already shuddering at his stupidity.

“Nah, Burke. He’s a security guard, like. Gets off after midnight. In this big building on Wall Street. He has to go right through this alley to where they park their cars. Porkpie said I could grab him there.”

“And . . . ?”

“I snatch him, okay? I slam him up against the wall, tell him I’m the girl’s cousin. Porkpie told me to say that, so he’d know I was serious and all. He tries to talk to me, but I’m not playing. I told him, he wants to get down, let’s do it. Right there. He drops his hands, puts his head down. I figure that’s it. . . . Then he comes out with a piece. I didn’t . . . think about it, man. I just plunged him.”

“You shanked the motherfucker?” the Prof asked quietly, leaning forward over the back of the front seat.

“Right in the gut,” Herk said. “I didn’t mean to, but . . . once I stuck him, I knew he was gone. I could see it in his face, like when the light goes out, you know? He was off the count.”

“Anybody see you?” I asked. It was business now.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. Porkpie said he didn’t see nobody.”

“When was this?”

“Two nights ago. I mean, it’ll be two nights when it gets dark.”

“What do you need, Herk?” I asked him.

“I need a stake, Burke. I got to get outa here. Outa this city.”

Herk couldn’t say it, but he could feel it. He was a mine-shaft canary, just beginning to smell the fumes, fluttering his wings against the cage. I looked back at the Prof. He nodded.

“I’m gonna take you someplace,” I told him. “You’ll be okay there. Meanwhile, I’ll see what’s going on, okay?”

“Sure, Burke,” he said, smiling. A big, sweet dumb kid.

“This one ain’t no Fourteenth Amendment citizen, is he?” the voice on the phone said.

“He’s the same fucking citizen I am,” I said, keeping my voice down to a jailhouse whisper—soft with threat.

“No offense, man,” the voice said quickly. “But you know how I have to play it. I mean . . .”

“No offense. A yard a day, right?”

“Right. Ten-day minimum.”

“He’ll have it with him.”

Ichecked on the wire. The police had it down as a mugging that went wrong. At least Herk had been smart enough to grab the dead man’s watch and wallet. And toss them into the nearest Dumpster, where some foraging wino was sure to pick them up. He’d never touched the dead man’s pistol, leaving it where it was. The cops had no suspects.

But I did. Herk was the third day into his hideout before we found Porkpie. He was coming out of a dive in Red Hook, wearing a snazzy dark overcoat and his trademark little hat with a fat little white feather sticking up from the band. A zircon glistened on his hand, bloodshot from a faded red neon sign in the window of the bar.

“Hey, Porkpie!” I yelled at him, closing the distance between us, hands empty at my sides.

He stopped in his tracks, making up his mind. Before he finished, Max had him.

One good thing about Red Hook, you never have to go far to find some privacy. I docked the dark-green Volvo sedan next to one of the piers, backing in carefully so I could spot any visitors. I didn’t expect cops—even when the weather is warm and the piers are crawling with longshoremen, the rollers working the pad know the money men only come out in daylight.

Porkpie was in the front bucket seat, Max right behind him, one hand on the weasel’s neck. Max’s hands are hard autobiographies: big leather-colored maps of seamed scar tissue with callused ridges of horn along the knife-edges—flesh-and-bone sledgehammers with bolt-cutters for fingers. Porkpie couldn’t see the hand, but he could feel it, the fingers pressing his carotid artery, thumb hooked just under his Adam’s apple. What he could see was the pistol in my gloved left hand, held at my waist, pointed at his crotch.

“Open the glove compartment,” I told him softly.

“Burke, I . . .”

“Open it, Porkpie.”

He pushed the button and the door came down. In the light from the tiny bulb he could see the coil of piano wire. And the barber’s straight razor with its mother-of-pearl handle.

“We wrap your hands and your ankles in the wire,” I told him. “We got a couple of car batteries in the trunk for the weight. Then I take the razor and open you up so you don’t float, understand?”

“Jesus! Don’t . . .”

“It’s a hell of a way to die,” I said. “But you tell us quick, I’ll do you a solid, okay? I’ll put a slug in your head first, so you don’t feel nothing.”

His stink filled the front seat.

“There’s only one way out,” I said, breathing through my mouth.

“Anything,” he blubbered. “Just tell me, I’ll—”

“You got Hercules to do a job for you. The girl, the one this guy was threatening, she yours?”

“No. No, man. I don’t know her. I ain’t never even seen her.”

“So somebody paid you, right?”

“Right. It was just—”

“Shut up, punk. Just answer what I ask you. Who paid you? And what was the job?”

“I don’t know her name. Honest to God, Burke! She found me in Rollo’s. Said it was her sister, that girl. The one this guy was—”

“Don’t make me tell you again,” I said. “I don’t want to hear your stories. How much was the job?”

He hesitated. I nodded to Max. Porkpie spasmed in his seat, his spinal fluid turned to liquid pain. “I don’t like this part,” I told him. “I’d rather ice you right now than keep hurting you, understand?”

“Yesss . . .”

“How much was the job?”

“Five grand.”

“And you were supposed to do . . . what?”

“Just scare the guy. Like, spook him, you know? Run him off.”

“Not total him?”

“You crazy? I ain’t no hit man.”

“That’s right, punk: you ain’t.”

“Burke, listen to me. Please. If I was gonna have Herk do him, would I go along? I didn’t know nothing until he comes charging back to the car. I . . .”

“That’s enough,” I told him. The smell of truth came right through the stench. Porkpie didn’t have the cojones to be anywhere within a mile of a killing, even as the wheelman. “Describe her.”

“I told you—I never even seen her, not once.”