Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“They’re so lucky,” Wolfe said, looking out at a tanker going up the Hudson.

“People with jobs?”

“No.” She laughed. “People who get to be on the water all the time.”

“You like that stuff?”

“I love it,” she said quietly. “If I had my way, I think I’d live on a boat.”

“Like a cruise ship?”

“No, a sailboat. A nice three-master that I could sail with a small crew.”

“ You could sail it?”

“Sure.” She grinned. “I captained a ship from Bermuda all the way back to Cape Cod once.”

“By yourself?”

“There were other people on board, but I was in charge.”

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“I was a Sea Scout.”

“A what?”

“A Sea Scout. Like a Girl Scout, only we went out on boats instead of camping.”

“I’d be scared to death,” I told her. “The water . . .”

“You don’t know how to swim?”

“No. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t sink. We used to jump off piers when I was a kid. But it’s so, I don’t know . . . I mean, you don’t know what’s out there.”

“There’s worse things on land,” she said.

I knew she was right, but it didn’t make any difference. Once, when I was small, I went down to the river to see what I could hustle up. It was night—I always felt safer at night. A boat was there. Not a big one, some kind of sport-fishing rig. They had a shark up on a hoist. It was twitching, like it was going to break loose. The men were laughing, drunk, celebrating their conquest. I looked out at the black water. I thought about more sharks being down there. Men hunt them for fun. I wondered if the other sharks wanted revenge.

“Sure,” I said, getting back to it. “This Pryce, is he one of them? Those worse things?”

“I’ve run across his trail a few times over the years. Only met him once face-to-face. He said he was with Justice then, but when I tried a trace, it got lost in the maze they have down there. By the time I worked it through, he was gone. He tells people he’s with the Company sometimes. Or DEA, ATF, whatever. And by the time anyone can check, he’s moved on.”

“Transferred, maybe?”

“Not a chance. I think he’s sanctioned, but he’s on permanent-disavowal status.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Pretty much what it sounds like,” she said, combing both hands through her thick mane of dark hair as a river breeze came up. “He does contract jobs, but he works for cash, not on the books.”

“Active work?”

“I don’t think so. He’s an information guy, not hands-on. What he is, I think, is kind of a bounty hunter. A bounty spotter, if there’s any such thing. He doesn’t make collars, he doesn’t do wet stuff. He works the edges, tracking. And he manipulates situations. There’s no holds on him—he doesn’t have to play by the rules.”

“Could he get favors done?”

“From the feds? Probably. At least he could from certain agents he’s bird-dogging for.”

“And he doesn’t play for headlines?”

“I remember one thing he said to me. ‘I never take credit. Only cash.’ I think that about sums him up.”

“You had a beef with him?”

“Not at all. He was very polite, very respectful. Said he knew about a pedophile ring. A new twist—on-line molestation in real time.”

“Huh?”

“One of the freaks would get the little girl—they only used girls in this one—in his studio. Then he’d set up the cameras, notify the rest of them and flash her image over their modems. They could tell him what they wanted him to do to the little girl, and they could all watch as he did it.”

“And Pryce knew this how?”

“He didn’t say. But I got the impression that he had reached one of the freaks. Had him in his pocket.”

“Was he trying to make a deal, have this one guy roll over on the rest in exchange for a walk-away?”

“No. He doesn’t work for defense attorneys. It wasn’t anything like that. As near as I could tell, he was willing to let his own guy go down with the rest.”

“So what was the problem?”

“He wanted to get paid. Not a favor, cash.”

“How much did he want?”

“He didn’t say exactly. Six figures, anyway.”

“And you wouldn’t go for it?”

“No. I couldn’t. We don’t have a budget for things like that. Nobody posts a reward until there’s a victim, right?”

“Yeah. And nobody knew—?”

“Nobody knew anything. This was the first I’d heard of it. I tried to put some pressure on him. Told him, if he didn’t turn over the information, not only was that one little girl going to continue to be gang-raped over the Internet, there had to be others too. He said that should make it worth more. I tried to spook him about ‘withholding information’ and he just laughed. I never saw him again.”

“So it just went on?”

“Actually, it didn’t. A week later there was a big bust. Federal. The FBI vamped on the whole operation, took it down in one fell swoop. A beautiful case: even the first one to roll got major time.”

“You think Pryce sold it to the Gee?”

“There’s no way to know. I asked a friend over there how they got the case, and he just said it started with a CI, that was all he knew.”

“But he didn’t mean Pryce was the Confidential Informant?”

“No. But he could have been running the CI, whoever he was. Or it all could have been bogus, a setup to justify the search warrant.”

“You got anything else?” I asked her.

“No, that’s it. But if I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

“Your turn,” she said, giving me another deadly smile.

Iwas telling Wolfe the story, spooling it out in bits and pieces, not going anywhere near Hercules. We both played outside the lines now, but we didn’t play the same. I trusted her, but Wolfe was a cop in her heart. A rule-busting cop, sure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a hell of a difference between concocting probable cause to take bad guys down and taking money from them. The only difference between Wolfe’s operation and a vigilante team was that Wolfe’s crew got paid. She still made her living busting crime—I still made mine committing it.

We were standing against my car, talking quietly, all by ourselves on that isolated patch of ground. Years ago, I used to think things could be . . . different between us. Not thinking, really—wanting. She drew the line. Once in a while we got to hold hands over it, but I couldn’t pull her to me, and she’d never tried to pull me to her.

Wolfe took a photograph out of her pocket. Not a mug shot, some kind of surveillance photo. “Is this him?” she asked me.

It was murky, indistinct. “I got a flashlight in the trunk,” I told her.

She was standing by herself between the Plymouth’s dead headlights when the egg-yolk-yellow Pathfinder rolled into the parking lot. No music coming from it. Bad sign. I looked up as it slid within ten feet of Wolfe. A young guy bounced out: shirt to his knees, sleeves past his knuckles, worn over baggy pants ending at half-laced ultra sneakers endorsed by some role-model basketball star and made in some sweatshop in Southeast Asia, black knit watch cap with White Sox logo turned sideways, representing. Hip-hopper or wigger—I couldn’t tell his color in the early light.

“Yo bitch! ” he shouted at her.

I came around the back of the Plymouth with the tire iron in my hand. The guy said “Oh shit!” and piled back into the Pathfinder. It took off, grinding its chunky tires against the crusty blacktop.

“Bruiser, out! ” Wolfe yelled. That’s when I saw the rottweiler, closing ground like Judgment Day wrapped in black fur.