Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“Yeah.”

“Like that. Did . . . people hit you when you were a child?”

“People did everything to me when I was a child,” I told her.

She reached over, took my hand, put it on her proud soft breast. “Feel my heart,” she said.

“Nobody ever hit children there,” she said about an hour later.

“What?”

“On the Farm. Remember, you asked me? Nobody ever did that. Once I came inside from playing and my mother and father were there. They didn’t see me at first. My mother was cleaning the table. My father walked behind her and gave her a slap on the bottom. A hard slap, I could hear it crack. I got angry and I started to run to her, to protect her. Then I heard her . . . not laugh, or even giggle . . . some kind of sweet sound. I was so confused I started to cry. Then they saw me. My father tried to get me to sit on his lap, the way he did when he explained things to me. But I wouldn’t do it.

“My mother took me for a walk. She told me my father was just playing. It didn’t hurt her at all. I asked her if all men played like that, and she told me they didn’t. But she also told me it didn’t matter how men played. All that mattered was how the women wanted them to play. Men should never play any way women didn’t want.

“A couple of days later, I remember asking my father if he wanted to smack me on the bottom, like he did my mother. He got very upset. My father was a very dramatic man. My mother had to calm him down. You know how she always did that?”

“No.”

“Like this,” Crystal Beth said, planting her broad little nose in my chest and pushing so hard with her head that I had to grab her and brace myself to keep from staggering backward. “See how it works?” she whispered, nuzzling me, her hands locked together behind my back.

“Yeah.”

She kept pushing until I felt the easy chair against the back of my legs. I sat down, pulling her with me. She snuggled into my lap, gave me a quick nip on the neck.

“It was so easy when my mother explained it,” she said softly. “There are things a man does with a woman that he doesn’t do with a child. Not his child, not any child. She said someday a man would do things with me. I asked her what things. And she told me. Some of them, anyway. That’s how I learned about sex. My mother knew when it was time. My father, he never would have known.”

“You really loved him, huh?”

“My father? I adored him.”

“So you’re doing his work?”

“His work? My father was a—”

“Protector, right?”

“Oh. Yes. I never thought about that. It’s my . . . purpose. Like my mother told me. I didn’t think it was . . .”

“Ah, what do I know?” I said.

“Burke?”

“What, girl?”

“It must have been so hard. Not to have even . . . known your father.”

“You think they’re all alike, fathers?”

“No. I just—”

“I didn’t miss a fucking thing,” I told her.

The phone rang. Crystal Beth got off my lap and padded over to a far corner in her bare feet. She pulled some papers off the top of a two-drawer file cabinet and picked up the receiver lying underneath.

“Hello.”

She listened, cocking one hip the way Mama had cocked her head—I guess all women listen differently. Then she said: “Yes, I understand. All the way in the back. All right.”

And hung up.

“That was him,” she said. “He says to meet him in the Delta parking lot at La Guardia. All the way in the back, against the fence. He’ll be in a white Taurus sedan.”

“When?”

“Now. He said he’ll give you an hour.”

“Okay,” I said, climbing into my clothes.

“An hour isn’t—”

“This time of night? No problem,” I assured her.

She knelt at my feet, carefully threaded the laces of my work boots, tied each one precisely. “Burke, he didn’t say anything about calling you. He had to know you were here.”

“He’s calling from the meeting place,” I told her. “He’s already there. Probably been there for hours. In a war zone, names don’t matter, just addresses. It’s the only way he can be sure I don’t fill the parking lot with my own people. He’s not watching outside—he was just guessing about me being here. Not a bad guess anyway, right? I told him I was your man, remember? Or maybe he thought you could find me on the phone right away.”

“Or maybe he has people of his own,” she whispered.

“Maybe.”

She stood against me in the dark. Her skin was silky, warm with the blood beneath it. I kissed her tattoo and left her there.

Itook the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, the Plymouth gobbling ground effortlessly. It was still cold out, but the pavement was dry and traction was no problem. I kept near the speed limit until a bright-orange Mustang with a huge rear wing shot by me, a white Camaro with a broad red racing stripe in close pursuit. They were doing at least a hundred. Not racing—just screwing around, pushing each other. The BQE isn’t a race road—too many giant potholes, too many reverse-graded curves. When the dragsters want to really throw down, they go over to Rockaway or work the deep end of Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. But those fools were all the interference I’d ever need on the off-chance some highway cop was lurking in the night. Which I’d never seen on the BQE in my entire life anyway.

As I went by the McGinnis Boulevard cutoff, the back of the rear seat popped out and Max emerged from the trunk. He climbed into the front seat, dressed in full night-runner gear—a modified ninja outfit, light-eating black, complete with hood and face mask. I handed him the key and he opened the glove compartment. Took out a little square box made out of gunmetal-gray Lexan with a row of tiny Braille-style dots across the top. Max tripped the switch and the dots flashed in sequence before they settled down to only one glowing steady. Green. Pryce didn’t have a tracking device planted anywhere on the Plymouth—the Mole’s technology was as good as anything the government had. Better, probably. Underground research is pure Darwinism—no grants, no bureaucracy, no politics. It works or it dies.

I checked the rearview mirror. Empty. I rolled over the Kosciuszko Bridge and pulled up on the shoulder just past the LIE turnoff, playing it safe, watching the sparse traffic roll by.

Nothing.

Max kept watch as I sketched a rough map of what I wanted. He took one quick look, nodded okay—he’d been there before. I put the Plymouth in gear and pulled back on the highway. Max tore the hand-drawn map into tiny pieces, let them trail from his hand out the open window.

Plenty of time. I turned off the BQE to the Grand Central, followed it to Ninety-fourth Street, exited and ran parallel to the highway through East Elmhurst until I was well past the airport. I doubled back through the interchange at Northern Boulevard and grabbed the Grand Central again, heading back toward Manhattan. I kept sliding right until I picked up the service road that leads to a highway gas station. I pulled over just before I reached it. There’s a small parking area there. Limo drivers use it when they have a long wait for a flight—they’re not allowed in the taxi line. At almost one in the morning, the lot was deserted—La Guardia doesn’t handle international flights and it’s usually out of business by midnight. I let Max off. Checked my watch. I still had almost twenty minutes.

I punched Crystal Beth’s number into the cell phone.

It rang a dozen times. No answer.

I smoked a cigarette. Slowly, all the way through. Then I went to meet whatever was waiting.

The Delta lot is all the way at the east end of La Guardia, the last piece of solid ground before the whole place turns to swamp. I pulled a ticket from the automatic vending machine and the gate lifted to let me in. The lot was sporadically dotted with cars, almost all of them clustered near the exit to the terminal, probably airline personnel. In the warm weather, some people use this lot as a four-dollar-an-hour motel, a Lovers’ Lane where you don’t have to worry about prowlers. But in the winter, it’s all business. I let the Plymouth poke along between the rows of parked cars, feathering the throttle, watching. Halfway through the lot, it turned empty. Except for a white Taurus sedan standing all by itself against the back fence, front end aimed in my direction.