Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“It’s just a . . . feeling, like,” he said, glancing over at Vyra. “But I think Lothar was doing that stuff first. I mean, the porno. And those other guys . . . one of them, anyway . . . comes in the shop, or he hears about what Lothar’s got, I dunno. I mean, one of the guys from his first cell, not the one he’s in now. The one I was supposed to be . . . Anyway I think he wasn’t like . . . with them first. He’s not a guy with guns or bombs or nothing. He used to write stuff. . . .”

“What stuff?”

“I dunno. About the Jews and niggers and all.”

“You get the impression he’s being cagey? Like maybe they got a bug in his apartment?”

“Man, I never know when someone’s being cagey. That’s what the Prof always says. Me, I’m thick. I mean, I never knew him before, so how’m I gonna know if he changed, right?”

“Right.”

“When this is over, I’m going away,” he said quietly.

“It’s a long way from over,” I warned him.

“And it’s a long way I’m going, bro,” Hercules said. “Either way, I’m gone. Live or die, I’m done with this.”

Ileft Herk there. Told him to hang around a minimum of a couple of hours. Watch TV or something. Vyra still hadn’t lit the cigarette.

I took the stairway to my room. Ducked inside. The message light wasn’t blinking on the phone.

Good.

I called Mama. Nothing.

Even better.

I know what happens when there’s too many loose threads—somebody weaves them into a noose. Panic was my enemy, but I knew how to deal with it: Aikido. In my head. My spirit against the enemy.

I stripped down to my underwear and closed my eyes, watching the loose threads dance on a tiny 3-D screen.

A movie. Only I wasn’t just a spectator. Or even an actor. I was the director.

Working on the final cut.

No point trying to call Davidson. He doesn’t trust phones and he’d go so elliptical that it’d take him an hour to say hello. I went over to his office, told his receptionist that I had an appointment. She couldn’t find it on her calendar, so I told her to ask him, gambling that he wouldn’t be in with a client first thing in the morning.

“You in trouble?” he asked without preamble as I closed his office door behind me.

“Not me. Maybe not anybody, if you can do something for me.”

“Something in court?”

“If it goes right, it never goes to court. Some . . . negotiations.”

“With . . . ?”

“I don’t know the name of the AUSA. I’m not coming in at that end.”

“And I’m not following you.”

“Here it is,” I told him. “I got a friend. A good friend. He’s about to do something for the federales. Something big. The promise is immunity. For everything.”

“Everything he’s going to do? Everything he’s already done? What?”

“Everything everything. He’s not a rat. This is kind of an . . . undercover thing. All I’ve collected so far is a pack of promises.”

“From the government?”

“From a guy who says he can get that done. A free-lancer.”

“Oh,” Davidson said quietly, a cubic ton of suspicion compressed into that one syllable.

“Yeah, I know. That’s where you come in. My friend needs a lawyer. Somebody to drive the nails home. What I want, I want this guy, this free-lancer, to put up now. I want him to take you to someone—whoever—who can grant the immunity. And I want it. In writing. A cooperation agreement. Rock-solid, no loopholes. And the deal has to include a new ID.”

“And a relocate?”

“Yeah, we can say that. But my friend, he’s gonna walk away, sooner or later. The deal isn’t for protection, it’s for a new everything—name, face, Social Security, work history. And no testimony.”

“No testimony? He’s going to access them to the kind of evidence that stands on its own?”

“That’s the deal,” I said. “You can do it?”

“I can do it if this free-lancer you’re talking about can deliver. If he really has that kind of influence. I understand what you want, but I don’t know what I’ve got to bargain with to get it.”

“How about if I tell you?” I asked, lighting a cigarette.

Ileft ten grand with Davidson, with the other half to come when the deal was done. He hadn’t said anything about cutting his price once I told him what was going on, but his whole posture shifted behind the big desk. Davidson was a stand-up guy with the best credentials you can have in our business—a track record. And he was a hell of a lawyer. Most of the time, I hold back some of the truth when I talk to him. But he’d lost relatives to the death camps, and I knew what the truth would do this time. I wouldn’t want to be the government lawyer who tried to get in his way.

Back at my place, I tried to think it through.

Mousetrap. Box. Closed-end tunnel. It all came up the same on my screen.

Pryce had me cornered. He had too many pieces on the board.

My mind ached with the strain from trying to slip out of the maze. My face hurt—sharp, spiking pain in the nerve cluster below the cheekbone. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I realized how tightly my teeth had been clenched. When I finally fell asleep, fever-dreams snapped me wide awake.

I knew what to do then. Stared at the red dot on my mirror until I fell into it. Stayed down there, safe and dissociated.

When I resurfaced I was calmer.

But still trapped.

“Are you afraid?” Crystal Beth asked later, lying next to me in the dark.

And that’s when I knew what was wrong. Why I couldn’t think my way out.

I wasn’t afraid.

The first thing I remember about being a baby is terror so total that fear became my one true friend. Always with me, never leaving my side. Warning me, keeping me vigilant. Distrustful. A layer of protection between the terror and me—the little tiny bit that was me then.

Fear never abandoned me. I took it with me everywhere I went. Everywhere they sent me. The State—my true parent—sending me to surrogates who continued its vicious work. The orphanage. Foster homes. Reform school. Prison looming as inevitable in my future as college was in the lives of the privileged.

Fear came there with me too. A friend I internalized so deep the wolf packs that ran wild through the joint couldn’t smell it. That’s because it wasn’t on me, it was in me. I cherished it, nurtured it, encoded it into my own DNA. My face flattened, my hands stopped shaking. My heart went slow and cold.

I came into prison with a life-taker’s rep. They test reps in there. I kept mine. It cost a lot, but it wasn’t me who paid.

I got to where I never broke a sweat. My voice stayed within a tight, narrow range. I could stare down a cobra. But the fear-bolts always roamed loose in my body, firing off bursts whenever danger was around.

In prison, I lived in danger, adrenaline crackling through my synapses like turbo-boosted cocaine. It kept me alive.

My one goal, then.

Out in the World, I kept the fear. But I played it different. I learned to show the fear when it would do me some good. Trained myself to act, role-playing along the tightrope of survival.

Fear never left me. Until now.

I felt abandoned all over again. Deserted. Without my old friend, I couldn’t plot, couldn’t plan.

So why wasn’t I afraid? I was boxed, all right. Couldn’t see a way out. So why . . . ?

“Burke! Burke, wake up. Are you all right?”

Crystal Beth, shaking my shoulders, gentle but serious. I opened my eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked again.