Andrew Vachss - Safe House

The other two sent word to me that there had been nothing personal—they’d mistaken me for somebody else. I was okay with them. Sorry about what happened. How about if they send a few crates of smokes over to my wing, make it up to me?

I sent word back: Sure. No hard feelings.

A couple of months later, the race war was over. For then—the only way it’s ever over in there. One of the two guys who’d sent me the smokes was watching a softball game on the yard when someone came up behind him and played a one-swing game of T-ball with his head.

The hacks figured it for debt collection—the black guy was a known gambler. Like always, they got it about half right.

Less than a week later, his partner went off a high tier all the way down to the killing concrete floor.

The investigation was quick. After all, a lot of suicides don’t leave notes.

The lookout was the sole survivor. He smelled the wind, took a voluntary PC. Refused to eat any food that the hacks didn’t taste. Which meant he was starving to death. He became convinced microwaves were being sent to give him cancer. Heard voices telling him he was going to die. They gave him medication—held him down for the needle. It calmed him, let him relax. After a while, he started to trust again, so they switched to oral meds. He always took them, no complaints. It wasn’t so bad in there for him after that. He got tranquil, started to eat again. But he never came out of his cell.

That’s where they found his body, burned to a crisp. If he’d screamed, nobody had heard.

Herk would die for me.

He was my brother.

My brother was in a box, not me.

But my family is me. My brother was in danger, and I was afraid. For him, for me. Same thing.

I had my old partner back. Fear was in me, alive.

And it would keep my brother that way too.

I guess I’ll never qualify as a sociopath. But you don’t have to be a sociopath to act like one.

I started to plot.

“Are you okay?” Crystal Beth asked me again. “You keep . . . going away.”

“I’m back now,” I told her.

In this city, some of the rats have wings. There’s parts of Brooklyn where pigeon-racing is a bigger sport than baseball. And if you’re tired of having your house covered in pigeon shit, professional exterminators will lay a covering on your roof to solve the problem. It’s really a carpet of tiny little face-up nails—pigeons can’t land on it.

But starlings live in this city too, and they need places to roost. For their tribe to survive. So what they do is they carefully gather twigs and paper and other stuff, drop it on the carpet of nails and then stand on that.

Idon’t know how they do it in other countries, but in America, people call themselves “friends” and it means about as much as when they sign their letters “Love.” All their letters.

Down here, it’s different. I have no friends. There’s people I know, people I wouldn’t hurt if I could help it. There’s people I like, and maybe they like me. But it really comes down to Us, Them . . . and non-combatants.

Us is the deepest blood of all. And it only takes volunteers.

In your world, you ask a friend to get something for you, he’d probably ask what you wanted it for. And then he might say yes and he might say no.

When I asked Clarence to get something for me, he didn’t ask me what I wanted it for.

And he didn’t just say he’d get it for me—he asked if he could use it himself.

“What’s the point?” Pryce asked.

“I don’t want to say on the phone. Especially without a land-line,” I told him.

“You want to meet, I can do that. But why does . . . my friend have to be there too?”

“I learned something,” I said. “It could change the game, understand? Change everything.”

“I still don’t—”

“Change everything, ” I said, letting an organ-stop of pressure into my voice.

He was silent for a minute, but the cellular’s hum told me he was still on the line. “The last time we met, it was all yours,” he finally said. “This time, it has to be mine.”

“Time and place,” I said. “You call it.”

“I can’t just reach out and—”

“When you have it, let me know,” I said. “But there isn’t a lot of time.”

“You trust me?” I asked Hercules in the bedroom of Vyra’s hotel suite.

“All the way, brother,” he said, no hesitation.

“Up to now, they been the players, we been the game, got it?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna change the game,” I told him.

Two days later. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Rain banging against Crystal Beth’s dark window.

“You know where River Street is?” Pryce’s voice, over the cell phone.

“What borough?”

“Brooklyn.”

“I can find it,” I told him. Lying. I know River Street. It only runs for a couple of blocks, parallel to Kent Avenue, right off where the East River flows under the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Go there now,” he said. “You’ll see my car parked.”

“I’m moving,” I promised.

“Are you inside?” I asked Vyra. Meaning: Are you in the suite, not the street?

“Yes.” Her voice over the cell phone was clipped, precise. Not like her.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Your car is there?”

“Yes.”

“Do this now. You both meet me at the Butcher Block. Now.”

“I don’t know where—”

“Your friend does. Now.”

I cut the connection.

Ispotted the burgundy Mercedes 600SL coupe coming down the block, moving slow. I stepped out so they could see me. “Get in my car,” I told Hercules.

“What’s going—?”

“Tell you later,” I cut Vyra off. “Go back to the hotel. Stay there, girl, no matter what. If you don’t hear anything in a couple of hours, call the number you have for me. Tell whoever answers that I went to meet Pryce. And I didn’t come back.”

“Why does Hercules have to—?”

“Not now,” I said, turning my back on her and moving off to the Plymouth.

“It’s gotta be this way, huh?” Herk asked me.

I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, heading toward Queens. Exited at Metropolitan Avenue and swung back toward Brooklyn.

“Yeah. When you play cards, the ace is boss, right?”

“Sure.”

“We need the king to be boss, Herk.”

He nodded soberly, watching the miserable weather. The sky was turning prison-gray.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“Vyra. Are you . . . like, with her?”

“With her? Like I’m with you? No. She’s not one of—”

“Nah, I don’t mean that. I never say things like I mean them. I mean, I say them straight, but they don’t come out the way I’m thinking. You understand?”

“Yeah, I do. What do you want to know?”

“You and her. She was . . . like your girlfriend, right?”

“No. She was never my girlfriend. We . . . got together once in a while. That’s all.”

“You like her?”

“I don’t know what I think about her. Never thought about it at all, I guess.”

“I like her.”

“You mean you’d like to fuck her,” saying it bluntly to take the edges off.

“Nah. I mean . . . I would. I mean . . . I already . . . Burke, I really like her. She’s real smart. And real sweet. I can talk to her about things.”

“Like what? Shoes?”

“Man, you don’t know her. She’s really a . . . good person.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means: okay. Whatever you want to do, it’s up to you. But, Herk . . .”