Andrew Vachss - Safe House

for the grief we have harvested

from the evil you have sown

jackals will forever call you coward

and vultures refuse your bones

— family curse

Acclaim for ANDREW VACHSS’s SAFE HOUSE

“A cobra’s nest of extortionists, neo-Nazis and other assorted freaks.”

— Chicago Tribune

“With his stripped down, stark prose and darkly evocative sense of place, Vachss introduces us to a world most of us would rather not know about—and then hooks us with a stunning story.”

— Milwaukee Journal

“Well done and well worth it.”

— Dayton Daily News

“Vachss’s prose is Hammett-tough, and Burke’s world is unsettling if not psychologically dangerous for the first-time reader.”

— Huntsville Times (Alabama)

“Vachss is one of my favorite writers, and I never miss one of his books. He brings incredible passion and flair to the mystery genre. Safe House is one of Vachss’s very best.”

—James Patterson

“ Safe House comes at you with the speed of a bullet train, a style as spare and stripped down as origami and Andrew Vachss’s usual black-as-pitch theme—the abuse of innocence. Yet for all of the their dark modernity, Vachss’s novels are inheritors of nineteenthcentury social criticism, as much Dickens and Defoe as Hammett and Chandler.”

—Martha Grimes

“Andrew Vachss’s work is all about horror, outrage, moral indignation and the blood of commitment. Vachss is the voice of righteousness confronting a powerful and cowardly evil.”

—James Ellroy

“Among writers of suspense, Andrew Vachss’s work stands out for its substance, integrity and absorbing readability. Safe House has all the distinctive Vachss virtues—a seductive style, a thought-provoking story and the creation of an utterly convincing world. I read it compulsively and with great pleasure.

—Richard North Patterson

“Outside the herd of self-serving, navel-magnifying American novelists, one man walks tall and almost alone: Andrew Vachss. You can read him for razor-edged entertainment, or you can read him for help in understanding the monsters who stalk America’s streets. Either way, read him: he deserves that, and so do you.”

—James Grady

SAFE HOUSE

Vyra twisted her body to catch the pale mid-afternoon light purring against the white mesh curtains in the window of the downtown hotel room. She was nude except for a pair of sheer stockings and sunburst-yellow spike heels with black ankle straps. Posing, she stood in front of me, one foot on a straight chair she’d pulled away from the desk, watching me over one shoulder, wheat-colored hair hanging straight down her back. As she slowly turned to face me, her enormous breasts came into view, appearing even more massive on her thin, curveless frame. She raised her hands high above her head, looking down.

“Aren’t they just perfect?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I assured her.

“They’re so beautiful, I just hate to take them off.”

“They won’t get in the way,” I said.

Vyra’s idea of foreplay is putting on a fashion show. But she makes up for it—a couple of cigarettes is about all the after-play she ever has time for.

Me too.

I’d known Vyra for years—I wasn’t the only key that had ever fit her lock. But my timing was good. Her husband did something that brought in beaucoup bucks. Or his people left him a bundle, I could never remember. Vyra changed her stories about as often as her shoes, but she loved them both. All I really knew about her husband was how he worshipped those humongous, incongruous breasts. That’s why she kept them, she said, just for him. They strained her scrawny frame, hurt her back. The heavy underwire bra she had to wear cut harsh marks into her pale skin. Her body looked like a cartoon drawn by a fetishist.

Vyra had a sweet, lonely heart. And a deep borderline’s void. When she got bored, she shopped. And volunteered for all kinds of organizations. Suicide hot lines, animal shelters, like that.

Vyra doesn’t know what I do, but she knows I’m not an accountant. She gets nosy every once in a while—just to keep in practice, I think. But she doesn’t push, and it never comes to anything.

Vyra knows where to find me. Or where to leave word, anyway. She never calls unless she’s already got a hotel room. And if I’m around when she calls, we get together and do what we do.

But only if I’m around when she calls. I never think about what she does when I’m not.

Isat up slightly, reached down and tangled her hair in my hand. Pulled gently. She kept her mouth locked around my cock, shook her head no. I pulled harder, warning her. She stayed where she was, making little grunting sounds until it was over.

After a minute or two, she slithered up my body, her breasts trailing against my stomach, stopping at my chest. She looked down.

“Is it different when a woman does it?”

“What?”

“Blows you. If your eyes are closed, does it make any difference?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you were . . . in prison, weren’t you?”

She brings that up a lot. I don’t know why—it’s important to her in some way she never explained. And I never asked.

“Yeah. So?”

“Were you in a long time?”

“What’s a long time, little girl?” I asked her gently, running my thumb over her sticky mouth.

“More than . . . I don’t know, a year?”

“Sure.”

“So what did you do for . . . sex?”

“Went steady with my fist.”

“But I heard . . . I mean, if you have sex in prison, it doesn’t make you gay.”

“So?”

“Is that true?”

“Prison’s like the rest of the world. All kinds in there.”

“Is that why you never did it? In there? Because you hate them?”

“Hate who?”

“Gay people?”

I slid my right hand around to the back of her neck. She smiled down at me. I suddenly twisted my hand, shoving her face down into the mattress. I moved to one side, held her down with my right hand while I pressed my left thumb into the base of her spine, hard. I leaned down and put my lips to her ear.

“You like this?” I said softly.

“ No! Let me—”

“Rape is rape,” I whispered. “It’s not gay, it’s not straight. I don’t give a good goddamn how people fuck, long as it’s what they want to do, understand?”

“Yes.”

I let her go. She popped up on one elbow. “I didn’t mean anything, honey,” she said, a fake-contrite tone in her voice. “I was just curious.”

“You’ve got a sweet little nose,” I told her. “Just watch where you stick it, okay?”

“ You watch,” she giggled.

Ipulled away from the hotel an hour later. Winter was against the ropes bleeding, but it refused to go down for the count. That gray day in March, spring was still a whore’s promise—nylons whispering, but no real juice waiting.

I cursed the cold as the Plymouth slid around another corner, its wipers all but surrendering to the leaden sleet sneering down from a sullen sky. The anemic sun had vanished along with Vyra.

The Plymouth was an anonymous drab shark in an ocean of quicker, brighter little fish—all of them darting about, secure in their front-wheel drive, ABS-equipped, foglight-blazing perkiness—at war with glowering pedestrians, all engaged in a mutual ignorance pact when it came to traffic signals. I feathered the throttle, knowing the Plymouth’s stump-puller motor could break the fat rear tires loose in a heartbeat, wishing the guy who had built what he thought was going to be the ultimate New York City taxicab had lived to finish the job.