The first two kids stepped off together, holding hands.
By the time I got mixed in it, they had company down there.
I'd been quiet a long time. Since I went into that house and killed a child.
Killed a child. I can say it now. Every word.
I took out each word and played with it. Over and over again, the way I used to do in prison. The way you try and take something apart, see what makes it work. Words. Like... in war, they call the bodies "casualties." I was in a war. Casualties. Casual. You think about it, it makes sense. No, that's wrong. It doesn't make sense. But it fits.
Each word. One at a time. Over and over again.
Facing it.
I went into that house. Me. I knew what I was going to do in there.
In Africa, I served with this Aussie. Malcolm, his name was. A cheerful guy, I once saw him greet a man in a bar by butting heads with him. An old mate, he told me, from Rugby days. I didn't know what he was doing in the middle of that miserable war -- one of the rules was that you didn't ask. Malcolm was telling a story once, about someone who had done something to him. When he was just a kid, in Sydney. "I got my own back," he said. I finally figured out what he meant. Revenge. Get your own back.
I went into that house to get my own back. When I was done, I left a dead kid as a monument to my hate.
I told myself all the stories. Ever since. Every damn dead day. They were going to kill the kid anyway... had him all trussed up for the film they were getting ready to shoot. Shoot... a funny word for making a film. Not the films they were making, though. The right word, for them, what they were doing.
Words. More bullshit, cold-comfort words.
It was a gunfight, a shooting war -- I told myself that too. But I went into that house to kill every last one of them. Whatever, whoever I found there, it was going down.
I did it to defoliate the jungle of my childhood. To rip out the roots.
I went in shooting.
I wasn't trying to rescue the kid -- I didn't know he was there. They were going to sacrifice him. Kill him and film it. Sell the films.
Killing them, I sacrificed the kid myself.
I got shot, getting out, took one in the shoulder. It didn't seem like enough.
The kid was a casualty of war. Very casual. Gone.
He didn't have a life to live anyway -- I told myself that. Probably would have killed himself if he had the chance. Committed suicide. Gone over.
That's how this last business started. With kids killing themselves.
The old street dog shook himself and snarled at Spring, knowing he'd beat the odds for another year. In a wild pack, Winter takes them. He looked like his ancestors had been German shepherds, but a dozen generations later, he was a City Dog: lean, dirt-colored and sharp-eyed.
I was his brother, hunting. I was watching the tall redhead -- covered to her ankles with a long, quilted coat, but moving with the confidence that said she was packing something potent under it. Her hips, probably, from the brassy-sassy look on her face. On the other side of the street, a black kid, with a geometric design cut into the side of his fade. Wearing a white leather jacket with a big red STOP sign on the back. He was walking just behind her, tapping his heart, making sure the pistol was still there.
A dead giveaway, no matter how it played out.
He wasn't my problem -- I was there for the redhead.
"I want to see if she's cheating on me," the client had said, looking me dead in the eye. "I'm a hard-core bottom, but whoever owns me, I own that, understand?"
She was a short, delicate little brunette with improbable-violet eyes. Probably contacts.
"Rena disciplined me with this," she said, brushing her close-cropped hair back from her forehead. "It used to be shoulder-length. You understand?"
I nodded, holding her eyes.
"I'm pierced too. Down there." Looking at her leather-wrapped lap.
I didn't follow her eyes, waiting.
"I want to know where she goes, who she meets, what she does. And I want to know soon."
"Okay."
"I don't need pictures, tapes, anything like that. Not legal proof. This is a lot of money for just watching -- I expect you to watch close, agreed?"
"Yeah."
"I don't like dealing with men," the brunette said. "But Michelle said you were all right."
"Michelle tell you I get paid for what I do?"
"Yes, she told me everything."
If I had a sense of humor left, I would have laughed at that.
She slid an envelope across the tabletop. "There's five thousand dollars in there," she said. "What am I buying for that?"
"What you said you wanted," I told her.
Michelle came back a few months after I killed the kid. I don't know how she knew, but she did. She stayed with me for a couple of weeks. Pansy was still up at Elroy's, trying to get pregnant, so it was safe for Michelle to live in my office. Days, she visited Terry and the Mole in the junkyard bunker -- nights, with me.
I was up on the roof, looking into the Zero. She came up behind me, one red-taloned hand on my forearm, tracer-bullet perfume all around her. I had forgotten how pure-beautiful she was. I'd never asked her if she'd gone through with the surgery when she came back -- never asked her why she came back at all.
She stood close to me, wrapping her arms around me like a referee with a beaten fighter, whispering the same words. "You can always do it, honey," she crooned. "Tonight's not your night."
Not this one, anyway.
I stayed to myself. In my office. My cell. Did a lot of reading, the way I did when they had me locked down. Built up all this vocabulary I had no place to use.
I didn't have the heart for any of my usual scams. I waited to save it for the pain.
More than a year passed, and they never came around. Maybe they knew and just didn't care.
It could be. I knew, and I didn't care.
I twisted the ignition key and the cab's engine kicked over. I put it in gear and pulled away from the curb on Franklin Street, circling the block, canceling the rooftop OFF DUTY sign with a flick of my thumb. When I came back around, the redhead was still striding along. She hailed my cab and I pulled over.
She climbed in the back seat, keeping one hand on a big black leather pocketbook.
"Where to?" I asked her.
"Central Park West and Seventy-seventh," she said in a hard, measured voice. "You know where that is?" she challenged, glancing at my hack license framed on the dash. Maybe she thought Juan Rodriguez didn't speak English.
"Yes ma'am," I told her. "West Side Highway to Tenth okay?"
"Isn't straight up Sixth shorter?" she asked, a hostile overtone to her throaty voice.
"Lots of traffic now, ma'am. It's quicker the way I said... but anything you say, that's okay."
"Oh, go your way," she snapped, lighting a cigarette, blowing a jet-stream at the yellow decal I had plastered on the partition between the front and back seats. The one that said No Smoking Please -- Driver Allergic in bold black letters.
When I pulled over on CP West, she tipped me two bucks -- I guess she liked docile drivers.
I watched her go into the high-rise. The doorman smiled as if he'd seen her before.
I parked the cab at a hack stand, pulled my gym bag off the front seat and walked along until I found a bar that didn't have ferns in the window.
"Absolut rocks," I told the bartender. "Water on the side."
The place was nearly empty. I left the change from my twenty on the bar, waited until the bartender was down at the other end, drank most of the water, poured some of the vodka into the water glass. I picked up my gym bag and carried it into the Men's Room. It was empty.
I took off my leather jacket, pulled the sweatshirt over my head, took off the oversize chino pants. Underneath, I had on a pair of dark gray wool slacks and a light gray silk shirt. I took an unstructured navy blue linen jacket from the gym bag, shrugged into it, checked for fit. Then I peeled off the phony mustache, squeezed some gel into the palm of my hand, ran it through my hair. When my hair got heavy and greasy enough, I combed it straight back, secured the little ponytail with a rubber band. I put the cabdriver clothes in the gym bag, walked out of the Men's Room and out the front door of the bar.
The doorman was still at his post, dressed like a lieutenant in some banana republic, standing with his hands behind his back.
I closed up the space between us, hands open at my sides, palms down.
"How you doing?" I asked him.
"Okay, man. What's up?"
"I'm looking for a little information. Lightweight stuff. Thought maybe you could help me out...
"You the po-leece?"
"The police this polite?" I asked him, holding out my hand to shake.
He did it, palmed the three twenties I had folded up.
"Woman came in maybe twenty minutes ago. Tall redhead. You smiled at her -- she's been in before?"
"I'm not sure, man."
"Yeah, you're sure. You didn't know her, you'd have to play the role," I said, glancing at the sign posted at the door: ALL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED.
"I don't know her name, just..."
"I know her name, pal. Which apartment does she go to?"
He tilted his head back, looked into my eyes.
I looked back.
He took his hand out of his pocket, looked over the money I'd passed him.
"It's enough," I told him.
"She goes to twenty-seven-G, man. Every time."
"Who's there?"
He looked back at the money in his hand.
"Fair enough," I told him. "I got a couple more, make it a flat yard, okay?"
He nodded. I handed him two more twenties.
"Miss Kraus," he said.
"Just her?"
"Yeah, she lives alone, man. Suzanne Kraus. She does something in advertising, I think."
"Yeah. She a good tipper?"
"Not as good as you, man.
Copyright © 1994 by Andrew Vachss
)
Andrew Vachss has reinvented detective fiction for an age in which guilty secrets are obsolete and murder isn't even worth a news headline. And in the person of his haunted, hell-ridden private eye Burke, Vachss has given us a new kind of hero: a man inured to every evil except the kind that preys on children. Now Burke is back, investigating an epidemic of apparent suicides among the teenagers of a wealthy Connecticut suburb. There he discovers a sinister connection between the anguish of the young and the activities of an elite sadomasochistic underground, for whom pain and its accompanying rituals are a source of pleasure--and power.
