Dead and Gone b-12

by Andrew Vachss

  He held Swift’s hand like he was his father. They walked along until Cormil opened one of the offices with a key from the big ring he wore on his belt. They went inside. Cormil left the door open, probably so he could hear if anyone was coming.

  But he never heard me coming. They don’t call it reform school for nothing.

  It didn’t look like rape. Not to me. Not to a kid my age. Not to a State-raised kid who’d seen rape. It looked like … like Swift on his knees, sucking Cormil off while the guard leaned forward and stroked the kid’s hair. And then it looked like Cormil pulling his cock out and helping Swift stand up. And bend over. He smeared some greasy stuff on his cock and fucked Swift in the ass. But slow and gentle, talking to him like a lover all the while.

  It wasn’t anything like I knew rape to be. There was no gun. No knife. No fist. No threats.

  It took a lot of years before I understood what I had seen that night.

  As soon as we were alone the next morning, I told Lune. He just nodded—you could see his mind was somewhere else.

  “How’d you know?” I badgered him.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “But I knew there was a pattern. Swift had things. He had to get them from somewhere. He was … special. How come? I didn’t know. But I knew, if you watched him close enough, we’d find out.”

  “You’re a dangerous motherfucker,” I told him.

  Lune and I didn’t speak the same language. He didn’t get that I was showing him high respect. “I just want to find my real parents,” he said, sadly.

  After that, the only hard part about busting out was waiting for Swift to visit Cormil again. And keeping Lune from screwing things up. He didn’t know how to move quiet. And he was so nervous, I thought they’d hear his raspy breathing as we slipped past the room where Cormil and Swift were doing what they did.

  But once we made it past them, it was easy. We dropped down flat on the carpet in the hall until they were finished. As soon as they walked back down the corridor together, we made our move. I loided the door to the big cheese’s office—it was nothing but a doorknob lock, no deadbolt—and we went inside.

  I picked that room because I’d been in there before. That’s how I knew there was no deadbolt. And what was right outside the window. A parking lot. A parking lot outside the walls around the hospital where they kept us.

  I opened the window, moving real slow against it squeaking, but it didn’t make a sound. The office was right on the first floor, and we dropped down easy. Then I pulled the window back closed.

  The parking lot was almost empty—just a few scattered cars, and not a Cadillac in the bunch. The big shots wouldn’t be showing up for hours.

  I didn’t know how to hotwire a car then. And even if I had known, it would have been a dumb risk.

  I had nine dollars in singles. Lune didn’t have anything. I didn’t know where we were, but I could see it was out in the country someplace.

  We could have tried hitchhiking, but it was too close to the nuthouse. And if a cop cruised by …

  So we walked, following the road but staying in the darkness of the shoulder. I was looking for a place where we could hole up before it got daylight when Lune spotted a diner a few hundred yards ahead.

  I told him to let me do the talking if we had to go inside. First I checked the parking lot. Most of the cars had New York plates. Some of the big trucks had a whole bunch of them, from different states. I couldn’t figure out why that would be, but I knew they locked the backs of those semis.

  I tried door handles, one after another. If I hadn’t believed God hated me personally, I probably would have prayed. A big new Ford station wagon called to me. The back door opened. “Come on!” I whispered to Lune. We climbed inside. There was some stuff there, but it wasn’t crowded. “He could spot us here. We got to get all the way in the back,” I said to Lune, putting my hand over his mouth when he opened it to ask a question.

  In the space behind the rear seat, there was nothing but a pair of suitcases. “All right,” I told Lune. “We’re going to just lie down here. If the guy comes out and gets in the front seat and drives away, we go wherever he’s going, got it? But if he opens up this back part, Lune—brother, listen now—we got to run, all right? Just fucking blast outa here before the guy knows what’s happening. See the woods over there? Right across from us? All right, that’s where we head for. I don’t think he’ll even chase us. Maybe figure it was a joke or something.”

  “I can’t—”

  “Lune, you have to! Look, if he opens up this part, I’ll try and kick him or something. Give you a little time to get going. Remember how you fought when Hunsaker …? Remember that? It’s like that now, too. We got to do it, or we’re fucked.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he was breathing real hard. And real loud.

  “Okay?” I asked him.

  He just nodded.

  I don’t know how much time passed before we heard the front door open. Lune squeezed my hand tight. We felt the weight of the driver as he plopped into his seat, even back where we were. Then we heard the blessed sound of the engine rumbling into life.

  When the station wagon pulled out onto the highway, Lune let go of my hand.

  It was just coming daylight when the driver slowed down. I couldn’t tell if he was getting gas or what, so I snuck a quick look up. It was another diner. We heard the front door open, then slam shut.

  When we climbed out of the back of that station wagon, we saw that the diner the guy had stopped at was in the Bronx.

  “We’re okay now,” I promised Lune.

  Lune stayed with me for almost three weeks. I knew better than to go back to where they’d grabbed me before. I knew some other things, too. Like places where kids our age could make some money. But shining shoes was out—if you took a corner, you had to be able to hold it, and Lune wouldn’t be able to help. If I’d been bigger, or even if Lune had been better at violence, we might have tried to rip off one of the Times Square chickenhawks.

  But there were plenty of other ways.

  Lucky for us, it was summer. Lots of kids on the streets. The cops wouldn’t give us a second look once we got some fresh clothes. That I knew how to do. Not shoplifting. That was for the artists. All I knew was snatch-and-run.

  I wouldn’t let Lune come with me when I hit the stores. It wasn’t just to protect him—I knew he’d screw it up.

  Once we had clothing, we hit the strolls, looking for working girls who’d pay me a little for steering, like I’d done for Sandi. But as soon as they saw Lune, they couldn’t stop fussing over him. They all wanted to pat him, or give him a kiss, or cuddle him … that kind of stuff. If I heard “dollface” or “angelpuss” one more time, I was going to puke. But at least they never bothered me with any of that sappy stuff. And some of them gave us money, too.

  People were a lot more careless back then. Stealing was easy. The hard part was finding places to sleep. I knew kids from reform school, but I didn’t know their last names, or their addresses or anything—just where they’d be hanging out if they were out.

  There were gangs all over the City back then. Small ones, mostly, with four-block squares of turf, although there were a few that could call out a hundred guys for bloody battles that only the newspapers called “rumbles.” I knew I could work into a gang as a Junior—I had all the credentials. But I also knew Lune wouldn’t be able to handle the initiation, so we steered clear of them.

  Finally, I found Wesley. Or maybe he found me. He knew places down by the docks that were perfect for hiding out. Wesley couldn’t figure out what I was doing with Lune, but he let him come along. That was Wesley then. If you were with him, anyone with you was with him, too.

  Years later, after he’d made his mark so deep the whisper-stream trembled every time he went on the stalk, people said he’d been born a killing machine. They didn’t know Wesley when he had a heart. A heart of napalm, ready to explode into flame for anyone who would love him.

  Lune
was one of the softest, gentlest people I’d ever known. And Wesley became an assassin so deadly that even his own death didn’t stop his name from invoking terror. But when they were kids with me, they had the same heart.

  Late one night, I told them about the fire. Wesley said I could have made sure if I had done them all first. I said I’d thought of that, but I’d seen kids stabbed and not die from it—even turn on the kid holding the shank and fuck him up. And I knew he had, too; we’d watched it together.

  “That was in there,” the ice-boy said. “It’s different out here.”

  “How come?” I asked him, puzzled.

  The next day, we went into a pawnshop. Wesley bought a pearl-handled straight razor for two dollars.

  And that night, he showed me how good it worked.

  We had a little more than three hundred and fifty dollars put aside—a lot of money, back then. It was time for Lune to go. I thought he’d kick about it, want to stay with me and Wesley. But he kept telling us that he couldn’t find his parents hiding out—he had to go looking for them. Lune figured his parents couldn’t be from New York. The way he reasoned it out was, the place where we’d been locked up—the nuthouse—that was in New York. So his real parents, if they were from New York, they would have found him.

  He asked us about our parents, once. We just told him we didn’t have any. When Lune asked us if we wanted to try and find them, Wesley gave him a look that would have scared a scorpion.

  Lune was smarter than me and Wesley put together, I think. But he had a special kind of mind. And he wasn’t raised where we were. So it was our job to spring him.

  Once we figured out that they put Lune in that nuthouse because they really thought he was crazy, we knew they wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking for him. He had to be a throwaway kid of some kind, like us, even though Lune always said he had a family. A real family that loved him.

  We knew he could never get out of the City on his own. Even if the cops weren’t looking for him, a kid traveling alone would get questions asked. And once they heard Lune’s answers, he’d be right back Inside.

  We knew places where you could jump freights, but I didn’t think Lune could handle that. And Wesley said, even if he could, the older guys riding the rails would eat him alive. That was after he had tried to show Lune how to use the razor. Lune wouldn’t even touch it.

  We found the answer where kids like us always found their answers. Wesley was even better than me at being invisible, but I was better at talking to people. Way better—Wesley didn’t like talking, and he didn’t like people.

  The hooker’s name was Vonda. All we knew about her was that she got ten bucks for half-and-half, and that she had a pair of dreams. One was to go to Hollywood and be discovered. The other was to get away from her pimp—a gorilla who snatched her right off the stroll every night and made her turn over the take. He’d already shown her what would happen if she ever held out on him. With a coat-hanger whip and the glowing tip of his cigarette. She was too scared to ever run on her own.

  Wesley and I figured she and Lune were a natural pair.

  “He’ll never let me go,” she told us, standing under an overhang to get some shelter from the rain, but still scanning the street for a customer. “And I don’t ever have more than a couple of bucks at a time of my own, anyway.”

  “We can get you two hundred and fifty,” I said.

  “I guess maybe you could, you little hustler,” she said, giving me a grin. “But he’d come after me. No matter where I went. I know he would. He’s got contacts all over the country.” There was a twisted mixture of pride and terror in her voice.

  “When he picks you up after work, where do you go?”

  “Home.”

  “With him?”

  “Sure,” she said, shrugging at the silly question.

  “Is he a heavy sleeper?”

  “Like a fucking log. But it would only give me a few hours’ head start, and—”

  “You’d have a lot more time than that,” I promised her. “But the deal is, remember, you have to take Lune with you. All the way to Hollywood. And you have to keep him with you—just a place to sleep and some food—until he’s ready to go out on his own.”

  “Like I was his mother, right?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “I … It wouldn’t work. What’s to stop Trey from—?”

  Then Wesley spoke. From the shadows, his natural home. He was a kid then, maybe twelve years old, I never knew for sure. But his voice was already ice-edged. “After he goes to sleep, just go downstairs and unlock the door,” he said.

  I didn’t think Vonda had been taking us seriously until right that moment. She looked into the shadows where Wesley stood. And the gleam she saw wasn’t coming from his eyes.

  “When do I get the money?” she asked me.

  Wesley was right about the razor. The first cut did it. The pimp made some spastic movements, trying to hold his throat together with his hands … but not a sound came out of his mouth.

  We’d made Lune wait downstairs, telling him to keep the hundred bucks we’d given him a secret, no matter what, until he made his break in California. We told him it wouldn’t be long—Vonda would be going back to hooking the second she got low on dough.

  After we all made it downstairs, we walked for a few blocks. I gave Vonda the money. Then she hailed a cab, and I didn’t see Lune again for more than twenty years.

  The cops never found me or Wesley. We both hooked up with a gang, and ended up busted a few weeks later. We gave them phony names, but it didn’t matter—when nobody came to claim us at Juvie, they put us back Inside. At least it wasn’t the nuthouse.

  I never got a letter from Lune while I was Inside. Not for the juvenile beefs, not for the felonies that turned me into a two-time loser later. And during the times I was out, he never called me on the phone, either.

  But he always knew where I was, somehow. One of the hacks would come by my cell, tell me someone had sent me a money order. They never actually gave you the money, they just put it on the books for you so you could draw against it for stuff they sold in there—like miners who could only shop at the company store.

  The money orders were always from Vonda-something—the last names were always different. And they were always for the maximum amount the institution allowed. I always wrote to the return address, but the mail always came back. So I knew that it had to be Lune. And that he’d learned some tricks.

  I had my own wires, too. I’d catch something about Lune every once in a while. Not by name. But there’d be something in the whisper-stream about an organization that did “forecasting.” You gave them the known facts, and they’d work out “scenarios” on a “probabilities scale” for you. Something a team of entrepreneurs could use, if they were thinking of opening a new restaurant. Or an armored car on its way to the bank.

  When I finally saw him again, he was in Cleveland, a whole crew working with him. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were working on, but it all had something to do with “patterns.” They were like a gang of crazed journalists, gathering facts at random, checking and rechecking and cross-checking them until Lune pronounced them “authentic.” Then they got to be pieces on this giant chessboard in Lune’s head.

  And when it was all done, he could predict white’s next move as easy as black’s. But all he did was watch; he never played.

  The people who followed him weren’t his partners. I mean, maybe they were, financially or something. But they were all looking for answers. And they believed that if they learned Lune’s patterning methods they could find what they needed.

  It wasn’t that Lune could deconstruct assassinations of major public figures, tell you who did them, and why. Anyone can have a theory. But Lune told his people that the murders were going down before they happened. He could explain why Albert DeSalvo wasn’t the Boston Strangler. And why Xerox was going to be a dominator when it was still a two-dollar stock.

  I never asked
Lune what had happened in all the years we hadn’t been in touch. I didn’t have to ask him if he ever found his parents—he greeted me by telling me he was still looking. Getting closer all the time. But I’d been right about one thing: whatever problems Lune still had, money wasn’t one of them.

  He didn’t ask me what I’d been up to. Never even mentioned Wesley’s name. I’d come all the way to that waterfront warehouse because I was looking for a roll of 8mm film. And the man who had it.

  Lune treated it like a training exercise. He brought his whole crew in there. Told me to tell them everything I knew. Then he kind of vaguely pointed at the others, and they started to ask me questions. In a few minutes, I realized I knew a lot more than I thought I had. They were like a pack of starved rats, rooting through concrete to get to grain stored on the other side of the wall. Grain they knew was there. They sliced and diced my narrative, culling “authenticated” facts from the rest of what I told them. And then they started on “patterning,” using index cards and pushpins on a whole wall covered in cork.

  When that was done, they all split. “Fieldwork,” Lune explained. I guess some of it was done on the phone, but I know some of them took off, too. And didn’t come back for a few days.

  It took almost two weeks. When Lune assembled them all again, they told me there was a “high-eighties probability” that the man I was looking for would be in a rooming house in Youngstown, Ohio. Lune told me I could move the probability into the high nineties if I wanted one of his crew to make a little trip … carrying the photo I’d brought with me.

  Youngstown is maybe an hour and a half, two hours from Cleveland. I told Lune I’d go look for myself. If it didn’t work out, I’d come back.