I made an “I wouldn’t even guess” gesture, afraid to say anything out loud.
“We got different values,” the monster said, solemnly. “There ain’t a whore in the world you can trust to keep her mouth shut. And there ain’t a thing on this earth that can make me open mine.”
“Nobody rats on him, neither,” Gateman said. “You know I was at a trial of his once, over in Brooklyn?”
“Yeah?”
“Square business. It was hilarious, bro. The whole courthouse was cracking up. See, Gigi rolled up these three jamokes who got behind in their payments. Probably three separate jobs, but you know that whale-scale bastard—he does them all at the same time, save himself a few steps maybe. So, anyway, while they’re in the hospital, probably flying on morphine, they all give statements, and Gigi gets taken down.
“But comes time for trial, one by one, the three witnesses get up on the stand, point over at Gigi sitting there, and swear that he wasn’t the one who did them.
“The DA, some kid probably a week out of law school, one of those Daddy’s-got-connections clowns the DA’s always hiring, he’s fucking screaming at his own witnesses: ‘Are you trying to tell this jury that you were beaten by another four-hundred-and-fifty-pound white male with a red lightning-bolt tattoo on his right forearm!? That is the exact description of your assailant that you gave the police, isn’t it?’ And the witness, each witness, mind you, stares him straight in the eye, says, ‘That’s right. All’s I know, it wasn’t him.’”
“Yeah. Gigi’s a few hundred pounds over the ninja limit, but he can sure disappear right in front of your eyes.”
Gateman high-fived that, said: “Five large, boss. Damn! So this is—”
“Half. Like we agreed.”
“Ah, come on, man. I didn’t think you was—”
“I said partners, Gate. Partners don’t cut pieces, they split. Equal shares.”
“You don’t just talk it, man.”
I tapped fists with one of the city’s deadliest shooters, and headed up the stairs to my place.
“You know, when people say ‘scared to death,’ they don’t mean it,” the skinny brunette said. “Not for-real mean it. They’re afraid of doing something, maybe. Or of getting caught at it. A woman like me, if she said something like that, she might be talking about getting a beating. But not about dying. She’s just being dramatic. You’ve seen that, right?”
I made a gesture that could mean anything.
“He’d do it,” she swore, as fervently as a preacher selling lies.
I made another gesture.
“So I don’t have any choice. Don’t tell me about putting a restraining order out on him. He told me, I ever did that, they’d find it in my purse, lying next to my body.”
I hadn’t been going to say anything about restraining orders. I’m not a counselor. Or a citizen.
“I’ve got kids,” she kept on, relentlessly trying to find another button to push. “Two kids. They’re terrified of him. If I don’t get away—”
She reacted to my raised eyebrows like I’d slapped her.
“Hey! I can’t just go, all right? What am I going to do? This is real life, not TV. People don’t just disappear. Specially people with kids. It costs a lot of money to do something like that.”
I let the right corner of my mouth twitch, knowing her eyes were on me like prison searchlights when the escape alarm goes off.
“So where am I going to get the money for what I want you to do, right?”
I shrugged.
“He’s got a life insurance policy. It comes with his job. I’m the beneficiary. You want to see it?” she said, reaching toward the purse where she probably also had the tape recorder.
I shook my head “no.” The guy she wanted hit was a prison guard—a “CO” is what she’d called him. Even if I’d bought her story about the life insurance, no prison guard’s union policy was going to buy her a sure-to-be-investigated murder.
How the live-in girlfriend of a prison guard got involved with a convict was more than I wanted to know. Why the convict wanted the guard dead probably had nothing to do with anything he was doing to the woman, but that didn’t interest me, either. How the con got my name was no mystery—any one of a couple of dozen lifers up there could have dropped it.
Only thing was, not one of them had ever reached out to me himself, just to give me the heads-up.
“You’ve got the wrong man,” I told the brunette.
Her dark eyes teared right up. “I can get more—”
“No. I mean, you’ve got me confused with someone else. I don’t do the kind of work you’re talking about getting done.”
“But I was told—”
“By who?”
“I’m not supposed to say. And when I give my word, that’s it. I’d never give up someone who tried to do me a favor.”
“I’m sure you’re a righteous, stand-up woman. You sound way too good for the guy you talked about. I wish you the best of luck finding a solution to your problem.”
“But—”
“I think whoever referred you to me—and I do respect you for not saying their name—was thinking about you going away. Disappearing. Starting over. There’s a group I know that could help you with that. After they checked out your story, of course. That’s all that happened, I think. Wires got crossed.”
“I don’t want to disappear. I want him to disappear.”
“You should be careful who you say things like that to. You never know who’s listening.”
“I came a long way.”
“Me, too,” I lied. “That happens a lot, I think. People travel to meet their expectations, and they turn out to be disappointed when they arrive.”
If that woman had been telling the truth—and if she’d had the money—I could have helped her go and stay gone. I’ve got a whole stash of identities. Not ID, identities. Different planets. Today, any amateur can get photo ID—all you need is broadband, the right software, a color laser printer, and a laminator. But that’s just pictures on documents, not an identity.
A real identity takes years to establish. You need credit cards, and you need to use them. Buy things, pay them off. Travel. Make a nice paper trail.
Driver’s licenses get renewed. Taxes get paid. Phone numbers stay listed. Answering machines pick up.
If you’re going to use a sham identity to work a score, it helps to have a Web presence, too. Not an actual site, just tracks—enough of a “trail” for chumps who think “Googling” makes them an investigator. Like a few posts to newsgroups, or even a blog. Faking a newspaper or magazine story is probably the safest—anything you plant on the Net will metastasize so quickly that tracing it back to the original becomes impossible for anyone less than a real pro.
All this costs money. An investment, the way I see it. Takes years to ripen on the vine, but when you harvest, it’s a sweet crop. A cash crop.
I’d been stockpiling ID ever since I learned how to do it. Each new one is better than the last. Since 9/11, they’re worth fifty times what they were, an inflation-proof asset. It isn’t that I knew the government’s license to invade privacy it has today was coming—but I always assume something bad is.
That’s one bet I’ve never lost yet.
Today, my walk-around ID is Scott Thomas. Scott—or is it Thomas? Hard to tell with names like that—is a good citizen. He owns my car—that rust-bucket ’69 Roadrunner with dog-dish hubcaps and a single, sorry exhaust pipe poking out the back—pays the insurance on time, keeps the registration up to date.
Scott pays his taxes, too. Of course, the poor guy doesn’t make a lot of money, working as a kitchen helper. But he’s lucky; the rent where he lives hasn’t gone up in ten years. You could ask the landlord, but his building is owned under a corporate name it would take a team of forensic accountants a decade to unravel. They’d have to be fluent in Chinese as well.
Still, the brunette worried me. She’d called Burke’s number, and she could
have gotten it from anywhere. Some of those places are more reliable than others, so it was possible she’d been told Burke did contract jobs.
That rumor had been as much a part of the city as judgeships-for-sale since forever—but then Wesley had checked out so explosively that it made the front page of every tabloid in the city. He left behind a suicide note—being Wesley, it read like a threat—taking the weight for a whole string of killings that went back a long time. Some of those were mine. Wesley’s suicide was anomic, but his confession was my inheritance. My brother, the iceman nobody could touch, still touching me.
Nobody doubted Wesley’s note. Not the cops, not the people who live down here. That was what Wesley did, make people dead for money. He never asked why, just told you how much.
Years ago, my compadre Pablo told me about a contract Wesley had on a Puerto Rican dope dealer uptown. The dealer knew the contract was out. He went to a Santería priestess, begging for voodoo heat against the glacier coming for him. The priestess told him Chango, the warrior-god, would protect him. For a price.
The priestess was an evil old demon, feared throughout the barrio. Her crew was all Marielitos. Zombie-driven murderers. They set fires to watch the flames. Ate the charred flesh. Tattoos on their hands to tell you their specialty. Weapons, drugs, extortion, homicide. Their executioner’s tattoo was an upside-down heart with an arrow through it. Cupid as a hit man.
The priestess called on her gods. Killed chickens and goats. Sprinkled virgin’s blood on a knife. Loosed her death-dogs into the street looking for Wesley.
The dealer hid himself in her temple. Safe.
Blazing summer, but the kids stayed off the streets around her temple. They knew winter was coming.
A few days later, a UPS driver pulled up outside the temple. The Marielitos slammed him against his truck, pulling at his clothes. Eyes watched from beneath slitted shades. The killers took a small box from the driver, laughing when he insisted someone had to sign for it.
Experienced assassins, they held the box under an opened fire hydrant, soaking the paper off. Then one of them held the box to his ear, shaking it. Another pulled a butterfly knife from his pocket, flashed it open in the street, grinning. They squatted, watching as the box was slit open. Looked inside. Saw a ghost.
They took the box inside to the priestess. A few minutes later, the dope dealer was thrown into the street, hands cuffed behind his back, duct tape sealing his mouth. He ran from the block. Never made it past the corner.
Nobody saw anything. His body was still there when the cops came.
The whisper-stream went mad with rumor. In the bodegas, in the after-hours joints, on the streets. It was said the priestess found the severed hand of her executioner inside the box, the tattoo mocking her. Chango was angry—she needed a better sacrifice than a chicken to appease him.
The Prof said it best: “Maybe that bitch was a witch, but Wesley just quelled her spell.”
Everyone saw him die. Wesley’s final moments were on live TV. Every channel in the city. But nobody ever found his body. The cluster of dynamite Wesley held aloft before he blew the screens into blackness hadn’t left even a micro-fragment behind. So, every time a super-clean, no-trace kill goes down, some part of the whisper-stream questions whether the iceman is really, truly gone.
The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that the brunette had just gotten bad info. Cons lose touch with the World; maybe her boyfriend was working off old rumors. Or just profiling, telling her he “knew people.” If she’d been a plant, I couldn’t see the cops doing it. Even if they somehow knew I was still alive, so what? I wasn’t wanted for anything. Ever since I’d gone “missing and presumed” years ago, they hadn’t even sniffed around.
No. Just a bad connection. My number’s been the same since forever. You float a public offering, you can’t choose who buys your stock.
“He was mad-dogging me, I mean right in my grille, so I fixed him up with a left hook,” the light-skinned Latino with a coiled-cobra tattoo on his neck said to me. “And what does this punk-ass faggot do? Cocksucker runs down to the precinct like a slapped bitch, puts a case on me.”
“And…?”
“And what, man? What else I got to tell you?”
“I look like Legal Aid to you, amigo?”
“Yeah. All right, I get it. What are we talking about, then, make this go away?”
“You break anything?”
“Broke that punk’s jaw,” he said—proud, holding up the fist that had done the job.
“So it’s a felony beef. Is that the problem?”
“Why you want to play me off like that, bro? I’m looking at strike fucking three, okay?”
“But you made bail.”
He leaned forward, left shoulder dropping just a notch. “What you trying to say?”
“Me? I’m just listening.”
“Yeah? Well, look here, the people who put up my bail, they’re the ones who gave me your number to call. They said you had contacts, could take care of stuff like this.”
“You got fifty?”
“Fifty what?”
He gave me a prison-yard stare for a long five seconds. I let my eyes go all soft and wet, so he’d know I knew. Every joint is full of murderers, but killers are a much rarer breed. All cons learn this, sometimes with their last breath.
“Not in my pocket, man,” he said, giving it up. “But I can get it. Question is, what do I get for it?”
“A good lawyer.”
“A lawyer? Fuck a bunch of lawyers, man. What I need is a judge.”
“And the people who told you to call my number, they said I could get that done?”
“Nah. That was my idea.”
“It’s a bad one.”
“So what you got?”
“I told you. A lawyer.”
“What you been smoking, man? You talking about some self-defense thing, right? That won’t—”
“Right. You can’t take the stand, because then your priors come out. And your priors, they’re for the same thing, same kind of thing, right?”
“I’m a collector,” he said, crossing his arms to display his ropy biceps.
“Reason you want the lawyer is you need one to pull a Michael Jackson.”
“A what?”
“The guy you clocked, he drops the case, okay? Then he sues you, like in civil court, for the damage you did to him. You settle the case for, say, thirty K. He gets twenty, his lawyer gets ten, your lawyer gets ten, and so do I. Nobody’s mad, nobody goes to jail. How’s that?”
“I could just pay the motherfucker off myself.”
“No, you can’t,” I said. Not arguing: telling. “You go anywhere near him, you’re going back Inside. If anyone comes around with cash in an envelope, that’s all kinds of hurt ready to be let loose. But if a lawyer approaches this guy, tells him he might have a good case…”
“How’s my lawyer gonna approach him?”
“Not your lawyer. A barrio guy. Abogado, comprende? One of those vultures you see hanging around every night outside the Arraignment Part, looking to pick up some change. You know the kind I mean: got their office in their cell phone.”
“Yeah. Those motherfuckers. So you’re saying I need two lawyers?”
“Just hire the one I tell you to, everything else will take care of itself.”
He nodded slowly.
My kind of score: low risk, low cash.
Big fucking deal.
“Gigi? Never forget that two-ton, son,” the Prof said. “Inside, you couldn’t touch him. They only got shanks in there, not harpoons.”
“He sounds like a pig, mahn,” Clarence said, fastidiously inspecting the line of demarcation between the edge of his butter-colored cashmere jacket and the protruding French cuff of a bronze silk shirt, anchored by glittering topaz links. “A gross, fat pig.”
“There’s all kinds of pigs, boy,” the Prof said, seriously. “My man Gigi, he’s a razorback hog. Ain’t got none of those
down in the Islands, do they?”
Clarence’s clean-featured face twisted into a grimace of disgust. “No, Father.”
“Haven’t seen one of those devil beasts since I was a boy. But once you see one coming your way, it’s in your mind, permanent.”
There was a tincture of pride in the old man’s voice. I knew the Prof had been born in Louisiana, but he always swore the only good thing that ever came out of the place was Slim Harpo; didn’t want to hear about Lazy Lester. I’d tried to interest him in Tab Benoit, but he said “Weary Time of Night” reminded him of Freddy Fender. Even Lonnie Brooks didn’t turn his crank. And he thought Zydeco was just plain wrong.
“He hasn’t changed, Prof,” I assured him.
“Who changes?” the noble-featured little man said, challenge clear in the textured voice that gave him half the weight behind his name: “Prof” was either “Prophet” or “Professor,” depending on how you knew him.
“Me. I’ve changed.”
“Yeah? No offense, but your face wasn’t exactly your case ace, son. The work they did on you in that hospital—so what?”
“I don’t mean that. I’m just…bored, I guess.”
“How you gonna be bored, boy? Hell, even Inside, we was never bored. Out here, there’s a gazillion things to do.”
“And if you already did them?”
“Look, fool, if everyone walked around with that attitude, nobody’d have more than one woman. And her only the one time. There’s some things we all meant to be doing over and over again, get it?”
“You know what I mean.”
The Prof took a long drag off his Kool, blew a harsh jet of smoke at the ceiling.
“You can’t roll the dice—”
“—if you can’t pay the price. Yeah, I know.”
“So?”
“I’ll come up with something,” I promised him.
The Bowery station on the J line is what happens to a neighborhood once politicians realize the people who live there don’t vote. Caveman paintings lined the dingy walls. Like all artists who can’t afford new canvas, the taggers just painted over the ones they already had. The structural columns were so encrusted with layer after layer of graffiti that they were an inch thicker than when they started.
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