Down Here

by Andrew Vachss

  Bruiser was ready. I heard his warning snarl as I came up the last flight of stairs.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  The beast didn’t recognize my voice. Or, more likely, he did. I heard Pepper say, “Bruiser, down!”

  She was sitting on the futon, Bruiser at her feet. Mick was standing off to one side, so he could see if there was anyone coming up behind me.

  “We didn’t want to risk a cell call,” Pepper said. “And we only have—”

  “I already got the bail secured,” I cut her off. “She’ll be out later on today.”

  “That’s great!” Pepper said, clapping her hands. The Rottweiler jumped to his feet. “No!” she said, jerking the dog’s short lead. “It’s all right, Bruiser.”

  “You’re sure?” Mick asked me, his voice thick with threat.

  “I’m not walking in there with a half-mil in cash,” I said. “It’ll be a bondsman. I went to see him myself. Just got back. And I don’t think there’s much doubt.”

  Mick made a noise in his throat. Bruiser looked up at him like a kindred spirit.

  “Listen, listen!” Pepper said, excitedly. “This is what I couldn’t say on the phone. There’s a detective, Sands. He was working Special Victims when Wolfe was head of City-Wide. Do you know him?”

  “Never heard his name,” I said, truthfully.

  “He called us. At the office number. He wants someone to meet him. At seven in the morning. This morning. A bar called the Four-Leaf. Do you know it?”

  “If he means the one around here, I know where it is,” I said. And I did. If you went westbound on Chambers Street, past the little park and all the way across the West Side Highway, you could find it, tucked into a corner, right near the river. “But I’ve never been there.”

  “He says he has some things for us. Things that could help Wolfe.”

  “Probably working for the DA. Hoping you’d be dumb enough to have a landline in the office, so they could find out where to serve the search warrant,” I said. Wolfe’s operation didn’t have a street address. She met with her clients the same way I did—anyplace else. “Or maybe he just wants to pump you. The cops have to know that Wolfe has a network, and that you’re with her.”

  “No, no,” Pepper said. “He’s not with them. He’s for Wolfe. For real.”

  “And you would know that exactly . . . how?”

  “Because . . . All right, I don’t know it. Not for sure.”

  “You ask Wolfe?”

  “How could I? I haven’t talked to her since . . . since this happened.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s why I’m . . . why we’re here. Why we waited. Detective Sands said he wanted to meet—”

  “You told me that.”

  “Here’s what I didn’t tell you,” she said, lips tight with self-control. “He didn’t ask for me. What he said was, ‘Send anyone you want. Ask whatever questions you want. Or don’t say a word—I’ll do all the talking. You understand? I could be wired like a radio station, it wouldn’t do the other side any good.’ Now what does that sound like to you?”

  “Like he’s for Wolfe. Or he’s smarter than the average cop.”

  “Or both, right?” Pepper said, eagerly.

  “We have to go,” Mick cut through it, his voice no-dispute hard. “If he’s got anything that could—”

  “Pepper’s right,” I said to him, getting it for the first time. “If he’s working for the other side, even getting a look at you or Pepper would be another round in their cylinder. Especially if you’re going to be her alibi, down the road. But my face won’t mean anything. . . .”

  “You’ll go, right?” Pepper asked, big dark eyes pressuring and pleading at the same time.

  “Seven? You mean, in less than two hours, then?”

  “Yes. That’s why we waited here. It’s pretty close by. If you hadn’t shown up, we would have had to—”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “But I don’t know when Davidson’s going to call and—”

  They were already on their way out, the Rottweiler leading the way.

  Less than two hours before the meet. A half-hour walk from my place, max.

  I don’t drink coffee. And stims scare me, the way they throw off my pulse rate.

  So I took a long hot shower, followed by a fifteen-second blast of only-cold spray. A quick, careful shave. A glass of grape juice and some rye toast, to settle my stomach. I threw down the motley assortment of vitamins and minerals and Devil-knows-what-else I swallow every morning, a habit I’d gotten into when I was holed up in the Pacific Northwest, after the ambush that was supposed to have totaled me. I wasn’t running from the shooters; I was staying down to make sure there weren’t any of them left. Besides the ones I’d already found.

  I let the whisper-stream declare me dead and gone, and just . . . waited.

  I was home only a short time before I got involved in a case. A case for real, like I used to have when I first was trying to make it as something other than what I am—a criminal in my heart. Wolfe helped me on that one. Oh, she got paid. Said that was why she did it, for the money.

  But I never believed her, not completely. That case was a lot of things for me, but, for me and Wolfe, I thought it was a test. The prize I was playing for wasn’t as big as a promise, just something to let me know I could get back in the game.

  And I brought it home. Got it done. Found out who had killed the teenage daughter who was a gangster’s darkest secret. I did it all the right way. Investigated, interrogated, interviewed. Came up with a plan. Put together a team. And spooked the truth out of the shadows.

  Along the way, some people got dead.

  They didn’t die for justice, and they didn’t die for money. I’m no vigilante, and I’m not a hit man—although the whisper-stream has made me out to be both over the years.

  Wolfe knew about some of it. Figured it out for herself. But I never got the chance to tell her the ending.

  An hour later, I was walking down Hudson toward Chambers. Dressed in a worn leather jacket over a dark-blue hooded sweatshirt, jeans, scuffed ankle-high boots on my feet, a pair of canvas gloves in my back pocket. A man going to work.

  I couldn’t do anything about my face. Once, I was so generic-looking that I could get past almost anyone who wasn’t raised where I was. But now I had two different-color eyes, which no longer tracked exactly parallel. One bullet had made a keloid beauty mark on my right cheek; another had neatly sliced off the top of the opposite ear. Now I had a face people would remember.

  Worse, they could see me coming.

  Burke had never had a tattoo. Most guys who start to jail early end up covered with ink by the time they’re on their second or third bit, but that depends on who schools you—gang kids or pros.

  With kids, it’s all about owning something. Something they can’t take away, even when they beat you for the fun of it, and toss you in a tiny dark room with only the stink of sorrow for company. Some kids know who “they” are from birth—only the faces change.

  There’s other reasons to ink up. Jailhouse tattoos aren’t painless. And a tattooed tear for each time you’ve been down marks you as a veteran.

  When you’re done with the juvie joints, when they put you Inside for real, sometimes you have to take a mark just to stay alive. The White Night crews make you fly their flag on your body, and the Latins are even harder about it. Some of their bosses are so heavily inked, it takes over their skin, makes them into some different race.

  But the Prof had pulled my coat early. “You ain’t got but one trick for when you hit the bricks,” the little man had counseled me. “You’re going to do crime, all the time. That stuff you see motherfuckers put on themselves? That’s ’cause they going to stay here, understand? But you, you’re still a young boy. The gate’s in your fate. You know what you going to do, so do it true,” he said. “Body art ain’t smart, Schoolboy. It’s like using vanity plates on a getaway car.”

  But the man walking do
wn Hudson that morning had a tattoo. A tiny blue heart, between the last two knuckles of his right hand. A hollow heart.

  That was for Pansy, my partner. A Neopolitan mastiff I’d raised from a tiny pup. She had taken some of the bullets meant for me when I walked into that ambush. Taken one of the enemy with her, too, before she went over.

  “You’re still the same,” my people kept telling me.

  Maybe I was.

  I wasn’t worried about recognizing this supposed cop. A lot of waterfront bars open early, to catch the crowd who hadn’t been picked in the morning shape-up. But this joint wasn’t close enough to any of the working piers, and the crews prepping the Twin Towers site for new construction would already be on the job by seven.

  The caller had told Pepper whoever she sent would recognize him by his white hair . . . and he’d be sitting in the corner booth farthest from the door. I checked my watch: 6:58. Close enough.

  As soon as I walked in the place, I understood why the cop had picked it. To my right was a flat wall, broken only by the clearly marked doors to the toilets. Dead ahead, a long, straight bar with a murky mirror behind it. Only four of the stools were occupied. To my left, running almost the full length of the window, a row of booths—all wood, no padding anywhere in sight.

  The second booth and the last were the only ones with people in them. A guy nursing a beer while studying the Racing Form was closest to me. All the way in the back was a man in a dark-tweed sports jacket. He had a thick mop of white hair, and eyes I could feel even at that distance.

  I walked over to where he was sitting. Noticed the last booth was just beyond the length of the window. A nice precaution, even though it would have taken a radiologist to read anything through that grimy glass.

  I sat down, uninvited, my back to the door. No point being cute—if it was a trap, it was already sprung.

  “What do you have?” I said.

  “I’ve got mine,” he said, holding up a double shot glass of something amber.

  “Not what will you have,” I said. “What do you have.”

  He nodded, as if I’d given him some secret code word.

  “How do I know you’re from—?”

  “That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “I don’t have any questions. You said you wouldn’t have any, either. All I had to do was listen. That’s what I’m doing.”

  The cop tossed down his drink, rapped his glass on the table. “You want . . . ?” he asked.

  I just shook my head.

  A man in what looked like a butcher’s apron came over. He took away the cop’s shot glass and replaced it with another. Neither of us said anything until the barkeep had gone back to his post.

  “My name’s Sands,” the cop said. “Molton James Sands, Jr. My friends call me Molly.”

  I didn’t call him anything.

  “I worked with Wolfe,” he continued. “For years. Best prosecutor I ever knew. She was one of us. In Sex Crimes, I mean. One of the squad. She’s getting railroaded by that candyass DA. Not the Manhattan guy—the head of City-Wide. The same faggot who fired her.”

  I hadn’t come there for an editorial, especially from a lush. “Tell me something we can use,” I said.

  His blue eyes darkened as he narrowed in on me. The veins in his slightly spread nose got redder. “Here’s fucking something,” he said. “That mutt who got shot, he’s no more in a coma than I am.”

  “Wychek?”

  “Wychek. Oh, he was unconscious all right. But as of a few hours ago, he’s come around. Whoever’s representing Wolfe . . .”

  “Davidson.”

  “Good! That’s a man. Now, listen. This should get her bail dropped all the way down to—”

  “Her bail’s covered,” I said, cutting him off. “This Wychek, he’s conscious now, right? You telling me he changed his statement?”

  “I don’t know about that,” the cop said, leaning closer to me. “But I do know this. He doesn’t want to be discharged.”

  “The wounds—”

  “—are bullshit,” he finished for me. “He got hit three times. Front of the right thigh, upper left arm, and right shoulder.”

  “That could still be—”

  “—with a fucking twenty-five,” he said. “What does that tell you?”

  “Nothing by itself.”

  “You don’t want to say, a twenty-five, that’s a woman’s gun, right? Well, it’s also a punk’s gun. Little piece-of-shit nothing, make a Saturday Night Special look like a Glock. Street Crimes probably confiscates more Raven twenty-fives a year than all the other pieces put together. Anyway, they got the bullets out like pulling a bad tooth, big deal. Cocksucker won’t even be walking with a limp.”

  “The coma was a fake?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” the cop said, a flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “I don’t think so, from what I heard. But this part is gospel—Wychek’s scared. Big scared. Demanding a police guard, the whole works.”

  “Scared Wolfe’s going over the wall at Rikers, swim to the Bronx, steal a car, pick up a real gun this time, and hunt him down at the hospital?” I said, not a trace of sarcasm in my voice.

  “Don’t be fucking stupid,” he said, showing me his street roller’s stare. “Look, I don’t have a lot of time; I’m supposed to be on a case in the Jamaica courthouse at nine—not that the fucking pussy ADA is ever on time himself—so listen up. For right now, the DA’s going along with it. You understand what I’m telling you? Full police guard. Why? Because the official story is that Wolfe’s put out a contract on him.”

  “Yeah, that’d be smart,” I said. “Believe me, if there’s one person in this city who wants that scumbag alive, it’s Wolfe. Davidson’s going to dice and slice him so bad on the stand, the case will never get to the jury.”

  “I’m not arguing,” the cop said. “Something else is going on. I just don’t know what. But him not being in a coma anymore, that’s worth something, right?”

  “How much?” I said, slipping my hand inside my jacket.

  Sands’ eyes snapped into violence. One of his big fists clenched. When he spoke, his voice was tightly constricted, like an overwound spring.

  “Listen, pal. You don’t know me. And I don’t know you. So I’m going to be real fucking patient. This once. I meant, worth something to Wolfe. You think I don’t go way back with her? You think I don’t know what a filthy little maggot this Wychek is? How many rapes he got away with because, in this whole stinking town, only Wolfe had the stones to take the case to trial, even when it wasn’t a slam-dunk?”

  I nodded, not affirming his connection to Wolfe, just the truth he spoke about her. When Wolfe was running City-Wide, if there had been any damn way to bring the other victims in, she would have done it.

  “I know something else, too,” he said, leaning even closer. “That ‘Ha ha!’ letter he sent Wolfe? He must have sent other ones, too. ’Cause that’s the kind of fucking degenerate filth he is. You want to know who really tried to kill him, that’s where you start.”

  “Where would I get—”

  “Been nice meeting you,” the cop said, holding out his hand for me to shake. “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime. You ever go out to Platinum Pussycats? The strip joint, out by JFK?”

  “No,” I said, arranging my face into a mute question, as I palmed the piece of paper he had slipped to me.

  “Ah, you can’t miss it,” he said. “It’s behind that giant storage-unit place they have out there.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, in a dismissive voice. “Anything you want me to tell—?”

  “Anything I want to tell her, she already knows,” the cop said.

  As I was walking back over to my place, the cell phone in my pocket rang.

  “What?” I answered.

  “Got your message.” Davidson’s voice. “Nice work. I’ll have her out by—”

  “There’s new stuff,” I said. “Call me as soon as you get her sprung, so we can meet.”

  I was st
arting to feel the fatigue knocking at all my doors by then, but I had to pick up whatever the cop had in that storage locker, and do it fast. If he was being straight, if he really was with Wolfe, I couldn’t leave him hanging out there, exposed. And if it was a trap, if they had a camera on the unit so they could get a look at the members of Wolfe’s crew, I couldn’t turn the job over to Pepper.

  The Prof and Clarence were probably back in their crib, over in East New York. Which was kind of on the way to the airport, if I took Atlantic Avenue all the way through Brooklyn into Queens. But with the key in my hand, I didn’t need the Prof for the locks. And this had to be a no-guns deal, which meant Clarence wasn’t coming.

  The Mole was all the way up in the South Bronx. But even if he’d lived close by, he wouldn’t be the man for this job—his idea of personal protection is heavy explosives. And I still wasn’t sure where Michelle was.

  But Max’s place was off Division Street, and I knew everybody in his house would be awake.

  I liberated my Plymouth, drove over to the warehouse where Max has his dojo on one floor and his family home on the next. I probed until I found the hidden switch that raised the metal doors to the loading bay, drove inside, and closed it behind me.

  By then, I knew Max was watching, from somewhere. As I got out, a dark shape vaulted over the second-floor railing, dropping next to me as lightly as a Kleenex on velour.

  Max. Not showing off, showing up.

  I started to gesture out what we had to do, but he held one finger in the air for silence, then used it to point upstairs before he flowed his hands together in a prayerful gesture. I took a quick glance at my watch, to tell him we didn’t have a lot of time, and then I followed him upstairs.

  “Burke!” the teenage girl shouted, as she ran to me. Flower, the only child of Max and his wife, Immaculata.

  The girl slammed into me like a linebacker making a goal-line stop, knocking me back a few feet as I held on to her. “Hey, kiddo,” I said. “Easy!”

  She stood on her toes, gave me a messy kiss on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so used to Daddy.”