Dead and Gone

by Andrew Vachss

  “The optic nerve was impacted,” one of the endless doctors told me. “The bullet also tore some of the muscles that keep the eyes operating binocularly.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, speaking slowly. Carefully, like I wasn’t used to it yet.

  “There won’t be any need for a … prosthesis. The right eye won’t process images, and there may be some slight pigmentation shift, but it’s organically sound. It doesn’t have to be removed. It may, however … wander a bit.”

  “Wander?”

  “The two eyes will no longer work as one. You’ll still be able to read, drive a car, do everything you did before. Your depth perception will be affected, but that’s just a matter of acclimation—you won’t even notice it after a while.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you’re one lucky man; I can tell you that. If the bullet had been a fraction of a millimeter off its path, you’d be dead. Or severely brain-damaged, without question.”

  “I can’t remember …”

  “That’s really not my department,” he brushed me off. “My specialty is ophthalmological surgery. This consultation is about your vision. We wanted you to have a sense of the various … sensations you’ll be experiencing when we remove the bandaging.”

  “When will you—?”

  “In a week or two, perhaps,” he said dismissively. The three young residents didn’t say anything, watching him deal with the stupid bum who’d gotten himself beat up and shot in the head.

  When he was done, they followed him out of the room, a small flock of white-coated sheep.

  “The reason it hurts so much to swallow is that your sternum is cracked,” Rich said.

  “Sternum?”

  “The central bone in your chest. In fact, it’s the central bone in your entire body. All the other bones grow from that point.”

  “Oh.”

  “And, of course, your throat is significantly abraded. From when you ripped the tubes out.”

  “I don’t …”

  “Of course not. You were unconscious then. Or, at least, in some subconscious state. Anyway, there’s no permanent damage. Everything will heal. You’ll be the same as you were before.”

  “What was I … before?”

  “That will come, too,” Rich promised.

  I would not think of Pansy. I would not do it. I knew what it would cost. I had to wait until I could make the payments.

  “How’s your memory coming?” one of the cops asked me.

  “I remember you,” I told him, trying for a proud tone in my voice, like a good kid who’d done all his chores. “You’re Detective Bond, right?”

  “Baird.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, shooting a look over at his partner. “Any of it coming back to you?”

  “The accident …”

  “Accident? No. You were shot. In the head. Didn’t they tell you?”

  “Said … something. My eye. But I thought it was … in the car, maybe? Then it crashed? I don’t …”

  “Come on,” Baird said to his partner. They both stood up and walked out.

  Cops play suspects like they’re fish.

  “Fish”—that’s what the cons call new prisoners.

  “Incoming.” In war, that word’s always bad news. Inside, it means fresh meat … but some of that news can be just as bad, if you read it wrong.

  Inside, they test you right away. But even the wolves walk soft and patient. The ones that don’t, sooner or later they make a mistake. They think some skinny, baby-faced kid will give it up the first time he gets threatened with a beating. Or a shank. But some of those little kids, prison is the nicest place they’ve ever been. And they know just what to do to make it even nicer.

  In prison, the wolf population is stable. They’re always around. But not always the same ones.

  The first thing you do when you hit the yard is—Stop! I shouted inside myself, nothing showing on my face. My mind was … drifting. I needed to focus. I had started with something. Where had I …?

  Yeah, okay, the cops. Playing me. Like they had all the time in the world. I knew what a crock that was. Sure, they knew who I was. Knew somebody had tried to take me out, too. But I wasn’t dead. This was no homicide investigation, just another “assault, perp(s) unknown.” And they had enough of those on the books to build another World Trade Center just from the paperwork.

  Their ace was the hospital, keeping me locked down the way no judge would. It’s not a crime to be a victim in New York. Even if you’re a career criminal on the Permanent Suspect List for a dozen different Unsolveds.

  If they knew who I was, they knew I had people. “KAs”—Known Associates—is what they’d call my family in their records. For cops, family is something you’re born into. Pure biology.

  Didn’t use to be that way with them, but now they don’t even trust their own kind. The Blue Wall had cracked too many times; too many cops had rolled on their “brother” officers. They didn’t think of themselves the way they used to when a cop had to be Irish to get above a certain ceiling in the Department. Didn’t matter what you called it—integration, immigration, affirmative action—it all played the same in the end. Once NYPD stopped being all-white, it stopped being all right with a lot of them.

  And the rest of them all knew it.

  Screenwriters who spend a few nights in the back of a squad car for “background” always make hatred of Internal Affairs part of the “character” of any cop they want you to like. Of course, screenwriters are the same twits who believe omertà is rat-proof.

  So the rules may have changed, but cops still play the same old games. There was a phone right next to my bed. I never got any calls—that wasn’t why it was there. I wondered what part of the City’s budget was paying for my private line. And what tame judge had signed the wiretap order.

  One night, real late, I reached for the phone. Punched seven different buttons at random, making sure I didn’t hit the 1 or the 0 to start. A man answered, his voice blurry with sleep.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Antonia there?”

  “Antonia? What’re you, fucking insane, Mack? There ain’t no Antonia here!”

  He slammed down the phone.

  I did it a few more times: seven buttons, punched blind. Mostly, I got a recording saying the number was not in service; twice I got answering machines; the last time a black woman, middle-aged, her voice tired. Just coming home from work, or just getting ready to leave.

  “There’s no Antonia here, mister. What number you trying to reach?”

  “I … don’t know,” I told her, sadness in my voice. Then I hung up.

  “Play with that, motherfuckers,” I remember saying to myself, just before I fell asleep.

  A few more days passed. Then the cops tried something even A weaker. This time the phone didn’t just sit there—tempting me, they thought—it rang. I answered it on automatic, like a guy who had no specific memories of who he was, but knew he had to be someone:

  “Hello?”

  “Burke? It’s me, Condo.”

  I knew him. A collector for Maurice, a bookie I used to place my action with. People thought he was called Condo because he was the size of a damn condominium. People who didn’t know him, that is. The rest of us knew where his handle came from: he was for sale or rent. That was one of the reasons the rollers picked him; the other was because I’d know his voice on the phone.

  “Huh?” is all I said.

  “I heard about what happened to you,” Condo said, his voice low and confidential, just between me and him. And the whirling reels of tape. “I got the lowdown on who tried to get you done. What’s it worth to you?”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “I told you, man: Condo. You know me. Now, you want this dope or not?”

  “You know who … did this?”

  “What?”

  “You know who … hurt me?”

  “That’s w
hat I’m trying to tell you, man. How much is it worth—?”

  “The police …” I said, my voice getting weaker.

  “They don’t know nothing, man. I got this from—”

  “The police said it was on purpose. I … don’t remember. A car … something about a car. Tell the police. They’re trying to help me. Call the police. Tell them who did this. They need to know.”

  “Are you fucking insane?”

  “I know you?”

  “Of course you know me, man. I told you …”

  “Then you know me? You know who I am?”

  “The fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “I … don’t know. I don’t know … who I am. I can’t … Can you come here? You’re my friend, aren’t you? Maybe if I see your face I’ll—”

  “You crazy cocksucker!” Condo said, and slammed down the phone.

  The cops had to be getting desperate. Eventually, I’d get better. At least enough to be released. All they could do was wait for that, and watch. But Rich said they never discharged people who were amnesiac, just transferred them to “another facility.” He looked sad when he said that.

  I couldn’t figure out why the cops were on this so hard. Had they found that kid’s body? So what? It wouldn’t link to me.

  Unless they found Pansy and … I felt my heart stop for a few seconds. It just … stopped. Pansy. She’d be all they’d need to know I’d been there.

  I made myself calm, worked with what I had. The “two men” who brought me to the hospital, they had to be family. And they must have unwrapped the Kevlar from my body first—that’s why the doctors thought the broken ribs and stuff were from blunt objects, not bullets. So my people must have Pansy’s … body.

  The cops, they had nothing.

  Endurance. Outlast them. Sooner or later, they all get tired. I had no strength anyplace but in my mind. So I worked there. Stayed there. I knew my job. And Morales had made it clear that I wasn’t ready to do it yet.

  Even in prison, I’d never worked out, except when I was in the bing—solitary. But there was that one crazy time when the Prof was convinced I could make it as a boxer when I got back to the World. So he’d started training me. And, even then, we weren’t working on building muscle; it was flexibility the Prof said he wanted. But in solitary, working out was something you did. Had to do.

  So I did it in the hospital. On the sly, careful. Testing each area, seeing where the give was, what held—getting ready for them to open that door.

  Every day. Every night. There was a TV in the room, but I couldn’t figure out how to turn it on. No radio. I never asked for one. Just kept working.

  But after a while, I realized this was a mistake. So I asked Rich, and he got the TV turned on. “From Central,” he told me.

  “Huh?”

  “Everything’s on computer,” he said. “In fact, every time you hit that morphine pump, the computer records it.”

  “How come?”

  “For billing,” he said, a thin smile on his face.

  I worked the needle out … slow and careful; it would have to go back in the same place. I hit the morphine pump. A tiny bit of liquid came out of the needle’s tip. All right.

  Nothing on TV. Nothing about me. Nothing about a shootout. Nothing about a kidnapping, a killing, nothing. Plenty of news about crime. Most of the news was about crime, like always. But no picture of me; no “Do You Know This Man?” stuff.

  I hit the morphine pump again, watching the liquid spray its lie into the computer’s bank ledger.

  The cops were down to nothing. I was brain-damaged and didn’t know who I was … or I did, and was waiting to make a break for it. If they thought I still needed the morphine six times an hour, they’d think I was much further away from making a move.

  I could walk by then. Even with the pump attached, I could move pretty good. And I could lift the whole thing off the ground with one hand, too. No way to test my legs, not really.

  At some point, I realized I didn’t want a cigarette. I wondered if this was a chemical change, or just me getting used to being in solitary again.

  Every time the cops came back, I’d let them see I was a little stronger—it would have made them suspicious if I wasn’t—

  but I acted even more anxious about who I was. When was I going to find out? How come my picture wasn’t on the news? Wasn’t anybody looking for me?

  “We already know who you are, pal,” one of them told me. “So we’re not looking for you. I was you, though, I’d be worried about who is.”

  “That’s enough,” his partner said, a thread of disgust in his voice.

  “Hey! I was just telling my man Burke here—”

  “Yeah. You told him. Come on. We got other things to do.”

  I couldn’t tell if this was another variation of the good-cop/bad-cop routine. Either way, they were wasting their time. Where I come from, “bad cop” is the same word, said twice.

  And if they thought they could keep me here with their little games, they were crazier than the people who had padded cells for return addresses on the postcards they wrote in crayon to the radio shows they picked up from the fillings in their teeth.

  As if calling me by some stranger’s name was supposed to ring my bell. “Baby Boy Burke” is what they put on my birth certificate, after the teenage whore who dropped me out of her womb disappeared. I guess Burke was the name she gave the hospital, so they passed it along to me. Probably wrapped my low-birth-weight body in yellow crime-scene tape instead of a baby blanket.

  Born bad.

  I know how it works. They could follow me around, put a guard outside my room, crap like that. But that was a major commitment of manpower. So all I needed was the one card that’s never out of my deck: Patience.

  I know all about waiting. It’s my greatest skill. Sooner or later, they’d pull off the guards. Sooner or later, there’s always an opening.

  Besides, I was safe where I was. Like the nasty-voiced cop said, they knew who I was, so they didn’t need to ask the public. I was logged in as a John Doe. And whoever had tried to take me off the count probably thought they’d gotten the job done.

  I wasn’t worried about my place going to hell while I was in the hospital, either. I live in an abandoned building. Off the books, under the radar. The only reason I ever had to go there was to make sure Pansy was …

  No! I couldn’t let that part in—it was more pain than the morphine could ever hope to touch. But I had something I could let in, welcome back home. Hate. It filled my veins, building with every circulation my heart pumped, giving me all I needed.

  They killed my dog. Killed Pansy.

  I don’t know how that would sound to a citizen. But since I’ll never be one, why would I care? I’d never needed a jury to tell me I’d been judged at birth. I was back to where I was as a young man, that “don’t mind dying” train I rode until I got lucky and landed in prison instead of Potter’s Field.

  But I wanted to die like my partner had … with the blood of my enemies in my mouth.

  So, every day, every way, I got stronger.

  And waited.

  A guy came up to my room. He said there was a Rehabilitation Institute attached to the hospital. If I kept improving like they expected, I’d be transferred down there soon.

  He gave me a few tests to see how my strength was coming along. I deliberately held back, but he told me I was doing great. Another week or so, I’d be transferred.

  I asked him a lot of questions, all wrapped around the only ones I cared about. When he told me that there were no private rooms in the Institute, that they had one of the highest staff-patient ratios in the country, and that the entire day was “activity-scheduled,” I knew I couldn’t make a break from there as easy as I could from where I was.

  Time was tightening. But still nobody came for me.

  A few days later, Rich told me my lungs were perfectly clear.

  “You did a great job,” he said, smiling approval. “You
must have worked very hard.”

  “I’ve been working just as hard in my head,” I told him. “Trying to bring it back …”

  His face turned sad. “Don’t worry about it. That part, it has to come on its own. And it will, as soon as it’s ready.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No question about it. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Meaning it.

  He said “Sure,” and walked out, waving his hand to hide his face. But I’d already seen the tears. He had a good heart, that kid. But he was a lousy liar.

  The floor outside my room was a rectangle, with a nurses’ station near each end and a bank of elevators in the middle. A full lap around the perimeter took me almost an hour the first time I tried it. Now I could do a couple of dozen without stopping to get my breath. I’d been off the morphine for ten days, but I’d kept the billing computer happy. And anybody watching wouldn’t see I was disconnected. I moved slow, taking my laps. Just like on the Yard—eyes down, but always watching.

  If cops were watching the door to my room, I couldn’t see them. Or any of those little dots that tip you to a minicam.

  But I couldn’t see what was at the bottom of the elevator’s ride, either. And I couldn’t leave the floor to find out.

  There had to be a reason why none of my people had come. The cops had all their faces, but Michelle had gotten through once. Why …? Sure! That was before the cops made their move on me, before the whole private-room game. That had to be it.

  Maybe the cops had some patience of their own, figuring they could outwait my people.

  No matter how I played it out, it came up NFG all the way. No Fucking Good. If my people came for me, the vise would close. And if they didn’t … Ah, no use in thinking about that. They would. They were waiting, but they wouldn’t wait forever.

  Well, fuck that: the State had made me into a lot of things during my life, but it wasn’t going to turn me into a goddamn Judas goat.