Dead and Gone

by Andrew Vachss

  “Sure,” is all I said, wondering why the cops hadn’t put something into the computer themselves. Maybe the insurance companies wouldn’t let them. This is New York. Money doesn’t just talk here, it’s Dictator-for-Life.

  “Do you need …?”

  “What?” I asked her, too sharply, put off by something in her voice.

  “The … drugs, honey.”

  “If you mean antibiotics or whatever other kind of crap they were giving me in those pills … I guess so. But if you’re dancing around the morphine, don’t. I haven’t had any for weeks.”

  I told them how I’d done that. The Mole nodded like it made sense. The Prof chuckled. Michelle just watched me.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told my family. “But there’s something I’ve got to know first. And only Mama will know the answer.”

  “I’ll roll on by and say hi,” the Prof volunteered.

  “Thanks, brother,” I said, closing my eyes.

  “No, bro,” is all the Prof came back with.

  “No what?”

  “No show, no go. Man hasn’t said word one.”

  “Dmitri thinks I’m … what, then?”

  “No way to tell. Depends on where he stood at the beginning.”

  “These Russians—the parents—they didn’t get their kid back.”

  “Right.”

  “And they didn’t get their money back, either.”

  “True.”

  “And it was real money, Prof. Remember, I went through it myself. Told Dmitri I wasn’t handing over some Chicago bankroll for the kid, take a chance on the wheels coming off.”

  “Sure. All true, I’m with you.”

  “So they took the money. Must have—the one guy had his hands on it when the kid came up blasting.”

  “Okay …”

  “What about our end?”

  “Huh?”

  “We … I was supposed to get a hundred large, for the whole deal. We were going to whack it up, like always. Dmitri paid half up front. To Mama. You ask her if he ever paid the other half?”

  “No, son, I didn’t. She was supposed to be the go-between, that’s all. They don’t know nothing about our …”

  He let the sentence drift away. None of us said the word “family” out loud if we could help it. Not because stupidass Godfather movies had perverted the term, but because we’d all known the truth of its perversion way before we were old enough to be watching movies.

  Mama was in business. Dmitri wanted to do business. He fronted half; that was the usual deal. Why would he pay off the other half for a job that never got done?

  “All right, so he hasn’t come around with the other half. But no way he can blame anyone but himself for what happened. We didn’t set it up. He put us in contact and we took it from there.”

  “I don’t see where you’re going, Schoolboy.”

  “Let’s say Dmitri got all that cash from the parents of the missing kid, okay? Now he shows them … what? Nothing. They lost their money, and they don’t have their kid. So I guess it’s on them for trusting whoever made contact. Unless they just turned it over to Dmitri and asked him to handle it. Then they’d be pushing him. And he’d be pushing, too.…”

  “So you think …?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I told him. “But I know how to find out.” I looked over at the Mole. “How much longer before I can get up, move around, do some work?”

  The Mole opened his mouth to spout a bunch of biomedical stuff. Then he thought better of it and pointed at Max.

  I nodded. Sure, that was the only way to find out.

  We started the next morning. Max doesn’t have any weights in his dojo, but it’s full of all kinds of things that take muscle to move. Before we went near any of that, Max took a stance opposite me and gestured that I should do whatever he did. He kept it simple at first, just basic stretches, probing for my range of motion. I could see him marking the limits in his mind, matching them up against whatever he’d be satisfied with at the end.

  I looked longingly at the heavy bag. Max shook his head. Spread his hand wide, inviting me to do the same, then adjusted until his fingertips met mine. And pushed, slightly. I pushed back. Nothing. I pressed harder, felt a tap on my shoulder, caught Max’s eye. He breathed through his nose, filled his lungs, then exhaled as he pressed his fingertips against mine. My hand crumbled. Yeah, I’d forgotten everything.

  It was about three weeks before Max let me try some light sparring, his hands heavily gloved so that he wouldn’t hurt mine when he caught the punches. And he did, every one. But he could have done that no matter what shape I was in, so I wasn’t discouraged.

  The depth-perception thing did discourage me. I couldn’t judge distances, kept going way short with my jab. And anything that came from my right side—well, now it was my blind side.

  The Prof came by to watch once in a while, keeping up a running fire of commentary the way he had when he was training me, years ago. But this time, none of it added up to what I had. Max finally shook his head at the Prof. Then he stepped forward with his left foot, sliding his right behind it, closing the gap between us. Showed the move to me.

  “Max got the facts, Schoolboy,” the Prof conceded. “You ain’t gonna keep nobody at the end of your jab no more. Got to get close. No need to guess when you inside his vest.”

  Another thing gone. I’d never been much of a power puncher, even when I boxed all the time. Finesse was what I’d finally learned. And now it was useless.

  That was the day Max started showing me places to touch a man that would paralyze—nerve clusters, pressure points, arterial junctions. It was tricky—you had to hit at least two of the points at the same time, and I’d probably never be able to do it in hand-to-hand fighting. But if I could get someone into a grapple …

  “I want to help, too, mahn,” Clarence said one day.

  “I need your help,” I assured him. “You still tight with Jacques?”

  Jacques was a Jamaican gunrunner Clarence worked for a long time ago. Before the Prof became his father, as he had once become mine.

  “I get you whatever you need, brother,” he said, his blue-black face calm as still water.

  I needed something that matched what was left of my body. The nine-millimeter Clarence carried was a precision instrument, its bullets like wasps, fast and sure. But if you missed a vital spot, a man could take a hit from a nine and keep coming. I needed something for close-ups. And I needed whatever I hit to go down.

  “Three fifty-seven,” I said.

  “Colt Python is best, mahn. Four-inch barrel?”

  “Unless you can get one shorter.”

  “Jacques can fix your trick,” the Prof put in. “The factory don’t make it, he’ll fake it. But you know the score—custom costs more.”

  “A nice wide hammer-spur,” I told Clarence, holding my hands about three feet apart so there’d be no mistake. “And no front sight.”

  “It’s going to buck, mahn,” Clarence warned me.

  I looked over at Max, caught his eye, pointed to my wrist. I made the gesture for firing a gun, showing the pistol kicking, my hand flying up. I opened my hands in a question.

  The Mongol nodded. Grasped my wrist with his hand. I flexed the wrist. It was like trying to lift a TV set with the back of my hand. Max shrugged—not sure.

  “Okay,” I told Clarence. “I guess I’ll have to try it out. You got a place where—?”

  “After dark,” the West Indian said.

  Clarence piloted the colorless, shapeless blob of a Toyota through the devastated blocks south of Atlantic Avenue. “I did not want to use my ride, mahn. We still don’t know what they may be watching for.”

  “Good,” I said from the back seat, knowing what he really meant. Clarence never brought his beloved British Racing Green ’67 Rover 2000 TC along when he thought there might be shooting. He could live with damage to it—after all, he’d restored it from scrap—but the prospect of police forfeiture made hi
m psychotic.

  With a dark-blue watch cap covering my head and an old Army field jacket providing bulk that I didn’t have, I looked like … nobody. But I still looked white. And in that neighborhood, white meant cop, junkie, or victim, so we were playing it safe.

  The basement was lined with bags of cement mix, stacked so deep you couldn’t see an inch of the walls, much less a window. The ceiling was thick foam acoustical tile. Even the floor had some kind of rubberized mat over the concrete. Clarence handed me a pair of ear-protectors. “Outside, nobody hears nothing, mahn. But in here, you blow an eardrum for sure, you don’t cover up.”

  I slipped the protectors on. Clarence did the same. Then he walked into the darkest corner of the basement and came back with the pistol. I tilted the protector to listen.

  “A Python, like I said, mahn. This is standard, all the way around. Nobody’s touched the piece or the ammo.”

  “I can just …?”

  “Sure. Blast away. We test much heavier stuff down here, no problem.”

  I aimed the pistol at the far wall of sandbags, squeezed the trigger slowly. Too slowly. I realized I was even testing the strength of my damn finger, said Fuck it! to myself, and cranked one off.

  The gun bucked hard, but I was anticipating the ride and brought it back down into firing position off the momentum. I looked over at Clarence. He nodded approval, flicked his index finger a few times, quickly.

  Okay. I snapped out the remaining five rounds, resisting the temptation to use my left hand to steady my right wrist. Felt all right. I gave it a few seconds for the echoes to be absorbed, then I pulled off the ear-protectors.

  “How’d it look to you?” I asked Clarence.

  “Looked pretty steady, to tell the truth, mahn. Your wrist is strong, I think.”

  “Any way to check on a grouping?”

  “Sure, mahn. But the longest distance we got here is—”

  “—more than I need,” I said.

  Clarence found an old newspaper, carefully tucked it in between some of the sandbags. In the dim light, I could only see a faint white rectangle. I stepped closer, looking for a six-to-eight-foot range. Raised the pistol.

  Then I stopped. Turned to Clarence. “How far away am I?” I asked him.

  “You about, I would say, fifteen feet, mahn. You want me to measure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Clarence paced it off. “Fifteen and a piece,” he confirmed.

  Christ! Just like the damn boxing—I’ll have to be closer than my eyes tell me. I stepped forward, cutting the distance in half. “I want six feet. How’m I doing?”

  “You about ten, brother.”

  I took another two strides. Looked over at Clarence. He nodded. We both put our protectors back on. I popped the cylinder, turned the gun up, extracted the empty cartridges, put them in my pocket, and reloaded. Then I put the pistol in my belt, made myself relax. When I was calm inside, I took the gun out, aimed it slightly below the center of the white blob even as I was cranking off the first round. I pulled until it was empty.

  We went over to look. Clarence took out a pocket flash, inspected the newspaper. It was shredded in the center. He studied the results, professionally objective, a physician seeking a diagnosis. “Looks like four of them within about, maybe, eight inches. One I cannot see, mahn. Perhaps it went … off—that can happen with the first round. The other, it is right here,” he said, pointing to the extreme upper left corner of the paper.

  My wrist didn’t throb at all.

  I did a half-dozen more full cylinders, then switched to my left hand. Nothing changed much. Maybe I was a touch more accurate with my right hand, but, at that distance, it wouldn’t matter much.

  “What do you think?” I asked Clarence.

  “I think,” he said, “that you could handle a shorter barrel. Colt makes a two-and-a-half-inch. And Jacques can Mag-na-port it for you.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Revolvers, they blow out a lot of gas, mahn. What Jacques does, he cuts these little slits right along the top of the barrel,” Clarence explained, illustrating with his fingernail. “Some of the gas comes out there, too. So what happens is, it helps bring your hand down, counteracts the buck, see?”

  “That sounds perfect.”

  “But you have to be very close, now. Especially for that first shot. With this piece, you put one into a man, he will go down.”

  “Die?”

  “Anywhere in the body or the head, yes, mahn. An arm or a leg, it would … maybe. A solid hit, he would go into shock. But if the paramedics got there quick …”

  “Okay. Fair enough.”

  “You want hollowpoints? Hot loads on the powder, too?”

  “Mercury tips.”

  “Mercury tips, I do not like them, mahn. For small slugs, sure. They tear right on through, and the mercury is a good poison to leave behind. But the .357, nobody knows why, exactly, but it has the highest one-shot kill ratio of any of the handguns. There are bigger ones, but this one hits the hardest.”

  “Just a little drop,” I told him. “For luck.”

  “All right, mahn. So that would be one Python with—”

  “Two,” I cut him off.

  “Ah,” is all he said, getting it.

  I spent every day working. For breaks, I stayed inside my head, trying to connect the dots.

  I found out one thing I needed to know. The way I usually learn things—by making someone sad. Only this time it wasn’t me doing it to myself.

  If Max or his wife, Immaculata, had any problems with me staying there, or even with the crew coming by all the time, they never let it slip.

  I guess they never even said anything about me being there to their daughter, Flower. I’ve known her since the day she was born. The child spoke Vietnamese and French, thanks to her mother, and could sign back and forth with Max even faster than I could. Mama, who insisted the child, being her grandchild, was pure line-of-descent Mandarin back to before they put up the Wall, was teaching her one of the Chinese dialects. English she picked up from the rest of the world. Her impeccably polite manners were those of a warrior: Respect, not subservience. Understanding, not awe.

  Sometimes Flower called me “uncle,” but that was only in the presence of strangers. She knew her parents and I were part of a family. A family of choice, the only kind us Children of the Secret ever trust. Only Mama insisted on a formal title. Very formal. It was “grandmother” in English, and whatever it was in the other languages seemed to satisfy her.

  Max can read lips, but I never know how much he’s getting, so I always sign along when I talk. I was standing with my back to the beaded curtains that close off the dojo from the rest of the floor, pacing a little. Max stood across from me on the mat, watching, immobile as stone. I was telling him about where I was stuck.

  I was just getting to the part about how I had been dealing with Dmitri long before it happened, middlemanning shipments of weapons he was selling. His clients were a crew of Albanians up in the Bronx who wanted to make a contribution to the Kosovo relief effort. Dmitri had the ordnance; I had the contacts. We did business, and business was good.

  Suddenly, I heard, “Burke! Burke! You’re back!” and the sound of running footsteps. Flower burst through the curtains, ran a little bit past me, whirled, and went “Oh!” She froze, her eyes locked on my face. My new face. “I thought …” she said, her voice trailing off.

  “It’s me, Flower,” I told her, keeping my voice soft and gentle.

  “What happened? Oh, Burke, your face, what …?”

  She started to cry then. I tried to take her to me, but she ran to Max. The Mongol scooped her up like she was cotton candy, held her close to him, communicating with tender touch. He must have seen it coming. Max maybe can’t hear, but he can feel vibrations as if his whole body was a tuning fork—I’ve seen him listen to music by putting his hands on the speakers. So he had to have known Flower’s footsteps.

  And he must have known that
her mother wouldn’t be far behind. When Immaculata swept into the room, one long red-lacquered fingernail leveled at his chest, Max quickly kissed Flower, then gently lowered her to the ground.

  “What is wrong with you?” Immaculata said to him, voice quivering, her gesturing hands eloquent with anger.

  Before Max could answer, she knelt and spoke directly to Flower. “It is Burke, child. Your Burke. Don’t be frightened. There was an accident. Burke was hurt. But he’s getting better now, all right?”

  The little girl looked up at me. “It’s true,” I told her. “There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  “I’m not scared,” she said solemnly. “It looks like it … hurts you.”

  “Nah. Let’s face it, I wasn’t all that good-looking to start with, right?”

  But I was aiming at the wrong spot. That might have gotten a giggle from a teenager, but Flower was too young and too old to respond that way. “No man is as handsome as my father,” she said. “But you always looked … like … I don’t know … not like this.”

  “I won’t always look like this, Flower. Promise.”

  “I don’t care how you look,” she said, stamping her little foot. “I just don’t want you to hurt.”

  Immaculata shot a glance at Max over the child’s shoulder. It was short of fatal, but not by a whole lot.

  Max made a gesture for “true,” tapped his ear, pointed to Flower. Then he made the sign of pouring one test tube into another, holding up the receiving vessel to the light, checking the results.

  Immaculata nodded, slowly. Getting it, but not liking it much. I’d been asking everyone if my voice sounded the same to them—it sure as hell didn’t to me. They’d all assured me that I sounded the same, but Flower, innocent Flower, she was the perfect test. She hadn’t seen me since I’d been there. But when she’d heard my voice …

  “I’m sorry,” I told Immaculata, trying to take the weight for Max.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand. And so does Flower.”