Dead and Gone

by Andrew Vachss

  “A man who—”

  “No,” I said, cutting her off. “A ‘survivor.’ For both. And that’s wrong.”

  “Why is it wrong? You did survive.…”

  “No. In war, they’re supposed to try and kill you. Not in families. It’s not the same. And that stupid label, it makes us all the same.”

  “Children of war and …”

  “Children of the Secret. All of us who were raised by fucking beasts. Like it’s a brand we can’t shed. But we don’t all go the same way. Some of us, we … copy whatever was done to us. Some of us just hurt … ourselves. And some of us, we hunt … them.”

  “So. You are one of those … hunters. And you do not forgive.”

  “In therapy—the kind they give you when you’re a kid and they know you’ve been … hurt—they tell you, if you want to heal, first you have to forgive. You have to ‘let go’ of your rage.

  “But you know what, little girl? When you’re a kid, when they hurt you and hurt you and fucking laugh when you cry about it, rage is your friend. It stands by you. Stays close. Carries you when you can’t walk on your own. It’s cold and clear and … clean. When everyone else is lying, it gives you the truth. And the truth is, any fucking ‘therapist’ who tells you to forgive the people who hurt you—they’re working for the enemy.”

  “I have no enemy to forgive. Or to hate.”

  “You’re a child of war, like you said. But your parents did their job, honey. They did their best to keep you safe. You can’t hate a whole national insanity. But tell me you wouldn’t kill Pol Pot if he was standing in front of us right this minute.”

  “I … don’t know.”

  “I would.”

  “You? Why? You had no—”

  “I’d kill them all, sweet girl. I swear I would. Every one of them.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know what to call them. Torturers, maybe. The freaks who like to play with electricity in dungeons. The gang rapists. The death-camp guards. The secret police. The mutilators. It doesn’t matter what you call them. I’d know them. Every single one. And if I could ever get them all in one place, I’d be the biggest mass murderer in the history of this planet.”

  She shuddered against me. “Wouldn’t that make you as bad as—?”

  “To some people. Not to anybody who counts with me.”

  “Is that why you are looking for …?”

  “What did you think, Gem? Somebody tried to cap me. I don’t know why, but I’ve got to figure they’ll try again.”

  “They could not find you now,” she said, urgently. “You said so yourself.”

  “There’s two ways to be safe, child. One is to hide. The other is to hunt. When I was a kid, I only had one way. I figure, whoever they are, they had their chance. Now I want mine.”

  She pressed herself against me so hard it felt as if our clothes had melted from the heat. I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my turn.

  “I told you,” she whispered, finally. “I told you, before. Ever since I was a small child, I made decisions very quickly. I don’t wait. I am your woman now. So even though I know what you want … I will help you do it.”

  After she went back downstairs—she called it “going below,” but even the sound of that made me nervous—I tried to make some decisions of my own. In my world, people deal themselves in—or out—all the time. But there’d be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow I was chasing. What I wanted was more of what Pansy had taken with her last breaths.

  I didn’t know what Gem did for money, but I figured her for an outlaw—no way she’d be connected to Pao’s network otherwise. And my best guess was that the Mexicans were about as legal as angel dust. So it all came down to her backing my play because she was my woman.

  I couldn’t work that part out. I guess, when Gem made decisions, she didn’t just make them quick, she made them alone.

  Gem got The Oregonian on Sundays, and always picked up Willamette Week, too, an alternative paper that covered a different beat. I spent a lot of time reading them, trying to feel my way into the territory.

  One day, I came across a piece about a con who stabbed another inmate. Turns out, in Oregon, you shank another guy Inside, you have to attend mandatory “anger management” classes.

  I almost fell off my chair laughing. Prison stabbings have about as much to do with anger as rape does with sex. Knifings are always about a debt, or revenge, or self-defense against a rape. Or territory. Or a new guy blooding into a gang. Thing is, unless the joint is race-war tense, nobody carries all the time—it’s a sure ticket to the hole. You want to stick somebody Inside, you plan it carefully. Even though the favorite target is the back—that spot between the bottom of the ribs and the pelvis, so bone doesn’t turn the blade—you still need cover if you’re going to get away with it. And a place to toss the blade as soon as you’re done.

  I’ve known prison assassins with a dozen kills and no busts. Wesley was the master. Nobody ever saw him mad. Nobody ever saw him coming, either.

  The Oregonian handled straight news real well. Good combination of local and wire-service copy, although most of the coverage was about Portland, and the weather got a lot more attention than it would in New York. The Willamette Week was more about culture, and it told me one thing I filed away—Portland was a blues town, for serious.

  But nothing in the personals of either one looked even remotely promising.

  I went back to working the phones.

  I was on the line with a guy in Detroit who said he knew a guy who knew a guy and—if I had the money—he might be able to bridge a connect for me … when one of the other cellulars buzzed. I hung up on the hustler, said:

  “What?”

  “Call for you, okay? Say you go Al-blue-quirk-key.”

  “Albuquerque?”

  “Yes. What I say. You go Thursday. Go to airport. Two o’clock afternoon, walk outside to parking lot. See big car with stripes like tiger. You wait there. Okay?”

  “This Thursday, the next one coming?”

  “Say, ‘You go Thursday.’ ”

  “The person who called, what did he—?”

  “Not man, woman. I say, ‘Who calling?’ She say: ‘Give message to Winston.’ Then say what I just say now, okay?”

  “Okay, Mama. Thanks.”

  I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes for a minute. Maybe it was longer. When I opened them, Gem was standing in front of me. “Can that computer of yours do airline schedules?” I asked … before she could ask me anything.

  Less than half an hour later, she was kneeling on the floor next to my chair, scraps of paper spread out before her.

  “There are many choices,” she said. “Several different carriers, all going at different times of the day.”

  “Any of them get in with plenty of margin before two in the afternoon?”

  “Oh yes. All leaving from Portland. Let me see.…” She crawled around on all fours from scrap to scrap, oblivious to the sweet show she was putting on. Or not—I know less about women than I do about stamp collecting. “Ah! You have … one, two, three … at least four separate choices. It just depends on how you want to be routed.”

  “Routed?”

  “Yes. None of the airlines have direct flights. You can change planes in Phoenix, Oakland, Denver, or Salt Lake City.”

  “I don’t care which airline. It’s not like I’ve got frequent-flyer mileage to worry about. All I need is something that gets me in there around noon or earlier.”

  Gem took a very close look at one of the scraps on the carpet. A long look. I guess I do know a little more than I do about stamp collecting. “All right, then,” she finally said. “Let us make it Phoenix.”

  “Great. Do you have a safe credit card you can use to make the reservation? I’ll pay you in cash.”

  “Yes, of course. But you will need a—”

  “I’ve got all the documents I’ll need to show them at the airport, girl. That’s not a problem.”
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  “How many days will this take?”

  “I don’t have a clue. What difference does it make?”

  She looked at me over one shoulder. “How could I pack intelligently if I do not know how long we will be gone?”

  “I can pack my own—” I started to say. Her depth-charge eyes stopped me cold, and I realized what she was really saying.

  “Do you like it?” Gem asked me on Monday.

  I looked at the inch-and-a-half color photo she was holding in her palm. Gem, staring straight ahead, the barest hint of a smile on her face. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Not exactly a glamour shot.”

  “But it looks like me, does it not?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good,” she said. And disappeared.

  “Chantha Askew?”

  “Of course,” she said, holding the passport with her picture and that name open so I could see it clearly. “Chantha is a good Cambodian name. And Askew, that is yours. Or the one on your passport, yes?”

  “Yeah. But—”

  “You don’t want to drive to Albuquerque,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have asked me about flights, much less to book one. There is some risk in flying. It’s not as … anonymous. You have not ever used your own passport before, have you?”

  “No,” I told her, wondering even as I spoke how she could know that.

  “And you have no fear of the people who constructed it for you revealing—?”

  “No!” I cut her off sharp. “Not a chance.”

  “All right,” she said, so softly that I realized I must have shown something in my face. Wolfe sell me out? She’d die first. And I’d rather be dead than to ever know about it if she did.

  Gem was quiet for a minute. Then she gently pushed at me until I sat down, and followed me down until she was in my lap.

  “They don’t have your name, the one on your passport,” she said softly, not having to spell out who “they” were. “And they don’t have your face, either. They don’t know who you are. Or where you are. You are hunting them; not they, you. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know you.…”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “They wanted to kill you because they knew you. We do not know why. Assassins kill when they are paid. But those who hire assassins, it is always for one of two reasons: it is either what you did, or what you are. What you described, it was too intricate for simple revenge. Too expensive. And it has become very, very complicated. So it must be that whoever wants you dead also fears you.”

  “Look, Gem, all this … logic of yours is fine, but—”

  “Indulge me, please. Assume they know you. Or know about you, anyway. They do not know where you are. Or even if you are alive. But one thing I am certain they would not expect—that you would be married.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, I do not mean you could not marry. Have you ever—?”

  “No.”

  “Yes. All right. What I meant was, you would not be … traveling as a married man. With a wife, see?”

  “So you’re coming along as cover?”

  “I am coming along because I am your woman.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “That?”

  “That you’re my woman.”

  “I am.”

  “My ‘woman’ … What does that mean in Cambodian, my boss?”

  “Don’t be silly!” She giggled. “I am very obedient.”

  “So long as—?”

  “So long as the orders are sensible,” she said, climbing off my lap.

  Gem sat quietly next to me in the back seat of Flacco’s Impala on the way back up to Portland. Maybe being a married woman required more decorum.

  “I am going to build one for myself, very soon,” Gordo said to me. I figured Flacco had heard this a few hundred times.

  “Which way are you looking to go?”

  “Like this one,” he said, patting the Impala’s padded dash. “But not no Chevy, that’s for sure.”

  “Because …?”

  “I need my ride to be … I don’t know, man … like no other one on the road. But I want to stay with the factory look,” he said, with a nod in Flacco’s direction. “That’s what’s happening now.”

  “Me, I like the fifties better than the sixties for that,” I told him.

  “Fifties? I don’t know, man. The sixties, the shapes were … wilder, you know?”

  “Maybe. Maybe too wild. If I was doing it, I’d want something people’d have to look twice at just to figure out what it was.”

  “Hey, hombre,” Flacco threw in, “there’s no way to do that when they made millions of each model then. What you mean? Something like a ’55 Crown Vic? Or a ’57 Fury? They’re cool, all right, but you could pick one out at a hundred yards if you leave them looking near-stock.”

  “You’re right. But the one I was thinking of, it’d slip right by, you did it right.”

  “So which one, man?” Gordo wanted to know.

  “Picture this,” I told them. “A ’56 Packard Caribbean. The hardtop, not the convertible. Strip all the chrome, even that fat wide strip down the sides. Then you slam it all around—not put it in the weeds, just a nice drop. Give the top a subtle chop … maybe only a couple of inches. I see it with some old-style mag wheels, like American Racing used to put out. Paint it about twenty coats of the deepest, darkest purple-black—you know, that Chromallusion stuff that changes color depending on how you look at it.”

  “I never seen one of those,” Gordo said.

  “I did,” Flacco said. “It had those giant taillights, right? Cathedrals?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “The man’s nailed it, compadre,” Flacco told his partner. “That would be the biggest, bossest, most evil-looking ride on the whole coast. And those suckers had some serious cubes. Mucho room for anything you wanted to do with the rubber, too.”

  “Problem is finding one,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, they’ll be out there,” Flacco assured me. “This part of the country, people keep their old cars. There’s always Arizona, too—we got plenty people down there could keep a lookout for us. And you should have seen this one when I first got it. Just a rusted-out shell.”

  “You went frame-off?”

  “Sí!” he said, proudly. “Me and my man, here, we got about a million hours in it. Gordo’s the mechanic, I’m the bodyman.”

  “Be harder for the Packard,” I said. “They make all kinds of NOS parts for Chevys, but …”

  “Be more work, is all,” Gordo said, reaching over to high-five Flacco.

  “It sounds very beautiful,” Gem said, her chest puffed out a bit, proud of me for some reason.

  It was still dark when they dropped us off in front of the Delta terminal at PDX. The first-class line was empty. Check-in was nothing at all—the clerk glanced at my passport photo so quick I could have been Dennis Rodman for all he knew.

  The first-class thing was all about keeping our options as open as possible. We were only taking carry-ons, and they cut you a bit more slack with the size of the bags up in the front of the plane. You get out faster, too, and that can count for something when you have to change planes. But most important was that we wouldn’t have any company right next to us—I could take the window seat and just lie in the shadow until it was time to make our move.

  The corridor leading to the gates at PDX was like an indoor mall. Upscale shops, some brand-name, some “crafts,” even a fancy bookstore—Powell’s—a real one, not the usual magazine stand with a couple of paperback racks.

  Gem failed to surprise me by suggesting that we had plenty of time to get something to eat. A bakery-and-coffee-shop was open, with little café-style tables standing outside. Inside, music was coming over the speakers. Kathy Young’s version of “A Thousand Stars.” The sound system must have been real sophisticated, because someone had the bass track isolated … and cranked up so high you could barely make out the lyrics. I know it’s hip to sa
y the Rivileers’ version is the real thing, and Kathy’s was just a white-bread cover. But I think the girl really brings it, her own way.

  I got a hot chocolate and a croissant. Gem got a tray-full of stuff. We sat outside all by ourselves, listening to the music. The Spaniels’ version of “Goodnite Sweetheart, Goodnite.” The Paradons doing “Diamonds and Pearls.” The Coasters on “Young Blood.”

  “What do you call that?” Gem asked me, head cocked in the direction of the music. “Rock and roll?”

  “No. It’s doo-wop. From the fifties, mostly. Where the voices were the instruments—a capella. The kind of stuff that sounds the same in the subway as it does in the studio. If you ever heard the Cardinals, or the Jacks, or the Passions, or—”

  “And today it does not?” she interrupted.

  “Today it’s all sixty-four-track, electronic-mixmaster stuff. The engineers are as important as the musicians. Except for the true-blues stuff.”

  “What is that?”

  We had time, so I told her about Son Seals. And Magic Judy Henske. And Paul Butterfield. Gem was so obviously listening, really listening, that I would have gone on for a much longer time … but she finally tapped her watch and raised her eyebrows.

  The metal implants in my skull didn’t set off the detectors like I’d thought they might—I wore one of those Medi-Guard ID bracelets, just in case I had to explain. I’d left the never-fired twin to the piece I’d put Dmitri down with at Gem’s, and made her leave her baby Derringer there, too, so I figured we were golden when our bags went through the conveyor without attracting any attention. But as we turned to enter the corridor to the gate, someone called out, “Sir!”

  It was a guy in some kind of uniform. He motioned me over. “Sir, do you mind if we check your luggage?”

  “Go ahead,” I told him.

  But instead of opening my bag, he put it on a small, flat platform, then ran a wand over the outside. “Supersensitive,” he said. “It can detect the most microscopic traces.”