Choice of Evil

by Andrew Vachss

  And when I saw the next message from the killer, I knew Wesley was right.

  >>select target<<

  is all he sent.

  I sat there, smoking a cigarette all the way through, waiting. It got too much for Xyla. “Aren’t you going to answer him?” she finally asked.

  “He doesn’t expect an answer,” I told her. “If I put one in right now, he’d get suspicious.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “I think I do,” I told her. “Just send this”:

  come back. 72 hours.

  She typed it in.

  “This means I have to leave my same addy up there, you understand that, right?”

  “I think I understand it better than you think,” I told her. “Go ahead and nuke your address, girl. My best guess—he’s already found you.”

  “You mean. . .?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be back. Three days from right now.”

  How much did the killer really know? Everyone thought Wesley was a machine, but they had it wrong. Wesley was just. . . focused. Right down to a laser dot. He studied his prey, but he didn’t know anything outside of that. Didn’t matter to him. This guy—this super-killer, how much could he know about Wesley’s jobs? How they worked? The last part of his journal—at least, the last part he’d shown me—said he was going to hunt them too. But. . . “them”? I had to play it like it was a category he hunted, not a group. It was the only thing that made any sense. And if I was right, there’d only be one match.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  “You’re. . . sure?”

  “Absolutely,” I told Lincoln, scratching behind Pansy’s ear. “He’s well away. No chance of getting caught. He’s a million miles from here.”

  “What’s he. . . like?” one of the men in the back of the room asked me.

  “That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “You wanted him safe. You got him safe.”

  “He’s right.” Nadine’s voice cut into the room. She was seated at the same table, but she’d replaced the lank-haired skinny woman with the same chubby blonde pony girl I’d seen in her little home video. “There hasn’t been a killing for weeks. The cops are just blowing smoke.”

  “It changed things, though,” another woman said from across the room. “It’s. . . different now.”

  “Sure,” an older man said, “you can walk down Christopher Street without the back of your neck tingling every time you see a crowd of straights now. There hasn’t been a fag-bashing for a good while. They’re scared. He did that. But what makes you think it’s going to last?”

  “He showed us the way,” Nadine spoke up. Like she was talking about Jesus. Walking to Mecca. Following the Tao.

  “What does that mean?” one of the younger guys asked, the sneer just below the surface.

  “They didn’t stop because they saw the light,” Nadine said, an orator’s organ-stop in her voice, speaking to the whole room. “They stopped because they were afraid. They’re still afraid. They’re afraid of him. And now he’s gone. But he doesn’t have to go. . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” Lincoln demanded.

  “Nobody knows who he is, right?” Nadine shot back. “All they have is two things: letters to the newspapers. . . and dead bodies. It’ll be quiet for a while. Maybe a long while, I don’t know. But when they. . . when they start going after us again, well. . . who says we can’t write letters to the newspapers?”

  “Sure, but they only printed the letters because they were authentic,” Lincoln said.

  Nadine got to her feet. Eye-swept the room a couple of times to make sure everyone there was riveted to her. She took a deep breath.

  “We could make ours authentic too,” she said. Softly. But everyone in the place heard her.

  “This is Tracy,” Nadine told me in the alley outside the room where they’d met, a nod of her head indicating the chubby blonde.

  “Pleased to meet you,” was all I could think to say.

  “Turn around,” Nadine ordered her.

  The blonde did it.

  Nadine stepped over to the blonde, pushed her until the other girl’s face was right against the wall. Then she reached around the blonde girl’s waist, and did something with her fingers. The blonde girl made some sound, too low for me to understand. Nadine yanked down the blonde girl’s jeans and her underpants in one two-handed pull.

  “Stay!” she said.

  Pansy stayed too. Watching. She didn’t know what was going on, but the hair on the back of her neck was up.

  It was dark in the alley.

  “Light one of your cigarettes,” she said to me, just this side of a command.

  I did it, wondering why even as the match flared. She snatched it out of my mouth. Looked at the glowing tip. Smiled ugly. “Want some of that?” she said, pointed at the chubby blonde.

  “No,” I told her.

  “Then go away,” she said, dropping her voice. “I’m going to play with her. Right out here. In public. When I’m done, she’ll carry my brand. Think about that. And remember your promise. I cleared it with the rest of them. You got your money. But you better not be—”

  “I’m still working,” I said.

  Then I snapped my fingers for Pansy to heel and walked out of the alley.

  Why did that crazy girl think she could pull me in with sex games? I couldn’t figure it out. Couldn’t understand the cigarette thing either. That wasn’t me. Ever. It always made me. . . I could never get it, never get the part where people yearned for what other people had done to me. But I guess I did get it after all. The freaks, they set things in motion. Sometimes they make more of themselves. Sometimes they create their own hunters. I guess they don’t. . . know. Or care. I never asked one. Except when I was a kid. I remember crying, “Why?” And I remember him laughing.

  I never knew what to do with all that hate until Wesley told me. A long time ago. “Fire works.” The ice-boy never played, not even back then. Not even with words.

  “Rocco LaMarca,” Strega whispered to me late the next night.

  “You’re sure?”

  “He ran a big crew. Mostly in Westchester. The carting industry. But he lived in Connecticut. New Canaan. Very classy. Not even a whisper about him. Called himself Ronald March.”

  “And he was—?”

  “The cops thought it was a mob hit. An ice pick in the eye. You know what that means—he saw something he shouldn’t have. And they cut his tongue out too. Saying he said something about what he saw.”

  “But how do you know he’s—?”

  “It wasn’t a sanctioned hit. The Family doesn’t know who did it. But they knew about his daughter. He made. . . films of her.”

  “For money? Like—?”

  “No. Just to. . . show off. His. . . power. I mean, he said it was business. Showed the films to a few of the boys who were in that end. You remember Sally Lou?”

  Strega, telling me she knew everything. Sally Lou ran the mob’s kiddie-sex business before Times Square felt the Disney steamroller. I love it. Disney cleans up Times Square, but they hire a convicted child molester to direct one of their movies. People protested, but the studio ranted on about giving people another chance. Sure, once it came down to money, all of a sudden, Disney’s got more faith in “rehabilitation” than an NCAA recruiter.

  Sally Lou had gone down around the same time Mortay did, all part of that same horror show that cost me my love and launched Wesley on his last rampage.

  A lot of thoughts. But all I said to Strega was: “Yeah.”

  “Well, Sally Lou was one of the ones who saw it. But LaMarca never turned it over. So Sally Lou, he asked around; like, what was the guy up to, right? And that’s when the word came back. He had a daughter. So they put it together. The filthy slime. He was—”

  “I know,” I said, stroking her hair. “What happened to her? To the daughter?”

  “Nobody knows,” Strega said.

  Meaning she didn’t. But she knew everything else. A
nd her answer to my next question was the last tile dropping into the mosaic. I could read it then, even through the haze of blood.

  “It was almost fifteen years ago,” Wolfe said quietly. “September twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-four.”

  “I got him now,” I told her.

  “You’re really working this?” she asked, disbelief the strongest element in her voice.

  “I’m not a good liar,” I lied. “There’s nothing more for you to do. You got paid. We’re square. You think what you want about me. Make your judgments. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Why ‘maybe’?”

  “I think you know,” I told her. “I think you’ve always known. You don’t want. . . me. I got that. I’m doing this for me. The way I do everything, right? For me, that’s what you think. But you had me wrong, and one day you’ll know that. Even if I don’t tell you myself.”

  “Burke. . . wait!”

  I just kept walking.

  “Write it down on a piece of paper,” Xyla told me. “I can’t tell how to spell it from what you’re saying. And what if you’re—”

  Her mouth popped open as her computer screen shifted.

  >>name?<<

  was all it said. And

  gutterball felestrone. 50-50

  is all she typed back.

  “He did find me,” Xyla said. “Christ, he’s good. I could never have found him.”

  “I did,” I told her. “Get ready. He’s going to come back. And pretty soon, I think.”

  I guess he wanted to make sure I wouldn’t miss it. Gutterball’s last meal had been in his favorite restaurant, a mob joint deep in what of Little Italy still survived the all-borders Chinatown encroachment. Nobody walked in there and blasted him, but someone had gotten into the kitchen. Gutterball was dead before the EMS ambulance managed to bull its way through the clogged streets. Gutterball always had the same thing: spaghetti and sausage with oregano-laced sauce—gravy, he called it. The newspapers had all that. The autopsy report was made public. The sauce had a little extra spice in it, that night. “Enough ricin to kill a regiment,” the pathologist was quoted as saying. “After the first swallow, he never had a chance.”

  “Would it be a true death?” I asked the woman. Her office was jumbled and serene at the same time. She had no desk, just a couple of easy chairs and a couch. No computer screen, not even a file cabinet.

  “It. . . could. Do you know if there were any others?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know—?”

  “I told you everything,” I said. “Everything I know. Doc said you’re the best there is. At. . . this stuff.”

  She flashed a smile. “This ‘stuff,’ as you call it, is. . . variable. That is, it depends on so many things. From what you told me, all I can say is that it could be. But only if the subject felt completely, totally safe.”

  “Safe? I don’t get it. I mean—”

  “It would be a true death only if the dead person never came back—that is what you’re asking, isn’t it? And I’m giving you the best answer I can. As long as the. . . environment was safe, really truly safe. . . if the. . . original conditions never resurfaced, then, yes, it could be a ‘true death,’ as you put it.”

  “How do you know he’ll—?”

  “I don’t,” I told Lorraine. “But I have to be ready in case he does.”

  “And you’re sure he’s the one who—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll get a cot put in here,” she said. “The bathroom’s right through that door over there. You want food, just walk into the kitchen, I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I would like to go with you,” Rusty said quietly. I hadn’t even noticed him before he spoke.

  “It can’t work like that,” I replied, bowing slightly to show my respect for what he was offering.

  “What kind of dog is that?” Xyla asked me.

  “She’s a Neapolitan mastiff,” I told her. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  Pansy ignored me, watching Xyla. I saw a look pass between them. And I recognized it. “You love dogs, don’t you?” I asked Xyla.

  “Oh, I do. I have a—”

  “Yeah. Whatever. Listen, do not feed her, understand?”

  “I wasn’t gonna—”

  “Yeah, you were,” I told her. “It won’t matter. She wouldn’t take food from a stranger anyway.”

  “I guess I’m busted,” she said, face reddening. It was a pretty sight in that machine-cold room, like a flower blooming at the base of a prison wall.

  “I’ll call you when it’s time,” I told her, lying back on the cot and closing my eyes.

  I wasn’t surprised when Xyla’s computer screen started blinking at 3:44 a.m. Sure. Let him think the machine was sitting in my house—that’s what the test was all about.

  >>50-50<<

  his message said. I told Xyla what to do, and she hit her keyboard:

  yours $125K

  Xyla was about to get up, but I put my hand on her shoulder, telling her he wasn’t done.

  >>why target?<<

  “He’s using ICQ,” Xyla said excitedly. “He’s there. I mean. . . somewhere. But he’s on the line.”

  “He won’t stay long. Just type what I tell you.”

  Cork unauthorized

  His response popped up almost immediately.

  >>next?<<

  4 names. major money. but they want to deal direct

  “What does that—?” Xyla asked.

  “Ssshhh,” I told her. “He wants that too. You’ll see.”

  >>understand. but no face-to-face<<

  they don’t want that either. afraid

  >>then?<<

  want proof

  >>*names* = proof<<

  no. want proof he’s alive

  >>*you* tell them<<

  polygraph

  >>understand. you know who i am?<<

  think so

  >>not *look* same<<

  so?

  >>how pass polygraph then?<<

  only question: did i talk to him in person?

  >>understand. you *do* know who i am.<<

  yes

  >>no more talk. next message, instructions for meet<<

  got it

  The screen flickered, glowed red, then yellow. Then Xyla’s computer just shut itself off.

  “Fuck!” she snarled, flicking switches like a madwoman.

  I watched her in silence. It was almost a half-hour before she pushed herself away from the computer, rolling her chair back across the room, sweat-drenched.

  “He crashed it,” she said. “Thunderbolt. I’ve heard about them, but I didn’t know if they were real.”

  “What’s a thunderbolt?”

  “A giant spike. Electrical. It’s transmitted over the modem during ICQ. When the sender signs off, it’s activated.”

  “You lost all your data?”

  She gave me one of those “What are you, stupid?” looks young girls probably memorize in the cradle. “Of course not. That’s in a separate unit. I don’t leave anything connected. All he spiked out was my software. But there was a ton of that. It’s gonna take me a couple of weeks to. . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. Even as I realized that his attack on Xyla’s setup was another message: whatever meeting he was going to set up wasn’t going to be soon.

  I learned a lot of trades in prison. Not the ones the rehab-geeks talk about. The ones we all learn, some better than others. Trades have tricks. One of them I did learn was how to use time you’re stuck with. And that’s what I did while I was waiting for the finale.

  “I know the whole thing now,” I told my family.

  They were all there this time: Michelle and the Mole, Terry sitting between them. The Prof and Clarence. Max and Immaculata. Even little Flower was around someplace, probably playing with the cooks in the back. Mama hawk-eyed the kitchen area, getting up every couple of minutes to check on her granddaughter.
>
  Nobody said anything, waiting for me to fill in the blanks. I did it. Slow, taking my time, testing every link before I added it to the chain.

  When I was done, the Prof was the first to speak. “If it’s written in blue, it must be true,” the little man said. “He found the Gatekeeper.”

  “Prof!” Michelle snapped at him. “Stop it! This is insane enough without a bunch of superstitious—”

  I reached over and took Michelle’s hand, squeezing it gently. “Prof,” I asked, “you said the only way to work it is to give them a soul for every one the. . . dead guy took, right?”

  “One for one, son,” he agreed.

  “That plane. . . the sex-tour one. I figure that probably evened the score.”

  “It is impossible to transmit matter in that way,” the Mole said, earning a loving glance of approval from Michelle.

  “Nobody knows some—” Clarence started, defending his father.

  “Both true,” Mama said.

  We all looked toward her, but she nodded at Immaculata, the first time I’d seen her defer. Mac gulped at the honor, knowing it had to be her profession Mama was deferring to, not her wisdom—Mama believed nobody under seventy knew anything of value from their own life experience. “Psychologically,” she began, “a belief can become a fact to the believer.”

  “But this ain’t no nut,” the Prof stepped up.

  “He wouldn’t have to be. . . crazy,” Mac told him. “Just a. . . believer. He might be rational in all other senses of the word. But if you ‘reason’ from a false premise, any conclusion, no matter how logically it follows, will be wrong, do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Both true,” Mama said again, not disrespecting Immaculata’s answer, but making it clear it wasn’t enough.

  “All right,” Immaculata said. “Look at it this way. Some believe this. . . Wesley never actually died, yes? But there was no. . . support for that proposition. This recent rash of murders, they represent a sort of ‘proof,’ seemingly to underscore the presence of. . . Ah, look: Those who think Wesley never actually died or those who think he could return from the dead. . . merge. Into a belief system. If it is ‘Wesley’ doing these murders in the minds of the believers, he has come back, understand?”