Safe House

by Andrew Vachss

  “Call her,” I said, jerking my head briefly in Crystal Beth’s direction. “Just tell her the place and the time. I’ll be there. And then you’ll decide.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Can I drop the act now?” she asked, walking next to me in the street.

  I reached behind her, grabbed one of her pigtails, pulled it sharply. She let out a little gasp. “You know who’s watching?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “That’s your answer,” I said.

  “Do you know why women always used to walk three paces behind their men?” Crystal Beth asked me as she pulled the jersey turtleneck over her head.

  “Because they were property?” I offered, watching the black bra standing sharp against her dusky-rose skin.

  “No. And not because they were submissive either. My mother explained it to me. Her people, the ones who didn’t go to the cities, they still do it that way.”

  She untied the drawstring at the waist of the long skirt, let it fall to the floor. Then she hooked her thumbs in the top of the black tights and pulled them down. The black panties and bra looked like a modest bathing suit. “They usually had a child between them,” she said. “It was to make a box, to protect the child. If the woman turned around, they would be back-to-back, do you see?”

  “Yeah. Like walking point and drag.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “In the jungle, military, you walk a column. The trails aren’t wide enough for more. You put the sharp man ahead, to watch. But you put the heavy firepower at the end, in case they close up behind you.”

  “The woman had the harder job,” she said. “Looking behind you is always hardest.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am right,” she said, reaching behind her to unhook the bra. Her breasts were wide and round, not sticking out much. The small nipples were dark in the candlelight.

  “If I get you a nice hanger, will you take off that beautiful suit?” she asked, walking over to where I was sitting.

  She kept the black panties on until right near the end. Moving so slow, kissing and whispering, never impatient, holding my cock like she was taking its temperature, waiting for the right time.

  “Can you hear that whistle now?” she whispered against my face.

  I entered her then. Or maybe she took me in.

  “Did I do it right?” she asked me later, propped on one elbow, looking down at my face, fire-specks of light from the candle playing across her tiny teeth.

  “There is no ‘right,’ ” I told her, wishing women wouldn’t always pull that number when sex was done.

  “Not . . . that.” She laughed deep in her throat. “I could tell about that. I knew it even . . . before.”

  “Before . . . ?”

  “Before you did,” she said, flashing a smile. “I meant with Pryce. In the restaurant.”

  “Yeah, you did fine.”

  “He’s a scary man.”

  “There’s two pieces to that,” I said. “There’s the gun. And there’s pulling the trigger, understand?”

  “I think so. I thought about that too. What good would it do him to . . . ruin people? It would be too late to stop us—we’d have already done it, right?”

  “You know what loan sharks are?” I asked her.

  “Sure,” she replied, cocking her head with a question she didn’t ask.

  “You know why they break legs?”

  “So people will pay.”

  “What if the borrower’s broke? I mean, dry-well broke. Tap City. Nobody to touch, nothing to borrow against, nothing for the pawn shops. Every bridge burned. Say he’s already crippled from the last beating. Maybe got cancer too, okay? Maybe he’s ashamed of himself, for what he did to his family. Maybe the only thing he’s got left is some life-insurance policy. Maybe he wants to die and just doesn’t have the guts to do it himself. Any reason to kill him then?”

  “Of course not. What good would it—?”

  “It’s good for the reputation,” I said quietly. “Word gets out they totaled a guy for not coming up with the cash, it makes all the others pay attention. One killing is worth a lot of beatings, see?”

  “So you think he . . . would do it anyway?”

  “I don’t know him. But that’s the way he comes off. No way this is the only time he’s done this. Every working extortionist needs a head on a stake once in a while. It’s good advertising.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. You know why he wanted that meet out in public?”

  “No. I met him before, and he wasn’t—”

  “He thought maybe you were gonna solve your problem.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Cut him down,” I said softly. “Take him out. He goes away, your problems go away too, right?”

  “Kill him?”

  “Sure.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “He doesn’t know that. I didn’t either, until we met. He’s an info-player, stacking up his chips. That’s one he doesn’t have.”

  “But . . .”

  “He’s going to call you. Then you’re going to call me. I’m going to meet him. And then we’re going to decide, you and me.”

  “Decide what?”

  “If there’s a way out,” I told her. “A way you can live with.”

  Early the next morning I stood on the paved area just off the Hudson River across from Riverside Drive, the hood up on my Plymouth like I was having engine trouble. The sun was just making its move. Light downtown-bound commuter traffic flowed past on the West Side Highway. Summertime, this spot would be crowded: guys fishing, working on their cars, chilling with blunt-and-brew combos. But now it was deserted. The radio said it was fifty-four degrees, but it didn’t feel that warm to me.

  I was lighting a cigarette when a street-hammered old Audi sedan pulled in a few spaces away. The driver’s door opened and she got out. Wolfe. I’d know her at a hundred yards, the long glossy dark hair with the two white wings standing out so clear. I knew the dark blot that filled the passenger’s window too. Bruiser. A killer rottweiler who had been going to work with Wolfe ever since he was a puppy. He used to lie under her desk when she ran City-Wide. Now he rides shotgun, making the transition from law enforcement to outlaw as smoothly as Wolfe had. I didn’t close the gap between us, letting her come to me—Wolfe never locks her car and I could see the passenger window was down.

  She was wearing a quilted orange car coat that came down past her knees, walking with a free and easy stride, like it was a country lane instead of garbage-strewn asphalt.

  “Pepper said you wanted to see me,” she said by way of greeting.

  “You want to sit in the car?” I asked her.

  “No, it’s nice outside today. Makes me think spring’s almost here.”

  She was being guarded, but that was her usual style. I got right to it: “You know a guy named Pryce?”

  “Yes,” she said, no hesitation.

  “I may be . . . in something with him.”

  “With him?”

  “No.”

  “You want what I know, what I can find out . . . what?”

  “Same menu?”

  Wolfe gave me her enchantress smile. The same one that had lulled a decade of defense attorneys to their doom. “These are inflationary times,” she said.

  “How much for what you know?”

  “I know a lot,” she said.

  “Figured you might. How much?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  “Or,” she went on like she hadn’t heard me, “we could trade.”

  “What have I got that you want?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Not for sure. But you want the information for a reason. Something’s going on. Or something’s going to happen. Something with Pryce. That’s what I’ll trade you for.”

  What do you know, you beautiful warrior-girl? I thought to myself. Wolfe already knew about th
e stalker—Crystal Beth had told me she was part of the plan. But had Crystal Beth ever mentioned Pryce to her?

  “Even up?” I offered, nothing on my face.

  “A thousand for what I have. Then you fill me in. And keep me updated.”

  “How come you—?”

  “Come on.” She smiled again. “You want to pay for that too?”

  “They’re so lucky,” Wolfe said, looking out at a tanker going up the Hudson.

  “People with jobs?”

  “No.” She laughed. “People who get to be on the water all the time.”

  “You like that stuff?”

  “I love it,” she said quietly. “If I had my way, I think I’d live on a boat.”

  “Like a cruise ship?”

  “No, a sailboat. A nice three-master that I could sail with a small crew.”

  “You could sail it?”

  “Sure.” She grinned. “I captained a ship from Bermuda all the way back to Cape Cod once.”

  “By yourself?”

  “There were other people on board, but I was in charge.”

  “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “I was a Sea Scout.”

  “A what?”

  “A Sea Scout. Like a Girl Scout, only we went out on boats instead of camping.”

  “I’d be scared to death,” I told her. “The water . . .”

  “You don’t know how to swim?”

  “No. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t sink. We used to jump off piers when I was a kid. But it’s so, I don’t know . . . I mean, you don’t know what’s out there.”

  “There’s worse things on land,” she said.

  I knew she was right, but it didn’t make any difference. Once, when I was small, I went down to the river to see what I could hustle up. It was night—I always felt safer at night. A boat was there. Not a big one, some kind of sport-fishing rig. They had a shark up on a hoist. It was twitching, like it was going to break loose. The men were laughing, drunk, celebrating their conquest. I looked out at the black water. I thought about more sharks being down there. Men hunt them for fun. I wondered if the other sharks wanted revenge.

  “Sure,” I said, getting back to it. “This Pryce, is he one of them? Those worse things?”

  “I’ve run across his trail a few times over the years. Only met him once face-to-face. He said he was with Justice then, but when I tried a trace, it got lost in the maze they have down there. By the time I worked it through, he was gone. He tells people he’s with the Company sometimes. Or DEA, ATF, whatever. And by the time anyone can check, he’s moved on.”

  “Transferred, maybe?”

  “Not a chance. I think he’s sanctioned, but he’s on permanent-disavowal status.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Pretty much what it sounds like,” she said, combing both hands through her thick mane of dark hair as a river breeze came up. “He does contract jobs, but he works for cash, not on the books.”

  “Active work?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s an information guy, not hands-on. What he is, I think, is kind of a bounty hunter. A bounty spotter, if there’s any such thing. He doesn’t make collars, he doesn’t do wet stuff. He works the edges, tracking. And he manipulates situations. There’s no holds on him—he doesn’t have to play by the rules.”

  “Could he get favors done?”

  “From the feds? Probably. At least he could from certain agents he’s bird-dogging for.”

  “And he doesn’t play for headlines?”

  “I remember one thing he said to me. ‘I never take credit. Only cash.’ I think that about sums him up.”

  “You had a beef with him?”

  “Not at all. He was very polite, very respectful. Said he knew about a pedophile ring. A new twist—on-line molestation in real time.”

  “Huh?”

  “One of the freaks would get the little girl—they only used girls in this one—in his studio. Then he’d set up the cameras, notify the rest of them and flash her image over their modems. They could tell him what they wanted him to do to the little girl, and they could all watch as he did it.”

  “And Pryce knew this how?”

  “He didn’t say. But I got the impression that he had reached one of the freaks. Had him in his pocket.”

  “Was he trying to make a deal, have this one guy roll over on the rest in exchange for a walk-away?”

  “No. He doesn’t work for defense attorneys. It wasn’t anything like that. As near as I could tell, he was willing to let his own guy go down with the rest.”

  “So what was the problem?”

  “He wanted to get paid. Not a favor, cash.”

  “How much did he want?”

  “He didn’t say exactly. Six figures, anyway.”

  “And you wouldn’t go for it?”

  “No. I couldn’t. We don’t have a budget for things like that. Nobody posts a reward until there’s a victim, right?”

  “Yeah. And nobody knew—?”

  “Nobody knew anything. This was the first I’d heard of it. I tried to put some pressure on him. Told him, if he didn’t turn over the information, not only was that one little girl going to continue to be gang-raped over the Internet, there had to be others too. He said that should make it worth more. I tried to spook him about ‘withholding information’ and he just laughed. I never saw him again.”

  “So it just went on?”

  “Actually, it didn’t. A week later there was a big bust. Federal. The FBI vamped on the whole operation, took it down in one fell swoop. A beautiful case: even the first one to roll got major time.”

  “You think Pryce sold it to the Gee?”

  “There’s no way to know. I asked a friend over there how they got the case, and he just said it started with a CI, that was all he knew.”

  “But he didn’t mean Pryce was the Confidential Informant?”

  “No. But he could have been running the CI, whoever he was. Or it all could have been bogus, a setup to justify the search warrant.”

  “You got anything else?” I asked her.

  “No, that’s it. But if I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Your turn,” she said, giving me another deadly smile.

  I was telling Wolfe the story, spooling it out in bits and pieces, not going anywhere near Hercules. We both played outside the lines now, but we didn’t play the same. I trusted her, but Wolfe was a cop in her heart. A rule-busting cop, sure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a hell of a difference between concocting probable cause to take bad guys down and taking money from them. The only difference between Wolfe’s operation and a vigilante team was that Wolfe’s crew got paid. She still made her living busting crime—I still made mine committing it.

  We were standing against my car, talking quietly, all by ourselves on that isolated patch of ground. Years ago, I used to think things could be . . . different between us. Not thinking, really—wanting. She drew the line. Once in a while we got to hold hands over it, but I couldn’t pull her to me, and she’d never tried to pull me to her.

  Wolfe took a photograph out of her pocket. Not a mug shot, some kind of surveillance photo. “Is this him?” she asked me.

  It was murky, indistinct. “I got a flashlight in the trunk,” I told her.

  She was standing by herself between the Plymouth’s dead headlights when the egg-yolk-yellow Pathfinder rolled into the parking lot. No music coming from it. Bad sign. I looked up as it slid within ten feet of Wolfe. A young guy bounced out: shirt to his knees, sleeves past his knuckles, worn over baggy pants ending at half-laced ultra sneakers endorsed by some role-model basketball star and made in some sweatshop in Southeast Asia, black knit watch cap with White Sox logo turned sideways, representing. Hip-hopper or wigger—I couldn’t tell his color in the early light.

  “Yo bitch!” he shouted at her.

  I came around the back of the Plymouth with the tire iron in my hand. The
guy said “Oh shit!” and piled back into the Pathfinder. It took off, grinding its chunky tires against the crusty blacktop.

  “Bruiser, out!” Wolfe yelled. That’s when I saw the rottweiler, closing ground like Judgment Day wrapped in black fur.

  “Who knows what that was really about,” Wolfe said to me, leaning on the Plymouth’s hood, smoking one of my cigarettes, the rottweiler sitting next to her, calm now. “They could have been after anything from a hassle to a rape. There’s something about being in a car that gives punks courage.”

  “It isn’t the car,” I told her. “It’s the gang. And a woman alone.”

  “I guess.”

  “And don’t call it courage,” I said. “Your dog, he’s the one with the balls.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Wolfe chuckled, reaching in her pocket and pulling out a disgusting-looking length of what looked like dark-red sinew. The rottie watched it, eyes narrowed in. But he didn’t move a muscle. “Bruiser, okay!” Wolfe said, handing it over. The beast immediately snatched it, lay down, grasped the prize in his front paws and started tearing into it. The sounds he made would have scared a forest ranger.

  “What is that you gave him?” I asked her.

  “It’s a dried beef tendon,” she said. “One of his favorites. Next to fresh pineapple. But I can’t carry that around with me.”

  “Well, he earned it,” I said. “I never saw a dog that big move so fast. He ever bite anybody?”

  “Sure,” Wolfe said, grinning at the stupid question.

  I hefted the tire iron, feeling foolish. I don’t carry a gun anymore. Don’t keep one in the car either. It’s got nothing to do with search warrants or being an ex-con. I’m just . . . careful. Ever since I tried to kill my childhood and killed a child instead.

  “I don’t know what’s going down with this Pryce guy,” I lied, playing the flashlight over the photograph Wolfe had. It was him all right. “Maybe nothing. I’ll let you know.”

  “Either way,” she said, pulling a promise with the words.

  “Either way,” I agreed.

  I rolled the Plymouth onto the highway, merging with the traffic, blending back in. A lot of stops to make that day, but I couldn’t really get started until the comic shops opened. The rest of what I needed for Herk was already stashed in the trunk.