Choice of Evil b-11

by Andrew Vachss

  I had Xyla type, stalling for time as I thumbed my cellular into life.

  “Hmmmm,” Strega answered.

  “Get ready to ride,” I told her. “Right now. Corner of Twenty-third and First.”

  “We’re ready.”

  “Now!” I told her, hitting the “End” switch just as his response popped up on the screen.

  >>yes. *you* remember. same rules for her.<<

  ok

  >>leave *now* one hour, no more.<<

  The huge digital clock above Xyla’s computer read 02:12. Sure, no traffic at that hour. I’d be able to get where he said on time, no matter where in the city I was. He couldn’t know the woman wasn’t with me already. I told Xyla to type:

  leaving now

  “He’s gone,” she said, fingers tapping impotently.

  In another minute, so was I.

  I knew he had the technology to monitor cellular traffic, but he couldn’t hear me speak face to face. “Pay phone. Twenty-third and First,” I told Clarence as I opened the door to the Plymouth.

  “With you, mahn,” the islander said, strolling over to his own car. They’d all be there, most of them before me.

  I couldn’t afford to be stopped, so I kept well within the limits all the way over. Still, I was there with a good twenty-five minutes to spare. I opened the transmission tunnel and pulled out the ice-cold untraceable pistol. Not for him—in case somebody was using the pay phone.

  But it was deserted. I put the gun back.

  A flame-colored Porsche Boxster roared up across the street from the pay phone. Strega, flying her flag.

  I walked over to her, not feeling his eyes, but believing in them. No way he wouldn’t have the whole terrain covered. I couldn’t see any of my crew, and hoped he couldn’t either. I bent down just as her window lowered.

  “He’s going to call me on that phone,” I told her, nodding in its direction without turning my head.

  “Kiss me,” she commanded.

  Her tongue was fire in my mouth.

  “Give me your hands.”

  She licked the backs of them across the knuckles.

  “Mine is stronger,” she said. “I’ll send her over in a minute.”

  “Then go,” I told her.

  “I’ll never go,” she witch-promised me. “And if you do, I’ll bring you back.”

  Nadine walked across the street to where I was standing at the pay phone. The Porsche roared away.

  “He’s going to call and—”

  “I know,” she said. She was dressed in a pair of cut-off jeans and a pink T-shirt, plain white sneakers and sweatsocks on her feet. If she felt the chill in the night air, she didn’t show it.

  I lit a cigarette.

  “She did that,” Nadine said to me.

  “What?”

  “Burned me. With a cigarette.”

  “She doesn’t smoke. . . .”

  “On purpose. So I would understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What I did. To. . . my friend. She said if I hurt you she would find me in hell. I had to wear her brand when I met. . . him.”

  “And you just—?”

  “You don’t understand,” Nadine said quietly. “But she does.”

  “I—”

  The phone rang.

  “The woman with you—is she the one?” the voice asked.

  “Yes,” I replied, knowing I could be talking to a tape recording, not wasting an atom of concentration on the voice.

  “Turn around.”

  I did it. Waited. Nadine didn’t move, so I was looking over her shoulder.

  “You are under observation. Full thermal. Discard all weapons, recording devices, and transmitters now.”

  “Don’t have any,” I told him.

  “See building directly ahead of you to the right? Gray stone. Twenty-nine stories?”

  “Yes.”

  “Security box to right of door. Access code is: thirteen thirty-three thirty-nine zero three. Repeat.”

  “Thirteen. Thirty-three. Thirty-nine. Zero. Three.”

  “Enter building. Summon elevator. Last car on your left. Enter. Follow instructions.”

  I heard a disengagement click!

  “Let’s go,” I told Nadine.

  The building had twin front doors of thick glass, each with a long vertical brass handle. I punched in the numbers. Pulled on the handles. Nothing. The muscles between my shoulders tightened. I took a deep breath through my nose and pushed. The doors opened inward. We walked across a medium-sized lobby with an unattended doorman’s desk. The last elevator to my left was standing open. We stepped inside. As the door closed, I saw a typed note taped to the control panel.

  PRESS → 21-11-19-4

  I did that. The car started to rise. A digital indicator showed each floor as we passed. When it reached 29, it kept on going. Like my old place, I thought. Crawl space. . . off the charts.

  The elevator door opened into an archway. I knew what it was right away. Security gauntlet. The most sophisticated detector made, as sensitive as an MRI. I’d seen one like it before. On the private penthouse floor of a terrified billionaire with enough cash to indulge his paranoia.

  I didn’t waste time worrying about the zipper in my jacket or my belt buckle or. . . anything. He’d trust his machines. I just said, “Come on” to Nadine and started to walk through it.

  The place was operating-room cold. I felt Nadine behind me, her hand fluttering against my shoulder. At the exit end of the archway was a small table, standing just off to the right. The only thing on it was a box about the size of an eight-by-ten photograph. I looked down at it. Greenish glow. I placed my right hand flat, making sure my fingerprints would register. I looked around. A tiny red light was standing above a door a few feet away. Even in the murky light, I could tell that the door was built hard and heavy. I could feel Nadine’s breath against my neck. It was ragged but not frightened. More like. . . excited.

  The red light blinked off. I walked to the door. Couldn’t see a knob. I pushed gently. It opened, swinging free. I stepped inside, Nadine so close now she almost shoved past me.

  The floor was carpeted. I could feel it, but I couldn’t see it. A single strand of blue neon tubing ran all around the walls. That was the only light. I could make out two metal chairs, a coffee table between them, standing lengthwise so the chairs were close together. On the table, a long narrow tray full of sand, like one of those miniature Buddhist gardens.

  I took the chair to the right, furthest from the door, showing him I knew I couldn’t get out if he didn’t want me to. Nadine sat down next to me. The blue neon amped up just enough for me to see what was in front of us. A wall of thick plastic, like they use in liquor stores, only this one had no money slot. Lexan, probably. I could make out a shape behind it. Seated. Impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman.

  “The instructions I taped to the inside of the elevator car—did you bring them with you?” a voice asked. A man’s voice, coming from speakers somewhere on my side of the glass. No way to tell if it was his own or an electronically altered version.

  “No. I left them there,” I said.

  “Good. If your. . . friends overheard the coordinates to enter the building and try the elevator, I presume they will push the same sequence. It has been reprogrammed.”

  “They won’t—”

  “If they do that,” the voice continued, as if I hadn’t spoken, “the doors will seal. And unless they came equipped with gas masks, they are already dead. The stairway is secured against anything other than low-yield explosive, and I have it on both visual and audio right in front of me. That option is closed as well.”

  “I played this square,” I told him. “I’m alone. And unarmed. You must have your own way out of here.”

  “Of course.”

  “So. You want to do business or I wouldn’t be here, right?”

  “Yes. Questions first.”

  “Mine or yours?”

  “M
ine. Why is the woman with you?”

  “Not now,” I told him.

  “You have no options,” the voice said.

  “Yeah, I do. If I gave a damn about dying, I wouldn’t have looked for you in the first place.”

  “I would have found you.”

  “I know that now, but I didn’t when I started. I know what you want. You can’t get it snuffing me. I’m sure you got gas jets in the ceiling. Probably got electricity in these chairs too. I got the message, pal. I’m surrounded. It’s no new experience for me. Your questions have nothing to do with her. She’s here because she wants to be. Ask her whatever you want. . . when you and me are done.”

  “You are in no position to bargain.”

  “No? You think you know me. You don’t. You think you know Wesley. You don’t know him either, for all your fucked-up ‘research.’ Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. What’s your problem? We can’t leave. And we can’t hurt you. Do what you want—I don’t give a good goddamn.”

  The voice was quiet after that. Nadine twitched in her chair. I probably shouldn’t have said anything about electricity. I breathed through my nose, shallow.

  Time passed.

  “I thought you would have wanted one of your cigarettes by now,” the voice said, like he had all the time in the world. “By the way, purely as a matter of interest, what brand did Wesley smoke?”

  “Dukes,” I told him. “Same as me.”

  “Dukes? I am not familiar with—”

  “New York has a humongous tax on smokes,” I said. “Lots of states do. Contraband creates opportunity. There’s major traffic in bringing them up from North Carolina. Tobacco country. ‘Dukes,’ get it? You buy them from a wholesale jobber down there, truck them up here, sell them for fifty percent retail, and everybody scores. Doesn’t matter what the brand name is—Dukes is what they call smuggled smokes. Me, I smoke whatever’s on the truck that month, understand?”

  “Certainly. Nothing in your profile indicates a connoisseur’s taste, even in something so mundane.”

  His voice wasn’t anything like Wesley’s. The voice coming through the speakers was machine-altered. Wesley was a machine.

  I waited.

  “I am in no particular hurry,” the voice said, picking up on my thoughts. “Even if your. . . friends have this building under surveillance. . . even if you have notified the authorities. . . I am able to leave undetected.”

  “And then blow the building?”

  “Perhaps,” he acknowledged, like it was no big thing. “I may choose to do so, but only if—”

  “I understand,” I told him. I could feel shock waves of surprise from behind the glass partition, but he didn’t say anything.

  Neither did I. Nadine had stopped twitching. A heavy, thick smell came off her. Not fear, something I couldn’t put a name to.

  I concentrated on my breathing.

  Time passed.

  “Why did you search for me originally?” he finally asked.

  “A group of gay people wanted to protect you. They were afraid you’d be captured. They wanted me to find you, get you out of the country to someplace safe.”

  “Ah. You understand that—”

  “You can leave whenever you want?” I cut in deliberately, trying to shift his balance, even if only a little bit. “And that this was never about fag-bashing?”

  “Correct. On both counts.”

  “You had a long rest,” I told him.

  “A. . . rest? No. Not a rest. I went. . . quiescent. Once I had mastered my art, there was no. . . challenge.”

  “You were always above us, huh?”

  “I am above you, Mr. Burke. In all ways.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking of his velociraptor icon. And the killing claw. “So far above you couldn’t get your ear to the ground, much less down into the whisper-stream. But it wasn’t until you did that you learned the truth.”

  “Your. . . idiolect is unfamiliar to me.”

  “You were the greatest kidnapper ever,” I said quietly. “Perfect.”

  “I was,” he acknowledged, accepting his due.

  “You mastered that art,” I told him, shifting my gears, trying to jam his. “And you switched to another. I never did get that last piece.”

  “Piece?”

  “Of your journal. That was your last kidnapping, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you switched to homicide?”

  “Assassination,” he corrected me. “Yes.”

  “Your journal was ambiguous,” I said. “What was the new art? Killing mobsters? Killing incest fathers? Killing child molesters? What?”

  “Ah. Because the first target fit all those criteria?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The target was pedophiles,” he said. “From the very beginning.”

  “But you. . . practiced on. . . what?”

  “Anyone,” he said. Dry ice.

  “Sure. And when you were ready, that’s when you switched from your private journal to the letters to the newspapers. And it almost worked.”

  “Almost? Please, Mr. Burke, don’t be ludicrous. I am universally acknowledged as the—”

  “Not in the whisper-stream,” I chopped him off. “You got a higher body count. . . maybe. . . than Wesley, but so what? Every single one of his hits was bought and paid for. Someone else picked the target. Down here, there’s talk of a guy called the Trustee. Supposed to be managing a fortune some old gay guy left. . . for killing fag-bashers. And word is, this Trustee got to Wesley. And all this work, it’s his, not yours.”

  “Where is this mythical ‘down here’ of yours?”—the machine not altering the sneer in his voice.

  “You like ‘grapevine’ better? It doesn’t matter. Back alleys, prison tiers, waterfront bars. Crimeville, understand? Not for citizens. That’s where Wesley lives. You say his name there, people tremble. He starts his walk, somebody’s gonna die. Everybody knows.”

  “Wesley is dead,” he said, repeating my line now.

  “To who?” I challenged him. “He went out the way he wanted. But maybe he went someplace else. Some say he never really left. That he had some tunnel under the school, or that it was a remote-control robot’s voice the cops heard or. . . whatever. You know how people talk. You’ve got a way out of here. Who’s to say Wesley didn’t?”

  “Yes. But the circumstances are—”

  “And others, they say he came back.”

  “From the dead?” The voice dripped sarcasm.

  “Yeah. You never heard about ‘Reaching Back’ either, huh? You’re so far above us, you can’t see down through the clouds. Wesley’s alive. He can’t die. And I know that’s what you want.”

  “What I want?”

  “Why else all this? I’m no threat to you. You don’t bite on that Internet bait, you’re well away. Vanished. Like you did before.

  “But you figured the only true test of art is immortality. Like a statue or a painting or a book that people still look at hundreds of years after it’s done, right? Your art. . . it dies with you. I don’t know how old you are, but you are going to die. And all your little ‘journals’ will end up as some cheap paperback book. There’s only one way for you to get where you want to go. And that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? You need me to set up some more hits. As Wesley’s ‘agent,’ right? That makes him alive. And that makes you him.”

  There was such silence I could hear heartbeats. A slow, steady thump. I was so calm I was almost comatose. Once you’re over the line, the tension stops. Maybe it was Nadine’s heart I heard. I never looked her way.

  “Yes,” he finally said.

  I waited. It wasn’t time yet. He wasn’t. . . exposed enough for my one strike.

  “How would it work?” he finally asked me.

  “There’s people I could talk to. See in person. They know me and Wesley were. . . They know I can reach him. I was—”

  “You were the original suspect when my most recent. . . artistry started,” he cu
t in. “Why was that?”

  It wasn’t time to fire yet, but I cocked the hammer. “One of the people that was killed in the drive-by. She was my woman.”

  “Ah. And the police thought you were seeking revenge.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is your reputation. Is it true?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when did you decipher the coding?”

  “Later on,” I said. “You needed a way to justify killing a whole lot of people quickly. So the body counts would put you up there with Wesley. But you didn’t want the police making connections—you wanted to spell it out for us. And you wanted some way to say Wesley was alive too. I don’t know how you found out that Gutterball wanted—”

  “He was not. . . discreet about it. I happened to access an individual he had attempted to. . . retain for that purpose.”

  “And then all it took was a phone call? And some meeting in the shadows?”

  “Yes. He. . . quite readily accepted that he was speaking to. . .”

  “Wesley.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you resurrected Wesley and kicked off the killings at the same time. It was. . . brilliant. No way the cops ever make that connection. Only problem is, it trapped you too.”

  “What does that mean? I am hardly the one trapped here.”

  “Listen to what you just said.” I spoke quietly, willing him closer. “You couldn’t have imitated Wesley’s voice. You never heard it. Nobody’s ever really heard it. So how come Gutterball went for the whole thing unless he already believed Wesley was alive? It’s like I told you, pal. Wesley can’t die. Not down here, he can’t.”

  “Ah,” he said smoothly. “So, in fact, I do not require your ‘services’ at all, do I, Mr. Burke? Let me ask you another question. . . purely for my own edification: Do you hold me responsible for the death of your. . . girlfriend? You do understand that I only executed the target. The rest was. . .”

  “I understand,” I lied. “No way you could have known who else would be there.”

  “Your statement does not square with other information I have unearthed about you, Mr. Burke.”

  “If you were really convinced of that, why have me here?”

  “Ah. Well, in simple terms—and please believe me, I do not intend to be insulting—your personal animosity, to the extent it exists at all, is of no concern to me. You are. . . powerless, shall we say. My. . . research sources are, as you so adroitly pointed out earlier, dissimilar to yours. And I concede that your. . . reputation is, to some extent, inaccurate. When I began my final. . . quest, long before I ever made contact, it quickly became apparent that you were linked to Wesley. However, it also became apparent that there was a commingling at some juncture, so that various homicides were misattributed between you.”