Only Child b-14

by Andrew Vachss

  He whirled to face me, pulling the gym bag behind his hip like he was cocking a right hook.

  “Who’re you?”

  “My name is Casey,” I told him, closing the space between us. “I wonder if I could buy some of your time.”

  “For what?”

  “Just to talk. About a business proposition,” I said, still moving.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  I was close enough to see the thick veins in his neck. “Well, let me introduce myself,” I said. “As I said, my name’s—”

  “Cocksucker!” he grunted, driving his left into my ribs.

  I was already spinning away from him when the punch landed, but it still felt like an anvil on a chain. I went down, rolling. He charged, the gym bag held club-high in his right hand. I X-ed my forearms for protection, brought a knee up to shield my groin, just as he...made a strangled sound and staggered back. Max had him in a one-arm choke. But when he shifted his weight to lock it in, the twin screamed—and launched Max over his back like a catapult.

  Max landed on one knee, pivoted and came up ready to...But Heltman was already sprinting in the opposite direction.

  The Mustang roared out of the lot, leaving us both on the ground.

  Max beat me to the Plymouth by a couple of seconds, dived into the back. The motor was idling quiet, Giovanni behind the wheel. I shoved him over, stomped the gas, and plowed sideways across the gravel, the Mustang’s lights still in sight. I took the hint, hit the rocker switch on the dash, and our own taillights went dead.

  He had maybe a quarter-mile on us as he wheeled onto a stretch of two-lane blacktop. The Plymouth swallowed the distance in a gulp.

  “He’s heading for home,” I yelled. “We don’t stop him first, we’re done.”

  “He’s the one who’s done,” Giovanni said, jerking a chrome semi-auto out of an ankle holster. “Get alongside of him.”

  The Mustang’s taillights were huge in our windshield. They went bright red as it skidded almost to a full stop before suddenly lurching off to the left.

  “He knows he can’t take us on the straights, so he’s going for the twisties,” I said.

  “He’s ours,” Giovanni said, patting the Plymouth’s dash affectionately.

  Heltman knew the roads, but it wasn’t enough. I held the Plymouth in second gear, barnacled to his rear bumper.

  The Mustang slashed back and forth, trying to shake us loose. I had to end it before the noise woke up the wrong people. As he leaned into a long right-hand sweeper, I hit the high beams and the landing lights at the same time, flooding his mirror with blue-and-white fire. I dropped the hammer. The Mustang seemed suspended in place as the Plymouth came on like a rock from a slingshot, dead-aimed at his exposed right rear quarter-panel. I rammed the soft spot, and he lost it. The Mustang went into a wild spin as we powered on past.

  I decked the brakes, threw it into reverse, and ripped back to the scene, Giovanni watching out his opened window. The Mustang was against a tree, crushed all the way into the windshield. Its airbag had deployed, but the driver’s face was buried under blood—he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.

  Max hauled him out and laid him out on the ground.

  “His wallet,” I said to Giovanni. “Quick! We need an address.”

  I ran back to the Mustang, wrenched open the glove compartment. A pair of black leather gloves, some condoms, and the owner’s manual. The gym bag was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. I ran back to where the others were.

  “He’s out,” Giovanni said. “This was in his back pocket”—holding up an alligator billfold.

  “We’ve got to split,” I told him. “Even way out here, someone might have heard the crash, called it in. Don’t worry about him; he won’t be able to identify any of us.”

  Giovanni looked down at the sprawled body, said, “Any chance he was one of the ones?”

  “Giovanni...”

  “One of the ones that killed my daughter?”

  “I don’t know. Come on!”

  Giovanni dropped to one knee, pinched the twin’s nose closed with one hand, blocked his mouth with the other.

  “Giovanni, no! It’ll take minutes for that to...”

  Max grabbed Giovanni under his arms, lifted him off the ground, and tossed him to the side. He looked at me. I nodded. Max rolled the twin on his stomach, mounted him, one knee against the spine. He took the twin’s head in both hands, pulled it all the way back, and gave it a short, vicious twist.

  “Maiden Lane,” I said, my mini-Mag trained on the driver’s license we’d found in the dead man’s wallet. “That’s right around here, close by; I remember seeing it on the map. This must be a good address. Only I can’t see asking for directions at this hour. Even a gas-station attendant would...”

  “Maiden Lane,” Giovanni said into his cell phone.

  He listened for a minute, then said, “Drive, Burke. We’ve got a street map on the screen. Just go where I tell you.”

  The Plymouth’s right-side low beams still worked, but they threw light at the same angle as the Mustang driver’s neck. I couldn’t feel any difference in the steering; it tracked straight and true. When you build a car to bounce off the wall at Talladega, nerfing a Mustang isn’t going to change its personality.

  The wood-frame house stood well back from the road. My flash picked up a “30” on the mailbox.

  “This is the one,” I said. “Let Max out,” I told Giovanni.

  I counted to a hundred in my head, said, “Some of the lights are on. He’s not going to spook at a car coming up the drive; he’ll be expecting his brother. Max is going to come in from the back. Ready?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Come on!”

  I motored up the long driveway, not trying to be especially quiet, but not making a show of it, either. As soon as I saw the pristine red Mustang convertible at the far end, I knew the dead man’s driver’s license hadn’t lied.

  We walked up to the front door, Giovanni behind me and to my left. I pounded on the door with the side of my fist.

  Nothing.

  I did it again.

  Heard sounds of someone moving, somewhere in the house.

  I pounded harder.

  “Who is it?” An angry, guarded voice, slurred with...sleep?

  “Fucking key!” I grunted, hitting the door again.

  The door opened a little. “You asshole...,” someone said. I hit the door with my shoulder, drove it open as Giovanni slipstreamed in behind me, his pistol up. The twin chopped at Giovanni’s wrist, as panther-quick as his brother had been. The pistol hit the floor. I dived for it, took a sharp kick in the side of my neck. Giovanni was against the wall, his right arm dangling useless at his side. “Come on, pussy!” he offered the twin.

  But Max had him by then. With both arms this time.

  “Move the car around the back,” I told Giovanni, urgently. “Make sure it’s in shadow. I don’t know how fast they’ll find the wreck, but if they run its plates, they could be coming here, and we’ll need the edge. Pull the dummy plates off the Plymouth. And take that white square off the driver’s-side door. It’s not painted on—just a piece of vinyl—there’s a couple of pull-tabs along the top.”

  In the back bedroom, I found a woman. Naked, lying on her belly, head twisted to one side. She was breathing raggedly through a wide-open mouth, a thin line of drool trailing down her chin to her neck. A large blue dildo was sticking out of her like a freakish flagpole, anchored in what looked like dried blood.

  “Filthy fucking animals,” Giovanni said, over my shoulder.

  “An address book,” I reminded him. “Anything that looks like names and phone numbers.”

  I was expecting a computer. Hoping for a laptop.

  Nothing.

  There was a big-screen TV and a VCR, but the tape collection was all commercial porn.

  A sharp crack! Max snaps his fingers when he wants you to come and he’s out of sight-line.

  Even with handcuffs
on his wrists, the twin looked dangerous. Giovanni held the pistol in his left hand. Max kept his forearm over the twin’s Adam’s apple.

  “We came for the tapes,” I told him, flat. His brother had taught me not to offer money, so I was groping, blind.

  “I don’t know nothing about no—”

  “Then you’re dead,” I said, doing the math for him.

  “Who sent—?”

  “Vision, who else? Now guess how many times I’m going to ask you again.”

  “That little cocksucker. He said we could—”

  “He changed his mind,” I said, placing my bet. “This is simple enough even for you, wet-brain. Yes or no. Live or die.”

  “I...I got it hidden.”

  “It better be hidden here.”

  “You’re gonna kill me anyway,” he said, stalling. Thinking his brother would be home soon.

  “We just want the tapes, you fucking moron,” I told him, lying with my eyes.

  “What for? I mean, all we got’s a copy. He said we could—”

  “He doesn’t want it floating around no more,” I said. “Come on. You give us what we came for, that’s the end of it.”

  “You swear?”

  “May my mother die,” I said. The one statement I could always pass a polygraph on.

  “Let me get up.”

  I nodded to Max, who changed grips.

  The kitchen counter was lined with gallon-sized plastic jars of bodybuilding supplements. A stainless steel blender stood next to several bottles of yohimbe and shark cartilage. The hiding place was a cut-out slot in the wall behind the double-wide refrigerator. Not bad, actually—if Max had to strain to wrench it away from the wall, it would take at least two normal men to do the job.

  I unwrapped the package like it was a Bomb Squad assignment. “There’s only one tape here, pal,” I said to the twin, looking at the standard-size cassette. The label showed four naked women, on their hands and knees in rows of two. They were yoked together by some kind of harness. Standing behind them, another woman in porno-regulation black leather, brandishing a whip. The title said: International Slut Racing Tournament!

  “That’s the only one he let us keep,” he said, annoyed. “It’s proof, man. That we didn’t do anything. It don’t show no...Hey! What are you going to do?”

  “We’re going to watch the movie,” I said.

  The tape opened with a woman standing at an easel on which the rules of the race were printed, taking questions from an audience of “reporters.” The race contestants were all chained to a long wall, waiting. Some were facing the wall; others looked at the camera. A couple were lapping up something from bowls with their names on them.

  “This is just—” Giovanni said, before I cut him off with a chopping motion of my right hand.

  The tape rolled on, as predictable as a fixed fight, then suddenly became a plain gray screen with white lines of static running horizontally. Another few seconds passed; then...

  A long corridor, mostly dark, with a few pools of reflected light. Looked like an industrial building, maybe an old factory. Abandoned, or maybe just closed for the night. A figure flitted past the far corner, then disappeared—all I could see was some kind of black robe, with a hood.

  And a long knife.

  A woman zipped across the screen. She was dressed in white shorts and a white T-shirt, white sneakers and white socks. A white hair-ribbon flamed from her dark hair as she ran.

  Another black robe popped out of a doorway.

  The only sound was breathing. Two, three separate tracks, as distinctive as voices would have been.

  The woman in white turned a corner. Stopped when she spotted a ladder. Hesitated, as if making up her mind, then started to climb. The camera filled the frame with her from the waist down, coming in tight on her buttocks and thighs, frantic, in sync with her high, frightened breathing.

  Somewhere behind her, confident, in-control breathing. Low-register grunting. Getting louder.

  The woman made it to a higher floor. A more open space than what she’d left, but still mazelike from the play of shadow against lighter pockets of dark.

  The images chased each other for what seemed like a long time, sometimes running, sometimes creeping. It was half-ass- surrealistic, black-and-white-in-color “symbolism.” A bad movie with a worse script.

  Suddenly, the woman in white turned a shadow corner and ground to a stop in a puddle of diffused light. The black robes, two of them, had her bracketed. The camera rushed in on her face as she opened her mouth to scream, her eyes wide with shock.

  Vonni.

  I turned to the handcuffed twin, said “Where was the—?” just as Giovanni put his pistol against Heltman’s temple and blew skull fragments all over the room.

  “The shell casing,” I said. “Find it, Giovanni.”

  “I...”

  “We don’t have time!” I snapped at him, and ran for the back bedroom.

  The sodomized woman hadn’t even twitched. The drugs they’d fed her must have been near-terminal.

  “They were the ones,” Giovanni said. “It was them who...”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Burke, he had to go.”

  “I’m not arguing.”

  “But I shouldn’t have...gone off like that, right? We should have made him tell us—”

  “It’s done,” I said, as I slid the Plymouth through wide streets, past landscaped lawns. “Get Felix on the phone, tell him we’re coming in.”

  “There!” Giovanni said, pointing at a substantial brick Tudor, barely visible from the street.

  Even as he spoke, the garage door started going up.

  “That was slick, that pull-off stuff you got,” Giovanni said. He was talking to keep from going jagged, and I let him run with it. “When I yanked it off, it looked like a different car.”

  “I must have swapped paint with that Mustang somewhere,” I said. “I’m going to need a whole new front end clip.”

  “I’m good for—”

  “I know,” I told him. “That’s not the problem now. Thing is, can I leave my car here?”

  “Felix?” he asked his partner.

  “For a couple of days, no problem. I can have someone come by, flat-bed it out, get it to the crusher.”

  “No way!” Giovanni said. “You should have seen how this—”

  “It doesn’t have to be disposed of,” I told Felix. “Just worked on. The people you’re talking about, they’re trustworthy?”

  “Mi famiglia,” he said.

  We pulled out in the late afternoon, me and Max in Giovanni’s BMW, Felix and Giovanni in a cream-colored Infiniti Q45. By Exit 12 on the Jersey Turnpike, we lost sight of them.

  The Mustang driver’s wallet had nothing in it but cash, a few credit cards, and assorted ID, all in the name of Brett Heltman.

  But his gym bag was the other side of the legit coin—a red-zone pharmacy. Dozens of clear plastic sheets of pop-out Dianabol pills, a half-dozen dark little rubber-topped bottles of Testovit, and a huge assortment of different kinds of alleged “andro,” flies just under the FDA’s radar. Inside the bag’s flap pockets were a Rambo knife, a cell phone, a handful of syringes, individually wrapped. And one of those “personal digital assistants,” a Palm m105.

  I ran through the cell phone’s menu. All the stored numbers were 609 area codes, local. The last number the twin had dialed was to a gym.

  That left the PDA. “He liked gadgets,” I told the crew, remembering his remote-starter trick. “I don’t even want to turn this damn thing on. Maybe he’s got it passworded or something, nuke everything if you do it wrong.”

  “Give it to me,” the Mole said.

  “It’s an emergency, Pepper.”

  “Leave your number, chief. And not a wireless.”

  “That one’s an NV, too?” Cyn said, tilting her head in the direction of the cassette I’d brought back from New Jersey.

  “Yeah.”

  “Burke...Burke, wh
at does it mean?”

  “I think I know, now,” I told her. “The NV tapes, for some of the people in them it’s an acting job, and for some it’s the real thing.”

  “But the guy making the movies...?”

  “For him, it’s all real,” I said. “And he’s in charge.”

  “How many?” Wolfe, on the phone.

  “A hundred and seventy-seven, total,” I told her, the results of the Mole’s invasion of the Palm Pilot spread out in front of me. “But—”

  “You’re joking.”

  “But I only need the 516 and 631 ones.”

  “And that’s...?”

  “Seventy-one.”

  She made a sound of disgust. Asked, “The names on each bill?”

  “Names and addresses. But if any one of them made calls to or received calls from these numbers,” I said, giving her the number from the cell phone in the gym bag, and the one I’d copied off the wall phone in their kitchen, “that’s the only one I need.”

  “This could take—”

  “Price no object,” I said. “Even a few hours could mean the difference.”

  I became a news junkie: print, radio, and TV going simultaneously, scanning for “Twin Brothers Found Murdered in New Jersey!”

  Nothing.

  There was always the chance that the cops hadn’t connected what they thought was a hit-and-run with what had to be a deliberate homicide—maybe the Mustang’s plates dead-ended instead of taking them to the address we’d pulled from the driver’s license. Or maybe the woman in the back bedroom gave them enough likely suspects to keep them working local for a long time.

  Or maybe they were keeping the media lid down until they tightened the noose.

  “You understand it’s not like the City out there,” Wolfe said, on the phone. “You’ve got 516 for Nassau, 631 for Suffolk, but 516 is also the area code for all the cell phones on Long Island. There’s no separate cell prefix, like our 917.”

  “And you can’t get into cell phone records because there’s so many different...?”