Choice of Evil (18 page)

“I already know he’s—”

“
Not
because he’s gay,” she said.

“Fine. Because he hates fag-bashers. Because he kills a lot of them. Because he’s a fucking superior specimen of humanity, for all I know.”

“He is,” she said, calmly. “And before I do anything more, I need to know more about you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You’re a mercenary, aren’t you? Lincoln says you have a ‘code.’ Some bullshit he picked up from the movies. You’re a ‘professional,’ ” she sneered. “You’d
never
double-cross a client. Your word is your bond. So, even if you could trade this. . . man to the cops instead of helping him get away, you’d never do
that,
would you? Even if it would help you get out from under a bunch of trouble of your own, huh?”

“You trust this friend of yours?” I asked her. “Not Lincoln—your playmate?”

“I told you—”

“You told me she’d kiss your ass in Macy’s window. So what? I don’t mean do you believe she’d play whatever game you ordered her to—I mean do you believe
her
when she says something.”

That stopped her in her tracks, as if she’d never considered it. She crossed her arms under her breasts, lifted them deliberately, looked down at herself like she was thinking about how one would taste. Then she looked over at me.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Ask
her,
” I said. “All you got so far is what anyone could give you, insider or not. Yeah, I got a record. A nice long one. And, yeah, the cops are always on my case—they got a bunch of Unsolveds with my name on them. I’m a thief. Been one since I was a baby. And I’ll be one until I die. Those ‘codes’. . . You’re right: it
is
all movie bullshit. Any one of those slimy little gangsters’ll rat out any other. Happens all the time. But me, I got no gang. No crew. No fucking ‘Mafia’ or anything like that. I’ve got a family. Not my blood, but more true than any DNA could be. Truly mine. I wouldn’t sell any of them no matter what the price was. My life? Fuck that. I don’t care that much about it myself anymore. So ask your little slave friend
that.
You know my name. She knows it. There’s cops been around long enough to know it too. I been the same since forever. My name is in the street. It’s fucking
engraved
there, you know where to look. It’s not all true. None of that stuff ever is. But stick your ear anywhere you want, you come back with anything that says I’d shop one of my own, I’ll kiss
your
ass, bitch.”

“Look, I wasn’t—”

“Save it,” I chopped her off. “This guy. This. . . killer. There’s people who think I know who he is already. People who think
they
know who he is. They’re wrong. The guy they suspect—he’s dead. Dead and gone. But if he
was
alive, I wouldn’t trade him either, not for anything. I came up with him, and he saved my life. More than once. I don’t judge him. . . . I know him. Hell, I wanted to
be
him once. But I. . . couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you—?”

“That’s not your business. And it never will be. I just told you the truth. You’re always telling me what a liar I am, right? You know it all, don’t you? Trouble is, your yardstick don’t work on everyone. You want to sit in, you have to ante up. You don’t have what it takes to back your own hand, get out of the game.”

“But if the police are wrong. . .? If it’s not this man they think you know. . .?”

“Yeah, if they’re wrong, if it’s someone else, what have they got to offer me anyway? A pass on some cases? If they really
had
me on those cases, I’d be Inside right now. They had me down to the precinct once already. If they had any kind of hammer, they would have showed it to me. Fuck, they would have
used
it on me.”

“What’s the bottom line?” she asked, standing up suddenly, looming over me, breasts swinging down close to my face.

“You think we’re all alike,” I told her. “Men, anyway. You’re wrong. You think because I like your legs better in spike heels
that
tells you I’d turn rat?
That’s
your idea of knowing stuff? You don’t know anything. You sure as hell don’t know anything about me. Want to know some truth? Go ask this friend of yours. Ask her to ask. . . Ah, I’m not giving you any references—you’d just think it was a setup. Let her ask anyone she wants about me. Tell her to ask two questions: Would I rat out my own? And what would I think of a guy who’s going around blowing up baby-rapers? When you’re all done with that, you still want to help, let’s do it. You’re not satisfied, go your own way.” I finished, getting to my feet, forcing her to step away from me.

I stopped near the door, turned to face her. “If you make that decision. . . if you go your own way. . . you better stay the fuck out of mine,” I told her. “Ask your little friend about
that,
too.”

If she said anything, I couldn’t hear it through the door.

“
I
s it true?” I asked Morales. “NYPD really believes Wesley’s back in town?”

He rubbed the blue-black stubble on his face, like he was deciding how much to tell me. But I knew the gesture for what it was—a habit, not an indicator. We were standing under the overpass to the LIE, just off Van Dam Street. A good place to meet if you wanted to do a deal and keep the peep for the rollers at the same time. Even better if you wanted anyone watching to think that
was
what you were doing.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “Some of them do. The older guys. But nobody’s saying it out loud.”

“You?” I asked him bluntly.

“Nah. Motherfucker’s dead. The feds’ve pulled some strange shit. . . . I know that whole thing about 26 Federal Plaza last year stunk, okay?” He gave me a hard cop-look when he said that. Another habit—he knew it wouldn’t get him anything, just wanted to tell me I was a suspect. Again. In another crime. Nothing changes with a cop like Morales.

I gave him a blank look back. Nothing changes with me, either.

“The way I figure it, somebody’s glommed his action,” Morales said. Not sure of himself, just throwing it out.

“Wesley’s?”

“Sure. He was the best, right? Money in the fucking bank. You paid—you got a body. Never a problem. Fucking Torenelli had to go off, start that war. That was bad enough. Then Julio double-crosses Wesley. Stupid motherfucker
had
to know what that was gonna cost.”

“You think Wesley did Julio before he—?”

“No way. I think the Family took him out. They knew whose fault that whole thing was. You don’t pay Wesley, you open the gates of hell. If they hadn’t offed Julio, fuck, Wesley, he would’ve wasted every mob guy in the city, the way he was going. They just cut their losses, that’s all. Not the first time.”

He didn’t sound like he was fishing. Good. The truth was buried with the body. I was innocent of a lot of things I was suspected of, but Julio was mine all right. I had met him at the spot where we were going to make a trade: a letter he wrote a long time ago—a letter about a little girl—for a bundle of cash. As we made the exchange, I vise-gripped his hand. He struggled to get free, his eyes insane with what he knew was coming. Max took him out. While Strega witch-watched from the shadows, a little girl no more.

That killing had been part of a trade. And Wesley kept up his end, like he always did. I hadn’t lied to that crazy Nadine. Wesley was a pure sociopath; that’s what all the psychs said. But they didn’t know. There was a piece of him that still connected. Not enough to keep him here, but enough to give me that one last gift.

At least this Homo Erectus loon had his own motives. All Wesley ever had was a list. And all it took to get put on it was money.

Money. Maybe Morales was right after all.

“You think someone’s stepping in? Taking over?”

“They’d have to blood-in, right?” he growled back at me. “No way anyone’s gonna fork over the kind of bucks Wesley got without knowing they was getting the real thing. This guy, whoever the fuck he is, he knows how to make bodies.”

“So what? They’re just random hits,” I said, fishing now myself. “It’s not like anyone ordered them done. Not like these guys had bodyguards or anything. Any freak can do a lot of kills if there’s no motive, you know that.”

“Yeah,” Morales agreed. If he knew anything about some mobster hiring a hit man he thought was Wesley, it didn’t show on his face. And I bought it too—Morales isn’t that good at keeping his face from talking even with his mouth shut, and he wasn’t the kind of cop they’d let in on an organized-crime thing anyway. Maybe the brass had called him a hero in their press conference when he got the credit for killing that psycho Belinda, but he was marked forever as a dinosaur street-roller. They couldn’t let him work narcotics, because they knew him for a flake-and-bake guy from way back. Put him in the gang unit and you’d have corpses by the end of the week. Vice was out of the question—he was too full of puritanical rage to work anything that took delicacy. Undercover was impossible—he reeked of cop. So he worked job-to-job, always roving, never partnered up. Which was okay with him. He wasn’t going anywhere. No promotions in his future. And they couldn’t fire him. So he was just doing time.

I knew all about that.

I also knew one place I could get what I wanted. . . if Nadine’s friend was really all she said she was.

“He was a man,” Morales said, surprising me out of my thoughts.

“Who?” I asked him.

“Wesley,” Morales said, touching the brim of his hat as a goodbye. Or maybe a salute.

D
riving away, I shoved in a cassette and let the blues flow over my thoughts. What’s a “man” to Morales, anyway? Someone who walked his own way, I guessed, same way Morales himself did. What was he saying, then? That this Homo Erectus guy. . . wasn’t?

It was like trying to knit a sweater from cigarette smoke. I gave it up.

T
he whisper-stream isn’t all lies. I’d never heard of this “Gatekeeper” the Prof had talked about, but I knew who might. Queen Thana, the voodoo priestess who had told me the truth about myself. My destiny. And, maybe because I understood she already knew—I guess I never really will know why—I told her the truth about myself, too. What happened to me when I was a little kid. First time I ever said it out loud. She told me I was a hunter. That was true—I’d been looking for a missing baby when I’d come to her, following a twisty-scary trail. She told me two more things: I had to be what I am—I could change my ways, but I couldn’t change myself. And not to come back.

After that, it all happened. I went into a house of beasts looking for a captured kid. At least, that’s what I told myself. But I went in shooting. Killing, really. The only gunfight was at the end. And if they hadn’t had guns down in that basement—where a kid was trussed up for the sacrifice, the videocams ready to turn blood into money—it would have been just killing then, too. In the exchange, they all died. Even the kid.

I’d gone into that house hunting my childhood. Not the ones who did those things to me. They were gone. I couldn’t dig them up and kill them again. But their descendants. Their heirs. Their. . . tribe. When it was done, it almost did me too. No rationalization worked. I know who killed that kid. I know it was me. I know I didn’t mean to. I know they were going to kill him anyway.

None of it helped.

For a long time, I wouldn’t touch a gun. I prayed for Wesley’s ice to come into my soul. He was my brother. We had suckled at the same poisonous breast. Only he could save me from going down into the Zero, it was pulling at me so hard.

Things happened since then. A lot of years. And the last time I held a gun in my hand, it was to protect my family. I never got to pull the trigger. Michelle was closer, and she got off first. And roared away on the back of Crystal Beth’s motorcycle as a team of feds drove a convoy of explosives toward the Hudson River.

That was 26 Federal Plaza, the giant downtown government building that houses IRS, FBI, INS—everything the New Nazis hated. That’s what Morales had been talking about. But it was just talk. Nobody really cared, not with hundreds of Hitler-worshippers in prison. . . and the plot to make Oklahoma City look like a pipe bomb defused.

I was rambling. Not out loud—that would have scared me. But in my head, still. And I didn’t like the sound.

Queen Thana wasn’t the only witch I knew. And now I had to see if Nadine’s friend was going to bring me the offering I’d need for the other one.

“
C
an you stop by sometime?” Lorraine’s voice, on the phone at Mama’s, as casual as if she wanted me to pick up a bunch of forwarded mail that had piled up for me at her house.

“Sure,” is all I told her.

I hung up. Walked through the back of Mama’s kitchen into the alley, climbed in the Plymouth, and headed over to the place I still thought of as Crystal Beth’s safehouse.

I
didn’t recognize the woman who answered the door downstairs, but she must have been expecting me because she forked over a folded piece of paper and slammed the door in my face.

U
nder a streetlight, I opened the paper. Just an address. I got back in the Plymouth.

I guess I was expecting a dyke bar, but it turned out to be a little diner—one of those aluminum-sided things—standing right off the Red Hook waterfront like a leftover from the Fifties. Inside, I could see they’d ripped out all the old fixtures and set up a bunch of wooden tables so it looked like a regular restaurant.

The crowd was dressed too good for the neighborhood, but I knew it was only a short drive from Brooklyn Heights and other trendy sections, so I wasn’t that surprised—New Yorkers are real adventurous when it comes to eating.

A woman behind the counter saw I was alone and waved her hand in the direction of some empty tables. I took the smallest one I could find—round, with a butcher-block top. I opened the menu and looked around.

I couldn’t tell what the game was. The diner was in a borderland, but the clientele was all from one side of the line. Yuppies are major consumers, but most places won’t let narcotics in the door. Mama has the same rule, and I never asked why. Could be morals, could be the untrustworthy nature of the traffickers. Or how easily homicide comes into play when you fuck with poppies or powder. It doesn’t matter. Truth is, every thief knows, it’s not for nothing they call it “dope.”

Maybe it was a restaurant for real. A waitress came over, asked if I wanted anything to drink. I asked her for some lemonade by touching it on the menu with my finger. She nodded and moved off.

Then I spotted the big guy in a corner, drawing something. I’d seen him before, in another joint. The one where I’d first met Crystal Beth. He looked over at me, like he was bored from working, giving his eyes a rest. His head moved about a quarter of an inch. I sensed someone just behind my left shoulder, but I didn’t look up.

“In the back,” a voice said.

I got up, saw the voice belonged to a stocky woman with an expressionless face.

“I’ll follow you,” I told her.

She shook her head. No.

I walked down a narrow corridor, past the restrooms, to a door marked
STORAGE
.

“That one,” the woman said.

It opened when I turned the knob. I stepped into an empty room. It was absolutely bare, except for a pocket door. I stood there, knowing there was a lens watching from somewhere, my hands open at my sides.

The flat door slid into the wall. I stepped through.

Lorraine was standing there. “Thanks, Trixie,” she said to the stocky woman. “You got here quick,” she said to me.

“Quick as I could,” I answered her.

Then I saw why she had called. Xyla. Sitting by herself in a corner of the room in one of those orthopedic computer chairs they have for people who spend hours in front of the screen. And the screen was huge—looked like a TV instead of a monitor. The entire wall was nothing but cyber-machinery: lights blinking, hard drives whirring, modem connections buzzing and howling. . . searching for openings.

I walked over behind Xyla’s chair. The screen in front of her was filled with numbers and letters and symbols, all strung together, like they’d turned an autistic kid loose at the keyboard.

“I got him,” Xyla said, not turning around.

“You sure?” I asked her.

“Pretty sure. I got. . . let me check. . .” She hit the keys so fast her fingers were a blur. “. . . four hundred and eighty-eight responses. But most of them were just to the addy—they couldn’t even open the message I sent, just wanted to talk, you know. He’s got his own home page now, so I figure maybe one of his fans—”

“What’s a home page?”

“A website. Like some companies have. You know: www, whatever, dot com? It’s a domain. A webmaster runs it, and it’s only devoted to one topic. We have. . .” She glanced over her shoulder at Lorraine.

“He knows,” Lorraine said. “Crystal Beth told me she told him about ours.”

Xyla nodded. “Okay. Anyway, this one isn’t actually
his,
okay? I mean, he didn’t set it up or anything. And it’s not a true domain, just a personal home page. Like a fan page, I guess you’d call it. They’re all over the Net. Some cyber-guy thinks a horror writer is hot stuff, so he starts a fan page for him. They usually post a few pictures, maybe some news about upcoming books or appearances. Like that. But the big feature is the message board.”

I gave her a puzzled look, but quickly figured out she was just drawing a breath before she went on: “You can leave messages, okay? Sometimes the star. . . or the writer, or the singer, or whoever the cyber-guy set the home page up for. . . actually answers, but that’s like a big thing. . . real rare. Usually it’s just fans of whoever the home page is for—talking to themselves, you know? Like who should play what character in the movie, like that.”

“And this guy has one of these home pages?” I asked her.

“Yeah. In fact, there’s about a half-dozen of them. One’s even in Japanese.”

“And people write to these message boards with stuff for him?”

“Sure. Mostly it’s like ‘Right on!,’ you know? I mean, they’re
fans,
right?”

“Of a serial killer?”

“Oh, please,” Xyla said. “First of all, that’s nothing new. Charles Manson has a website.
Plenty
of people get turned on by serial killers. Go to the movies, read a book—serial killers are hot stuff. But this one, it’s. . . different. I figured, at first, it was mostly gay guys writing, just being. . . encouraging, you know? But once he started blasting those child molesters, it’s like
everyone’s
on his side. You can see it everywhere. They call him HE. For his initials, I guess it meant, once. But now it’s like ‘he,’ understand? Like ‘He said so,’ see?”

I did see. I’d sure seen

graffiti’ed all over town. Thought it was another of those religious-nut organizations pasting their crap up the way they always do.

“Anyway, so, I got a bunch of hit-backs, like I said,” Xyla went on. “But only three even opened up the encryption, and two of those were
obviously
from geeks.”