Choice of Evil (28 page)

The screen switched colors. I knew what was coming, so I called out Xyla’s name.

>>Queensboro Bridge: (1) You present? (2) Caliber?<<

I said some words to Xyla and she made them appear on the screen:

(1) yes (2).223 Remington

She hit the keys, and my message disappeared. Somewhere in cyber-space, I had just told a killer I was with Wesley when he’d done one of his hits. And proved it.

Y
ou know how it is—you talk different things over with different people. I had no one to talk this over with. No point guessing what the next installment would be, or how it would end. I couldn’t make a move until he was finished with his story. If it was a story.

Nadine called me at Mama’s. Asked: “Do you have anything yet?”

“No,” I told her, and hung up, not even sure if I was lying.

When I called Strega to ask her the same question, she just hissed at me, asked what I
really
wanted. So I hung up on her too.

I know a brilliant guy when it comes to unhinged minds. Doc runs a little private clinic now, but I’d met him in the joint—he’d interned as a prison shrink. I could have asked him, I guess. But there just didn’t seem any point. He always said I knew more about freaks than he did.

You could only ask the Mole techno-questions. And Michelle only emotional ones.

Mama knew money. Max knew combat.

The Prof knew it all. But he didn’t know this.

I had the lines out. But I couldn’t do anything until I got a bite.

I
spent a lot of time with Pansy. Wondering how much time she had left. They say Neos are a long-lived breed. But Pansy had already gone past where they said. She looked okay—fatter, slower, maybe, but okay. I took her to a vet I know in Brooklyn. He’s not a guy I like—he works pit-bull fights for cash—but when it comes to medical stuff for someone you love, you look the other way. He said she was in good shape: heart, lungs, all that. Nothing wrong with her. “She’s just old,” the vet said.

“Me fucking too,” I told him as I forked over the money.

I
was in the Plymouth, on my way back from wasting a couple of hours with a punk who said he wanted to buy three crates of guns. But he didn’t show me the cash and I sure wasn’t showing him any guns first. Reason the conversation took so long, neither of us knew if the other was ATF. He didn’t feel that way to me. Just some disturbo who wanted to talk politics and had been thrown out of too many bars, so he set himself up as a buyer and got an audience that way. Pitiful stupid loser. When the ATF
did
drop him, he’d shriek “Entrapment!” all the way to Leavenworth.

The cell phone throbbed next to my heart. I unholstered it, said: “What?”

“Incoming.” Xyla’s voice.

I punched the throttle.

* There was no expectation of immediate response on my part. Indeed, the voice message transmitted had provided different directions entirely:

We have your daughter. She has not been harmed in any way. This is not personal. We are professionals. Do not notify the authorities. This can be resolved very easily if you cooperate. Place an ad in the Personals column of USA Today which states: “Lost at O’Hare Airport: Saudi Arabian passport number 125689774. Repeat: 125689774. Reward for return. No questions asked.” When we see the ad, we will contact you by this same method. Any attempt to trace calls will be detected by our equipment and the subject will be terminated without further contact. You may, however, record any incoming calls so that you need not rely on your note-taking ability.

     I have found that allowing the target to tape calls provides them with a measure of reassurance. Even the most cooperative of victims can be subject to attacks of nervousness, and I would not want such a mental state in those whose *precise* cooperation would be required throughout the process.
     USA Today was selected because of its status as a “national” newspaper, available from a wide variety of totally anonymous outlets. The ad itself has the ring of authenticity: While I cannot be certain without hacking into the passenger manifests of various airlines—something of which I am certainly capable—logic compels the conclusion that some Saudi nationals have passed through America’s busiest airport within the two weeks or so preceding the placement of the ad. Further, because it is a common practice of contraband-traffickers to place apparently innocent ads which contain a series of numbers, those in law enforcement who scrutinize such placements on a regular basis would assume the ad I requested to be in that category, never connecting it to my actual intent.
     Finally, of course, no physical contact is required for me to read the ad. . . or to read subsequent entries in that same forum.
     My next task was to monitor local radio, alert to any news of the kidnapping. There was no such reference. Although I had little fear of being discovered accidentally, the thought of roaming search parties of self-righteous locals, any of whom would trade their paltry futures for a few minutes’ exposure on television, was not comforting to me. By then, the bus would have been discovered. But even had I been careless enough—and I assure you, I was not—to leave some indication of my brief presence, any bus occupied on a daily basis by a dozen or so schoolchildren would prove beyond the forensic capabilities of any local operation. In my work, I rely to some extent upon the jealousy and territoriality of local jurisdictions, and do not expect FBI involvement for a minimum of seventy-two hours. And the FBI, following its own procedures for excluding known prints, would be required to take exemplars from all of the children who habitually ride that bus. Amazing though it will sound to the uninitiated, my experience indicates that at least one of the families of the children who were not kidnapped will balk at this intrusion into their “civil rights,” thus delaying the process even further.
     None of that is of any consequence.

Then he was done.

I had my mouth open to call Xyla when she walked in. Almost like she knew how long it was going to take me.

“Question coming?” she asked.

“Always has, so far,” I replied.

It took less than a minute.

>>Last address?<<

Whose address did this maniac want? Mine? Wesley’s? Wesley never had an address. The last time I’d seen him face to face, it was in an abandoned building he was using as a staging area. . . before his last strike. Was he trying to tie me to. . . No, what was the point? All this. . . information. Fuck it. I spoke to Xyla and she made it appear on the screen.

Meserole Street

M
y answer to his last question had been a pair of guesses. Even if I was right and he was asking about Wesley, the ice-man’s last hideout wasn’t actually on Meserole Street, it was just off the corner. But I couldn’t give you the number of the building if my life depended on it. That neighborhood probably didn’t even have a goddamned zip code.

He was getting cute now. No reason for it.

None I understood, anyway.

“
N
ot a single one,” Wolfe said.

That was all she said. I felt. . . surrounded. We were in the no-man’s-land under the Williamsburg Bridge. Someone I didn’t recognize was standing off to one side, holding a revolver. It was pointed at the ground, but I was close enough to see his left hand on his right wrist. And that the piece was cocked. Mick was somewhere behind me. Max had always figured him for a karateka of some kind, but we’d never known for sure. Pepper was in the front seat of her car, watching, the motor running.

Me, I was alone.

Wolfe was looking at me, a glowing red neon
I Don’t Trust You!
sign in her gray eyes. Cold gray now.

“Can you—?”

“On what you gave me, no.”

“Then I—”

“Just give me the money,” Wolfe said.

I
guessed I’d sent the killer what he wanted. When I opened the next message, he was right back. . . continuing from where he’d left off.

    When I returned—allegedly from making a telephone call from some remote location—the child was munching calmly on some cookies, a glass of juice at her elbow, her face half buried in one of the books I had procured in anticipation of her stay. If the restraints bothered her in any way, it was not apparent.
     “Did you call them?” she asked, looking up as casually as if I had been a legitimate member of her household who had gone out to perform some mundane task.
     “I did,” I told her. “But there will be no response from them for a minimum of forty-eight hours. This whole process will take a certain amount of time.”
     “How much time?” That was a reasonable question, especially from a child’s perspective. Usually, I am careful to keep the estimate quite short (bearing in mind, of course, that even the modified form of sensory deprivation attendant to keeping a captive away from all sources of natural light is sufficient to completely blur the concept of “days”), but I sensed that this child was simply asking for information, and not emotionally invested in the response.
     “It could be as long as two or three weeks,” I said.
     “Is it ever longer?” she asked.
     I watched her eyes, aware that innocence is often a mask. Had she deduced my true calling from my prior conversation? Or was she somehow baiting me into revelation? Could she simply be curious? I decided to make no assumptions. . . .
     “Why do you ask that? Do you think I have done this sort of thing before?”
     “Oh, you must have,” she said, her little face perfectly serious. “You know everything about it. Nobody’s very good at something the first time they try it, are they?”
     “Well,” I explained, “there is a difference between talent and skill.”
     “I don’t understand,” she said.
     “Let us assume you have a natural talent for. . . oh, I don’t know, say painting, all right? Now, you would be quite good at it as soon as you picked up a brush. That is, you would have a natural. . . aptitude for it. But the more you practiced, the better you would become.”
     “I have a natural talent,” the child piped up.
     “And what is that?” I asked her.
     “I can draw.”
     “Can you?” I asked, simply to engage the child. Her work on the checkerboard pieces rendered her declaration quite superfluous.
     “Yes, I can. I don’t mean trace, or color either. Not like a baby. I can draw.”
     “What do you draw?” I asked her, drawing her (pun intended) further away from the potentially frightening aspects of her situation.
     “I can draw anything,” she said with the smug confidence of the very young.
     This disturbed me. I pride myself on being fully equipped, studying the child I capture well in advance to be prepared for any eventuality. For example, I once took a child who was diabetic. It was greatly reassuring to inform the parents on my very first call that I was aware of the problem and our “nurse” was on hand with all appropriate medications. Improvisation is not my forte, and leaving the hideout to obtain materials was out of the question. Still, I asked the child: “What do you need to draw?”
     She looked at me questioningly, but said nothing. Clearly, she required a further explanation.
     “What. . . materials?” I asked. “Paper, pencils. . . what sort of implements do you require?”
     “Oh!” she said brightly. “I have everything. Right in my backpack.”
     A momentary flash of paranoia—that is, paranoia in the classic psychiatric sense, not the functional hyper-vigilance which is the trademark of a successful practitioner of my profession—overcame me for an instant, but then I told her she was free to get what she needed.
     “I can’t reach it,” she said.
     And I saw she was speaking the truth. Her restraints permitted significant freedom of movement, but I had placed the backpack in a far corner of the basement, and it was, in fact, beyond her grasp. I walked over and picked it up. Professional experience commanded that I search it thoroughly. . . but the finely honed instincts—which are, obviously, not “instincts” at all, being not bio-genetic but actually the synthesis of sufficient experiences so that they surface as quickly as if encoded—developed over those same years caused me to hand it to the child without examination.
     She took it from me as though she expected nothing less. Some captives are querulous and demanding. Others are abject and fearful. Some are floridly terrified, others virtually mute. This one fit no such definition. She was. . . at peace. Not with the resignation that comes over an individual when all hope is gone, but with the sense that the future, while immutable, was acceptable.
     “Is everything there, Angelique?” I asked.
     “My name isn’t Angelique,” she replied, not looking inside the backpack.
     “Angel, then,” I offered.
     “My name is Zoë,” she said in a voice that brooked no disagreement.
     I avoided the usual adult trap of condescension and merely said, “My apologies, Zoë. Now. . . is everything there?”
     “You didn’t open it,” she replied.
     “I. . . don’t understand.”
     “You didn’t open it,” she repeated. “From the time I got on the bus, I was the only one who had it. It’s always been with me.”
     “And so. . .?”
     “So if you didn’t open it, whatever was there is still there, see?”
     “Yes. That was a very good deduction. You’d make a good detective,” I told her, mentally chastising myself for overlooking the obvious—if I were interested in protecting a child from kidnapping, I would certainly have affixed a tracking device in some way, and a backpack would be quite suitable. I would not make such a mistake again.
     “I would?” she asked, checking my face carefully.
     “You certainly would,” I assured her, my voice brisk and professional. “A good detective works only with the facts. Anything that is not a fact should be ignored.”
     “There’ll be detectives, won’t there? Looking for me, I mean.”
     “Certainly. They have probably already begun.”
     “But they won’t find me, will they?”
     “No, child, they won’t.”
     “Because you’re smarter than them, right?”
     “I am. . . . It is not strictly a matter of intelligence,” I explained. “It is more a matter of careful planning and skillful execution. There is no accounting for random chance, but—”
     “So they *could* find me?” she interrupted.
     “It is possible. Nothing is one hundred percent certain in these matters. There is always *some* chance.”
     “Oh,” is all she said.
     “Don’t you want to draw?” I asked her.
     “I always want to draw.”
     “Then why not. . .?”
     “I don’t want you to be mad,” she said, her voice tentative.
     “Why would I be angry?” I asked her, hoping to teach by example the difference between insanity and annoyance—people are so imprecise in their verbiage, but only children seem capable of learning.
     “Because I want to draw you,” she said, her eyes wide and alert.
     A conundrum was thus produced. The child’s intelligence was manifest, a phenomenon not to be ignored. Therefore, despite my desire to make her stay with me as pleasant and stress-free as possible under the circumstances, surely she realized that a sketch of her own kidnapper would be of great value to the authorities. On the other hand, she certainly had ample opportunity to use her eyes, if not her skill at drawing, and my features were, presumably, memorized. If I refused her request, it might supplement the illusion that she was, eventually, to be returned. Conversely, it would perhaps distress her. On balance, I elected to compromise.
     “You may certainly draw me, if you wish,” I told her. “But under the circumstances I’m sure you will understand you’ll have to leave the. . . artwork here when you leave.”
     “It was for you anyway,” she said. “I never keep what I draw.”
     I pondered this internally. Children are generally guileless, but that is a rule to which there are many exceptions. . . some characterological, but most situational. Children are extraordinarily self-absorbed—a characteristic often retained into adulthood. But that sort of analysis did not figure in my assessment—globalization is not a valid problem-solving tool. Why would the child never keep her own handiwork? Under other circumstances, I would have simply asked the apparently invited question. But the child’s mien was that of someone who did not expect to be questioned, so I merely said:
     “Very well. How would you like me to. . . pose?”
     “You don’t have to do anything,” she assured me. “I can just draw while we. . . talk or something, okay?”
     “All right.”
     She opened her backpack and removed a thick drawing tablet and several pencils.
     “I have pastel sticks too,” she said, noticing my observations. “But I don’t draw people with them. Not until I’m done with the pencils.”
     “Very sensible,” I told her. “Pencils are more precise, aren’t they?”
     “They’re sharper,” she replied, as though amplifying her agreement.
     She busied herself at the tablet. I watched her work, dark hair spilling over her face, almost obscuring it from view. I glanced at the tablet and noticed that a good many pages had been removed. Apparently it was true that the child did not keep her work once it was completed. I. . .
     “How long does it usually take?” Her voice intruded into my thoughts, startling me. Even without glancing at my watch, I realized some considerable time had passed.
     “How long does what take, Zoë?”
     She smiled, perhaps at my use of the name she had selected. “For them to. . . I mean, don’t you have to talk to them? So you can. . .”
     “Oh. I understand what you mean now. There is no set rule. Sometimes it takes several weeks for the entire arrangements to be worked out.”
     “What’s the shortest time it ever took?”
     “Nine days,” I answered without thinking. Immediately, I began to berate myself internally for my foolishness. The answer I gave the child was an honest one, but it would not be as reassuring as I had hoped.
     “But this will probably take longer, won’t it?”
     “Yes. Absolutely,” I told her, grateful that she was not going to fixate on a nine-day period and become anxious if it were exceeded.
     “You’re hard to draw,” she said.
     “Why is that?”
     “Your face keeps. . . shifting. I don’t know, I’m not sure. You have to draw the skull.”
     “The skull?”
     “The skull beneath the skin. You have to draw that first. That’s the part that stays the same.”
     “I’m not sure I follow you exactly,” I told her. “May I have a look?”
     “No!” she replied, the first hint of sharpness in her voice since I had captured her. “I don’t like anyone to see my drawing until I’m done. Sometimes I don’t get it right, and I have to keep doing it. So I don’t like anyone to see it until it’s true. Please?”
     “Certainly,” I assured her. “Every artist must work in his or her own way.”
     She smiled gratefully and went back to work.
     On her first night, I asked the child her normal bedtime, but she was vague in response. Offered a choice of evening meals, however, she became animated. When I told her that, yes, she could mix several of the meals I had planned, incorporating components as she wished, she clapped her hands in delight. After great deliberation, she chose spaghetti, spinach, and liver.
     “Do you think that’s gross?” she asked.
     “As a matter of fact, I think it is quite creative,” I told her. “I believe I’ll have the same.”
     The child helped with the cooking. She ate her meal with relish, but watched me anxiously until I assured her that, indeed, her mixed selection was delicious.
     “And very good for you too,” she added.
     Realizing that, for whatever reason, she was not going to be precise about her normal bedtime, I told her that she could, while she was staying with me, go to bed anytime she wished. After all, there would be no school for her in the morning.
     “Are you going to do it?” she asked.
     “Do what?”
     “Teach me. I have a friend. Jeanne Ellen. She’s home-schooled. Do you know what that is?”
     “Certainly. Some states permit—”
     “Are you going to do it?” she interrupted.
     “Do. . . what?”
     “Home-school me,” she replied, as though I were a bit slow.
     “Well, I. . .”
     “I have most all of my books with me,” she said, a pleading undertone to her voice. “And you have *lots* of books here too, the ones you got for me, I mean.”
     I began to protest that I was not familiar with her coursework, but quickly self-edited. After all, how complex could a fifth-grade curriculum be, especially given the abysmal state of American education generally?
     “All right,” I agreed. “But you had better get ready for bed, just in case you fall asleep.”
     “I don’t have any pajamas.”
     “My apologies. I showed you the books, but not the clothes. Over there in the chest of drawers. Take a look. It’s all new, of course. I had to guess at your sizes, but I believe I was quite accurate.”
     The child immediately ran over to where I had indicated and began pawing through the clothing. It was all of good quality, but not up to her usual standard, I assumed.
     “Can I keep all this?” she asked, surprising me. After all, if she was not permitted an excess of books, why. . .? Still, I did not pursue the issue.
     “Of course,” I said. “But now go put on your pajamas, all right? You can use the bathroom.”
     She trotted off without a word, emerging in about fifteen minutes. I had no anxiety about the time lapse—escape from the bathroom was impossible and it was devoid of potential weaponry.
     “I brushed my teeth,” she announced when she emerged, wrapped in the pink terry-cloth bathrobe I had purchased in anticipation of a little girl’s natural modesty in the presence of a stranger.
     I made up the bed for her, and sat down to read. I left the television on. In the past, that had always succeeded in eventually lulling the children to sleep. But this one proved remarkably resistant. It was almost midnight when I looked up to find her wide awake.
     “Are you having trouble getting to sleep?” I asked her.
     “No. I’m just not sleepy.”
     “All right.”
     “But I *should* sleep, right?”
     “Well, of course. At some point, everyone—”
     “Could you read me a story?” she asked. “That would make me sleepy, I know it.”
     “I—”
     “There’s lots of books,” she reminded me. “And I haven’t read hardly any of them.”
     “Do your parents usually read to you before you—”