Choice of Evil (3 page)

We had killed to do that, all of us, together. And when it was over, Crystal Beth asked me if I was going to stay. Not here, not in this cesspool of a city where I was born—stay with her.

I told her the truth then: I didn’t know.

But I was there now. Me and Pansy. Trying. Living in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, seeing if it could maybe be my house too. That’s when it started.

P
eople don’t kill for no reason. What the cops don’t get is that sometimes no reason
is
the reason.

They thought it was random, that first one. A target of opportunity. Like the victim of a bomb dropped from above the clouds, the pilot certain everything down below was the enemy. Killing things, not people. Following orders.

But not all bombers are military. And some take orders only from inside their twisted-circuit heads.

When people from the other side started to fall, the cops got it all distorted. And once they worked it backward to me, they were sure they knew the motive.

It fit me like a good pair of handcuffs.

I
t’s hard to say it even now. Hard to say her name. When Crystal Beth died, so did my chances.

It didn’t happen the way she thought it might. It wasn’t one of the risks she knew she was taking. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. It didn’t have anything to do with that “purpose” she was always talking about; the one her mother had tribal-tattooed on Crystal Beth’s teenage face before she went out to meet her own destiny. Crystal Beth’s purpose was the safehouse. The network. Fighting stalkers and protecting their victims. Why even
go
to a gay-rights rally? I remember asking her, deep in the quiet darkness of her room on the top floor.

“It’s not you, girl,” I said.

“Why not?” she answered, her soft voice as rich and round as her thighs. “You know I have. . . I mean, you know I did. . . with Vyra and all. It wasn’t her who started that, it was me.”

Vyra was gone now. My old. . . what? Not girlfriend. Not even friend. Sex partner, I guess. I never saw any
real
piece of her until the wheels came off last year. When my own house was threatened by a pack of race-haters and my brother Hercules went into the fire to save us. Homicides happened. And when it was over, Vyra left with Hercules. To new lives, out of mine.

But before she went, I saw her and Crystal Beth make love to each other. Right in this room, on this bed. I wasn’t a spy or a voyeur. They wanted me to stay, wanted to show me something. Much later, when Crystal Beth was sure I’d seen what was really there, she asked me if I was going to love her.

I told her I didn’t know. Lying is encoded in my genes. I learned lying so I could keep them from hurting me. It didn’t always work, but it was all a little kid had. Later, I learned better ways.

Couples who want to make a baby tell everyone they’re “trying.” It always makes me sick to hear that. . . like they’re making me
watch
them try. But I understand what they mean. I was trying to love Crystal Beth then. I’ll never know if I was going to get it right.

“That doesn’t mean you’re gay,” is what I told her.

“Because I’m a woman? That’s the way
men
think. If
you
have sex with another man, even once, then you’re gay for life. That’s the fear, isn’t it? When a little boy is raped, he’s afraid he’s going to be just like the rapist. . . only he doesn’t think ‘rapist,’ he thinks ‘queer.’ But if you’re a woman, it’s like. . . okay, right? Just an experiment. Just playing. You know what, baby? Gay people don’t like my way either. I’m not
out
enough for them. Not for the lesbians, anyway. If I still have sex with men, I’m not
really,
see?”

“Really what?”

“Not really real. Not. . . myself, whatever that’s supposed to mean. You know, ‘yourself’. . . the person someone
else
wants you to be. For them, not for you. Funny. Gay people are discriminated against, hated, feared. . . and they do the same thing to themselves. I’m bisexual. And they have no tolerance for me just as straights have no tolerance for them.”

“So fuck them. Why go?”

“Because they’re
wrong.
I belong there too. And I’m going.”

“No, you’re not, bitch.”

“Don’t sweet-talk me,” she whispered, flashing her smile in the darkness. “I took your orders when we were in the middle of. . . that thing. But it’s over.
That’s
over, I mean. This is me, now. Me, no matter what a pack of fools think.”

“It’s not about being gay,” I said. “Who cares? But why go where you’re not wanted? It’s just another bullshit demonstration anyway—it’s not like it’s gonna change anything.”

“Tell that to the Freedom Riders.”

“Hard to talk to dead people,” I said, warningly.

“This isn’t Mississippi, Burke. It’s not even close. The climate has changed. And it didn’t change by itself. We helped
make
it change. I’m going.”

“Crystal Beth—”

“Shush up, now,” she mumbled against my chest. “I’ve got something better for you to do.”

I
t was just cracking light when I left the next morning. I looked down at Crystal Beth, sleeping on her belly, soft cheek against the pillow. Heavy-haunched and glistening in her own dew, her face open even with her eyes closed. I thought about giving her a kiss but I didn’t want to chance waking her up.

I never saw her again.

T
he papers had it pretty close to accurate. I know because I went down there. Not to the scene—to where I could find the people who saw it. People who wouldn’t talk to the law.

Crystal Beth wasn’t even one of the speakers. She was just in the crowd, toward the back. Not a big crowd, maybe a couple of hundred or so. Right on the rim of Central Park, west of the Ramble. Protesting another fag-bashing episode, demanding the Police Commissioner send some undercover cops in there to stop it. The speaker was saying something about how they used undercovers to bust straights looking for hooker sex, but they wouldn’t spare any to protect gays. Talking about voting as a bloc. . . knowing as he spoke that you might tip an election for a local City Council seat with a threat like that, but it wouldn’t make the Mayor blink.

A car swept by. Nobody saw it good enough to say much except that it was a dark color, moving fast. Gunfire poured from the windows. At least two guns—they found that from the ballistics lab later. Five people went down. Two dead. One of them was my Crystal Beth. The car flew north, disappeared somewhere in Harlem.

That didn’t prove anything—didn’t mean it was their home base. There’s a hundred ways out of Harlem: bridges, tunnels, alleys. Underground garages where you could stash a car and switch to the subway.

The first thought was that the drive-by had to be about the dope business—a typical triggerboy spray-and-pray hose-down job. One of the guns had been a Tec-9, so that sounded right. For about a minute. Then it went on the books the same way the streets already had it—as a hate crime.

Fag-bashers all over the city were high-fiving.

Then they started dropping.

T
he first three weren’t hard to connect. They’d been convicted of beating a gay man to death after luring him into a playground at night. Aluminum baseball bats and bicycle chains were all they needed, although one of them stabbed him a few times after he was dead. Didn’t take a psychologist to figure out that last part.

One rolled over immediately, took a short manslaughter hit in exchange for his testimony. The other two went to trial. The lawyers got a lot of camera time. And their clients got a lot of time Upstate—a pair of life sentences.

But then the appellate courts reversed all the convictions—said the cases should have been severed for trial. So everything was voided, even the guilty plea. All three got bail pending a retrial. The gay community protested. Got a lot of TV coverage. Changed nothing.

Then two of them got done. They’d been living together. Sleeping together too, I guess—they were found in the same bed, what was left of them.

The third one, the informer, he must have figured it out—or thought he did. He called the cops, asking them to take him back Inside while he waited for the trial. The cops said they were sending someone right over. I guess the guy opened the door himself. Whoever he opened it to stuck an ice pick into his spine. Then hacked his head off with a butcher knife while the fag-basher watched himself die, paralyzed.

The reason the cops knew that, they found the victim’s phone had been tapped into. And rerouted. When the third one had dialed 911, he’d been talking to his doom.

A
nd while the cops were wasting time grilling the family and friends of the gay man who’d been murdered, some “Christian” organization took out a full-page ad saying homosexuals needed to “convert” or burn in hell.

That night, every TV news show ran clips of the organization’s spokesman saying, “AIDS is God’s cure for homos,” and other, similar sound bites.

The next day, the spokesman was napping in a hammock in the backyard of his estate when a long-distance rifle shot opened his left eye. Opened a bigger hole in the back of his head.

One of the picketers at the funeral of the murdered gay man—the one holding the sign saying his death was God’s Good Riddance—got a UPS package. And got a real bang out of it.

But it was the poisoned black-market steroids that killed the bodybuilder—the one who kept in shape with fag-bashing—that finally persuaded the cops.

T
hey managed to keep the connection between the victims out of the papers. But the killer trumped them by going public.

Be warned! These attacks have not been indiscriminate. All the targets were predators, and homosexuals were their prey. Queer-bashing is no longer a risk-free sport. For too long, the gay community has tolerated assaults in the vain hope that protection would come from outsiders. Be warned: now
we
hunt.

The first radio station to receive the tape with the machine-altered voice had played good citizen and turned it over to the cops. But it wasn’t long before another station decided it couldn’t pass up the chance for a ratings score. Once it went out over the airwaves, the dam was breached. The flood followed.

A
short time after I met Crystal Beth, we got into a war. A war to keep our house safe. It took all of us. And all we had. Just before I left for the showdown, Crystal Beth said she wanted to have my baby. That last time, as we parted before I went out to do my work, she asked me. Of all the women in my life, she was the only one who’d ever asked. Flood had told me she’d thought about it, had been thinking about it, but she went back to Japan and I never saw her again. Belle loved me. Died for me. But she knew her blood was bad—she was her sister’s daughter, and she’d never pass that along. I’ve had sex with so many women. I liked some of them; some of them had liked me. But it was only Crystal Beth who’d wanted my child.

I’d told her the truth then. I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago. Not because my blood was bad, like Belle’s. I don’t know my blood. “Baby Boy Burke” is all it says on my birth certificate. It’s not my blood that stopped me—it’s that I know blood doesn’t mean anything.

But the cops had this much right: when Crystal Beth was taken from me, I needed to spill some.

Only I couldn’t find the shooters.

And while I was looking, this other guy kept killing the tribe they came from.

T
rolling for freaks in this city is no different from poling a skiff through a swamp, hunting for gators. They don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. And you better not fall in the water.

The gay community already had one of the usual arrest-and-conviction bounties out on the drive-by killers. There was government money too. The lame Mayor caught so much heat the last time he opened the public coffers for reward money—for that “gay serial killer” who’d never even crossed our borders—that he was an easy mark. But even a total of more than a hundred grand didn’t turn up a trace. Oh yeah, the pay phones were clogged with quarters from informants, but not a single tip proved out.

Then a skinhead clubhouse in Queens blew up. The whole thing. Maybe a half-dozen of them inside. Impossible to tell—too many body parts to match into complete sets. The radio stations played his tape right away this time. Short and sweet:

Skinheads all hate fags. This was always stupid. Always a mistake. Now it’s a mistake to
be
a skinhead. A
fatal
mistake. See you soon, boys.

They should have known what would happen at the gay-pride parade. The cops, I mean. It takes them longer because they act as a herd.

Or maybe they thought he’d only react to actual violence. When the first two drunks jeering at the queers dropped like they’d suffered heart attacks, the cops started running toward them. But by the time they figured it was him—
had
to be him, firing from a rooftop, scoped and suppressed—he was gone.

So were the two drunks—heavy-caliber hollowpoints tend to do that to you.

A
pervert who ran something called
Homo-Haters Gazette
—a website featuring news of “successful actions” against gays around the world—must have thought the letter he got was fan mail. The cops couldn’t determine from the few fragments that they found. And they couldn’t interview a guy with a severed brainstem.

“
T
hey want you for it.” Morales, on the phone, voice like a bulldozer in a garden.

“Get real,” I told him.
     “Just did,” he said. “Straight up. They don’t know where you are, but they’re looking.”
     “So. . .?”
     “You should come in. I know this one ain’t yours.”
     “Thanks.”
     “For what? You not slick enough to be sending no letter bombs, pal.”

“
I
can find out,” Davidson said, puffing on his cigar. “But if I make the inquiry, that alone will. . .”

“I know,” I told him. “Do it.”

“Give me a call, uh, tomorrow. Before ten.”