Dead and Gone (31 page)

“That’s just because—”

“I will not listen to any of your stupid man’s explanations. You do not understand, even when I show you the truth.”

“Gem … Look, I wasn’t …”

“Last night, after you fell asleep, I put your thumb in my mouth. I love to do that with you—I don’t know why. I thought it would help me sleep, like a child’s pacifier. But do you know what happened?”

“What?”

“I had an orgasm. So deep I can
still
feel it.”

“Great. So even if my cock flops, so long as my goddamn thumb holds out—”

I was ready for her slap this time, but I didn’t move to block it. It was a lot harder than the first. Then she jumped up, grabbed one of my sweatshirts, pulled it over her head, and walked out the door.

I
t was very late when she came back inside. I was half asleep, but snapped awake as soon as I heard the door. She pulled off the sweatshirt and climbed into bed next to me.

“I apologize,” she said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I did not
say
anything wrong. But I should not have slapped you.”

“It’s all right.”

“No, it is not. Would you slap me?”

“No.”

“I do not mean, would you slap me of your own volition? I understand you would not. That is not you. But … would you slap me if I asked you to?”

“Gem …”

“Would you? Please? It would make me feel better.”

I reached toward her face. She was unflinching, eyes wide. I tangled my left hand in her hair, pulled her across me, and smacked her bottom a couple of times. Harder than she had slapped me.

When I let go of her hair, she stayed where she was.

“Gem. If I—”

“Feel me,” she said, softly.

I
fell asleep with Gem lying across me. And woke up to her mouth on my cock. Full. She pulled away, held my cock in her fist, said, “See, stupid man!,” and climbed on top of me.

I
nstead of a gigantic corkboard, Lune now used some sort of projection system—whatever one of his crew typed into the notebook computers they all had on their laps showed up on a broad expanse of pristine white wall. Lune connected to the individual words with some kind of electronic pointer—changing their color and moving them around to construct his patterns.

Every day, more facts passed their “authentication” test. And the list grew:

“What’s
that
all about?” I asked Lune, pointing to a spot on the wall where
Nazi Lowriders
was displayed in green.

“Supposedly another hate group,” the Latina answered for him. “But they operate as roving gangs—the Aryans call them ‘street soldiers.’ They’re not into turf at all. They’re younger than most white-supremacist crews, and they tend to focus on blacks, rather than Jews, for as-yet-unknown reasons.”

“So Inside …?”

“Yes. They often ally themselves with Chicanos against the blacks,” she finished for me.

“So how do they connect to …?”

“They may not,” Heidi put in. “But, even though they wear the kill-tattoos—they use lightning bolts instead of spiderwebs—and do the whole Hitler thing, their
raison d’être
is drug-dealing. And crystal meth is their product. So, when you look at Ruhr and Timmons …”

“It’s time to plug in the personals,” Lune announced.

Nobody said anything. But they were all looking at me.

“It’s up to you,” Lune said.

“Take your best shot,” I told them all.

I
t took the better part of four full days, and Lune’s crew weren’t nine-to-fivers—every time I looked around, there was still another one I didn’t know. Working. The new wall they created finally got filled. With my life.

I’d never have thought there was that much to it. And, when they put it all down, I could see there really wasn’t.

Father unknown. Orphaned-by-abandonment when my teenage mother gave a phony name and then checked out of the hospital ward without me. The whole trail from there. Always dropping, never climbing. Tighter and tighter levels of custody as I aged. Both my long prison jolts—the hijackings and the shootings—and all the short stays in jail. The madness in Biafra. All my scams, hustles, and cons. Kiddie porn that never got delivered. Crates of guns that did.

I went all the way with them, leaving nothing out except for when I’d been with Lune—that part had to be his call.

All the way
down
, trampolining off the Zero itself. Even the kid I’d killed by accident in a gunfight in that basement in the South Bronx. The basement where they were making the kind of movies where the star dies at the end. But that truth had never erased the guilt I’d carried ever since. Other killings—ones I still felt good about. Belle’s daughter-raping father. Strega’s Uncle Julio. Mortay, the karate-freak who wanted a death-match with Max—and got ambushed by me instead. All the things I’d done with Wesley.

I kept going through the swamp of my life, dredging up memories with every name. So many dead. So many gone. It was like a thirtieth high-school reunion, where everyone looks around to see who’s going to show up this time. Or not.

I wasn’t proud of what they put up there. But I wasn’t ashamed of it, either. When you make a Child of the Secret, sometimes he comes back “home” for a visit.

Lune flicked his pointer. One word popped up on the wall, in bright blue letters:
Pedophile(s)
.

“It’s the single common thread,” Lune said to all of them. “Burke makes his … living in a variety of ways, all of which could motivate enemies to the sort of assassination that was attempted on him. But the
resources
necessary to orchestrate such an attempt … No, it has to be someone who believes Burke is pursuing
him.”

“Or her,” the Latina added.

“Yes,” Lune said. “Certainly. Our own research indicates that Burke’s reputation is … mixed. Some see him as a mercenary. Others as a hired killer. There are even those who believe him to be some sort of private investigator. But most know him professionally as a contraband-dealer. The one unifying thread on which we can rely is … Aydah?”

Aydah, a tall, slender black woman, got to her feet to speak. “In New York,” she said, in a faint French accent, “when it comes to pedophiles, Mr. Burke is considered a homicidal maniac. An irrational, dangerous individual who is blamed—or, depending on the source, credited—with virtually every type of violence against them—assaults, murders, arsons, explosions.”

“Personality as perceived?” a guy from the far corner asked. He was white, medium-height, slim build—a good-looking kid with very close-cropped hair.

“Single most distinguishing characteristic is pathological vengefulness,” she answered him.

“Thank you, Aydah,” Lune said formally.

“But the operation itself,” an Asian kid with cold eyes offered, “…  the way it was coordinated, the assassins were certainly professionals. So it isn’t just a question of money, then. Whoever
hired
them had to know where to
find
them.”

“That’s right, Minh,” Heidi said, “and you can’t just find a contract killer in the
Soldier of Fortune
want ads anymore.”

“Maybe the connect is to Timmons and Ruhr,” Aydah said.

“That doesn’t authenticate,” the Latina argued. “Those white supremacists aren’t even good at killing, never mind gunfighting. It smells more like the government.”

“Oh,
they’re
real experts, all right,” Aydah shot back.

Lune held up his hand for silence.

“Burke, it’s your time now,” he said. “You have to sit down and start making out a list. It doesn’t matter how long it is, but it has to be as complete as you can possibly make it.”

“A list of …”

“Pedophiles who might want revenge for something you did. Or who might have had reason to believe you were hunting them.”

“That could be any—”

“You’re safe here,” Lune said. “Take all the time you need.”

I
knew better than to do that kind of work without a break. Your body gets tired, it moves slower. But when your mind gets tired, it turns on you.

There was a heavyweight-championship fight on the giant-screen TV they had in one of the common rooms. Not many were watching: the white kid with the close-cropped haircut, the Asian they had called Minh, the Indian, the Latina, and a couple of others.

“Clint,” the white kid said to me, holding out his hand for me to shake. “This is my partner, Minh.”

I shook both their hands—they were the first ones I’d met there who offered them.

The fight was pitiful. One boxer spent most of each round leaning against the ropes like a wino using a wall to prop himself up. The other guy slapped at him as if he were trying to keep flies off a corpse.

“If I hit a guy like that on the street in front of a dozen witnesses, I wouldn’t even get arrested,” I said.

Clint laughed, offered me a high-five.

The Indian nodded a silent agreement.

The Latina glared at me.

Since neither of the boxers dropped dead of a heart attack, the decision went to the judges. I didn’t wait around for it.

I
kept working on my list, following Lune’s parameters: they had to be either wanting revenge, or fearing it.

The first category was much longer than the second. The people I would have wanted to hurt the most—the ones who had hurt me so much when I was little—I didn’t know most of their names, much less where to find them. They wouldn’t even know I was alive.

Anyway,
they
would know what the dumb-fuck government doesn’t. Most of us, damn near
all
of us, we don’t turn on the ones who hurt us. No, we turn on ourselves, mostly. Or on you.

And then you say we were born bad.

You and Hitler. Yeah, you don’t like the comparison? Then, while we’re doing time for what was done
to
us, don’t fucking tell us, “It’s all in the genes,” okay?

Just thinking about it made the back of my neck burn. A guy goes to work and spends the day kissing the boss’s ass. So he goes home and kicks his wife’s. Makes him feel like a man. We know what he is. A lowlife coward. But a kid who finally can’t take it anymore and kills the people—you call them “parents”—who’ve been torturing him forever,
he’s
the one you send to prison.

I love it when some punk prosecutor tells a jury the kid didn’t have to
kill
his father. The father who’d been sodomizing him since he was six. Why didn’t the kid just, like, assault him, or something? I’ll tell you why. Because we all know. We know what happens if we
don’t
kill them. As soon as they recover, they’ll make us pray we had.

When babies are born to beasts, when the government pats the beasts on the head and lets them keep feeding, when the kids know they’ll never get away because their baby brother or sister will be next … Oh, there’s a lot of things kids can do. To
themselves
. That’s okay. But if they ever dare to do it to the beasts, they’re penitentiary-bound.

I
was there for patterns. So I could see the truth. And maybe the whole process was getting to me. I was starting to see a pattern myself. People hurt their kids. And the government doesn’t do anything to protect the kids. Soon, one of the kids figures it out—he can’t go through life without backup, and he’s not getting it from where other kids do. Next thing, he’s in some juvenile institution. Learning to be everything they said he was when they put him in there.

Meanwhile, there’s all these people who would give
anything
to have a kid of their own. And they can’t get one. If the government just
moved
on humans who hurt their kids, took them away, handed them over to people who wanted to be real parents, they could shut down a lot of the prisons.

But that would put too many people out of work.

I stopped it right there. Drove it out of my mind. Concentrated, focusing
down
to tiny points until I was … somewhere else.

And a lot of the names Lune wanted from me were right in there, too. Waiting for me.

I
asked Lune if Gem and I could go outside one morning. “Go with Levi,” is all he said.

The Indian took us out through a different door from the one he’d used that first time. We were on a jagged expanse of rock that seemed to go on forever, but I could see trees in the distance. The air was thin—and so pure it was almost sweet inside my lungs.

“How long have you been with—?” Gem started to ask the Indian, before a look from me cut her off.

“Lune is a sensei, not a guru,” he answered, guessing where she was going. “The answers to every question a man can have are in what most of the world believes to be a series of random, unconnected events. To see the pattern in the randomness is to unlock the mystery … whatever the mystery is.

“Lune knows how to do that. Better than anyone who has come before him. If he wanted to lead a cult, he could. If he wanted to make a billion dollars, he could do that, too. But he is a seeker, just as we are. The greedy ones—the ones who learn of Lune’s work and want to profit from it—they never get past our screens.”

“Do people find their answers here?” I asked him.

“Some do.”

“And when they do—?”

“Ah. I understand. Yes, some leave then. But some return.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because a person of honor must honor his debts.”

I didn’t ask him if he was talking about himself.

“Do you know why Lune is helping Burke?” Gem said.

“Yes. Lune said they were brothers when they were very small. And that Burke was the first person who understood his gift. And his need.”

“So you know he’s—?”

“Searching for his real parents? Yes,” the Indian said, his face flat, but pain for his soul-wounded sensei clear in his eyes.

I
kept working on my list. Gem wanted to help, but I told her I just didn’t see how she could.

“Tell me your life,” she said. “I will listen. Maybe I will hear something of value to you.”