Mask Market (6 page)

Where I lived may have been the top floor, but it was so far underground it made the subway look like a penthouse. The Mole fixed it so I could pirate my electricity from the trust-fund hippies who lived below me. I used their phone, too…but only for outgoing. So long as I made my calls before noon, there was no chance any of them would catch wise. They were on the Manhattan Marijuana Diet—no coherency allowed before lunch.

The narrow stairway that led to my place was on the other side of the building from the regular entrance, and I kept my car stashed in a former loading-bay slot that was concealed from the outside by a rusted metal door.

That was back when I worked as an off-the-books investigator. I could go places a licensed PI wouldn’t even know existed, and I found all kinds of things during my travels. One thing I stumbled across had been an address for the building owner’s son, a professional rat who was doing very nicely for himself in the Witness Protection Program. The little scumbag had a federal license to steal—he cheated everyone he dealt with, then turned them all over to the law, and got to keep the money, like a tip for a job well done. I found more than just his address, too. I had his whole ID trail…and a real clear photo of the new face the Law bought for him.

Hard to put a price on something like that, but the landlord agreed that making a few minor structural changes to his building would be a fair trade. He didn’t charge me rent, but it wasn’t like he was losing money on the deal.

Pansy lived with me then. We would have stayed in that place forever, but the landlord’s son eventually got exposed, and the stupid bastard blamed me for it—as if I’d queer a sweet deal like I had just for the pleasure of playing good citizen.

So the landlord had called the cops, said he had just discovered the top of his building was being illegally occupied by some Arabs. I wasn’t there when the SWAT guys hit the building, but they tranq’ed Pansy and took her away. They could have killed her, but they were afraid to just blast through the door, so they sent for the Animal Control guys.

Pansy was as unlicensed as I was, and I knew what happened to unclaimed animals. We had to jail-break her out of that “shelter” they were holding her in.

After that, I called that landlord. Told him he’d made a mistake. Two of them, in fact. One stupid, one fatal.

“I
’m…not comfortable, doing this,” Beryl’s father had said to me the first time we met, his thin, patrician face magnifying that message.

“You didn’t find me in the Yellow Pages,” I told him. “And you must have already been to guys with much better furnishings.”

“I don’t want the police….”

“I don’t want them, either.”

“Yes. I understand you’ve had some…”

“It’s your money,” I said, referring to the five hundred-dollar bills he had put on my battered excuse for a desk as soon as he walked in. “It buys you an hour, like we agreed on the phone. You want to spend it tap-dancing around me having a record, that’s up to you.”

He clasped his hands, as if seeking guidance. Pansy made a barely audible sound deep in her throat. I lit a cigarette.

“My daughter’s run away,” he finally said.

“How do you know?”

“What…what do you mean by that?”

“You said ‘run away,’ not ‘disappeared.’ What makes you so sure?”

“Beryl is a troubled child,” he said, as if the empty phrase explained everything.

I blew smoke at the low ceiling to tell him that it didn’t.

“She’s done it before. Run away, I mean.”

“How’d you find her those other times?”

“She always came back on her own. That’s what’s different now.”

“How long’s she been gone?”

“It will be two weeks tomorrow. If school wasn’t out for the summer, it would be difficult for us—my wife and me—to explain. As it is…”

“You did all the usual stuff, right?”

“I’m not sure what you—”

“Contacted her school friends, checked with any relatives who might be willing to let her hide out at their place, read her diary…”

“Yes. Yes, we did all that. Under normal circumstances, we would never—”

“Does she have a pet?”

“You mean,” he said, glancing involuntarily at Pansy, “like a dog or a cat?”

“Yeah.”

“What difference would that make?”

“A kid that’s going to run away permanently, you’d expect them to take their pet with them.”

“Beryl never had a pet,” he said flatly, his tone making it clear that, if they had deemed one advisable, her devoted parents would have run out and gotten her one. The very best.

“Okay. What about clothes? Did she take enough to last her awhile?”

“It’s…hard to tell, to be honest. She has so
many
clothes that we couldn’t determine if anything was missing.”

“What makes you think she’s in Manhattan?”

“One of the private detectives we hired was able to trace her movements on the day it…happened. We don’t know how she got to the train station—it’s about twenty minutes from our house, and the local car service hadn’t been called—but there’s no question that she bought a ticket to Penn Station.”

“Penn Station’s a hub. She could have connected with another train to anywhere in the country. Did she have enough money for a ticket?”

“I…don’t know how much money she had. None of the cash we keep in the house was missing, but we’ve always been very generous with her allowance, and she could have been saving up to…do this. But the last detective agency we retained was very thorough, and they are quite certain she didn’t catch a train out…at least, on the day she left.”

“So you hired this ‘agency,’ and…?”

“Agen
cies,
” he corrected. “Two of them rather strongly suggested we call in the police. The third place we consulted told us about you.”

“Told you what, exactly?”

“They said you were a man who…who could do things they wouldn’t be comfortable doing.”

“What makes you think your daughter is with a pimp, Mr. Preston?”

“What?!”

“You didn’t want to come here,” I said, calmly. “Now that you showed up, you don’t like
being
here. You want to waste your money lying to me, that’s up to you. But there isn’t a PI agency in this town that would have recommended me—they don’t even know I exist.”

He sat there in silence, not denying anything. Back then, NYPD had a Runaway Squad, and I went back a long ways with the best street cop they had, a nectar-voiced Irishman named McGowan. His partner was a thug with so many CCRB complaints against him that the only thing keeping him on the job was that all the complaints came from certified maggots: baby-rapers a specialty. Guy named Morales. So the Commissioner teamed him with McGowan, and, somehow, they meshed into a high-results unit. Word was, if they had partnered Morales with the devil, it would be Satan who played the good cop in tag-team interrogations.

Years later, when McGowan finally retired, Morales went off by himself. He was an old-school street beast, a badge-carrying brute who’d always pick a blackjack over a warrant. He’d been dinosaured to the sidelines because nobody wanted to partner with a bull who knew every china shop in town.

In his eyes, I was always a suspect—which was nothing special for Morales—but I’d saved his life once, and he hated the debt more than he did me. It was Morales who planted the pistol and the bone hand, calling things square in whatever crazy language he used when he talked to himself.

It wasn’t just his feral honor that guaranteed Morales would never change the story he’d made up. When 9/11 hit, he was one of the first cops into the World Trade Center. When his body was recovered from the wreckage, the papers called him a hero. Down here, we know they got the answer right, but had figured it all wrong. Morales had charged into the flames with a semi-auto in one hand, a lead-weighted flashlight in the other, and a throw-down piece in his pocket, like always. The old street roller hadn’t been on any rescue mission; he’d been looking for the bad guys.

Jeremy Preston wasn’t the first parent McGowan had sent my way. He never came right out and
recommended
me, exactly—he just wove my name into one of his long, rambling accounts of the shark tank that was the Port Authority Bus Terminal then, each newly arriving bus discharging chum into the water, the pimps circling.

We’re not talking Iceberg Slim here. The Port Authority trollers were the low end of the scale: polyestered punks with CZ rings and 10K gold, not a Cadillac among them. They didn’t turn a girl out with smooth talk and sweet promises. For that breed, “game” was coat-hanger whips and cigarette burns. And gang rape.

I
lit another cigarette, watched Preston’s derma-glazed face through the bluish smoke. Said, “Well?”

“Look, I don’t
know
for a fact that my daughter is with some…pimp.”

“I understand,” I said. “Just tell me what you
do
know, okay?”

By the time he was done, we’d agreed on a price. And I went hunting.

M
y first rescue had been an accident. One thing I had learned from my last stretch Inside: steal from people who can’t go to the Law. And stick to cash. I had lurked for days, watching for what I thought was a good target. When he made his move, I followed him and the teenager he had plucked off a bus from the Midwest. The derelict building he took her to was a couple of notches below slum, the kind of place where the mailboxes were all wrenched open on check day, and the despair stench had penetrated down to the last molecule. There was no lock on the front door. I followed them up a few flights, listening to the pimp saying something about how this was “just for tonight.”

The top floor was all X-flats—cleared of occupants because the building was waiting on the wrecking ball. The pimp had put his own padlock on the door. I figured he had another one on the inside, so I didn’t wait. I came up fast behind them, shouldered them both into the apartment, and let the pimp see my pistol—a short-barreled .357 Mag—before he could make a move.

“What is this, man?”

“I’m collecting for the Red Cross,” I said. “They take money or blood, your choice.”

“Oh,” he said, visibly relaxing as the message that this was a stickup penetrated. “Look, man, I’m not carrying no real coin, you understand?”

“A major mack like you? Come on, let’s see the roll. And move
slow
—this piece could punch a hole in you the size of a manhole cover.”

The girl stood rooted to the spot, her eyes darting around the vile room, taking in the stained, rotted mattress in one corner, the white hurricane candle in a wide glass jar, the huge boom box, and the word “Prince” spray-painted in red on a nicotine-colored wall.

The pimp reached…slowly…into the side pocket of his slime-green slacks, came out with a fist-sized wad of bills. At a nod from me, he gently tossed it over.

I slipped the rubber band with my left thumb. A Kansas City bankroll: a single hundred on the outside, with a bunch of singles at the core.

“Where’s the rest?” I said, gently.

“Ain’t no ‘rest,’ man. I’m still working on my stake.”

The girl walked over to the closet, head down, as if some instinct told her not to look at my face. She opened the door, gasped, and jumped back. I glanced in her direction. Inside the closet was a single straight chair. Draped over the back were several strands of rope and two pairs of handcuffs. On the seat of the chair was a thick roll of duct tape, and one of those cheap Rambo knives they sold all over Times Square.

“Get the picture?” I said to her, nodding my head at the other item in the closet—a Polaroid camera.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“What?”

But she just kept saying “I’m sorry,” over and over again.

So much for my big score.

“Turn around,” I told the pimp.

“Look, man, you don’t gotta—”

“I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “I’m a professional, just like you. Thought you’d be carrying heavy coin. Now I’ve got to get out of here. So I’m going to put those handcuffs on you. Your friends will get you loose soon as they show up.”

“I ain’t got no—”

“Friends? Yeah, that’s right, you probably don’t. But you’re expecting some company, aren’t you,
Prince
?”

“Shit, man,” he said, resignedly. He turned around, put his hands behind his back.

The Magnum was a heavy little steel ingot in my right hand. I stepped close to him, tipped his floppy hat forward with my left hand. He was still saying “What you—?” as I chopped down at his exposed cervical vertebrae with all my strength. He dropped soundlessly—his head bounced off the wood floor and settled at an angle that looked permanent.

“Come on,” I said to the girl.

She followed me without a word.