Choice of Evil (33 page)

“I know. Forget that too. Come here.”

She crawled over to me. Looked down. I shook my head. She dropped hers until her ear was against my mouth.

“This won’t be in any computer,” I told her, speaking soft. “I could do that myself. It has to be a whisper. Dead guys. Mob guys. And they had to have been fucking their own little girls before they—”

“Aaahhh,” she moaned, her fingernails raking my chest. I could feel the blood. She licked it off her talons, kneeling straight up now, witchfire loose and wild in her eyes.

“Not Julio,” I told her softly. “That one’s done, remember? All done.”

She started to cry then. I pulled her down to me, held her against my chest, rubbed her back.

A long time passed.

“I can find out,” she finally said, the steel back in her voice. “But you have to tell me why.”

“You said you’d do anything for—”

“I
will
do anything for you,” she hissed. “I already have. You’re in me. Forever. I would never let anyone hurt you. But if he’s doing. . . that—killing them—I don’t want to do anything that would—”

“He’s stopped,” I said, sure it was the truth. “And he’s moved on.”

“How do you—”

I pulled her close to me. And, for the first time in all the years I’d known her, I told her some of my secrets.

I
spoke to the ice-man the way I always do. In my mind. If I told people that Wesley answered, they’d institutionalize me. But regular people don’t get it. We have our own language, the Children of the Secret. It’s garbled gibberish to anyone else. But that wasn’t my link to Wesley. He was my true brother. We had gene-merged in the crucible of the State system for abused and abandoned kids. Even the grave couldn’t silence him when I reached out.

And when I saw the next message from the killer, I knew Wesley was right.

>>select target<<

is all he sent.

I sat there, smoking a cigarette all the way through, waiting. It got too much for Xyla. “Aren’t you going to answer him?” she finally asked.

“He doesn’t expect an answer,” I told her. “If I put one in right now, he’d get suspicious.”

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“I think I do,” I told her. “Just send this”:

come back. 72 hours.

She typed it in.

“This means I have to leave my same addy up there, you understand that, right?”

“I think I understand it better than you think,” I told her. “Go ahead and nuke your address, girl. My best guess—he’s already found you.”

“You mean. . .?”

“Yeah. I’ll be back. Three days from right now.”

H
ow much did the killer really know? Everyone thought Wesley was a machine, but they had it wrong. Wesley was just. . . focused. Right down to a laser dot. He studied his prey, but he didn’t know anything outside of that. Didn’t matter to him. This guy—this super-killer, how much could he know about Wesley’s jobs? How they worked? The last part of his journal—at least, the last part he’d shown me—said he was going to hunt them too. But. . . “them”? I had to play it like it was a category he hunted, not a group. It was the only thing that made any sense. And if I was right, there’d only be one match.

“
H
e’s gone,” I said.

“You’re. . . sure?”

“Absolutely,” I told Lincoln, scratching behind Pansy’s ear. “He’s well away. No chance of getting caught. He’s a million miles from here.”

“What’s he. . . like?” one of the men in the back of the room asked me.

“That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “You wanted him safe. You got him safe.”

“He’s right.” Nadine’s voice cut into the room. She was seated at the same table, but she’d replaced the lank-haired skinny woman with the same chubby blonde pony girl I’d seen in her little home video. “There hasn’t been a killing for weeks. The cops are just blowing smoke.”

“It
changed
things, though,” another woman said from across the room. “It’s. . . different now.”

“Sure,” an older man said, “you can walk down Christopher Street without the back of your neck tingling every time you see a crowd of straights now. There hasn’t been a fag-bashing for a good while. They’re scared.
He
did that. But what makes you think it’s going to last?”

“He showed us the way,” Nadine spoke up. Like she was talking about Jesus. Walking to Mecca. Following the Tao.

“What does
that
mean?” one of the younger guys asked, the sneer just below the surface.

“They didn’t stop because they saw the light,” Nadine said, an orator’s organ-stop in her voice, speaking to the whole room. “They stopped because they were afraid. They’re
still
afraid. They’re afraid of
him.
And now he’s gone. But he doesn’t have to go. . . .”

“What are you talking about?” Lincoln demanded.

“Nobody knows who he is, right?” Nadine shot back. “All they have is two things: letters to the newspapers. . . and dead bodies. It’ll be quiet for a while. Maybe a long while, I don’t know. But when they. . . when they start going after us again, well. . . who says
we
can’t write letters to the newspapers?”

“Sure, but they only
printed
the letters because they were authentic,” Lincoln said.

Nadine got to her feet. Eye-swept the room a couple of times to make sure everyone there was riveted to her. She took a deep breath.

“We could make ours authentic too,” she said. Softly. But everyone in the place heard her.

“
T
his is Tracy,” Nadine told me in the alley outside the room where they’d met, a nod of her head indicating the chubby blonde.

“Pleased to meet you,” was all I could think to say.

“Turn around,” Nadine ordered her.

The blonde did it.

Nadine stepped over to the blonde, pushed her until the other girl’s face was right against the wall. Then she reached around the blonde girl’s waist, and did something with her fingers. The blonde girl made some sound, too low for me to understand. Nadine yanked down the blonde girl’s jeans and her underpants in one two-handed pull.

“Stay!” she said.

Pansy stayed too. Watching. She didn’t know what was going on, but the hair on the back of her neck was up.

It was dark in the alley.

“Light one of your cigarettes,” she said to me, just this side of a command.

I did it, wondering why even as the match flared. She snatched it out of my mouth. Looked at the glowing tip. Smiled ugly. “Want some of that?” she said, pointed at the chubby blonde.

“No,” I told her.

“Then go away,” she said, dropping her voice. “I’m going to play with her. Right out here. In public. When I’m done, she’ll carry my brand. Think about that. And remember your promise. I cleared it with the rest of them. You got your money. But you better not be—”

“I’m still working,” I said.

Then I snapped my fingers for Pansy to heel and walked out of the alley.

W
hy did that crazy girl think she could pull me in with sex games? I couldn’t figure it out. Couldn’t understand the cigarette thing either. That wasn’t me. Ever. It always made me. . . I could never get it, never get the part where people yearned for what other people had done to me. But I guess I did get it after all. The freaks, they set things in motion. Sometimes they make more of themselves. Sometimes they create their own hunters. I guess they don’t. . . know. Or care. I never asked one. Except when I was a kid. I remember crying, “Why?” And I remember him laughing.

I never knew what to do with all that hate until Wesley told me. A long time ago. “Fire works.” The ice-boy never played, not even back then. Not even with words.

“
R
occo LaMarca,” Strega whispered to me late the next night.

“You’re sure?”

“He ran a big crew. Mostly in Westchester. The carting industry. But he lived in Connecticut. New Canaan. Very classy. Not even a whisper about him. Called himself Ronald March.”

“And he was—?”

“The cops thought it was a mob hit. An ice pick in the eye. You know what that means—he saw something he shouldn’t have. And they cut his tongue out too. Saying he
said
something about what he saw.”

“But how do you know he’s—?”

“It wasn’t a sanctioned hit. The Family doesn’t know who did it. But they knew about his daughter. He made. . . films of her.”

“For money? Like—?”

“No. Just to. . . show off. His. . . power. I mean, he
said
it was business. Showed the films to a few of the boys who were in that end. You remember Sally Lou?”

Strega, telling me she knew everything. Sally Lou ran the mob’s kiddie-sex business before Times Square felt the Disney steamroller. I love it. Disney cleans up Times Square, but they hire a convicted child molester to direct one of their movies. People protested, but the studio ranted on about giving people another chance. Sure, once it came down to money, all of a sudden, Disney’s got more faith in “rehabilitation” than an NCAA recruiter.

Sally Lou had gone down around the same time Mortay did, all part of that same horror show that cost me my love and launched Wesley on his last rampage.

A lot of thoughts. But all I said to Strega was: “Yeah.”

“Well, Sally Lou was one of the ones who saw it. But LaMarca never turned it over. So Sally Lou, he asked around; like, what was the guy up to, right? And that’s when the word came back. He had a daughter. So they put it together. The filthy slime. He was—”

“I know,” I said, stroking her hair. “What happened to her? To the daughter?”

“Nobody knows,” Strega said.

Meaning she didn’t. But she knew everything else. And her answer to my next question was the last tile dropping into the mosaic. I could read it then, even through the haze of blood.

“
I
t was almost fifteen years ago,” Wolfe said quietly. “September twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-four.”

“I got him now,” I told her.

“You’re really working this?” she asked, disbelief the strongest element in her voice.

“I’m not a good liar,” I lied. “There’s nothing more for you to do. You got paid. We’re square. You think what you want about me. Make your judgments. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.”

“Why ‘maybe’?”

“I think you know,” I told her. “I think you’ve always known. You don’t want. . . me. I got that. I’m doing this for me. The way I do everything, right? For me, that’s what you think. But you had me wrong, and one day you’ll know that. Even if I don’t tell you myself.”

“Burke. . . wait!”

I just kept walking.

“
W
rite it down on a piece of paper,” Xyla told me. “I can’t tell how to spell it from what you’re saying. And what if you’re—”

Her mouth popped open as her computer screen shifted.

>>name?<<

was all it said. And

gutterball felestrone. 50-50

is all she typed back.

“
H
e
did
find me,” Xyla said. “Christ, he’s good. I could never have found
him.”

“I did,” I told her. “Get ready. He’s going to come back. And pretty soon, I think.”

I
guess he wanted to make sure I wouldn’t miss it. Gutterball’s last meal had been in his favorite restaurant, a mob joint deep in what of Little Italy still survived the all-borders Chinatown encroachment. Nobody walked in there and blasted him, but someone had gotten into the kitchen. Gutterball was dead before the EMS ambulance managed to bull its way through the clogged streets. Gutterball always had the same thing: spaghetti and sausage with oregano-laced sauce—gravy, he called it. The newspapers had all that. The autopsy report was made public. The sauce had a little extra spice in it, that night. “Enough ricin to kill a regiment,” the pathologist was quoted as saying. “After the first swallow, he never had a chance.”

“
W
ould it be a true death?” I asked the woman. Her office was jumbled and serene at the same time. She had no desk, just a couple of easy chairs and a couch. No computer screen, not even a file cabinet.

“It. . . could. Do you know if there were any others?”

“No.”

“Do you know—?”

“I told you everything,” I said. “Everything I know. Doc said you’re the best there is. At. . . this stuff.”

She flashed a smile. “This ‘stuff,’ as you call it, is. . . variable. That is, it depends on so many things. From what you told me, all I can say is that it
could
be. But only if the subject felt completely, totally safe.”

“Safe? I don’t get it. I mean—”

“It would be a true death only if the dead person never came back—that is what you’re asking, isn’t it? And I’m giving you the best answer I can. As long as the. . . environment was safe, really truly safe. . . if the. . . original conditions never resurfaced, then, yes, it could be a ‘true death,’ as you put it.”

“
H
ow do you know he’ll—?”

“I don’t,” I told Lorraine. “But I have to be ready in case he does.”

“And you’re sure he’s the one who—?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll get a cot put in here,” she said. “The bathroom’s right through that door over there. You want food, just walk into the kitchen, I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks.”

“I would like to go with you,” Rusty said quietly. I hadn’t even noticed him before he spoke.

“It can’t work like that,” I replied, bowing slightly to show my respect for what he was offering.

“
W
hat kind of dog is that?” Xyla asked me.

“She’s a Neapolitan mastiff,” I told her. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

Pansy ignored me, watching Xyla. I saw a look pass between them. And I recognized it. “You love dogs, don’t you?” I asked Xyla.

“Oh, I
do.
I have a—”

“Yeah. Whatever. Listen, do
not
feed her, understand?”

“I wasn’t gonna—”

“Yeah, you were,” I told her. “It won’t matter. She wouldn’t take food from a stranger anyway.”

“I guess I’m busted,” she said, face reddening. It was a pretty sight in that machine-cold room, like a flower blooming at the base of a prison wall.