Safe House (13 page)

Michelle stole whatever she could, and lived the same way. She kept trying do-it-yourself to make things right. Almost destroyed her body with back-alley implants and black-market hormones. Always saying she was going to get it done—be herself. Be
come
herself. “Going to Denmark, honey. Real soon,” she used to tell me every time our paths crossed.

I knew Michelle loved me. She’d proved it too many times to doubt—not with conversation, with the way you prove things in the street. But we were never really family until the night I pulled a little kid away from a pimp in Times Square. That wasn’t the job I was hired for, but I couldn’t just leave the kid there—I owed Hate that much. I was going to get him to a shelter or something, but Michelle took him for herself, right then and there. She made me bring him to the Mole’s junkyard. Her baby. Terry, she named him. And she and the Mole raised him, the two of them. They were still doing it.

It had been a loose network before. Steel mesh ever since. Michelle always told people the AIDS plague drove her off the streets, but that was a lie. It was Terry. Her boy.

It was Terry who finally took her over the line too. Not to Denmark, to Colorado. But she got it done. A citizen might call her a post-op transsexual. To me, she was as much woman as there could be on this earth. My sister. Terry’s mother.

What we all wondered was . . . would she ever be the Mole’s wife?

“You think that’s what they’re playing for?” I asked her. “They want somebody done?”

“What else could it be?” she snapped back at me, angry and impatient with my slowness. “Those two bitches have a problem, right? Some man. Some men. Whatever. They just want it to go away. I know how that feels.”

“You scan it different than Schoolboy does?” the Prof asked. To him Michelle was a kid—that’s the way he saw everyone—but he had an awesome respect for her criminal mind. More than he had for mine, that’s for sure—it wouldn’t take much for him to toss out any analysis I tried to offer.

“This girl—Crystal Beth, what a name, puh-leeze—she went to that little skeeve Porkpie first, didn’t she?” Michelle answered him. “Nobody’d hire Porkpie to middle up a scam. You know how he profiles, like he can get heavy work done. He’s selling muscle, not brains . . . like he’s got any of either.”

“She couldn’t have known that guy was going to go down,” I told Michelle. “Best she could have hoped for was Porkpie would get him fucked up, scare him off. She wasn’t buying a hit, not for five grand.”

“Unless Porkpie was lying,” she put in tartly. “Remember the first rule, honey—deviates never deviate.”

“He wasn’t lying,” I said. “Max was there with me when I talked to him.”

Michelle nodded, dropping the argument. Nobody lied when Max had them in his hands.

“So how about she knows another way?” Michelle proposed.

“Knows what?” I asked her.

“The street-brand, baby. You’ve had the hit-man tag on you ever since . . .”

She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t have to. We’d all been there when it started. Except Clarence. And he was there when it got added to. Once it was a mosaic, a landscape dotted with truth if you knew where to look. Now it was a miasma, a junkyard so full of discards you couldn’t find the truth with a microscope.

But the cops had tried. More than once. In our world, homicide happens . . . so the police are always around. But they never press all that hard. You listen to the PR guys at One Police Plaza, you’d believe the Man takes it just as seriously when someone from our world goes down as they would a citizen.

Sure.

I picked up the hit-man label a long time ago. When some Sicilians got into a range war. One of the dons hired a guy I’d come up with. An ice-man so laser-locked to his work that predators cringed in the shadows every time the whisper-stream passed the word that he was coming.

A man who stood alone, as emotionless as the death he dealt. “Nobody knows where he’s going,” the Prof said once, “but everybody knows where he’s been.”

A man everyone feared. In our world, that passed for respect.

A man I wanted to be, once.

The don double-crossed the ice-man, and the killer did what he was. The Sicilians starting dropping—some alone, some in bunches. Finally, the don came to me. He said he wanted me to talk the killer into a truce. Call it off, go back to the way things had been.

But if I’d gone to him with a message from the don, the killer would have taken me out too.

The don thought he had me in a box, but it was only a bottleneck . . . still a narrow bit of exit road left. I took it. And the don’s life paid the tolls.

But it was too late then. The wheels had come off.

The perfect killer was gone now. He went out with a sheaf of dynamite sticks wrapped in duct tape held high in his cold hand, standing like a homicidal Statue of Liberty just before the blast took him away. He took a whole mess of citizens with him for company. And left a note warning the cops not to follow him into whatever lesser Hell awaited.

I have that note. It was his last gift to me, a Get Out of Jail Free Card, if I played it right. But the only place to play it was from Death Row.

So he’s gone now. And I talk to him sometimes. In my mind. The only place any of us ever say his name.

Wesley.

I knew what Michelle meant. The whisper-stream flows everywhere, a toxic blend of rumor, legend and lies—but it always carries a current of truth too. It said there were only two pro snipers working the city—Wesley and El Cañonero. But El Cañonero only worked for the Independentistas, a man with a cause, a soldier under the flag of Puerto Rican liberation. Wesley worked for whoever paid him. A long time ago, I faced some men in a parking lot. One of them was a
karateka
called Mortay, a death-match fighter who wanted Max. And threatened his baby daughter to bring the Mongolian into the ring. One of the men died in that parking lot, picked off from the nearby rooftop. The whisper-stream said it was Wesley, working for me. It wasn’t. It was El Cañonero, but that’s what the whisper-stream does with the truth.

Crystal Beth might have tapped into it, thought I was the man for the job. Maybe it was me she’d been looking for all along.

“But Herk’s the wild card,” I protested. “He doesn’t run with us.”

“He did,” the Prof reminded me.

“That was Inside,” I told him. “No way that hippie chick has those kind of wires.”

“The other bitch, she knows your business?” the Prof asked.

I didn’t take offense. We don’t talk to outsiders, and I’d had all the lessons, but tight pussy makes loose lips sometimes, and the Prof was within his rights to ask.

“Nothing,” I said. “Zero. I’m a slumming fuck for her, that’s all. But who knows what kind of bullshit she’s cooked up in her head.”

“That’s the place for it, all right,” he agreed.

“What do
you
think, sweetie?” Michelle asked Clarence. That was her way, always. To build us up, all of us, spread the respect. If she hadn’t asked, Clarence would never have volunteered an opinion.

“I do not know,” he said carefully, uncomfortable on center stage. “But it seems to me, if this woman—the one who hired you, my brother—” he said aside to me, “if she somehow knew Hercules would be the one Porkpie would select for the job, she would still have to know it would end . . . as it did. And she could not know this. Nobody could know. It was not the plan. What if Hercules did not have his knife? Or if he was not so quick?”

The young West Indian slid out of the booth, stood on his feet, addressing us like a doctoral candidate at his orals, glad for the chance and nervous at the same time.

“If she was running a . . . If it is murder she wanted, why would she have been so satisfied when you did the work on that other man? Scaring him off,
that
is what she wanted, yes? I believe that is all she asked Porkpie for too.”

“So it was an accident that she grabbed me at Rollo’s?” I asked him.

“You do not go there enough,” he replied, more confident now. “It is not our place. I think, maybe, she was just . . . looking. And when she told the other one—”

“Vyra,” Michelle said. Like you’d say “maggot.”

“Yes, Vyra. When she told her, then this Vyra, she said, maybe, ‘I know that man.’ And then, perhaps, it all came together.”

“So, if Porkpie had passed the test, she would have brought him into it?”

“Ah, I do not know this girl, mahn. But she seems too clever for that. She must know the difference between a contractor and the hired help, yes?”

“Yeah, I think so too.”

“That goes together like barbed wire and panty hose,” Michelle said, venom dripping from her candy tongue. “Little sister don’t think so.”

“Little sister?” Clarence said, puzzled.

“Me, honey,” Michelle cooed at him. “I’m your little sister, aren’t I?”

“I . . . mean, if you—”

“You don’t see me as your
big
sister, do you, baby?” Michelle asked him, sugar-voiced, but the Prof knew better. He shot Clarence a warning glance.

Too late. “Not a sister, no,” Clarence said. “I mean, you know how I love you and respect you. But I always think of you as like my—”

“What?” Michelle asked, still sweet.

Oh Jesus . . . ,
I thought to myself, catching the Prof’s eye.

“Like my auntie. A sister to my—”

If Clarence hadn’t been honed to a lifetime of quickness, the flying bowl of fried rice would have cracked his skull.

I
t took us a good half-hour to get Michelle calmed down. That crazy, all-class broad would catch a bullet for Clarence as casually as she’d touch up her lipstick, but her self-image was baby sister—bossy baby sister, maybe, but not
anybody’s
aunt. While the Prof crooned confection into her ear, I grabbed Clarence and poured some survival truth into his.

I don’t know where he got them at that hour, but the armful of orchids—I warned him not even to
think
about some chump-change Reverend Moon roses—he came back with went a long way toward banking the fire.

Mama watched all this impassively. Treat
her
like she was younger than you and she’d show you where the “chop” in chop suey came from. And she thinks losing your temper is an Occidental thing anyway.

Hours to go yet. No point in leaving—the restaurant was the only number Crystal Beth had. I told Mama I needed Max, then I went to the bank of pay phones and started to work.

“
A
llo?”
A young woman’s voice, distinctive French accent.

“Is Wolfe around?” I asked.

“Pretty late at night to be calling, chief.” Pepper’s voice, the accent gone. She’d recognized me, though. I didn’t know she did voices, but I could see why Wolfe’s crew could use that skill.

“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “I didn’t expect to catch her in. Can I leave word?”

“Sure.”

“Just ask her to call me.”

“Is this hot?”

“No. But it’s not social either.”

“Okeydokey.” She laughed. And hung up.

Last time I saw Pepper she was in Grand Army Plaza dressed in a pair of baggy striped clown pants, teaching a whole pack of little kids some kind of gymnastics. And walking point for Wolfe to set up a meet. Wolfe told me once Pepper was some kind of actress, but I’d never paid much attention. I guess she was, though. A real good one.

A
s soon as I put down the phone, Max was at my shoulder. I hadn’t heard him come up, but that’s nothing new—they don’t call him Max the Silent just because he doesn’t speak. As soon as he finished his soup, we went down to the basement. Mama keeps a long table set out there. “For counting,” she’d explained when I’d first asked her why.

I went through all of it. Slowly. Not because Max couldn’t follow otherwise, but so I was sure I had it straight in my own mind. Max shook his head impatiently, interrupting my hand signals. He got up, went over to a black lacquer cabinet in a dark corner of the basement, opened a drawer and came back with some sheets of cream-colored origami paper. Then he gestured for me to start over.

Every time I came to a name, I’d spell the sound out with my lips. And Max would fold paper. By the time I was done with the first pass, Max had a table-full of distinctive little paper sculptures. He had me say each name again. And for each one he held up one of the sculptures . . . until we were on the same wavelength.

And then he gestured for me to start again.

H
ERCULES

M
E

P
ORKPIE

C
RYSTAL
B
ETH

H
ARRIET

V
YRA

W
OLFE

P
RYCE

Max looked at the neat row he had fashioned. Then looked at me and held up the Vyra sculpture, reached over, and touched my watch.

I held up three fingers on each hand. It was maybe about six when I knew Vyra was in the safehouse.

Max shook his head no hard, looked another question at me.

I didn’t get it. Told him so.

He got up, went upstairs. He was back in a minute, with one of those cheapo calendars insurance agents send to everyone on the planet. He placed it carefully between us, held up the Vyra sculpture in one hand, probed his finger at this month’s calendar page with the other.

“When’s the last time I saw her before tonight?” I asked him, words and gestures together.

He nodded yes.

I showed him. Max switched the order, now placing Vyra first.

Then it was my turn to shake my head no. I made the sign of talking into a telephone, made the gesture for Mama so he’d know the call came in here, and picked up the Hercules sculpture. Then I touched another day on the calendar—one just before when I’d been with Vyra at the hotel. Herk had called the night before and left word about the meet.

Max’s face went into repose. But his hands were busy, fingers flying now. He was creating more sculptures, duplicates of the ones he’d already made, as precise as a cookie-cutter. If I hadn’t seen him do this before, when he made an entire origami chess set for his daughter, Flower, I would have been astounded. Even so, I had to shake my head in wonderment.