Another Life

Another Life
A Burke Novel
Andrew Vachss
Pantheon Books, New York

for Pam

R
evenge is like any other religion: There’s always a lot more preaching than there is practicing. And most of that preaching is about what
not
to practice.
“Vengeance is mine” translates to: “It’s not
yours.
” The karma-peddlers will tell you how doing nothing is doing the right thing, reciting, “What goes around comes around” in that heavy-gravity tone reserved for the kind of ancient wisdom you always find in comic books.
Every TV “counselor,” every self-help expert, every latte-slurping guru…they all chant some version of the same mantra: “Revenge never solves anything.”
Their favorite psalm is Forgiveness. And their hymn books are always open to the same page.
Get it? When you crawl away, you’re not being a punk; you’re just letting the cosmos handle your business. Whoever hurt you, they’ll get theirs, don’t worry. Just have a little faith.
Down here, we see it different. We don’t count on karma. But you can count on this: hurt one of us, we’re
all
coming for you.

* * *

A
low-level maggot once got a little taste of power and overdosed on it. He murdered a thirteen-year-old girl after three privileged little weasels ran to him for help.
The boys hadn’t
meant
to kill her; they were good kids who just got a little carried away. All they wanted was to gang-rape the little cock-teaser, take some pictures…teach her what it cost to humiliate people of their status. But when the girl suddenly stopped moving, their freakish plan tumbled out of control.
Terrified, they offered the maggot anything he wanted if he’d dump the body for them.
But when he arrived at the abandoned house where they’d left the girl, he discovered she wasn’t actually dead—passed out from the pain, but still breathing, leaking blood. He touched her throat, found a good, strong pulse. If he’d taken her to the ER, she would have made it.
Instead, he went to work on her. His kind of work.
That little girl lasted a few more minutes. Alive in terror and praying for death.
More than thirty years later, the maggot and the three grownup weasels were blown away. They went out together—never saw it coming.
We got paid to do that.
Now
we’re
paying.

* * *

T
he sniper who had pinned my father to the ground as we were making our getaway is gone, too. An on-target warhead from an RPG had turned the stone-shielded corner he’d been firing from into an incinerator big enough for him and the rest of the hired guns up there with him.
So many died that day. Every time my heart pumps, regret pulses through my bloodstream.
That’s the worst thing about killing certain humans: you can only do it once.

* * *

“W
hat more can we do, mahn? My father is somewhere between this world and the next. He must stay—his
body
must stay—with those people until he comes back to us. If he were only in a real hospital…”
“We’ve been through this,” I told Clarence. “A thousand times, ever since it happened. You think we can, what, call a city ambulance? The Prof’s prints would fall like a cinderblock on an egg. They’d handcuff him to the bed and turn the whole place into a goddamn PBA convention.”
“I could—”
“You can’t do
anything
!” I snapped at him, as sharply as his father would have.
“When
you
were shot—”
“Your father—
my
father, too, remember?—
he
made the call then. And he made the right one. This one isn’t the same; the minute we unhook the Prof from those machines, he’s done. This call was on me to make, and I made it. Now we have to play it out.”
“If any of those doctors—”
Max pulled at the sleeve of Clarence’s jacket, the same dove-gray cashmere he’d been wearing the night we dropped the Prof off—now it was almost black, darkened with fear. When Clarence looked up, the mute Mongolian made the universal gesture of pointing his finger like a pistol and dropping his thumb like a hammer. Then tapped his temple, and made a facial expression that spoke louder than words.
“You think those medical boys don’t fucking
know
that?” I echoed. “They’re not worried about some malpractice claim. They’re running an outlaw operation, and they get paid a fortune to take care of people from our world. That’s what we’re paying so much for: not just the care, the risk—they’re putting a lot more than their licenses on the line, understand? That’s why you never threaten people like them—they’ve heard it all before. It won’t make them work harder. But it might scare them into doing something stupid.”
“But…for what they are charging, even with all the money we took from that last…thing, we will run out by—”
“I know,” I said soothingly. “But don’t worry about it, Clarence. We found a new way to keep earning.”
“Nobody told me—”
“You had no role to play in this one, son,” I said, channeling the Prof. “Not up till now, anyway.”
“Listen to me, sweetheart.” Michelle spoke just above a whisper, her voice the same mystery-blend as her perfume. “Trust me, the word’s out: the Prof’s in the consultant business now. Any serious thief playing for a retirement score would want the Master to check over the plans, make sure there’s no flaw. But they wouldn’t expect a face-to-face. So the Prof’s got a front man for that. Get it?”
“Yes,” the Islander said, looking over at me and nodding. “But how is that going to bring in the kind of money we—?”
“It already is,” I cut him off. “Got more business than we can handle. We’re even ready to have you start working backup, too. If you want.”
Clarence opened his mouth to say something, but Max just shook his head.
Mama crossed the distance from her register at the front to my booth in the back. Looked us all over. Held Clarence with her eyes. Said, “Movie business very good. Those kind of people, spend money like drunks.”
Clarence opened his mouth again, but this time it was Michelle who shut him up. “We’ve got a doctor too, baby. A
script
doctor. Best in the business. The only one who gets his quote
and
a percentage of the gross. Let’s you and me go over there and sit down, okay? Buy your baby sister a drink, and I’ll explain it all to you.”

* * *

T
he apartment was spacious by New York standards. Three bedrooms, two baths. And on a decent West Side block, too.
But this was no luxury co-op. No awning over the front door. No doorman, never mind a concierge. No central air. The elevator only went down—
all
the way down. From a uniformed operator, to push-your-own-damn-buttons, to permanent “Out of Service.”
Even the super was part-time. His one qualification was that he’d
done
time, and his real job was handling complaints with a “you don’t want to go too far with this” look.
Thirty-six units, but only five of them still occupied. The building owner was warehousing the rest, playing stare-down with the remaining owners. No real-estate broker had any of the empty units listed.
Some of the holdouts had been stupid enough to try bribing the super. He introduced them to the Sucker Two-Step. Step one, he takes your money. Step two comes when you run into him again—a blank look, like he’s never seen you before.
When it comes to bribery, citizens are out of their league. Even in this everything-for-sale pesthole of a city, you can’t run to the cops when the guy you greased doesn’t do what you paid him for—that would be like a loan shark suing you for missing a payment.
We paid the super for access to the apartment. Not a bribe: payment for a service. He didn’t try his look on us—it’s our kind he learned it from. He wasn’t a genius, but he was smart enough not to confuse us with citizens.
The cell phone in the right-hand pocket of my jacket vibrated. My clients were on their way up…up the stairs. I nodded to Max. He opened the door just as they were about to push the disconnected buzzer.
The doctor was in.

* * *

T
here were three of them. Nice business suits, nothing too flashy. I knew the headman by rep only. He may have looked like a pita pocket overstuffed with suet, but if crime was a dance, he had the moves of a tango star.
The other two could have been his partners. Or crew members, or undercover cops. The way we had it set up, it didn’t make any difference. Any tape they walked away with would be about as useful as a Vietnam body count.
My worktable was a rough-hewn slab of wood with fold-up legs. I gestured for them to sit wherever they wanted. Canvas director’s chairs were the only option.
Nobody offered to shake hands. As I leaned back, Michelle swiveled over. All they saw was a blonde in a red latex derma-sheath skirt and a padded bra threatening a stretchy top—if they even looked high enough up to see the blonde part. She held out a tray of plain glass ashtrays. The guy to the left of the headman took one, placed it carefully in front of him.
Michelle snake-hipped her way out of the room, making it clear that they’d already experienced the full extent of our hospitality. No minibar in this hotel, and the only room service you could order was already
in
the room.
The headman opened a document case, took out some paper and a chrome pen. He cleared his throat, said:
“Now, the way we’ve got this scripted, the wealthy guy’s seen all the movies, so he wouldn’t rely on any motion-sensor system. He thinks you can blow talcum powder into the room, make all the laser beams show up.” His smile was room-temperature.
I consulted the graph-paper pad in front of me. It was covered in tiny, autistic symbols. “So he’s afraid some gymnast in a leotard—”
“You got it,” the raisin-eyed pile of dough seated across from me agreed. “We’re looking for
realism
here. Remember, this is an indie production; we don’t have a few extra million to waste on special effects. So—what the guy in
our
script does, he keeps the stuff in a bunker.”
“You mean like one of those old-time bomb shelters, or just a safe buried in the ground?”
“Totally fucking nuclear,” the blob said, catching a confirmatory nod from the non-smoker to his right—a solidly built guy in his forties who was either too image-conscious to be saying, “Yeah, boss,” in front of strangers, or an undercover still feeling his way. It had been that guy’s call to Mama’s that set this ride in motion, but he wasn’t the one with the gas money.
“You have him
living
in there?” I asked the boss. “Inside the bunker, I mean?”
“Nah. But he
could,
is the point.”
“You’re saying, in this script, the way it’s set up, all he has to do is make it inside the bunker before the take-away guys get to him, right? Then he could just kick back in the La-Z-Boy, toss some porno into his DVD player, and sip fine wine until the cops show up?”
“Not cops,” the blob said, with an absolute sureness that meant whatever they intended to snatch was something the victim couldn’t report to his insurance company. Straight out of the pro thief’s bible: the best thing to steal is stolen property.
“Cops,
guaranteed,
” I contradicted him. “Sure, a guy with whatever this one’s got stashed away isn’t going to give the Law a chance to see it for themselves. So he’s going to have all kinds of communication equipment in there…probably an underground cable to an Internet connection that you’d have to dig up the whole backyard to find. All he needs to do is go online, click a mouse, and in comes the cavalry. His
own
cavalry.”
“Not a chance,” the headman dismissed my concerns. “Look, unless whatever this guy’s got stashed—that doesn’t matter, we can write it in later—actually gets taken, there’s no movie. We
start
from there, which means he never makes it into the bunker.”
“Get real,” I shot back. “You’re trying to tell me, the kind of neighborhood where you have this one set, people hear an explosion big enough to blast open that bunker, they’re
not
going to be hitting nine-one-one like an old lady in Atlantic City jacking the lever on the slots?”
All three of them nodded without exchanging looks. None of them spoke.
“Bottom line: you need to flip this whole script,” I told them. “When you show the heist team planning the job, they have to be figuring on two things: one, the guy with the stash never makes it into his bunker, and, two,
they
do. This isn’t some safe you’d be cracking, or even a bank vault. Not only would you need a lot more than a few vials of nitro, you’d have to be working outdoors, with no cover. One nosy neighbor and you never even get a chance to blast your way in. And, like I said, even if you could, the place would be surrounded by the time you walked out.”
“Well, what, then?” the blob asked. He wasn’t agitated or annoyed, just expecting to get what he’d paid for. All thieves at his level were practicing Utilitarians: if you had skills they wanted, they had the price…and the patience. To this guy, everything was job-dependent. For some scores, a molecular biologist would be hired help. For this one, he needed a script doctor who wasn’t going to go running to the Guild demanding screen credit.
Life’s a gamble; all that ever changes is the odds. But in my world, there’s no track take-out on the betting pool, and no IRS waiting at the finish line if your horse comes in.
And men like the blob sitting across from me only make one of two bets: fold, or all-in.
“So he doesn’t
live
in the bunker?” I asked, giving him the choice.
The blob went all-in. “He’s crazy, but not that kind of crazy.”
“So it’s all down to timing, then.”
He made an “I’m listening” gesture.
The guy to his left reached into his jacket. I couldn’t see behind him, but I knew a red laser-dot had just blossomed on the back of his neck. Clarence. Positioned around the corner—triangle-braced, a silenced 9mm in his hands. At that distance he could center-punch a microbe.
The guy came out with a single cigarette, lit up, carefully blew the smoke away from me.
My turn. “So the tension-point is, the thieves have got to get to this guy
before
he gets to the bunker. Agreed?”
“Okay, but we’re showing him like one of those nigger bosses. Not here, I mean, like in Africa. Never goes anywhere without a fucking army around him. Not bodyguards, guys who hold rank.”
“Drives an armored car?” I asked, wishing these guys would remember to stay in character, but not all that disappointed. To be disappointed, first you have to be surprised.
“
Gets
driven,” the headman said. “There’s companies who’ll make one for you. Any specs you want: bulletproof glass, armored sides, blast-plate underneath, all that. You end up with a four-ton Caddy or whatever, but, for driving around the city, who cares? But if you blow up the car with him in it, you might never get inside that bunker. That ruins everything. The plot, I mean.”
I closed my eyes for a minute, as if I was working through the script again. Scribbled a few more symbols on my pad.
“What do we know about them?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The ones who go everywhere with the general.”
“How’s that important?” the blob asked, leaning forward with his voice, the way his body would have if it could.
“Well, this isn’t a blank-page script you’re consulting me on. My job is just fixing the ending. If you want me to figure out how to make it work, I have to know what I’m working
with.
”
He glanced at the man to his left. Said: “Let’s say maybe we could show the audience some of their private lives, if we had to.”
I grudgingly gave him a little credit for at least
trying
to stay in character, said, “You’d have to get in pretty deep to make that work.”
“Girlfriend-on-the-side, you’re thinking?”
“No,” I dismissed that nonsense. “Good enough excuse if you need a sex scene, but it won’t work for getting to whatever’s inside that bunker. What we need is their
personalities.
How they got to be where they are. You’re not talking about hired help here. From the way you’ve got it scripted, these are guys he came up with.”
“From the sandbox.”
“And this guy, he’s not a family man.”
“Only thing this guy knows about guineas is that they do nice tile work,” the blob said, grinning. The man on his right tightened his face. Just a touch, but more than I needed to make the diagnosis.
“So the people around this guy,
close
to him, there has to be a way they got there,” I said. “I mean, none of
them
are on top. You said your man was the ace, right? So the guys under him, how did
those
cards get dealt?”
The blob’s face flexed enough to show me he was on the same page.
“We’re not looking for a bent guy we can turn. The way in is to find one who wants to
be
the ace, understand?” I asked, making sure.
“How—?”
“Parallelism,” I said, letting my Hollywood expertise show. “We could split the screen: One side, we show a little military coup, like the one they had in Fiji. On the other side, it’s the same thing, only it’s happening to
your
guy. Nobody’s dressed in uniforms, but we get the same result…total takeover.”
“But
our
guy, he can’t be killed,” the blob said. “Just because a man’s close to the king don’t mean he’s got the keys to the castle.
Keys,
get it?”
I twisted my lips to certify the blob’s cleverness. After all, he was the wordsmith; I was just the man he was hiring to consult on a script-fix project.
“Then it comes down to surveillance,” I said. “Plenty of ways to show that, but it could cost a lot of screen time. Better to add a reach-out.”
“Reach-out means sell-out?”
“More than that,” I told the blob. “The character you’re looking for, money won’t work. What he wants is to
be
the man, not work for him, okay? And when the target’s in his own car, surrounded by his own boys, that’s when he’s most vulnerable.”
“You’re losing me.”
“The plot hinges on what the target keeps in that bunker of his, right?”
“Right.”
“And he built it to be blast-proof?”
The blob nodded.
“He’s the only one who knows how to open it?”
Another nod.
“Okay, then. You have to get to him before he gets inside. That’s the plot-point, like you said—everything works off that. Either this guy’s got some kind of disguised door-opener that’s always with him, or there’s some other way in, like a touchpad code number. Either way, he has to be
made
to give it up, and that could take some time.”
Another nod.
“Okay, picture this: Four men in the car. One’s the boss, the
only
one with the key. We want one of the others, the one who needs to
be
the boss. Find him; make the deal. And then it comes down to this: four get in, two get out.”
“Does it have to be the
driver
who turns?”
“It can be anyone you want,” I said. “Hell, it’s a movie, not real life, so what does it matter? The guy who thinks he’s going to end up being the boss, nobody’s going to pat
him
down, right? And we know the
boss
won’t be doing the driving.
“Your guy makes his move while they’re still parked. Remember, those armored cars, they’ve got blacked-out windows and tons of baffling; he wouldn’t even need a silencer.
“Two quick pops, and the four is down to two. Then the shooter taps his cell phone, and your people move in. One of
your
guys gets in behind the wheel, then both cars take off.
“Once the patsy hands over the boss—the
ex
-boss now, he thinks—you can write your own ending.”