Another Life (22 page)

* * *

W
hen I stepped off the elevator, the bodybuilder was waiting for me. I stood where I was, sensing the wall behind me, hoping he’d bull-rush, give me a chance to convert his energy to injury. But he closed the distance between us slowly, one near-tentative step at a time. I watched his eyes. Suddenly he stuck out his hand. Open.
I expected a bonecrusher move, so I just looked blank, giving him nothing.
“Look, buddy,” he said, “that little…thing before. I already forgot it. I hope you have, too. I wasn’t trying—”
“Do I know you?” I said. Not cold, quizzical.
He blinked rapidly a couple of times, twisted his lower lip, turned his back, and walked off. I watched him leave the building, wondering if he was pumped up enough to be waiting around outside.
That’s when I glanced over at the table where Taralyn had been sitting. Pryce motioned me over.

* * *

“I
t’s hard to find good help these days,” he said, as I sat down across from him. “They can follow orders, but you have to use small words. Tell them to fill up the car, you have to make sure they understand the gas goes in the tank, not the backseat.”
“Yeah. Why stay in the closet when it’s got a glass door?”
Pryce’s eyes were veiled. “It’s that obvious?”
“Where’d you find him, in a skinhead compound?”
“Close enough.”
“So he’s not on the books?”
“He thinks he is. But the kind of thinking
he
does…”
“You don’t care who you use, do you?”
“What are you, one of those ‘bushido’ boys? You think killing a man with a sword is more honorable than shooting him in the back? Dead is dead. It’s not the tool; it’s the job. You use whatever works.”
“Like me.”
“Like you. Get over yourself, Burke. You think killing a few vermin makes you an avenging angel?”
“I’m only working for you because—”
“Did I
ask
? I made an offer; you accepted it. You’re a contract man. How you get paid makes no more difference to you than how you get the job done makes to me.”
“I’m
doing
what I was paid to do.”
“I know you are. I’m the one who came to you. After no ransom demand came, I thought there must be another motive, and that you’d know how to find people with that kind of motivation.”
“I still think I do. Only—”
“Only my original idea was no good. So why not just go through the motions? You already got what you wanted. All you promised was to look, and I know you’ve been doing that.”
“Because you crossed the same trail?”
“No,” he said. “Because I know you. No way you
don’t
go all-out on this one. Because you know me, too.”
“Fair enough,” I said. Meaning his analysis, not our bargain. In our world, bargains don’t have to be fair, they just have to be kept.
“So why are you
still
working? What’s left to do, except for this crazy—”
“First of all, I’m
not
all done. I dropped a lot of rocks into a lot of different pools, and the circles are still radiating. I don’t have high hopes, but I’m playing it out until you call me off. I already told you: I don’t think this is a cold-trail case, I think it’s a
no
-trail case.”
“Yeah. I remember. Can you run that down for me, one more time?”
“Because…?”
“Because, even though I think you’re insane, I don’t have anything else. And I
can
make what you want happen. But if I do that, I’ll be playing for higher stakes than I like. In fact, I don’t like playing at all.”
So I spent a couple of hours sitting in that atrium. Trying to convince the shape-shifter why he should step into the light long enough to cast a shadow.

* * *

P
ryce wouldn’t commit; said he had to think it over first. I didn’t like that—the longer we waited, the worse the odds. I needed to find a way to hedge my bet.
There was only one other group that might have what I needed, but I couldn’t find them on my own. And I knew what would happen if I tried.
“Let me just—”
“No,” the Mole said.
“But you know what I’m trying to—”
“They don’t trust you.”
“Don’t trust
me
? I did plenty of jobs with them, and never once—”
“You made
trades
with them,” the underground man said. “And you kept your part of the bargain each time, that’s true.”
“So they know me, right?”
He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Said, “What they know is what they know. What
I
know, that is different. They know what you did. They know what you do. I know
you.
They would not make such a distinction.”
I closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them, nothing had changed.
“Will you ask them
for
me, brother?”
He nodded.

* * *

L
ater that night, we met in his bunker. Terry and Michelle were outside, waiting their turn.
“They won’t do it,” the Mole said.
“Why not?” I asked him, half angry, half puzzled.
“If there was a single cockroach in your house, would you spend every penny you had on a platinum brick to crush it with?”
“Risk versus gain, then? No more than that?”
“No more than that,” he affirmed.
“It was worth a shot,” I told him, shrugging my shoulders to show what I thought my chances had been.
The Mole turned away. He got the joke, but he didn’t think it was all that funny.

* * *

M
ama pointed at the space behind my booth, held up three fingers. One of the four pay phones was ringing. I could never hear any difference between them, but she could.
I picked up the receiver, said, “What?”
“El Cańonero ha ido de nuevo a su hogar.”
The line went dead.

* * *

I
t didn’t matter how I translated the message, it all came out the same. The UGL’s sniper wasn’t around. Maybe he’d gone
jibaro,
disappearing into the hills of Puerto Rico. Maybe he was in prison, or too deep underground to reach. But no maybe about one thing: he wasn’t going to be doing any job for me.
Like with the Mole, even though I knew I didn’t have a chance, I still had to ask. Sometimes you just have to spin the wheel, even if all the numbers but one are double-zeros.

* * *

“Y
ou can’t go on the market for this one, son,” the Prof had told me, and I didn’t argue. Assassins can always be found, if you know where to look. Most don’t, which is why fools who want their spouses removed generally end up hiring undercover cops. Makes for good TV, but not very good results.
I’d known that, just by asking, I was telling Pablo I couldn’t call on Wesley. If the word got around that Burke was looking for a take-out artist, the whisper-stream would hum…and the cloak of protection my ghost brother had wrapped around me when he blew himself into mystery would disappear. Secrets are power, and trust is the path to them. But I never felt the slightest flicker of anxiety—if a man like Pablo would betray me, I was too wrong about the world to want to stay in it.
“I tried the Mole, but his people—”
“What’s in it for them?” the Prof cut to the core. “Forget all that mad-scientist shit, Schoolboy. Two to the head, make him dead. Trick is, without…Wesley, we got to get close, and that’s a high motherfucking wall to climb.”
“If I can’t
promise
to—”
“How many times you got to tell me the same thing, boy? You think I don’t know when a lie won’t fly? You get near enough to make that promise, you got to keep it.”

* * *

“W
ho
is
that, mahn?” Clarence asked, transfixed by Dinah Washington’s “Long John Blues” as it velveted out of the speakers in my workroom.
“That’s Judy Henske’s mother,” I told him. “Listen to this.” I pushed a button, and Magic Judy’s “Oh, You Engineer” came driving through. “See?”
“I…I
do.
Yes. They both have voices you could hear in church, but they are so…”
“They’re
women,
Clarence. Not half-dressed booty-shakers who think whining three octaves on the same syllable makes them divas. Torch singers know that the best sex is always in the promise. Not any promise they’re making, the promise any man who wants to ride a champion filly like them has to
keep,
see?”
“I feel this. In my heart. Like our father says, you never lie to your prize.”
“Taralyn?” I said, knowing Clarence wasn’t making a social call.
“I know only one way to get money,” he said, solemnly. “But…I have, I have
struggled
with this, Burke. I have studied on it, but I find…nothing. How I can prove I am the man for her? The true man?”
“You loved your mother?” Not questioning, opening a door.
“She was my heart,” the once-lost boy said.
“What did she want for you?”
“Not what I became,” he said sorrowfully, thinking of the teenager who had drifted the second his anchor had been pulled loose. “Not that.”
“Are you a man of honor? Do you keep your word?”
“Burke—”
“Would you step between your family and death?”
He gave me one of those “are you insane?” looks.
“You honor your father? And your mother’s memory?”
“Please. You do not—”
“Yeah, I do. It’s
you
that doesn’t, little brother. I’m going to tell you a truth now. Not just make a truthful statement, tell you a
truth.
You know the difference?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, you do. Because you were taught, and you listened. Now listen one more time. Your father is my father. He pulled me to him as he pulled you. So hear me now: the Prof is in terrible pain. Not from bullets, from guilt.”
“But he has done nothing but—”
“He loves you, Clarence. And he knows, deep in his heart, that you were never meant to be one of us.”
“No! You are my—”
“Your family is always going to be your family. But
look
at us. Your sister, Michelle, can she step over some invisible line and turn into a citizen? Can Mama? Max? Me?
“When the Prof found me, I was so crazy with hate that all I wanted was to be Wesley. You never met him, but you know who he was. Who he still is. And that’s what
I
wanted to be.
“All I ever wanted in life was to never be afraid again. I didn’t want to be a good man; I wanted to be a good criminal. I didn’t know the difference between earning respect and building a rep. I just wanted people to say: ‘Don’t fuck with Burke. You don’t want to pay what that’ll cost you.’ See?
“The Prof pulled me off that path. We both love him the same, but I know him like you never could. One day, I don’t know when it was, maybe just a short time ago, he started to count the days. He knows I’m going to carry on when he’s gone. Remember, ‘You carry my name; never bring me shame’? He expects that from you, too. But
not
the same way.”
“I know,” Clarence said, his love-torn eyes on my one good one, telling me he truly did. “My father wants me to be a man who can raise his grandchildren to be…ah, it does not matter. But not outlaws, as we are.”
“Not
all
of us,” I reminded him. “We taught Terry lots of different things, but we hope he never needs to use them. True?”
“It is,” he admitted.
“Yet what have any of us taught Flower? For her, the sky is open. Anytime she walks out the door, her mother worries for her. Immaculata is a mother, and a
true
mother always does this. But Immaculata, she worries about…things that might happen
to
her child, not anything her child might
do.
”
“That is not me,” the Islander said, grimly. “When my father found me, I was already grown. He never forbid me to…live as the rest of us do.”
“It wasn’t the right time yet,” I said.
“So what would my father fear for me
now
? Prison? How could I fear prison, when I have seen my father laugh at death itself? You were there, Burke. You saw it, too.”
“He saw it coming, and he faced it, Clarence. But he didn’t go looking for it.”
“You are saying, now there is one thing my father
does
fear, yes?”
“Yes. Not for himself, for you.”
“I know,” Clarence said. “He didn’t even have to say. And I know that Taralyn is for me, Burke. This was decided in a way I will never understand. Taralyn never knew her own father, just as I. But her mother, she never strayed from her duty. Her daughter is her life’s work. If I am to be worthy of this, I must…”
His voice dissolved. I held my little brother against my chest as he sobbed out his mourning.
“We’ll fix it,” I promised him. “Your family will make it work.”