Down Here (21 page)

“From meds?” Michelle asked.

“No, honey,” the Prof told her. “From
reports.
That’s where you tap the vein. You know what it’s worth to a man going before the Parole Board to have a few little changes made to his jacket? Or a guy trying to get into a work-release program? Or—?”

“I get it,” Michelle said, grinning.

“Let me read it to you,” I said, clearing my throat. “‘V71.01. Adult Antisocial Behavior. This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is adult antisocial behavior that is
not
due to a mental disorder, for example, Conduct Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, or an Impulse-Control Disorder. Examples include the behavior of some professional thieves, racketeers, or dealers in illegal substances.’”

“What does that—?”

“Means us,” the Prof cut Michelle’s question off. “Our kind of people.”

“That filthy little maggot isn’t—”

“No,” I said. “He’s not us. He’s not even
like
us. That code isn’t some diagnosis a psychiatrist put on him—that’s what he’s saying about him
self.
What he’s telling the world. He didn’t do the . . . things he did because he was nuts; he did them because he wanted to.

“That Nietzsche thing he told Silver? He did those rapes, hurt those women, took those trophies because he
could.
In his mind, he’s not some sicko; he’s a superman. And the tattoo is his little private joke.”

I handed the photocopied sheets of paper to Max.

“Where he find that book?” Mama asked, pointing at the pages I was holding.

“What I think is, he had a
lot
of therapy, probably when he was very young,” I said. “I’m guessing here; the sister didn’t say anything about it. But a freak like him doesn’t spring into full bloom overnight.

“First, he experiments. I’ll bet he hurt a lot of small animals, set some fires. . . . And when he finds out what certain things do for him, how they make his blood get hot with power . . . he escalates. Until he gets caught.

“His family had money. Not enough money to quash a major felony, but enough to get him sent for ‘treatment’ instead of the juvie joints when he was a kid.”

“So tattoo is big insult?” Mama said.

“Yeah, exactly,” I agreed. “A joke nobody’s supposed to get but him. I don’t know when he got the idea for it, but it’s his way of sneering at the whole idea of him being a sick man. He’s the
opposite.
In his mind, he’s a god.”

Max picked up a pair of chopsticks, held them together in his two fists. He twisted his hands, and the chopsticks splintered like matchsticks.

^“
Y
ou do have a backup plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you wanted to interview him. But if you can’t . . .”

“I already told you. I was working on the book way before this whole business with him came to light. His case wasn’t even part of the proposal.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“But what, Laura? What difference does it make now?”

“I guess I’m just . . . insecure.”

“About what?”

“About . . . us. In my world, people are
always
plotting. You have no idea of all the
crimes
people in business commit every day. Like it was nothing. Or there’s a set of special rules for them. Remember when Bush made that whole speech about ‘corporate ethics’ last year? What a fraud. You think stuff like Enron or WorldCom is an aberration? It’s only the tip. Business is a religion. Probably the only one practiced all over the world.”

“What does that have to do with—?”

“If you want to succeed, you have to plan
very
long-term,” she went on, talking over me. “Tools and research. Research and tools,” she said softly, stroking the rock of her faith for comfort. “You have to be
very
patient. There’s no forgiveness in my world. You only get one chance.”

“Laura . . .”

“You and I met because you wanted something.
That
part is real, I know. What happened, with us, I mean, I don’t know how real
that
is. And now that you’re not going to get to meet my—”

“I’m still here,” I said.

“Yes.”

“There’s never any more than that.”

“Yes there is,” she said, fiercely. “There’s . . . promises.”

“I never made any—”

“That’s exactly it,” she said, taking the handcuffs out from under her pillow.

^“
O
h no,” she said softly, as she climaxed. “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no!”

In the silence after she let go, I thought I heard the bottle tree whisper. But I couldn’t be sure.

^“
S
orry, chief. She doesn’t want you.” Pepper caught herself, quickly added, “Working the case, I mean. There
is
no case, far as we’re concerned. You understand, right?”

“Sure, but—”

“It’s done,” she said, gently. “Let it go.”

^“
I
don’t know who the hell you are, or what you’re talking about, pal. But I can tell you this: don’t ever fucking call me again. Understand?”

Molly, at the other end of a phone call. The dead end.

^“
W
ell, sure, it’s still theoretically open,” Davidson said. “But I’ve got my deal in place with Toby, and my client and I are both certain the result will be as agreed.”

“What about the other rapes he did?”

“You know the statute of limitations on a felony as well as I do,” he said. “Better, I’m sure, given your . . . profession. He could call a press conference, confess to everything, and walk away giggling.”

“He’s already done that,” I said.

“What do you want from me, Burke? Some bullshit about bad karma? We both know how it is. Real life isn’t on
Oprah.
What goes around sometimes
doesn’t
come around. Chalk it up.”

^“
W
e already had this conversation.”

“I found some new—”

“No,” Wolfe said, drawing the line all the way down to the exit wound. “You found something new that proves what we already know, so what? We
already
know Wychek did those rapes. We
already
know I didn’t shoot him. With what Toby Ringer told Davidson—and
I
trust him, even if you don’t—we’re never going to have to prove either one.”

She tapped a cigarette out of her pack. Didn’t offer me one. Snapped her lighter into life before I could move.

“And if Toby’s gone in the tank,
double
so what?” she said, not looking at me. “If they force us anywhere near a trial, we’ll prove
both.
Steamroll those punks in the DA’s Office like fresh asphalt in August.”

I just sat there, silent.

“I’m not going to prison, Burke. It’s over.
Everything’s
over.”

She blew a harsh jet of smoke into the night air. “I appreciate all you did,” she said, looking away. “But there’s no more for you now.”

^“
D
idn’t
that
prove anything to you?” Laura said. She was lying on her stomach, both hands around the big tube of KY she had taken from under the pillow. Before the handcuffs.

“Is that why you did it?”

“Maybe.”

“To prove what, exactly?”

“That I would do things for you. Things I wouldn’t do for anyone else.”

“I think you know,” I said.

“Know what?”

“You know I’d never hurt you. What you said, a while ago, about trust? If you didn’t trust me, you wouldn’t use those—”

“I trust you
now,
” she said, softly. “That first time, I couldn’t know. Not for sure. It was a risk. A chance. I was frightened. But it was time, and I knew it.”

“Time?”

“I always know when it’s time to do something, to make the move,” she said. “That’s my gift. That’s what I do. So that’s me.”

^“
I
’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks or so,” I said, much later that night. Setting the stage for my fadeout.

“Really? To where?”

“Out to the coast. There’s a couple of interviews I need to do for the book. And my so-called agent claims he’s got a couple of meetings set up, with a production company that specializes in TV pilots.”

“You don’t sound very excited about it.”

“I’m not. I’ve had those kind of meetings before. But since I have to be out there anyway . . .”

“You’re here now,” she said, tongue flicking against my chest.

^“
W
hen are you leaving, exactly?” she asked, looking up from a bowl of grains and nuts she was breakfasting on. The sun slanted against the far wall of the kitchen, but it didn’t reach where we were sitting.

“I don’t have a flight yet. Next couple of days or so. I have to pack, make arrangements for coverage at the paper. . . . A trip like this, you never know how it’s going to play out. If I come up with something dynamite, I may just—”

“Did you ever hear of StandaBlok Machine Tools?” she said, stopping me in mid-sentence.

“No. Is it one of your—”

“It was a small operation, not so very far from here. You know the area around Liberty Avenue? Anyway, it’s out of business now. The building they used would be just perfect for a conversion like this one. The only thing is the neighborhood.”

“Sooner or later, there’s no neighborhood in New York that won’t be worth money,” I said, reciting the conventional wisdom.

“That’s what I think, too. But for now it’s just an abandoned building. After vandals broke all the windows, it got boarded up and padlocked.
Tight.
Nobody goes there now.”

“All right,” I said, just to fill the empty space between us.

“The day after tomorrow, I have to go there. Alone. At midnight.”

“What for?”

“To meet my brother,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

W
hat she told me was, Wychek called her at work Monday afternoon. He asked her for a safe place where they could meet. Said he wanted
her
to choose it, after what happened last time.

“That building she told me about? She’s got the key. The way she was talking, I figure she already owns it. Or a piece of it, anyway. Some development deal.

“All Wychek’s got to do is make sure he’s not followed. If he told her the truth—that nobody knows where he is now— shouldn’t be any problem for him.”

“And she wants to just bring you along?” Michelle asked. “Like a little surprise?”

“No. What she wants is just for me to stand by, close. Once she meets him, she’s going to pitch the idea of him doing the interview with me. For the book. If he says ‘okay,’ she’ll call and wave me in.”

“No chance you make that dance, son.”

“That’s true, Prof. But she can’t know that.”

“Why does she do it, then, mahn?”

“She’s gotten more and more . . . I don’t know the word for it. She keeps trying to ‘prove’ something to me. Like if I thought she was for real I’d . . . be with her, I guess.”

“So you think all this cloak-and-dagger is so she can say, ‘I tried, honey’?” Michelle.

“You tell me.”

“Well, she
is
a woman. And having a freak in your family doesn’t make
you
one,” my little sister said. “We all know that song. By heart.”

^“
G
uy down here, boss.”

“Seen him before?”

“Yeah. The lumberjack.”

“Let him pass, Gateman.”

^“
I
’m in.”

“In what, Mick?” I asked.

“What you’re doing,” he said, his glance covering all of us, seated around the poker table.

“It’s over,” I told him. “Like Wolfe said.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You looking to join for the coin?” the Prof asked suspiciously.

“There’s only one thing I care about in all this,” Mick said, eyes just for me. “Same as you.”

Nobody said anything, waiting.

“And I don’t trust the fucking feds,” Mick said. “Same as you.”

T
hursday, 3:22 a.m. The building was two stories of solid brick, standing squat and square, as if daring anyone to ask it to move.

By the time we finished offloading, the Prof had seduced the lock.

We left him just inside the door, cradling his scattergun. I led the way up the stairs, a five-cell flash in one hand, a short-barreled .357 Magnum in the other. Clarence was just behind me, to my right. As soon as we cleared the area, Max and Mick brought up the gear.

Except for a thin film of interior dust, the place was immaculately clean, as if a former tenant had swept up before moving on.

We set up camp on the top floor. Clarence started to unpack methodically. Max and Mick went around making sure we had more than one way out. I took care of setting up observation posts, carefully using a box cutter to make eye-slits in the blackout curtains we hung behind the boarded windows.

“No people, no food, and it’s nice and warm out,” the Prof muttered, looking around. “So the miserable little motherfuckers got business elsewhere.” The Prof hated rats.

By daybreak, we were ready to start sleeping in shifts.

^“
I
say he gets here first,” the Prof whispered to me.

“Michelle put the padlock back in place behind us,” I said. “And only the sister has the key.”

“What time’s the meet?”

“Midnight.”

“I got a century to a dime the cocksucker gets here by eleven-thirty, minimum.”

I was still considering the offer when Max slapped a ten-dollar bill on top of one of the duffel bags.

^“
P
ssst!”

“You got him?”

“Got
somebody,
mahn. This scope makes everything green, but it’s a man, walking.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” Clarence said. “Closing now.”

The Prof snatched Max’s ten and his hundred off the top of the duffel bag in one lightning move. Then he and the Mongol took off downstairs. Mick was already there, waiting.

T
hirteen minutes later.

“You’re not feds,” Wychek said, despite my dark-blue suit, white shirt, and wine-colored tie. If being stripped, handcuffed to a pipe, and surrounded by the men who had choked him into unconsciousness and carried him up the stairs frightened him, it didn’t show on his face.

“Good guess,” I said.

“And you’re not with . . .”

“With who, John?” I said, pleasantly, not a trace of urgency in my voice.

“Oh no,” he said, lips twisting in a stalker’s smile.

“When did you last take your medication, John?”

“Just before I— What difference does that make?”

“You know why I asked,” I said, very softly.

“I don’t—”

“Ssshhh,” I said, soothingly. “We’re already here. You know what that means.”

“If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, John. But we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know who else was coming.”

“She doesn’t have it,” he said, smoothly. “She doesn’t even know where it is.”

“One of those is a lie, John. Maybe,
maybe
it was true that first time, on Forty-ninth. But it’s not true now. Not tonight. So, the way we see it, all we have to do is wait. Soon as she shows up, we won’t need you anymore.”

“The feds know where I am. If anything—”

“You said that already, John. That’s why we took your clothes. To make sure you didn’t have any way to stay in touch.”

Wychek watched me blank-faced, same as he had watched dozens of social workers and therapists and cops and prison guards for a lot of years. His other face only came out under a ski mask.

He hadn’t been carrying a cell phone. No tape recorder, no body mike.

But he had his straight razor. And a roll of duct tape.

I walked around in a little circle, as if I was making up my mind. Finally, said, “You want to know what this is about, John? What it’s really about?”

“Yeah. Because if you think—”

“It’s about money,” I said, moving closer to him. “And you’re going to—”

Clarence stepped into the room, chopped off my speech with a hand gesture. I followed him out of the room, over to where he had an observation slot.

A silver Audi TT convertible pulled up to the front of the building. Its headlights went out. Just as Laura Reinhardt opened her door, I caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the lot.

I gestured to Max and the Prof, pointing two fingers down, forked. They took off.

“Big SUV,” Clarence said, watching through the scope. “Coming on.”

“I’ll cover you from up here,” I said, and went back to where we had Wychek trussed up.

“This is so you don’t hear or see what’s going on,” I said, a doctor explaining a medical procedure to a nervous patient. “Just breathe through your nose,” I told him, very softly.

“Do
not
panic,” I cautioned him, just before I fitted a set of sound-canceling earphones in place. “We’re all going to be busy for a few minutes. You have yourself a seizure now, it’s your last.”

I slapped a couple of turns of duct tape around his mouth, then dropped the black hood over his head, with another quick turn of the tape to hold the earphones in place.

I heard the downstairs door open.

A flashlight blazed downstairs for a half-second. Then it went out.

The SUV was a moving brick, black against the gray night. It came to a shadowed stop about fifty yards from the building. The front doors opened, and a man climbed out of each side. No light went on inside the truck.

“Can you see anyone still inside?” I asked Clarence.

“It looks empty, mahn. But someone could be on the floor.”

“All right. She should be out of the way by now. Go on downstairs. Remember, if there has to be any—”

“I know,” he said, threading the tube silencer into his nine-millimeter.

I
lost sight of the two men just as they entered the building. I moved over to the top of the stairs. Looked down. Shadows inside shadows.

The front door opened. Closed.

A
blast!
of sudden light.

“Freeze, motherfuckers!” the Prof barked.

I heard a harsh grunt. Then the
puffft!
of a silenced handgun.

^“
T
he broad strolls in. Max takes her from behind, same as he did the freak. She goes right out, never saw a thing. We wait for the two guys following her. As soon as they come in, I light them up, give them the word. One raises his hands, the other goes for his steel. Clarence cut loose, and—”

“Where’s the sister now?”

“Sleeping,” the Prof said. “I gave her the hypo the Mole put together. One shot, he said she’ll be out for a few hours. Wake up with a bad headache. Be all fuzzy, too, like coming out of a bad dream. That’s why he needed you to tell him how much she weighs, get the dose perfect.”

“We’ve got two men,” I said. “One in the room next door, one upstairs. No way to know if the guys in the SUV had backup—”

“Not in their truck, they didn’t,” Mick said, telling us he had gone out to make sure.

“—but they both had cells. Don’t know if they’re supposed to call in, how much time we’ve got. . . .”

“Got to pick one and run, son.”

“Yeah, Prof. I know.”

“Which one?”

“Wychek knows where. But the guys who came in after Laura, they know why, I think.”

“We came for the green,” the Prof said, settling it.

T
he man was in his late forties, tall and rangy, with leathery skin. In the soft light from the candle, his eyes were colorless.

“I’m not with them,” he said, in that calm, deliberate voice people use when they’re trying to keep an unstable person calm. “I’m a professional. Freelance, just like you, am I right? No reason for anyone to get wild, now. Just tell me what I have to do to walk out of here, and it’s done.”