Safe House (32 page)

That’s where they found his body, burned to a crisp. If he’d screamed, nobody had heard.

H
erk would die for me.

He was my brother.

My brother was in a box, not me.

But my family
is
me. My brother was in danger, and I was afraid. For him, for me. Same thing.

I had my old partner back. Fear was in me, alive.

And it would keep my brother that way too.

I guess I’ll never qualify as a sociopath. But you don’t have to be a sociopath to act like one.

I started to plot.

“Are you okay?” Crystal Beth asked me again. “You keep . . . going away.”

“I’m back now,” I told her.

I
n this city, some of the rats have wings. There’s parts of Brooklyn where pigeon-racing is a bigger sport than baseball. And if you’re tired of having your house covered in pigeon shit, professional exterminators will lay a covering on your roof to solve the problem. It’s really a carpet of tiny little face-up nails—pigeons can’t land on it.

But starlings live in this city too, and they need places to roost. For their tribe to survive. So what they do is they carefully gather twigs and paper and other stuff, drop it on the carpet of nails and then stand on
that.

I
don’t know how they do it in other countries, but in America, people call themselves “friends” and it means about as much as when they sign their letters “Love.”
All
their letters.

Down here, it’s different. I have no friends. There’s people I know, people I wouldn’t hurt if I could help it. There’s people I like, and maybe they like me. But it really comes down to Us, Them . . . and non-combatants.

Us
is the deepest blood of all. And it only takes volunteers.

In your world, you ask a friend to get something for you, he’d probably ask what you wanted it for. And then he might say yes and he might say no.

When I asked Clarence to get something for me, he didn’t ask me what I wanted it for.

And he didn’t just say he’d get it for me—he asked if he could use it himself.

“
W
hat’s the point?” Pryce asked.

“I don’t want to say on the phone. Especially without a land-line,” I told him.

“You want to meet, I can do that. But why does . . . my friend have to be there too?”

“I learned something,” I said. “It could change the game, understand? Change everything.”

“I still don’t—”

“Change
everything,
” I said, letting an organ-stop of pressure into my voice.

He was silent for a minute, but the cellular’s hum told me he was still on the line. “The last time we met, it was all yours,” he finally said. “This time, it has to be mine.”

“Time and place,” I said. “You call it.”

“I can’t just reach out and—”

“When you have it, let me know,” I said. “But there isn’t a lot of time.”

“
Y
ou trust me?” I asked Hercules in the bedroom of Vyra’s hotel suite.

“All the way, brother,” he said, no hesitation.

“Up to now, they been the players, we been the game, got it?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna change the game,” I told him.

T
wo days later. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Rain banging against Crystal Beth’s dark window.

“You know where River Street is?” Pryce’s voice, over the cell phone.

“What borough?”

“Brooklyn.”

“I can find it,” I told him. Lying. I know River Street. It only runs for a couple of blocks, parallel to Kent Avenue, right off where the East River flows under the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Go there now,” he said. “You’ll see my car parked.”

“I’m moving,” I promised.

“
A
re you inside?” I asked Vyra. Meaning: Are you in the suite, not the street?

“Yes.” Her voice over the cell phone was clipped, precise. Not like her.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Your car is there?”

“Yes.”

“Do this now. You
both
meet me at the Butcher Block. Now.”

“I don’t know where—”

“Your friend does. Now.”

I cut the connection.

I
spotted the burgundy Mercedes 600SL coupe coming down the block, moving slow. I stepped out so they could see me. “Get in my car,” I told Hercules.

“What’s going—?”

“Tell you later,” I cut Vyra off. “Go back to the hotel.
Stay
there, girl, no matter what. If you don’t hear anything in a couple of hours, call the number you have for me. Tell whoever answers that I went to meet Pryce. And I didn’t come back.”

“Why does Hercules have to—?”

“Not now,” I said, turning my back on her and moving off to the Plymouth.

“
I
t’s gotta be this way, huh?” Herk asked me.

I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, heading toward Queens. Exited at Metropolitan Avenue and swung back toward Brooklyn.

“Yeah. When you play cards, the ace is boss, right?”

“Sure.”

“We need the king to be boss, Herk.”

He nodded soberly, watching the miserable weather. The sky was turning prison-gray.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“Vyra. Are you . . . like, with her?”

“With her? Like I’m with you? No. She’s not one of—”

“Nah, I don’t mean that. I never say things like I mean them. I mean, I say them straight, but they don’t come out the way I’m thinking. You understand?”

“Yeah, I do. What do you want to know?”

“You and her. She was . . . like your girlfriend, right?”

“No. She was never my girlfriend. We . . . got together once in a while. That’s all.”

“You like her?”

“I don’t know what I think about her. Never thought about it at all, I guess.”

“I like her.”

“You mean you’d like to fuck her,” saying it bluntly to take the edges off.

“Nah. I mean . . . I would. I mean . . . I already . . . Burke, I really like her. She’s real smart. And real sweet. I can talk to her about things.”

“Like what? Shoes?”

“Man, you don’t know her. She’s really a . . . good person.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means: okay. Whatever you want to do, it’s up to you. But, Herk . . .”

“What?”

“She’s got herself a real good gig where she is, you know what I’m saying?”

“Her husband? He ain’t—”

“He’s rich. Major-league rich. Remember what the Prof told us about women once? ‘Some play, some stay.’ Vyra, she’s a player, all right?”

“You don’t know her,” the big man said, sullen and stubborn.

I shrugged my shoulders, concentrating. It wasn’t time to worry about Herk being such a sap—we were a couple of blocks from River Street.

T
he white Taurus was parked on the street. No other car was close, but the block wasn’t deserted: People walking around, maybe from the change-of-shift at some of the nearby factories, maybe locals. Cars crawled by too.

I pulled in behind, leaving myself room enough to drive away without backing up first. “Let’s do it,” I said to Hercules.

Pryce must have been watching us in the rearview mirror. The back doors of the sedan popped open as we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce put his right arm along the back of the seat, turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead.

“All right, let’s hear it,” Pryce said.

“I want Herk to have his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”

“That wasn’t the—”

“That’s the deal now,” I said. “I got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together.”

“You can’t expect to have that sort of deal in front,” Pryce said in an annoyed tone. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time.”

“I think Lothar’s
already
taken care of.”

“That’s different,” Pryce said in the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”

“So’s Herk now.”

“But they don’t
need
him,” Pryce said in a patient voice. “They don’t even know about him yet.”

“But you can do it?” I asked him. “You got that much juice with the feds?”

“Guaranteed,” he said. “But what does this have to do with Lothar?”

“How do I know you’re going to come through for Hercules?” I said, ignoring his question.

“I’ve done what you wanted, haven’t I? You’re just going to have to trust me.”

I sat there quietly as a woman trundled past, pulling one of those little grocery carts behind her. Then I took out the fat tube of steel Clarence had gotten for me, said “Lothar?” and, when he turned sideways to listen, put a nine-millimeter slug in his temple.

It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.

“You got it wrong,” I told Pryce. “You’re going to have to trust
me.
”

L
othar’s head slumped forward, his body held in place by his seatbelt. I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him backward so it looked like he was just sitting there. There was no blood, just a round little black dot on his temple—the opposite of a birthmark. Some of the powder had been removed from the cartridge to keep the sound down—the bullet was still somewhere in Lothar’s brain.

“You—”

Pryce cut himself off, out of words.

I wasn’t. “Now we’re gonna find out,” I told him, watching his hands in case we had to do him too. If it came to that, Hercules would have to snap his neck from behind—I didn’t have another bullet. Clarence’s connection made custom pieces—this one was a one-shot derringer with a thick core of silencing baffles. “Look,” I said, my voice as calm as a Zen rock garden, “Lothar was stalking his wife. That’s a fact, well documented. There’s an Order of Protection. You know that too. Well, what happened was that he got spotted breaking into his wife’s house. She isn’t there anymore, but he didn’t know that. He had implements with him—handcuffs, duct tape, like that. He was gonna kill his wife and kidnap the baby. Or both of them. Who knows? The cops came on the scene, and Lothar decided to shoot it out. Gunfire was exchanged. There’s the result, sitting right next to you. That’s the story that needs to getin the papers. So the others will see what happened. It won’t surprise them either—they knew Lothar was a torture-sex freak with a major hate for his wife. Okay, that leaves Herk. He’s your inside man now. And he needs that immunity. Or the faucet gets turned off.”

“You’re insane,” Pryce said, looking through the windshield. The street was quiet.

“People could argue about that,” I told him. “Nobody’s gonna argue about Lothar being dead.”

“You expect me to drive around with a dead body and—”

“I don’t care what you do. I know people can’t see through these windows from outside. You want cover, I’ll drive point until you get clear. To wherever you want—we can stay linked on the cellulars. But I don’t think you want me to see where you’re going.

“It’s time to prove,” I told him. “If you’re the real thing, if you’re down with ZOG, you can do this. If you’re not, it’s all over. You got no more cards to play. You thought you knew me. Now you do. You take down Crystal Beth’s network, you dime out Vyra to her husband, you turn Porkpie loose on Hercules, you’re done, pal. You’ll never find all of us. And one of us will find you.”

“Get out of the car,” he said in a tight, controlled voice. “Get out now. I’ll call you.”

We watched the white Taurus drive away. Smooth and steady.

I
crossed the bridge into Manhattan. Pulled up to a deli on Delancey. A Latino in an old army field jacket was leaning against the wall, just out of the rain. He walked over to the Plymouth. Herk rolled down his window. The guy stuck his head inside, nodded at me. He went into the deli, came back with a paper bag full of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of apple juice. I glove-handed him the empty, wiped-down steel tube and five one-hundred-dollar bills. He pocketed both and walked off.

H
erk dialed Vyra from a pay phone on the street. Told her he’d be there soon.

Back in the car, he turned to me. “Burke, I’m with you, okay? No matter what. I mean, I don’t gotta understand why—”

“You know what happens when a raccoon gets his leg caught in one of those steel traps, Herk? You know what he’s got to do, he wants to live?”

“Bite the leg off?” the big man said.

“Yeah. There’s two kinds of raccoons get caught in those traps. The ones with balls enough to do what they gotta do. And dead ones. A bitch raccoon gets in heat, she wants a stud that’s gonna give her the strongest babies, understand? You know what she looks for? Not the biggest raccoon. Not the prettiest one either. A smart bitch, she looks for one with three legs.”

“I get it, bro. Okay, we got three legs now. I’m in. But . . . we got a problem. I think, anyway.”

“What?”

“There’s a meeting. Tonight.”

“Damn. Why didn’t you—?”

“I forgot. Until just now.”

“Jesus, Herk. Even if Pryce goes for it, he can’t make it happen right now. He’s gonna need a day or so, minimum. The best we can hope for is the newspaper story. I thought we’d watch—he makes that happen, I believe he can do the immunity thing. And then I was going to have this lawyer I hired go in and tighten that up for you. But if you go to that meeting and Lothar isn’t there . . .”

“He wasn’t
supposed
to be there, right?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, he’s supposed to be stalking his wife, right? And he gets smoked doing it, okay? No way I know about that. Or any of
them
either. Unless it’s on the news. Why shouldn’t I just go on? It ain’t like me and him was supposed to be cut-buddies anyway.”

“Herk, that’s
if
Pryce goes along. That’s
if
he can do it even if he wants to. That’s
if
he hasn’t already decided to cut his losses and down the whole fucking crew. If you know about the meeting tonight, Lothar did too. And he probably told Pryce.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”