Down Here (22 page)

“We want the money,” I told him.

“Sure. Give me the book, and you can name your price.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. It would have
been
just like that if that fucking Yusef didn’t have to play with his toys.”

“That’s what took Wychek out the first time?”

“Yeah. Could I have a cigarette?”

The Prof fired one up, held it to the man’s lips. He inhaled gratefully. “Thanks. I’m the same as you, okay? A professional. I get hired, do a job, get paid. Only they don’t trust outsiders, so they sent that degenerate psycho along with me.”

“Yusef?”

“Right.”

“He came with you tonight? He’s the one—?”

“Yeah. Like I said, he’s one of them. You had the drop on us, cold. Stupid asshole must have figured he was going straight to Mecca,” the tall man said, deliberately distancing himself from the dead body at the foot of the stairs. “After what he pulled the first time, I couldn’t believe they’d ever send him again.”

“The first time? You mean with the girl in that apartment on the Lower East Side?”

“Right. Fucking sicko. They told me he hooked her up to a car battery. He kept jolting her, but she kept telling the same story.”

“And later they found out it was the truth.”

“Not from her. Or from the other one, either. Fucking scumbag morons don’t know from interrogation. All they know is torture. It wasn’t until Wychek contacted
them
that they knew for sure.”

“He took the book from her apartment? After he raped her?”

“Right. When she found it was gone, she panicked. I don’t blame her, seeing what happened.”

“She couldn’t tell them anything but the truth.”

“Right. But they didn’t know it
was
the truth until Wychek started holding them up for money. That was when he was in the joint. By then, it was way too late for her. Fucking half-wits outsmarted themselves. They figured, even if they got busted themselves, nobody’d ever think to look for the book in some white girl’s apartment.”

“She was the girlfriend of one of the—?”

“If you mean, was she fucking one of them, yeah, I guess. But that wasn’t why they let her hold the book. She was one of them. One of those rich little ‘revolutionaries,’ you know what I mean? Like shopping isn’t enough of a thrill for them anymore, so they need to go liberate the downtrodden masses.”

The contempt in his voice invited me to join him, but I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to fill the silence. Maybe me holding Wychek’s straight razor helped.

“At first, the little weasel didn’t want that much,” the mercenary said. “I handled everything for them. I was the bridge man to get him that protection contract.”

“From the Brotherhood.”

“Right. You know what happened next. Fucking Wychek steps it up. He wants a lawyer. Okay. Still within budget. And by then they knew he hadn’t turned the book over to anyone. So they figured, Wychek gets out, they can deal with him.

“He gets out, all right. Only what he wants is a
lot
of money. Now, these sand nig—” He pulled himself up short, segued into—“assholes, they
got
the money,” without missing a beat. “They got all
kinds
of money. But instead of just paying him, they decide to get cute.

“Yusef’s got this little pistol. A twenty-five. Custom job. Between the suppressor and the reduced-powder hand-loads, it
looked
bad enough, but it wouldn’t kill a fucking cockroach. Yusef promises them, no electricity this time. He’ll use fear. Figures, he puts a couple of rounds into Wychek, it won’t kill him, but it’ll scare the shit out of him, make him give up the book.

“And that’s what Yusef does. He pops Wychek a couple of times. Then he puts the piece right between Wychek’s eyes, tells him ‘Last chance,’ and . . .”

“Wychek goes out.”

“Yeah. Fucking Arab assholes. Yusef swore Wychek didn’t have the book on him. Stupid amateur. He was too busy searching the body to check and see if Wychek was even still breathing.”

The tall man took another hit off the cigarette the Prof was holding for him. “After that, they’re in a panic,” he said. “In case Wychek’s got backup—you know, someone he left it with. But the book never surfaces, so they start to breathe easy.

“All of a sudden, there’s that story in the papers. That Wychek didn’t die. And they got this woman charged with shooting him. But Wychek’s supposed to be in a coma, and they’re not worried about him talking. Then, a couple of weeks later—bang!—they get
another
call. Wychek himself. He’s out of the coma. And he
still
wants to sell them the book. But now, behind what happened, he wants the money in front.”

I didn’t say anything, watching the play of candlelight on the razor’s edge underline the reality of his situation.

“They figure,
pay
him, okay?” the tall man said. “But they also figure he makes copies, right?”

“I would.”

“Sure. Look,
you
got the book now. And
you’re
not some sick-fuck amateur, like him. I could get them to go a flat million, for real. All cash. Or gold, if you want it that way. Any drop you say.”

“Then I’m in the same place he is,” I said. “On the spot. And I don’t even know who’d be looking for me.”

“If you’d ever looked in the book, you’d know, man. Those camel-jockeys put it
all
in there. Names, addresses, phone numbers, codes . . . the whole thing. Most of them are still in place. Once they realized Wychek wasn’t going to do anything but hold them up for money, they got cocky. They’re sitting ducks, man. One call, you could take them all down,” he said. “They
have
to pay.”

The tall man was reciting his credentials. A mercenary to his core, keeping it real. One man-for-hire to another. Whatever was in the book he was talking about, his own name wouldn’t be. In the sociopath’s moral compass, true north is always in his mirror.

“We understand each other, right?” the tall man said. “I’m the same as you.”

I looked over to the Prof. He shook his head.

^“
W
e’re a lot smarter than the Arabs were,” I told Wychek. “If we wanted, we could keep you alive a
long
time. Long enough for you to tell us whatever we need.”

I deliberately stepped back a couple of paces, to lower the threat-level.

“But I got a better deal for you,” I said. “Fifty-fifty. That’s fair. Come on. You should have hired people like us in the first place. You know what happens if you go anywhere near those psychos yourself. This way, we collect the money for you, split it down the middle. What do you say?”

“How do I know I can trust you?” he asked, eyebrows raised above his reptile eyes.

“You can trust us to hurt you
bad,
if you make us go that way. Go the right way and you walk, with half of the score. Call it a commission.”

He didn’t say anything.

“We don’t have much time,” Mick said to me, tapping his wristwatch.

“Right,” I said, catching his rhythm. “We’re up against the clock now,” I told Wychek. “So the way it works is this: no answer from you is a ‘no’ answer, understand?”

I started counting inside my head. I was up to seven when he let out a long, thin breath. “My sister’s bringing it,” he said. “It was in a safe-deposit box. Only has her name on it. Her married name; not mine. I told her to go and clean out the box.

“She’s bringing me my . . . other stuff in a suitcase. But the little book, you’d never find it,” he said, twisting his lips into something like a smile.

“Just tell us—”

“I ordered her to carry it in her cunt,” Wychek said. “In a Ziploc. She knows how to do it. As soon as she gets here, just bring her to me and I’ll—”

I
drove Laura Reinhardt’s Audi back to her place. My cloned card opened the gate. I put her over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry and took the stairs. Moving slowly, the .357 in one hand.

When she woke up, she would find herself in her own bed. Alone.

I looked down at her. Feeling . . . I wasn’t sure what.

“I never meant to hurt you, Laura,” I whispered, gently adjusting the blanket, touching her body for the last time.

The book had been where Wychek had promised. Boasted. “You were just another casualty,” I said. “That’s the way it is down here. The way it has to be. I’m sorry.”

I kissed her beneath one drug-closed eye. And went out the way I’d come in.

T
he newspapers said three bodies had been discovered inside a Ford Explorer in the swampland near JFK Airport. All three were charred beyond recognition. The Mole’s package would have been enough on its own; but when the fire hit the gas tank, the whole vehicle had just about vaporized. The police said it was an obvious gangland hit, a “message” of some kind. The Queens DA promised that those responsible would get the maximum sentence.

Wolfe probably never even saw the papers. She had been somewhere off the Maine coast for the past few days. On a little sailboat, with Pepper and Bruiser.

Pepper had made all the arrangements. Used Wolfe’s credit card to rent the sailboat. And the car that they drove up in. And the motel where they stayed.

Pepper’s a real friendly girl. Wolfe’s mostly standoffish. But lots of people saw them. Pepper had some of them take their pictures, the three of them together, for souvenirs of their vacation.

Whenever the coroner’s office got around to doing the autopsy, all they would have to work with was bones. But if they looked close enough, they would find three .25-caliber slugs rattling around in whatever was left of Wychek’s skull.

^“
Y
ou know what was in what you gave us?” the man asked. I knew him only as Pryce, and I hadn’t seen him in years. Not since the last-minute abortion of a plot to blow up Federal Plaza by a “leaderless cell” out of the White Night underground.

We had planted my brother Hercules in that cell. For him, it was that or go back Inside, forever.

They had ringed the downtown building that housed everything they hated—from the IRS to the FBI—with trucks stuffed full of enough explosives to level the ground down to zero. The drivers thought the plan was for them to set the timers and run, but the boss—hiding in the van outside the blast zone—held the real detonator. He was still holding it when a close-up blast from a girl he thought was a hooker shattered his neurons.

The pure-white sheep were still in their trucks when Pryce’s crew went into action. A surgical strike. Only one was left at the end. And when he was clued into what the
real
plan had been, he sang a canary aria that thinned the rest of their herd, big-time.

Hercules walked away. I don’t know where he is now. But I know where he’s not.

The last time I saw Pryce, he was holding out his hand for me to shake. “I’m gone,” he said quietly. “None of the numbers you have for me will be any good after today. And I won’t have this face much longer, either.”

I took his hand, wondering if the webbed fingers would disappear, too. Watched the muscle jump under his eye. I’d know that one again.

“I’m gone, too,” I had promised him.

If my new face threw him, it didn’t show on
his
new face. The fingers of his hands were still webbed. The muscle still jumped under his eye. I wondered what he still saw in me.

“I couldn’t make any sense out of it,” I lied. “Just enough to know you’d be interested.”

“It was all pre-Nine/Eleven stuff,” he said. “There were a hell of a lot more people involved than anyone ever imagined. We’ve been making arrests like there was no tomorrow. True-believers and freelancers, they’re all going down.”

“It’s hard to think of—”

“What, Americans working for them? You know the kind of money they’re throwing around? The little princes learned from what happened to the Shah. They eat peacock tongues off gold plates while the rest of their country dies of malnutrition. All the secret police in the world won’t keep them safe from their own people. They know they can’t stay on their thrones unless they provide a shunt for all the pressure building up, a bleed-valve for all the anger and hate.”

Pryce shifted posture, as if his spine hurt, but his pale eyes stayed chemical-cold. “You think those people wiring up their own children and sending them into crowded markets in Israel are revolutionaries? Wake up. They’re fucking flesh-peddlers, selling their kids for the bounty. It’s the most lucrative form of child labor ever invented. You know what the bounty is up to now? Fifty grand. Fifty thousand dollars, for people who don’t know what an indoor toilet is. For people whose
other
kids are going to grow up to be cannon fodder, anyway. The car-bombers, the one-way pilots, the . . . For
all
of them, who’s putting up the money? Not the terrorists themselves, my friend. The little princes who finance them.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I?

“It’s been more than two years since the World Trade Center,” Pryce said, softly. “I guess the scumbags thought they were safe in their little sleeper-cells. They knew, if we’d had that book, we would have rounded them up a long time ago. So, therefore, we
didn’t
have it, see?”

“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “And the case against Wolfe—”

“It’s gone,” he assured me. “And it’s never coming back. One of the bodies in that truck they found out in Queens? It was Wychek.”

“Really?”

“Really,” he said, no expression on his new face. “That book, it was what he was holding over . . . the agency. That’s why they gave him—”

“I don’t care.”

“But if you got the book from . . . ?”

“I didn’t get the book from him,” I said. “And that’s the truth.”

“Why did you just hand it over?” Pryce asked me, his eyes everyplace but on mine. “You had to have some idea of what it could be worth. You’re a merc yourself. How come you didn’t try to make some kind of a deal? When you reached out for me, I thought that was what you were angling for.”

“It’s not true, what they say,” I told him. “You know, that everyone’s got a price. I know people like that. I was raised with them. I’ll never be a citizen. But I’ll never be them, either.”