“Sure. He knows. Doesn’t matter. The only time his own modem is actually open is that last little thing at the end—when I send to him. He receives it, and the whole thing comes down. Fingering it would be a waste of time.”
“But if you don’t send him a new address. . .?”
“Hmmm,” she said. “I see what you mean. He couldn’t reach me. Unless he could. . .”
“. . . do what I wanted you to do,” I finished for her. “Right?”
“Right. You think he can?”
“I think he will,” I told her.
“How could you possibly—?”
“Because I know who he is now,” I said.
“You want what?” Wolfe laughed. “A list of every Family man hit during the past. . . what did you say, ten years?. . . Sure. I can get that for you. Only the printout wouldn’t fit in the trunk of your car.”
I was standing in the same box I’d been in the last time I’d met with her. Only this time, besides the pistol, the man I didn’t recognize had something else—a honey-colored pit bull on a snap lead. I’d seen that pit before—she scared me more than the gun.
Yeah, I was standing in the same place, all right. And Wolfe was showing me where I stood with her.
“There’s that many?” I asked her.
“It would be ‘that many’ even if you were talking just the metro area,” she said sarcastically. “New York, New Jersey, Connecticut—give me a break. And national, come on!”
“I just thought. . .”
“You know what?” she said, shifting her posture to a more aggressive one, dropping her voice just a fraction. “I think you’re in something way over your head. You think there’s a pattern somewhere, that’s obvious. But the database is so huge, you couldn’t find it without some serious computer. . . . Oh! You found yourself some new friends, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“And I don’t know what you’re doing. But I really only came here to tell you this. We’re done, you and me. You want to know about dead mobsters, ask your pal—he put more of them in the ground than anyone else.”
She turned and walked away. Her crew stayed in place until I did the same.
The sheets on Strega’s bed were silk. The same color as her hair. Her body slid between gleam and shadow, mottled by the candle’s untrustworthy light.
“Tell me the rest,” she whispered at me. “Quick, before I get hungry again.”
“Dead guys. Assassinations, not accidents. And they have to have been on the street when it happened, not in the joint. Murders, okay? Unsolved murders.”
“Wesley did—”
“Forget Wesley,” I said, harsher than I’d meant to. “Listen. I know the list would be too long. You—”
“I’m still working on what you asked me before. You can’t get something like that in—”
“I know. Forget that too. Come here.”
She crawled over to me. Looked down. I shook my head. She dropped hers until her ear was against my mouth.
“This won’t be in any computer,” I told her, speaking soft. “I could do that myself. It has to be a whisper. Dead guys. Mob guys. And they had to have been fucking their own little girls before they—”
“Aaahhh,” she moaned, her fingernails raking my chest. I could feel the blood. She licked it off her talons, kneeling straight up now, witchfire loose and wild in her eyes.
“Not Julio,” I told her softly. “That one’s done, remember? All done.”
She started to cry then. I pulled her down to me, held her against my chest, rubbed her back.
A long time passed.
“I can find out,” she finally said, the steel back in her voice. “But you have to tell me why.”
“You said you’d do anything for—”
“I will do anything for you,” she hissed. “I already have. You’re in me. Forever. I would never let anyone hurt you. But if he’s doing. . . that—killing them—I don’t want to do anything that would—”
“He’s stopped,” I said, sure it was the truth. “And he’s moved on.”
“How do you—”
I pulled her close to me. And, for the first time in all the years I’d known her, I told her some of my secrets.
I spoke to the ice-man the way I always do. In my mind. If I told people that Wesley answered, they’d institutionalize me. But regular people don’t get it. We have our own language, the Children of the Secret. It’s garbled gibberish to anyone else. But that wasn’t my link to Wesley. He was my true brother. We had gene-merged in the crucible of the State system for abused and abandoned kids. Even the grave couldn’t silence him when I reached out.
And when I saw the next message from the killer, I knew Wesley was right.
>>select target<<
is all he sent.
I sat there, smoking a cigarette all the way through, waiting. It got too much for Xyla. “Aren’t you going to answer him?” she finally asked.
“He doesn’t expect an answer,” I told her. “If I put one in right now, he’d get suspicious.”
“I don’t get it,” she said.
“I think I do,” I told her. “Just send this”:
come back. 72 hours.
She typed it in.
“This means I have to leave my same addy up there, you understand that, right?”
“I think I understand it better than you think,” I told her. “Go ahead and nuke your address, girl. My best guess—he’s already found you.”
“You mean. . .?”
“Yeah. I’ll be back. Three days from right now.”
How much did the killer really know? Everyone thought Wesley was a machine, but they had it wrong. Wesley was just. . . focused. Right down to a laser dot. He studied his prey, but he didn’t know anything outside of that. Didn’t matter to him. This guy—this super-killer, how much could he know about Wesley’s jobs? How they worked? The last part of his journal—at least, the last part he’d shown me—said he was going to hunt them too. But. . . “them”? I had to play it like it was a category he hunted, not a group. It was the only thing that made any sense. And if I was right, there’d only be one match.
“He’s gone,” I said.
“You’re. . . sure?”
“Absolutely,” I told Lincoln, scratching behind Pansy’s ear. “He’s well away. No chance of getting caught. He’s a million miles from here.”
“What’s he. . . like?” one of the men in the back of the room asked me.
“That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “You wanted him safe. You got him safe.”
“He’s right.” Nadine’s voice cut into the room. She was seated at the same table, but she’d replaced the lank-haired skinny woman with the same chubby blonde pony girl I’d seen in her little home video. “There hasn’t been a killing for weeks. The cops are just blowing smoke.”
“It changed things, though,” another woman said from across the room. “It’s. . . different now.”
“Sure,” an older man said, “you can walk down Christopher Street without the back of your neck tingling every time you see a crowd of straights now. There hasn’t been a fag-bashing for a good while. They’re scared. He did that. But what makes you think it’s going to last?”
“He showed us the way,” Nadine spoke up. Like she was talking about Jesus. Walking to Mecca. Following the Tao.
“What does that mean?” one of the younger guys asked, the sneer just below the surface.
“They didn’t stop because they saw the light,” Nadine said, an orator’s organ-stop in her voice, speaking to the whole room. “They stopped because they were afraid. They’re still afraid. They’re afraid of him. And now he’s gone. But he doesn’t have to go. . . .”