“You figure they wanted you to kill the guys who—?”
“How could they lose? Not only do they close one case, they get a beautiful new felony handed them on a platter, complete with perpetrator. One step closer to that gold shield.”
“I thought I was cynical,” Davidson said.
“You are,” I assured him.
But nothing happened. Nothing changed. There’s a million places to live in this city, but it’s hard to find one off the radar screen. The Mole had done it. Even if you suspected he lived in an underground bunker in a Hunts Point junkyard, you wouldn’t go poking around there to make sure. The Prof used to live in the subways until he hooked up with Clarence. Then they found a crib over in East New York, right off one of the prairies. Bought the whole building, a gray brick eight-flat, for a song and started the rehab. Only they’re never going to have tenants. They offered to let me stay, but they blended into that neighborhood and I didn’t. It wouldn’t take long for somebody to notice.
Plenty of places I could hole up, but not for long. I even called a girl I knew from a few years ago on the off-chance. . . And I scored. She was by herself again, and wanted to have a try. Asked me if I was ready for a commitment. Not hard to lie to her—comes naturally to me, and I hate extortionists anyway—but once she saw the size of my commitment, all hundred and fifty pounds of Pansy, she decided the whole idea was overrated.
I know a lot about junkyards. Fact is, I own one. And Juan Rodriguez, he used to work there. Simple enough scheme: The guy who runs it for me, he writes me a check every two weeks. I cash it, kick back most of it, and I got that Visible Means of Support thing knocked. Being Juan Rodriguez is the same as being John Smith, only it doesn’t trip the IRS alarms, at least not coming out of New York. I protected that identity for years, never risked it doing anything wrong under that name. Always kept up the Social Security, Workman’s Comp. . . everything. Juan Rodriguez wasn’t just a citizen, he was a good citizen.
Such a good citizen, matter of fact, that the guy who runs the junkyard for me made a mistake about him. I dropped by, told him he’d be hiring someone else pretty soon. No big deal. But he got stupid. Told me, after all, it was his name on the title, right? So I gave him a history test. Asked him if maybe he remembered how his name got there. And who I got the place from. And how I got it.
He passed the test.
Now all I needed was a new set of papers, starting from scrap.
I know plenty of people who can make paper. Any kind you want: Passports. Birth certificates. Bearer bonds. Social Security cards. Only problem with them is that they’re merchants. I don’t trust merchants. Today you pitch, tomorrow you catch. Anyone who sells you outlaw stuff is always a risk to sell you if the Man makes the right offer. I never worried about that with the Juan Rodriguez stuff. I’d built it up myself over the years, slow and careful, starting with a dead baby’s birth certificate—a baby who’d be around my age if he’d lived. But I didn’t have time for that now.
Until last year, I didn’t know Wolfe could get paper made. But she’d shown me different, manufacturing a Jew in the background of a dead guy to buy my brother Hercules a ticket into the White Night underground. And she had one credential none of the other paper-makers did—I knew I could trust her.
I could never say why. Not out loud. And never to anyone who wasn’t part of me. But I know I’m not wrong. I’ve known Wolfe since she was a prosecutor. We worked opposite sides of the law then, but sometimes we got close enough to the line to hold hands over it. Never more than that. And never for long.
I guess I. . . I don’t know why I can’t say it different, say the truth: I always wanted her to be with me. But alligators don’t mate with egrets, even if they live right next to each other in the same swamp.
When Wolfe had been chief of City-Wide Special Victims, she was working in a counter-evolutionary world where you could travel faster on your knees than standing up. And if you stood up too long, they took you down. She’d sneered at the firing squad. Everyone on both sides of the line respected her for it.
I never could tell Flood I loved her. She went away from me knowing it, but never hearing me say the words. Women know it, somehow. Before you do. I did tell Belle—it was the last thing she asked for before she left, full of bullets she took for me.
I never told another woman since.
I couldn’t tell Wolfe. But I could call her.
“What?” A man’s voice, not Pepper’s. Not sweet either.
“How you doing, Mick?” I asked.
“What?” he said again, like he hadn’t heard me. I don’t know what Mick does, except it’s something with Wolfe’s crew. I know he’s Pepper’s man, know he’s some kind of fighter. Big guy, good-looking, like an actor. But his eyes are flat and he’s got that ki-alert radiating all the time.
“You know who this is?” I asked.
“No.”
Fine. All right: “It’s Burke. I want to see Wolfe. Can you tell her?”
“Yeah,” he said. And hung up.
I lost almost all my tapes too. Hundreds and hundreds of them, put together over more than a dozen years. Oh, I still had a whole bunch in the Plymouth—I circulated them between my major stash and the car so I always had a fresh batch to listen to—but most were gone forever. I didn’t know how I was going to replace some of them. Judy Henske, that probably hurt the worst. Magic Judy is hard to find on vinyl. And her voice. . . impossible to find anywhere else on earth, period. I had some bootleg stuff of a couple of her live club dates that were just plain unreal.
Ah, fuck it. I know where to get more. But it just. . . hurt, somehow. I mean, I knew the thieving cops would appreciate the cash and the guns they “found” there, but the tapes. . . They were probably already in some Dumpster. Or maybe some techno-geek was patiently listening to every one, hoping for something incriminating. Well, good luck, sucker. You’ll never find anything, but you’ll be in love with Magic Judy by the time you’re through.
Replacing the guns was nothing. I’m not one of those loons who has a favorite piece. When it comes to firearms, I’m strictly a use-it-and-lose-it man. This city’s got some of the toughest gun-control laws in the country. Some of the harshest penalties for dealing drugs, too. And every drug-boy in town packs heat.
Michelle was more upset about the clothes than anything else. “Oh, baby, not your alligator boots? And your beautiful suits, the ones I bought you? And the lovely—”
“It’s all gone, Michelle,” I told her, not insane enough to mention that she’d bought it all with my money. “They got it all. Everything I didn’t have on my back.”
“Well, you know what, baby? That’s really a good omen.”
“Huh?”
“Honey, even with my careful, meticulous shopping, your wardrobe was hopelessly out of date. Now we can start over.”
If there was a God, I would have cursed him.
I tried the area around the Greenpoint riverfront, but even with the HAZARD buoys floating everywhere in the slime that passed for a piece of the East River, the area was lousy with artists and entrepreneurs. Next thing would be a Starbucks on the corner. I kept looking.
The reclaimed swampland out around JFK had too many other operations going, besides the quick-trick motels and the topless joints. Too many warehouses without signs on them, too many rotting big rigs parked together like an elephants’ graveyard.
South Ozone Park was good once, but it’s chop-shop heaven all along Atlantic Avenue, and too many neighborly citizens in the little houses just beyond.