Another Life (29 page)

* * *

“W
e found six,” Cyn said. “Certified.”
“Okay, just give me the—”
“Already done,” she said, looking over at Rejji as she spoke. “Three of them haven’t had a customer in months. Two’re still in the hospital; the other was just discharged. The only other one wouldn’t go near an Arab; she only does Nordic.”
I looked a question.
“Nazi torture chamber. The tricks play dress-up while they do her. There’s two more we know of, but we couldn’t reach them. One’s been in Vegas for almost a year; the other one’s not talking.”
“Maybe if I offered her—”
“Too late for that,” Rejji said, on the borderline between making a judgment and not giving a damn.

* * *

“Y
ou must find that child,” Taralyn said. She was looking at me, but speaking to Clarence. “Your father has made remarkable progress, but he is going to need several more weeks of rehab and at least one more refitting before he can even
think
of—”
The Prof wasn’t going to let anyone talk about him like he wasn’t in the room. “Girl, I wanted to slide away, you think I’d tip the play?”
“Mr. Henry—”
“’Sides, you think I’d ever put my own son under the gun?” the old man said, hitting her with a smile that made it impossible to disbelieve him.
If you didn’t know him.

* * *

I
t took a while to get in touch with everyone, but we managed to get together just before midnight. I looked around the table, thinking how some of us were in each other’s life from way back and some of us just knew each other’s back-story. And how none of that made any difference now.
Michelle and me had been together since we were kids. Max hadn’t been born deaf, and after so many years of keeping the vow he made never to speak while he was learning the death arts, he probably couldn’t anymore. I’d been there when he’d told Mama how he lost his hearing. I knew why the Mole hated sunlight, but I was probably the only one.
The Prof had adopted Clarence as he had me, but before the young gunman ever spent any time behind the Walls. Terry knew his own truth, but he’d known his true family longer. His “childhood” had been a dirty little glass bead until Michelle used the telekinesis of love to roll a twenty-ton boulder over it.
Gateman had been in that wheelchair since he was a little boy. His father hadn’t put him in there, but he liked dumping him out of it, especially when he came home drunk.
Nobody knew much of anything about Mama, but her name was no accident. Neither was Flower not being with us that night. She’d been kept out from the start. From
her
start.
“I can do it, boss,” Gateman assured me. “The whole block is shorter than a damn football field, and his place is just about in the middle. I can park myself at the corner. You know, the whole begging-bowl bit—nobody’ll even look at my face. At that distance, I can put one in his eye socket without breaking a sweat. You know I can.”
“Making the shot ain’t the same as getting off the block,” the Prof vetoed. He shifted in his chair, pillows bracing his stump.
We’d only gotten the Prof out after Clarence promised Taralyn we’d bring him back. He’d taken her hand and kissed it, said, “I swear on my love,” and made her look into his eyes.
“I know it is true, then” was all she said.
“I done it before,” Gateman told the Prof. “You know I have.”
“Ain’t no doubt you got the chops,” the old man agreed. “But this ain’t down where we live, Gate. This is rich man’s country. People don’t be going all Ray Charles when somebody gets himself popped off the count. Streets be
jammed,
too. Only way you get out is blast yourself a path. And you got too far to roll, bro.”
“I’d only need to get as far as the van,” Gateman insisted. “We done it before.”
“Not in
that
neighborhood,” I echoed the Prof. “Those car chases through midtown, that’s only in the movies. Nobody has to be chasing you; the regular traffic is a perfect roadblock. Remember, you’re going
crosstown.
There isn’t a getaway man alive who could make that run.”
Michelle opened her cell phone, turned it so the screen was aimed at Gateman, said, “Gotcha!”
“Mom’s right,” Terry said. “Everybody walks around with one of those things. You could be on YouTube before you got ten blocks away.”
That was true. Terry’s words took me back to the freak who told me all about how he had invented “noir vérit锅just before he died. Now it was an epidemic, with “directors” posting their kitten-in-microwave masterpieces on video Web sites, to the delight of creepy-crawly fans all over the world.
One endlessly recycled fave was the prison surveillance tapes of Father John Geoghan being strangled in his cell. The notorious “pedophile priest” had been murdered nine years ago. But the guy accused of doing it demanded a showcase trial…which meant the tapes were part of the discovery evidence the prosecution had to turn over. How that tape got so popular on the Internet is less of a mystery than why so many people keep insisting there’s no such thing as snuff films.
Gateman had picked up some of Rosie’s habits; he wasn’t going to drop the bite. “But what if I—?”
“Listen, brother,” I said. “I wouldn’t care if we could blast him from a spaceship, we can’t have it look like a shooter’s work. We’re building a skyscraper here. We leave out one lousy brick, the whole thing comes down.”
“From what you say, there ain’t but one way,” the Prof said. Argument over.
“But…” Michelle started, then stopped herself. We all looked at her, waiting. “I know you can read, baby,” she said to me. “But that doesn’t mean you can write.”
“I don’t—”
“My girl’s saying it like it is,” the Prof backed her. “Just ’cause you a wizard at catching lies, that don’t put you in the same class at
telling
them.”
“Why would it be a lie?” I asked. Asked them all.
“You have always said—”
“I know, Mole. But how did
I
know?”
Maybe for the first time, Clarence explained something to his father…by saying something to me: “The Beryl woman. Ever since her, you have been…different, mahn.”
“Satchel Paige had it all wrong,” I said, looking at the Prof. “You look back, maybe somebody
is
chasing you. But if you never look back, how can you know?”
“Ain’t no way you could—”
“I know that door’s closed,” I said, admitting out loud that the truth of my childhood was beyond reach, forever. “And I’m not going back. Not even to find it, never mind open it. But what the Mole said was right: I always
thought
I knew. And now…now maybe I’m not so sure.”
“
That’s
the truth to tell, honey,” Michelle said, reaching out to touch my hand.
“First study,
then
teach,” Mama cautioned, pointing at her unreadable eyes.
“I will,” I promised them all.

* * *

“Y
ou recognize my voice?”
“I might,” the man at the other end of the line said, “but I couldn’t put a name to it.”
He wasn’t being cagey, he was saying he’d never told anyone about me. Joel Dryslan, Ph.D., didn’t get to be one of this country’s elite forensic psychologists by reading books; he’d learned a lot of his craft the same place I learned mine. He was a prison shrink for years before he became Chief of Forensic Services for the whole state. After a few years on that job, the climate in Albany caused him to call in sick…. He never came back to work.
“It’s a permanent state of war in here,” he told me once. “We can sometimes negotiate temporary peace treaties, but the one war we’ll never win is Security versus Treatment. Some two-digit-IQ sadist can nullify any decision I make. And he’ll do it just to show who’s boss.”
Today, Dryslan makes more in a few hours than he used to make in a month. He’s for hire, but he’s no whore. Pay him his price, and he’ll take a look for you. But you can’t tell him what to say after he does.
That means hiring him before the other side does isn’t going to shield you, like with a lot of forensic “experts.” You know the kind I mean: The defense hires them, they’ll tell the jury the blood-spatter evidence proves the defendant’s wife must have jumped from the balcony into the empty swimming pool. But if the prosecution is quicker to write the check, that same evidence will prove she was thrown to her death.
In some states, all you need to qualify as sane is to rote-repeat, “It is a sin to kill.” A lifelong history of psychiatric hospitalizations, complex conversations with the voices in your head, being on enough meds to open your own pharmacy—so what? Just throw in the “confession,” like the woman who told the cops she stuffed her baby in the oven “because Satan fears fire.”
Then you bring in an expert guaranteed to label them all “sociopaths.” Translation: they’re not insane; they’re evil. And perfect candidates for the death penalty.
Works the other way, too. You can buy an “expert” who’ll tell an enthralled jury how a human who raped babies for fun and made videos of it for profit was psychiatrically overwhelmed. The poor soul was suffering from a witch’s brew of personality disorders, depersonalization syndrome, and, of course, “pedophilia.” A tormented creature like him should never be sent to prison; what he needed was a highly specialized, tightly structured, secure treatment program. In fact, having researched the matter thoroughly, the expert even knew the perfect place—it had all the latest “modalities,” really tight security, and a recidivism rate lower than his morals.
The defense summation would pound all this home, reminding the jurors that this treatment program wouldn’t cost the State a dime; the defendant’s family stood ready to defray all costs…and compensate the victims, too. Now, wasn’t that the best way to
really
protect society?
Dryslan’s specialty was the effects of solitary confinement on mental health. He was enough of a realist to accept that some humans are too toxic to be at large, even inside a prison, but he’d been around cons long enough to understand that solitary confinement isn’t always about protecting the other inmates.
I’d stumbled across him years ago, when I was hiding out in Oregon. I had to make money, so I took on some work. The trail I’d been following led to a teenage runaway trying to protect her younger sister. That teenager’s best friend turned out to be Dryslan’s daughter.
The two were so close, they’d called themselves the Crow Girls, after the Maida and Zia characters in the magical books of Charles de Lint that so many young searchers adored.
It ended like most of my work does. But not as ugly as what was going on before I stepped out of the night long enough to do the only
good
thing I’m good at.
This time, my call was to a 520 area code, not a 503—it had only taken me a minute to locate Dryslan once the operator told me the first number I’d tried had been disconnected.
Another new experience for me: looking for someone who wasn’t trying to hide.
“I need to talk to you,” I said. “This has
nothing
to do with you or yours, past or present.”
I could feel the change in him even as I spoke. Most people who cross paths with me share the same wish—that it never happens again.
“Professionally?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And it’s not something you could do—?”
“Face-to-face, Doc. But anything else you want, any other conditions: you say it, you got it.”

* * *

T
he flight to Phoenix was a nice, smooth non-stop. I’d always thought of Phoenix as kind of a small town. Maybe it was, but the airport was humongous.
Walking out of baggage claim onto the sidewalk was like stepping out of a meat locker into the Sahara. An ancient, bleached-green BMW Z3 was just pulling up. I opened the door, climbed inside.
Dryslan looked the same: broad-chested, with a gentle smile and empathetic eyes. His handshake conveyed just a hint of the wrestler he’d been in college.
“Ever been to Phoenix before?” he said, by way of greeting.
“Couple of times,” I told him.
“Like it?”
“Long as you don’t put the top down, I’ll probably like it fine. How old is this crate, anyway?”
“You sound like the dealer every time I bring her in for service,” Joel said, grinning, still in love with his toy.
And still driving with an urgency that was all about having fun, not being in a hurry.
“My office is in my house,” he said, when we got on a main road.
“I’ve got a hotel room,” I told him, handing him the paper with my reservation on it.
I’d met his kids. Jenn was a beautiful girl, but so unselfconscious about it that she never fell into the role. A brilliant student, with a deeply caring heart, following her father’s path. His son, Mike, was tough enough to play rugby for entertainment, and walked around exuding a sincerity that even the best con man couldn’t hope to copy. He was in a top MBA program, after working for two years to get real-world experience. I didn’t care what business that kid ended up picking; I was ready to invest.
“Protective” doesn’t get within a thousand miles of how Dryslan was about his family, so I knew what telling me his office was in his home meant. I admired the way he found to get that across without hurting my feelings.
That’s why I’d come. About those.