Another Life (3 page)

* * *

The 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 Herk.
Pryce must have been watching—the back doors of the sedan popped open as we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead, as if the windshield held vital secrets.
“All right, let’s hear this big emergency of yours,” Pryce half-sighed.
“I want Herk to get his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”
“That wasn’t the—”
“That’s the deal
now,”
I said. “I’ve got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together. Probably take less than an hour.”
“You can’t expect to have that sort of payment in front,” Pryce said, annoyed at my mulishness. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time. As we
agreed.”
“Me, I think Lothar’s already been taken care of.”
“That’s different,” Pryce lied, switching to the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”
“So’s Herk, now.”
“But my…employers don’t
need
him,” Pryce said, in the patient voice you use on a slow student. “They don’t even know he exists yet.”
“How do I know you’re going to come through?”
“I’ve done everything I promised so far, 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 a thick tube of baffled steel, said, “Lothar?” When he turned sideways to listen, I put a slug in his temple.
It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.
“You got it wrong,” I told Pryce, as Lothar slumped over. “You’re going to have to trust
me.”
Lothar’s head lolled forward, his body held in place by the seatbelt. I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him back so it looked like he was just sitting there. There was no blood, just a
round little black dot on his temple—a reverse birthmark. Some of the powder had been removed from the cartridge to make it subsonic; the slug was still somewhere in Lothar’s diseased 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 he moved wrong. If it came to that, Herk would have to snap his neck from behind—the piece I’d used couldn’t be reloaded.
“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 even an Order of Protection; you know that, too. Now,
here’s
what happened:
“Lothar was spotted breaking into his wife’s house. She isn’t there anymore, but he couldn’t have known that. Lothar had all his freak-tools with him: handcuffs, duct tape…. He was going to kill his wife and kidnap the baby. But first he was going to teach that race-traitor bitch a lesson.
“Nine-one-one goes off. Luckily, a sector car’s only a few blocks from the house. Soon as the cops roll up, Lothar knows he’s done. Decides to shoot it out. Gunfire’s exchanged.
“The result of that is sitting right next to you. Just add a few more rounds to the body. Use different guns—that way, more hero cops can get their medals. And be sure to blow away a chunk of his head.
“That’s
the story that needs to get in the news. The others in the cell will find out what happened, probably on TV. It won’t surprise them, either. They all knew Lothar was a sex-torture freak—look how they found him in the first place. And he never stopped ranting about what he wanted to do to his wife.
“Get it? That leaves Herk.
He’s
your inside man now. Your
only
one. And he needs that immunity. Or the faucet gets turned off.”
“You’re insane,” Pryce said, not turning around.
The street was quiet.
“People could argue about that, maybe,” I told him. “But 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. It’s time to prove up now,” I finished. “If you’re the real thing, you can make it happen. And if you’re not, it’s all over, anyway.
“You got no more cards to play, Pryce. You thought you knew me. Now you do. You take down the safe house, you dime out Vyra to her husband, you turn Porkpie’s testimony loose on Hercules
—any
of that, you’re finished, pal. I don’t care what you put in the street, you’ll never find all of us, because you don’t
know
all of us. But one of us will sure as hell 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 my 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 wiped-down steel tube and a packet of five C-notes. He pocketed both and walked off.
Back in the car, Herk turned to me. “Burke, I’m with you, no matter what, you know that. I don’t gotta understand why you did all that, but—”
“You know what happens when a raccoon gets his leg caught in one of those steel traps, brother? You know what he’s got to do, he wants to live?”
“Bite the leg off,” the big man said. He probably couldn’t spell “education,” but he had a Ph.D. in Survival.
“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, Burke. But we got a problem. I think, anyway.”
“What?”
“There’s a meeting. Tonight.”
“Damn! Why didn’t you—?”
“I forgot,” the dumbfuck giant said glumly. “Until just now. I’m sorry.”
“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 get to stand by and watch: Pryce makes it happen,
then
I believe he can do the immunity thing, see? That’s when 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’s not
supposed
to be there, right?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, he’s supposed to be out stalking his wife, right? And if Pryce comes through, he gets smoked doing it. No way I could know about that. None of us could. Why shouldn’t I just roll on into the meeting? It ain’t like me and Lothar was supposed to be cut-buddies anyway.”
“Herk, that’s if Pryce goes along,” I said, thinking maybe the big man wasn’t half the dummy we all took him for. Not anymore, anyway. “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 take down the whole fucking crew. If you knew about the meeting tonight, Lothar did, too. So he probably told Pryce.”
“What else
can
I do, brother?”
“You could jet,” I told him.
“I was gonna do that, what’d you take Lothar off the count for? I ain’t
that
stupid. I know what you was talking about. It was Lothar who got cut down, but me,
I’m
the one on three legs. So I’m hobbling, okay. But, fuck it, I’m hobbling
in.”
We touched fists. I hoped it wasn’t for the last time.

* * *

The way it turned out, Pryce did his part. And Herk went on to do his. The night the cell’s plan was supposed to go down, a lot of men ended up dead on lower Broadway, but Federal Plaza stayed up. That was years before 9/11, but so was the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Center. The government’s always listening
in,
but it never learns to listen
good.
Pryce wasn’t an outlaw like us. There was always work the government needed done, so unemployment wasn’t one of his worries. No surprise he’d been plugged into the White Night underground. He had informants all over the country, on both sides of the Walls. Some people thought he was a myth; others thought he was a magician. That’s the rep you earn when you always find the tools you need to do a job. Any job.
Pryce wasn’t some fantasy-world “spook.” He knew survival wasn’t about staying in the shadows; it was about never casting one.
“Maybe you’re more interested in current events?” he said.
I shrugged again. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I knew it wouldn’t be a threat. Pryce had already seen for himself how far I’d go if anyone threatened my family. Seen a piece of it, anyway.
“The Prof needs his right leg amputated,” he said, like a mechanic saying you needed a valve job. “It should have been done a while ago. They’ve been keeping him in a comatose state so they can use an air tourniquet on the femoral artery, but he can’t stay like that for much longer. Not only don’t they have the facilities to do a perfect cut-and-reattach, they don’t have a prosthesis-maker, a rehab facility, or a—”
I held up my hand, meaning, “Enough!” That didn’t stop him from talking, or even modulate his tone.
“They’re afraid,” he said, in that same mechanic’s-report voice. “Everyone on your side of the fence knows the deal with that place they run. They don’t report gunshot wounds, and they fix whatever they can—bullet extractions, stitching, just about any kind of patch-up work. They’ve got all the antibiotics, and they can even handle transfusions….”
He paused, waiting for me to be impressed that I’d recently learned that one way to pay for blood is to replenish the supply. When I didn’t react, he rolled right on: “But they don’t have a cath lab or a—”
I raised my eyebrows. All the communication he was going to get, until he got to what
he
wanted.
He moved his head just enough to show me that he wasn’t trying to outwait me, then spread his hand on the table between us. “Their thinking is this: If they cut, and the old man dies, they’re sure you’d send them along to keep him company. And if they
don’t
cut, and he never comes out of that coma, they’re convinced they’ll all end up in one.”
I just watched him.
“It may surprise you,” he said, with just the barest trace element of sarcasm in his metallic voice, “but there seem to be a number of people there who believe if anything happened to that old man you might just lose it and turn their whole operation into a slaughterhouse.”
“So…?” I said, knowing there had to be more.
“So they made a phone call,” Pryce said. “But what they had to say wasn’t news to…us.”
The heat from where Clarence was stationed was starting to peel the paint off the wall behind me.
“We have the whole thing on video,” he said, more like a prosecutor than a mechanic now. “I didn’t know you had access to that level of ordnance. That sniper you blew up—he was ours. In fact, the whole team up there was. We had our own operation in place, took years to set up. We had no idea you were going to make a move on our targets.”
I speak Pryce’s language, so the translation was instantaneous: “ordnance” meant the RPG I’d shoulder-fired at the sniper’s roost; “ours” meant someone paid by the same agency that paid him.
I knew Pryce wasn’t there about payback; he doesn’t get emotional over chess pieces. The sniper who had tried for the Prof was a paid assassin. Didn’t know who he was aiming at, didn’t care. Nothing personal. Not for him, anyway.
But Pryce hadn’t stopped by to shoot the breeze with an old friend, either. Pryce didn’t have friends.
“Let me guess,” I said, contempt making a crop-duster’s pass over my voice. “Homeland Security, right?”
“And you don’t care about that?” he shot back. “No, that’s right. You’re not a patriot, you’re a borderlord, aren’t you? You should read some of Marc MacYoung’s work. Very enlightening.”
I gave him a blank look.
“Don’t cross
your
lines, and the rest of the world can blow itself up, far as you’re concerned,” he decoded for me.
“And your point is…what? I’m not a terrorist; I’m a thief, remember?” I half-answered, sidestepping around that video. I believed Pryce had it, sure, but I also knew he wouldn’t turn it over to the Law. Why bother? You lose one shooter, you just hire another.
“Just say what you want,” I told him. No point pretending I had any negotiating room; if I turned down any chance to save the Prof, Clarence would have shot
me.
“There’s more than that on offer,” Pryce said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “I can do magic tricks, too. Like make prints disappear.”
“From?”
“Everywhere they’re logged. Local, state, federal, international. On all of you. Every single one.”
“Why? You gonna make us all legit so your bosses can make us pay income tax?”
“
You
already do,” he said, flexing again. “‘Scott Thomas’ does, anyway. And ‘Juan Rodriguez’ did before him. I hit the right switch and you won’t need to fly under the radar anymore. You know you could never get far enough under so I couldn’t find you, anyway.”
“Some doors swing both ways,” I bluffed.
“Listen,” he said, a thin vein of urgency in his toneless voice. “We’ve got a narrow window. Every election, the system changes.”
“Politicians—”
“Not
that
system,” he said dismissively. “Not the future, the past. Right this minute, we have
total
access, but that’s not for long. There’s two ways to alter existing info: delete it, or overwrite it. Our way, Burke
stays
dead. Scott Thomas lives. Or anyone else you pick. Backdated IRS, everything. But it all has to happen
quick,
understand?”
“If you say so,” I said.
“Flower has a wonderful future,” he snapped out, as precisely deadly as a balisong artist.
I slipped the thrust, said: “They’re both W-2s. Her father works in a restaurant; her mother is a social worker. Max’s prints are in the system, but only for arrests, no convictions. And Flower’s on scholarship, anyway.
Merit
scholarship.”
“The—”
“Save it,” I cut him short. “What’s with all this paper promising? The Prof hasn’t worked for years. Neither has Michelle. And if the
federales
could have touched Mama, they would have done it a century ago. How do I know you’re not just trolling, trying to find out who else is with us? I already said I’d do whatever you want done. I could be out there doing
that,
instead of sitting here listening to you talk about stuff I don’t give a fuck about. And you know what my word is worth; you’ve cashed that IOU before.”
“He’s already in transit.”
“The Prof?”
He glanced at his watch. “Another two hours, he’ll be inside one of the finest facilities in the country. In a sealed-off wing. Same level of care they’d give the President if he caught a bullet.”
I could feel the temperature in the room drop. Clarence wasn’t angry anymore—he was merging with his weapon, controlling his body with his mind so he could take his shot between heartbeats. Waiting only for me to signal whether I preferred Pryce disabled or dead.
“And that’s the card you’re holding?” I said, my voice very measured, hands not moving. “You’ve got the Prof. And he’s not in Walter Reed.”
“I don’t work like that,” Pryce said. “And you know it. I’m just explaining why you should sit and listen. Nothing
you
want is being held up.”
He was telling the truth. “Go,” I said, putting both hands flat on the table.
Clarence stepped into the room. I shot him a look. Pryce intercepted it, said, “Don’t blame the young man. And don’t think he’s just told me something I didn’t know.”
“My father—”
“Is getting the best care there
is,
” Pryce told Clarence. Not the way a salesman makes a pitch; the way a scientist states a fact. He wasn’t being reassuring, just reading a chart.
“Whatever Burke says he will do, I—”
“Yes. I know.”
Clarence looked at me, eyes glistening.
I ignored him. “You going to get to it now?” I said to Pryce.
“Terry?”
“What about him?”
“
He’s
the one who needs my magic tricks.”
I waited, thanking Satan that Michelle wasn’t there that day. If she ever heard her child’s name come out of this man’s mouth, even Max couldn’t have stopped her.
“Terry’s a piece of paper,” Pryce said. “A lot of pieces of paper, every single one of them a three-dollar bill. And they’re all stacked like dominos on an earthquake fault line. One little tremor and…”
“Too late. He’s already in—”
“College? I know. But that was an easy enough slide. He might even go all the way through grad school without a ripple. Of course, he’d be the first person to have his tuition paid in cash. Cash
over
the table, that is,” he said, nasty-chuckling at the idea that his last paymaster had gotten into Yale on his SAT scores.
Dealing with Pryce was like juggling spun-glass balls, each one filled with sulfuric acid. I knew he had a calling of his own. Whatever that was, it was strong enough to make him overcome his loathing for whoever paid him.
“You think we can’t put together a legit checking account?” I said, tossing chum into the water.
“Here’s what you
can’t
do,” he said, showing his quads to my full house as he ticked off the poison-tipped arrows on his webbed fingers. “You can’t come up with an
authentic
marriage license for Michelle and the Mole. And even if you could, you could never create a birth certificate for any child born of
that
marriage. You can’t—”
“What’s ‘real’?” I shot back. “The morons you work for had as much chance of finding ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq as I would of catching the Colombian drug lords who murdered O.J.’s wife.”
“Terry’s going to be famous, Burke,” he said, utterly self-possessed. “That young man’s IQ is immeasurable. His science teacher is
afraid
of him. There’s no limit to what he could achieve. And you, you want to keep him out of anything that wouldn’t survive a deep-background check? I can change all that. I can let him live in the light.
Blazing
light. I can make it all go away: where he came from, how he ended up where he is, all that.”
“DNA.”
“I can fix that, too, if I move
now.
But I see what you mean. Who knows how long any one of us is going to be around? It’s easier if I paper it so he was adopted. At
birth.
His biological mother died during childbirth, father unknown. For at least a few more months, I’ve got the key to the Records Room. Write your own story; I can turn it into non-fiction.”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “But why
would
you?”
“Why would you care?”
“Because I know you, Pryce. And I know there has to be a reason for you to be sweetening a deal I already took. There’s a piece missing, somewhere. And it’s not some green card,” I said, glancing at Clarence.
He nodded a silent agreement, then said: “It’s not a piece that’s missing; it’s a person.”
“So call out the—”
“And get what? A ‘profile’?” He dry-laughed. “I’m already dealing with cops who’d Taser a drunk lying in a puddle of water, and I don’t have time for them to grow a brain. This is
tight.
Most of the sand’s already out of the hourglass.”
“No ‘national security’ pitch this time, huh?”
“I’m a freelancer,” he said tonelessly. Underground-speak for “unattached.” Pryce would take money from anywhere, but he wouldn’t take orders from anyone.
I shook my head. Not refusing, showing I was confused.
“Your old friend Morales died a hero,” Pryce said, almost formally. “Charged the Towers while they were still coming down. He’s not talking—not that he ever would. But that plant of his didn’t make you disappear, just moved you to the ‘missing and presumed’ category. There’s no wants or warrants; you’re not on parole. But your past is on paper. Which means your future…”
“I’m living on my residuals.”
He put a disgusted expression on his reconstructed face, but his eyes never changed. If you shine a bright light into a bayou at night, you see a bunch of paired orange dots out there. Alligators have reflectors in the back of their eyes, so they can pick up even the tiniest flicker of movement. Part of their predator’s arsenal. Even if Pryce lost those webbed fingers, I’d always recognize him. He came on like he was money-only, but I knew that was just a piece of the truth. A long time ago, Wolfe had shown me the other side of the two-headed coin Pryce was always flipping.