Everybody Pays (42 page)

The woman’s voice was soft. “Yes. Everybody pays, don’t they?”

“That’s the way it is,” Cross said.

for David and Jill

A hit man defies the confines of a life sentence to avenge his sister’s batterer. An immaculately dressed man hires a street gang to extract his daughter from a Central American prison, for reasons as mysterious as they are deadly. A two-bit graffiti artist with a taste for Nazi-ganda finds himself face-to-face with three punks out to make a mark of their own—literally—with a tattoo needle.

From neo-noir master Andrew Vachss comes
Everybody Pays
, 38 white-knuckle rides into a netherworld of pederasts and prostitutes, stick-up kids and fall guys—where private codes of crime and punishment pulsate beneath a surface system of law and order, and our moral compass spins frighteningly out of control. Here is the street-grit prose that has earned Vachss comparisons to Chandler, Cain, and Hammett—and the ingenious plot twists that transform the double-cross into an expression of retribution, the dark deed into a thing of beauty. Electrifying and enigmatic,
Everybody Pays
is a sojourn into the nature of evil itself—a trip made all the more frightening by its proximity to our front doorstep.

ANDREW VACHSS

Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social caseworker, a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for youthful offenders. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including song lyrics, poetry, graphic novels, and a “children’s book for adults.” His books have been translated into twenty different languages and his work has appeared in
Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, The New York Times
, and numerous other forums. He lives and works in New York City and the Pacific Northwest.

BOOKS BY
ANDREW VACHSS

Flood

Strega

Blue Belle

Hard Candy

Blossom

Sacrifice

Shella

Down in the Zero

Born Bad

Footsteps of the Hawk

False Allegations

Safe House

Choice of Evil

Everybody Pays

Dead and Gone

Pain Management

Everybody Pays
Copyright © 1999 by Andrew H. Vachss

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Vachss, Andrew H.
Everybody pays / Andrew Vachss
p.  cm. — (Vintage crime / Black Lizard)
1. Private Investigators—United States—Fiction. I, Title. II, Series
PS3572.A33E9    1999
813’.54—dc21    99-28773
CIP                    

Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-375-71914-1

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