Pain Management (12 page)

I nodded, as if I was thinking it over. “Not all the comics are done by big publishers. You said that before, when I was in here.”

“That’s right. There’s
lots
of people trying to publish their own. Not many as successful as Madison, but there’s always new players every month. They come and they go.”

“And
some
of those comics—a few of them, anyway—they could end up being collectible down the road, right?”

“It’s possible. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

“Not the farm, maybe,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “but what if you pulled two hundred bucks a month worth of those new comics for me? Or maybe a little less, and use the rest to put them in those protective bags. In a couple of years, I’d have a real collection.”

“You would. But so what? There’s no guarantee I could pick any winners. Or that there’d even
be
any winners to pick.”

“I’m a gambler,” I told him.

“A professional gambler?” he asked, like he’d heard of them but never met one in the flesh.

“Yeah. Let’s say you pull the comics for me every month. And let’s say I pay you six months in front, just so you know you’re not going to all that trouble for nothing. And so there’s no risk.”

“That would be—”

“Twelve hundred, right?”

“Well . . . no.”

“Is my math wrong?”

“No. No, it’s not that. It’s just that . . . Well, our best customers get special discounts; they don’t pay retail.”

“So I’d actually be getting more for my money, then?”

“Yeah. I can’t say exactly
how
much more—it kind of varies.”

“Sold,” I told him, handing over the bills.

“I’ll get you a receipt.”

“Nah, that’s not necessary,” I told him, keeping my voice light to take the sting out of what I was going to say. “I know where to find you.”

“We’ll be here,” he promised. “I took a long-term lease on this spot when things were . . . different.”

“Great. Now, as a valued customer, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind . . . ?”

The convertible Gordo and Flacco lent me was a bone-stock Mustang. It had been sitting around in the shop waiting on a custom paint job. I drove it through the strolls with its top down. The radio dealt out the new Son Seals cut, “My Life,” which was getting a lot of air play:

I’ve been so cheated

Until I was just defeated

But still I went and repeated

All of my mistakes. . . .

I didn’t see the Subaru flit by until right near the end of my tour. And I didn’t have any better luck with the girls.

“Tonight is satisfactory for you?” Gem asked.

“What does that mean?”

“To meet. As you asked.”

“Oh yeah. Your cop.”

“He is not
my
cop,” she said sharply. “Sometimes I do not understand where you—”

“That’s what
you
called him, Gem.”

“I did not,” she said positively, hands on hips.

“What’s the big—?”

“You are wrong,” she said, turning her back the way she does when she’s angry.

“I’m sure,” I told her, keeping my apology deliberately hollow. “What time?”

“It must be after one in the morning. When . . . Detective Hong is off-duty.”

“All right.”

“He is a very meticulous police officer. If he were to meet you while on duty, he would have to make a record of it.”

“I got it.”

“Very well,” she said. All Gem’s movements are economical. She was raised in the jungle, where blending is safety. So it was no surprise that she kept her hips under control. But when she walked away that time, even the subtle hint of a wiggle she usually allowed was gone.

Nobody spun around on their stools when we entered the bar, but the current shifted just enough to tell me our presence was noted.

The booth was the last one in a row of maybe a dozen. The man waiting there was mixed-race Asian, surprisingly tall when he got up to greet us. His hair was jet black, carefully spiked. His face was too rounded to be Chinese. Samoan? Filipino? Mama would have been able to decode his DNA in ten seconds. I just filed it away with the million other things I didn’t know. He wore a slouchy plum-colored silk jacket over a black shirt and tie made of the same material, and a heavy silver ring on his left hand with some sort of symbol cut into the top.

Gem kissed his cheek hello. Even in her four-inch spikes, he had to bend forward to let her reach his face. He did it so smoothly I could tell they’d done it before.

We shook hands. His grip was dry, without pressure. “Henry Hong,” he said.

“B. B. Hazard,” I answered him.

He waited for Gem to slide into the booth before he sat down across from her.

“Gem says there is something you want to know that I might be able to help you with?” he opened.

“Maybe. Depends if what I’m picking up is on your teletype.”

“Could you be a little more specific?” he asked politely, taking a gunmetal cigarette case out of his jacket, opening it to make sure I could see what it was. He offered me one with a slight gesture.

“Thanks,” I said.

He lit his smoke from a slim lighter the color of lead, then handed the lighter to me. I fired up, blew some smoke at the ceiling.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time on the hooker strolls,” I began. “Looking for a teenage girl. Runaway.”

“Where, specifically?”

“Burnside, MLK, Upper Sandy . . .” I said vaguely, implying even wider coverage.

“All right,” he said, validating my choices. “What makes you think she would be hooking?”

“Nothing. In fact, I’ve got good reason to think she
wouldn’t.
But she has to be earning money somewhere, and I wanted to just . . . rule it out, you understand?”

“Yes.”

“All right. What I’d do, normally, is spread her photo around with my phone number on the back. Tell the girls there’s a reward out for good info.”

“Normally?” he asked, mildly.

“Yeah,” I replied, ignoring the question he was asking. “But these girls are on the hustle. You want to work with them, you have to make sure they aren’t working
you.
So you try and get one of them alone, make your pitch.”

He dragged on his cigarette gently. I was letting mine burn out in the ashtray.

“That’s where I picked it up,” I said. “I’m using a flash car—nice new Caddy, no rental plates, clear glass. Nothing that would spook them; anyone can see inside. But they pretty much approach only in pairs. I’ve even seen three of them at a time. And the ones who don’t come off the curb, they’re still watching . . . a lot closer than from idle curiosity.”

“No offense,” he said softly. “But your face . . . Maybe you’re just—”

“It’s not that,” I told him, so he’d know I wasn’t being sensitive. “No way they react to my looks from that distance. Maybe some types of rides would make them edgy. I could see it if I was driving a van, even a station wagon. But I even tried it with a top-down convertible, and it didn’t make a bit of difference.”

“You try any of the escort services?”

“Why would I do that? I’m looking for street info, not the high-priced spread.”

“You said she was underage. . . .”

“Oh. Okay. You got any suggestions?”

He looked over at Gem, boxing me out as if he had wedged a wall between us in the booth. I couldn’t see her expression without turning sideways, and I wasn’t about to do that. I reached over and ground out what was left of the cigarette I hadn’t smoked past the first drag. The cop’s eyes were downcast, as if he was thinking something over. Or maybe he was looking at the tiny blue heart tattooed on my right hand, between the knuckles of the last two fingers. A hollow, empty heart. My tribute to Pansy.

Burke’s NYPD file shows a lot of scars and marks, but no tattoos. They’d never had a chance to photograph this one.

“What do you think it means?” he finally asked me.

“Girls have been disappearing. Girls who worked the streets. Maybe in Portland, maybe somewhere down I-5; word like that moves with the traffic.”

“This is a guess?”

“At best. I haven’t seen anything in the papers about a serial killer. . . .”

“There was the guy they caught up north.”

“Yeah. And he preyed on prostitutes, too. But that’s nothing new—they’re the easiest targets.”

“They are,” he conceded. “But that’s all you have—that the hookers are working doubled up? Maybe three-way’s the hot ticket out there right now.”

“You start a sentence with ‘maybe,’ anything you say after that has to be true.”

Gem kicked my ankle. A lot more sharply than she would have needed to get my attention.

“So what do
you
think?” Hong asked.

“I think you’re playing with me,” I told him. “There’s lots of other reasons I’ve got for thinking there’s a killer on the road, but what difference? Either you already know it, or nothing I can say would convince you.”

He put his cigarette case flat on the table, helped himself to another. I passed.

“Could you not say what else you—?” Gem started to say. That time I turned and looked her full in the face. She shut up.

Hong smoked another cigarette in silence. I didn’t know what Gem had told him about me, but if he thought waiting was going to make me nervous, he was misinformed.

Finally, he snubbed out the butt, leaned forward, and spoke so softly I had to concentrate to get it all.

“There’s thirteen of them known gone. Between Seattle and the California line, nine of them in Oregon. No bodies. No missing-persons reports, either. None of them listed as runaways. All but one have priors.”

“And habits?”

“It’s a safe bet, but not a sure one. We don’t think that’s any kind of link.”

“Their pimps said they ran off? Or just didn’t come back one night?”

“Both. A couple of them claimed they knew where their girls ran off to. They pull girls from each other all the time.”

“Or sell them.”

“True. But the trafficked girls, you wouldn’t expect to see them on the street right away. The pimps would want to stick them indoors, get their money out of them as quick as possible.”

“No bodies, right?”

“No bodies,” he confirmed. “No
crimes,
as far as we know.”

“But the girls, they know different.”

“They think so, anyway.”

“Much obliged.”

“Sure. If you pick up anything, I’d appreciate—”

“Bur— My . . . Uh, B.B. could help you,” Gem stumbled out.

Something was very wrong with all this. Gem doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

“How would that be?” Hong said smoothly, as if trying to spackle over a suddenly appearing crack in a plaster wall.

“B.B. is an expert,” Gem told him confidently. Like I wasn’t there. “He knows more about this . . . kind of thing than anyone.”

“Is that right?” Hong asked me, deliberately neutral.

“I know freaks,” I promised him.

“And you scan this as . . . ?”

“I don’t. I needed to verify what I picked up on with you before I spent any time on it.”

“And
why
would you spend any time on it?”

“If there was something in it for me,” I told him, making it clear that was the
only
motivation that worked.

“You’re going to catch a killer?”

“No. Not my style,” I said.

“What, then?”

“Maybe I could get you some information about how it’s being worked.”

“ ‘It’?”

“The disappearances.”

“Yes? Well, that would be worth . . . something, I’m sure. What is it you’d be looking for in exchange?”

I reached in my jacket, handed him one of the photos of Rosebud I’d been circulating. He took it, nodded.

“And,” I said, quickly, before he got the idea that we had a contract so easy, “the name of that escort service.”

“Which . . . ?”

“The one that runs them underage.”

“What is
wrong
with you?” Gem snapped, as soon as we got into the Caddy.

“With
me
? I was just doing business.”

“You were . . . offensive for no reason.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You do not think you were being offensive? Or you believe you had a reason for being so?”

“You sound like a fucking lawyer.”

“You do not wish to answer me?”

“What I fucking ‘wish’ is that you’d keep your little nose out of where it doesn’t belong.”

“Is that so? Perhaps you believe my nose does not belong in your house, then?”

“It’s
your
house,” I reminded her.

“Ah,” she said. As if I had finally confessed to something.

For the escort service, I would need a hotel room. The only place I’d ever stayed in Portland was the Governor, when I’d been studio-comped by an old pal. It was an old-fashioned, classy joint, with nice thick walls. And it had a back way in that allowed you to avoid the front desk.

Nobody except the room-service folks had seen me the last time I’d stayed there, and if they remembered me at all, it would be in connection with the studio, so a visiting “escort” wouldn’t exactly shock them.

I checked in around four in the afternoon. Between taking a nap, having something to eat, showering, and shaving, I easily killed time until it got dark. Figuring the escort service would have Caller ID, I made sure I used the hotel phone. Asked for a “reference,” I gave them the name Hong had told me to use.

All that got me was a conversation, kind of like no-touch dancing. I tossed them every hint I could think of—right down to telling them I wanted a girl any father would be proud of; I bit eagerly when they spoke vaguely about “no discipline problems.” After running the valid but untraceable major credit-card number I gave them, they promised me a “perfectly behaved young lady” by eleven.

She was about what I expected—a thin, curveless girl dressed down to look fifteen. She even brought her own silk-lined leather handcuffs and a red lollipop.

It took me about ten minutes of soft talking to convince her that I wasn’t a cop, and another half-hour to sell her on the idea that she could make some serious money if she turned up Rosebud.

The hooker looked at the photo, almost blurted out that she’d never seen the girl I was looking for, then went into a slow shuffle about how
maybe
she’d seen her around, she just couldn’t be, like,
sure,
you know.

Sure, I knew.

Maybe the hardest game on the planet is convincing a hooker you’re not a trick.

The girl-looking hooker left early enough for me to go back on the prowl. So I walked a few blocks to where I’d stashed the Caddy and went back to work.

But the only girls who approached me alone were big-time wasted, strung out, and needy. Risking a ride with a serial killer wasn’t much compared with their daily game of sticking dirty needles in collapsed veins. But all they could babble was a mulch of “fuck-suck” and “money-honey.” Not much point in asking them if they’d seen Rosebud—they couldn’t see the end of their own road.

When the sleek Subaru drifted across my path, I had a flash that maybe
it
was what was spooking all the girls. The wheeled shark sure looked menacing enough. Just the kind of car some halfwit screenwriter who thinks all sociopaths are handsome, charming, and intelligent would write into his fantasy.

But around three I saw it parked. Or stopped anyway, with a couple of girls bent low to get their heads down to the driver’s window, their bottoms poised high, always working. I slid past on the right. The Subaru’s passenger-side window was up. And tinted almost as dark as the body.

I grabbed the license number. Just in case Gem’s friend would do me a little favor. If I ever decided to trust him that much.

“What is it that you want from me, exactly?” Madison’s voice, on my cell phone. I guess Smilin’ Jack
did
take care of his regulars.

“Just to ask you some questions. About comics . . . I think.”

“You . . . think?”

“I have this picture. I mean, it’s a drawing. But in ink, whatever you call that. I want to show it to you, ask you a couple of questions about it.”

“And this is all because . . . ?”

“Because it’s a clue. To that girl I told you I was looking for.”

“What makes you think I would know anything of value?”

“I think you know a lot of value,” I told her. “I’ve read all the comics now.”

“How nice. But as to this . . . drawing?”

“Oh. Yeah, well . . . I’m not sure.”

“Why me, then? Portland’s full of experts who could take a look at—”

“It’s the connection to you. To your work, I mean.”

“Do you think it was
my
drawing?”

“No. It obviously isn’t. Not your style at all. But that’s not what I meant. Look, Ms. Clell—”

“Madison.”

“Madison. Rosebud collected
your
comics. There isn’t a sign that she ever collected anything else. So, the way I figure it, if anyone knows what this drawing means, it’s you, okay?”

I listened to the cellular’s satellite-connect hum for a few long seconds. Then she said, “Okay.”

I’d already run across every street-kid thing from New Age to Wicca to skinhead. Pretty extreme range, but one thing in common—music drove all their cultures. Sometimes it just ran in the background, sometimes it was the sun everything orbited around. But it was always there.

I knew my chances of just bumping into Rosebud at random weren’t worth much, so I concentrated on making friends. Financial friends. Bouncers at clubs, clerks in bookstores, swastika-inked tribalists, buskers, multi-pierced statement-makers, druggies, day-trip runaways.

Bobby Ray was always ready to talk with me, but he never came up with anything. I knew he was testing—pumping for info, back-checking to see if I told the same story twice—but I didn’t know if he was sitting on knowledge or just looking for some.

When you’re hunting, you tell different people different things. Or, at least, you drop different hints, let people draw their own conclusions. The bouncers thought I was looking for the kind of underage runaway that could only make trouble for them if they let her inside. But she could make them some real cash if they lifted the rope, and made a call while they had her boxed.

Other people got the idea Rosebud didn’t know her sister needed a bone-marrow transplant. The skinheads thought I was up to something privately ugly. I made sure they knew she wasn’t Jewish, and that if anyone but me hurt her, I’d hurt them.

One night, I passed by a couple of low-grade humans who thought that wearing stomping boots made them street-fighters. They were busy slapping around a tired old burnt-brain who lived out of garbage cans. I pointed the pistol at them and held the index finger of my left hand to my lips. They moved away quick. I figured, since the burnt-brain spent all his time on the street, he might have seen something. But whatever he saw he couldn’t bring out into words.

Every time he saw me after that, he gave me a gathering-spiderwebs-from-the-air kowtow. A fragment from an earlier part of his journey, maybe.

The punk who thought the
snick!
of his switchblade opening would paralyze me must have thought the neat round third-degree burn on his right hand happened by magic. That would be later, in the emergency room, after he’d stopped screaming. If he’d taken a closer look at the cigarette lighter I’d been toying with as we talked, he would have seen they make piezoelectric blowtorches real small nowadays.

I was getting the kind of shadowy reputation that can buy you anything from information to a bullet. But I wasn’t getting any closer to Rosebud.

In fact, I couldn’t be sure she was anywhere close by. Not one confirmed sighting . . . although plenty of people told me otherwise, thinking they’d see the color of my money before they actually went out looking. The color was all they got to see.

I had one idea, but it was as close to a hole card as I was holding, and I didn’t want to play it too soon.

“Any progress?” the lawyer asked me.

“It’s not like building a house,” I told him. “You can’t see it going up. I haven’t
found
her.”

“Yet?” the father asked.

“It’s always ‘yet,’ “ I answered him, not taking my eyes from the lawyer. “Until you get it done.”

“Can you at least tell me if she’s in Portland?”

“I’ll be able to tell you in a couple of weeks, max.”

“Why by then, particularly?” the lawyer wanted to know.

I shrugged.

“I’ve already spent a lot of money,” the father reminded me.

“Uh-huh,” is all he got back.

“Isn’t there any way to get more . . . aggressive about this?” the lawyer said, his academic tone designed to take some of the insinuation out of his words.

“Not much point hurting people for information they don’t have,” I said, bluntly.

“I’m opposed to violence,” the father said.

“Me too,” I assured him, catching the lawyer’s thin, conspiratorial smirk.

A pro burglar had trained me. I mean a
professional,
not a chronic. To the public, you do the same thing often enough, you’re a “professional,” no matter if you’re a total maladroit at it. The government feels the same way about the people who work for it.

The newspapers will call some congenital defective who sticks up a dozen all-night convenience stores in a month a “professional criminal,” but people who actually make a
living
from crime know better.

The old-timers knew how to ghost a house so slick, they could unload the pistol you kept on the night table in case of burglars and put it right back in place between your snores—just in case you woke up while they were sorting through your jewelry like an appraiser on amphetamine.

They prided themselves on never carrying a weapon, never hurting anyone, and never stealing anything they couldn’t turn over quick. Back then, if one of the black-glove freaks who combined house invasion with rape ever dared to call himself a thief, he might get shanked just for disrespecting the profession.

Today, your average burglar is like your average bank robber: an amateur or a junkie. Both, most likely. The take is always small, and the cops don’t even bother to dust for prints. They just give you an incident number, so you can lie to your insurance company.

There are still pro jobs being done, but they tend not to get reported to the cops; the victims aren’t big fans of law enforcement.

The guy who taught me said that a truly pro touch is when the mark doesn’t even know he’s been hit. Until, one day, he looks for whatever’s been taken, and comes up empty. The pro also told me that daylight jobs are the best, if you can blend into the area where you’re working.

I could do better than that, now that I’d code-grabbed the remote for Kevin’s garage door.

I watched the mini-bus with the day camp’s name stenciled on its side, as it stopped at the corner to collect Daisy. If the schedule held, the mother would be off within an hour or so. She always did the same things. Some leisurely shopping, lunch with friends, then maybe a salon for her hair and nails, maybe a bookstore. Aimless, time-killing stuff, but she appeared devoted to it. She never got home before four in the afternoon the whole week I kept watch.

I’d thought about borrowing Kevin’s Volvo for a couple of hours, but I couldn’t know if he would use it at lunchtime. Or if his neighbors would make it their business to mention they’d seen a strange car enter his garage. My impression of the neighborhood was that it wasn’t upscale enough for the pure-leisure class, and everything Gem had learned so far confirmed that. Best bet was that the houses were mostly dink—double income, no kids—occupied, and even the people that had kids worked during the day.

I had an additional layer of protection. Even if some suspicious citizen called the cops, my story would be that I was an invited guest, and I knew the father would back that up. He might not be happy about it, but he’d keep his mouth shut.

At a quarter to twelve, I was in position on the corner. I’d swapped the Caddy for the nondescript Ford again. If any nosy neighbors had seen it when I came to the house the first time, it would dull the edge of their suspicion.

I rolled just past the driveway, then reversed and backed in, triggering the remote as I rolled. The garage was big enough for three cars. And empty. I tapped the remote again, and I was alone in the darkness.

I made my way through the connecting passage to the house, carrying my equipment in one hand, sensors on full alert. Nothing. Rosebud’s room was exactly as I remembered it, curtains open to the light, but no way for any outsider to see in. I used the mini-camera’s flash just for fill—it was so faint it wouldn’t have spooked a parakeet.

I never thought about trying Daisy’s room. Any girl that maintained such an ungodly mess so diligently would know where every single little thing was. And she’d pick up any intrusion quicker than a motion-detector.

I went downstairs, then back up to the adult side of the divided house. The bedroom was apolitical, with that antiseptic, anonymous look that tells you they paid someone to pick out the furnishings. Lots of artifacts from the civilization they’d conquered—brand names on the clothing, jewelry from all the best places, severe-modern furniture. Even the bed linen screamed
Designer!
very tastefully.

If the mother was telling the truth about having no maid, she did a hell of a job. The place was as dust-free as an autopsy table.

Kevin’s den was as rabid as the bedroom had been sterile. The walls were papered like a wood fence around a construction site. Everything from a giant symbol of the Symbionese Liberation Army to an old magazine cover where some overdosed-on-privilege twit proclaimed Charles Manson to be a great revolutionary. Giant head shots of Huey Newton and George Jackson side-by-side in unconscious irony.

He covered the international front, too: the Japanese Red Army, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Red Army Brigades, a “letter to the people from Assata Shakur, s/n JoAnne Chesimard,” mailed from Cuba. The whole place was strangely time-warped, as if nothing had happened before or after a ten-year period carved out of the sixties and seventies. Nothing about the IWW. Nothing about the Tamil Tigers.