Terminal (12 page)

T
he guy selling supernotes—the counterfeit C-notes made in North Korea; supposed to be the best in the world—wanted way too much for the boxcar load he was supposedly trying to peddle.

The woman who wanted “a deep investigation…you know what I mean, right?” of the mother who was accusing her ex-husband—the wannabe client’s current boyfriend—of sexually abusing their six-year-old daughter on “overnights” made a down payment and left. On the way back to her car, she had an accident. With any luck, she’ll be out of the hospital in time for the trial.

The impeccably dressed Nigerian who wanted to make sure I understood the concept of “virgin cleansing” before proceeding further seemed greatly reassured when I recited the gospel for him: An HIV-positive male who has sex with a girl so young that her virginity is assured can transfer the disease to the child. Certain procedures must be observed. When the barrier is penetrated for the first time, only then can the disease itself be ejaculated out of the donor and into the recipient.

Of course, a physician’s examination must precede the actual “transfer ceremony,” he explained. After all, believe it or not, some unscrupulous individuals have been known to have a child’s ruptured hymen surgically restored, so that the product could be used again. What an evil world this is!

I played the only cards I had, saying I had to meet his “principal” myself, to make sure he had the kind of money this was going to cost. The Nigerian smiled, opened his rhino-hide briefcase, and placed stack after stack of hard currency on the table between us.

I told him I would call when I had the package in my possession. Because I couldn’t keep the little girl for long, his “principal” would have to come to wherever I was holding her to conduct his transfer ceremony.

I was told this was unacceptable; the Nigerian would continue to be the “bridge.” When I was ready, he would bring the required amount and take the child with him.

The Prof watched him leave. Told us that the Nigerian’s car had diplomatic plates. And that he was assisted into the backseat by a chauffeur who made no attempt to conceal the shoulder holster he wore.

A couple of nights later, while the Nigerian was on the phone getting the news he’d been waiting for, his chauffeur was enjoying a leisurely smoke outside the limo—he never saw whoever broke his neck. When the Nigerian came out, he was assisted into the backseat.

A couple of hours later, he finally acknowledged that he himself was the principal. Then we transferred a steel-jacketed lump of lead to his brain.

The papers called it a political assassination. They got it right—the same way a man who picks the winning number gets it right.

The way I see it, he got what he paid for. I’d promised him he would never die from AIDS.

It was another week before the call came.

“H
e’s yours,” the AB man said. “Want to do it the same way?”

“No need for all that,” I told him. “Drop by my place, pick up a couple of bottles. He takes the blue one. When you’re sure he’s ready, you take yours—the red one.”

“So he doesn’t see me—”

“Yeah.”

“Y
ou must have given him a much heavier dose,” the AB man said, watching the man on the cot across from us: still zonked, mouth open, trace of drool on his chin.

“Just gave you a much lighter jolt than you had last time.”

“I get it. What do we do now?”

“Wait for him to come around. Then you tell him what I told you, the first time
you
woke up here. After that, you make sure he understands that talking to me isn’t optional.”

“I’ll do that, brother.”

I gave him a look.

“Just practicing,” he said, straight-faced.

T
he guy on the cot came around slyly, slitting his eyes so whoever was watching wouldn’t know he was awake. The AB boss and I caught the angled overhead light bouncing off the whites of his eyes. We exchanged a look, but kept quiet.

What the guy on the cot saw was two men, each wearing a black hoodie draped to cover his hair and ears. The AB man’s alligator eyes were enough of a memory-cue; mine were hidden behind wrap-around mirror sunglasses.

What we saw was a tallish runt with thinning dark hair, combed straight back from his forehead and moussed into what I guessed he thought was a style. His face was flabby, his chin was weak, and his eyes were little pools of greed and fear.

The AB man warned him about sitting up too quick, his voice soft and mechanical.

“Thanks,” the guy on the cot said, moving very carefully. He wasn’t the type to test his pain tolerance.

“This is the man,” the AB man told him. “You already know how it’s going to work. You’re going to tell him your story. Then he’s going to ask you questions. You’re going to answer the questions. What you’re not going to do is
ask
questions.”

Seeing us both smoking, the guy on the cot lit one of his own. “And then you’ll decide if you’re going to—?”

The AB man stood up and walked off into the shadows, leaving me alone with…whatever he was.

“T
horn—that’s what your friends call you, right?—what I need you to do is start at the beginning.”

He took a drag on his cigarette, gave me a look, as if he was making sure I measured up. Then he realized his mistake, and started talking: “It was somewhere between two-thirty and three in the morning when—”

“That’s not the beginning,” I told him. No threat, just a man making sure of the facts. “That’s the night it happened. But these boys, they’d been to your place before, right?”

“Oh, yeah. Plenty of times.”

“Because…?”

“Because? Oh, you mean, them being just kids and me being…Yeah, I get it. It wasn’t like I
hung
with them or anything. I mean, they were high-school kids. Punks.”

“And you were a dealer?”

“Just grass and pills.”

“Pills?”

“Ludes, mostly. Once in a while, I had some speed—not coke, I mean amphetamines—and some downers, too. Like tranqs, you understand?”

“You had a steady connection?” I asked, acting as if I was reluctantly impressed at the operation he’d been running at such a young age.

“I had a lot of them,” he said, back to being what he thought he was.

Sure. You had access to a doctor’s office, a pharmacy, or a scrip pad. For weed, you just went down to The City, bought at street price from people who scared you, then doubled that when you sold it to kids who thought you were a real bad guy.

I kept those thoughts where they belonged, just nodded. That’s how you do it if you really want to get it done. Never interrupt the flow, let them talk. No fish ever bit a hook with his mouth closed. But there has to be
some
bait, and letting the mark finish your sentences was always a good choice.

“So they’d been coming around for…?” I asked.

“Maybe a few months, a little more. Carl was the only one with a license. Before that, they’d only show up when they were with older guys.”

“So word was around?”

“Definitely. I mean, a little town like that, there wasn’t really room for more than one dealer.”

“So if
they
knew…?”

“The cops knew, too? Fuck, yes, they did. Had to.”

“‘Had to’? Meaning you never got shook down?”

“Not even once,” he said, with the smugness of a vet explaining the ropes to a rookie. “See, even back then, I figured out how things work. It’s not who’s selling, it’s who he’s selling
to.
The cops knew I never handled hard stuff. It was what’s called an ‘unspoken agreement.’”

Showing your hand pretty early, huh?
I thought.
Or are you testing? You that smart a sociopath, “Thorn”? Or are you trying to find out if I’m a stupid one?

“Nobody ever got arrested for possession?” I asked him. “Ever?”

“You have to remember when this was. Just past Vietnam. Who
wasn’t
smoking weed then? Besides, it isn’t like I was an outsider.”

“Because you had a house there?”

“I was
born
there. Same as those punks were.”

“So your parents could—?”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said, making a dismissive gesture with his left hand. “I was a
disappointment
to them. That house I had? It was really more like a cottage. And it wasn’t them who bought it for me; it was my grandfather.”

“You were tight with him?”

“I don’t even remember him. Died when I was a little kid. Left me some money, but I couldn’t get my hands on it until I was thirty or whatever. Unless I went to college. So the money was in trust, and my father got to ‘manage’ it for me. What he did was, he invested it in the cottage, see? That way, I had a nice place to live, and, instead of paying rent, I was
making
money.”

“Your father knew you were dealing?”

“No,” he said, barely suppressing a sigh at my slowness—he had my number now. “Real estate
appreciates.
Goes up in value. The idea was, I live in the cottage until I turn thirty, then I sell it for a lot more than they paid for it.”

“I get it. So your parents, they just thought you had some kind of regular job?”

“They. Did. Not. Give. A. Fuck.” Making each word its own sentence: a sentence he was still serving.

“Okay. Did it work out like they planned?”

“You mean, sell the place when I turned thirty?” he said, chuckling. “No. No, it didn’t.”

“You were never arrested before the night the three kids came to you?”

“For what?”

“For anything,” I said, indicating it wouldn’t matter to me what he got dropped for; I was just getting all the facts. Doing my job.

“No. Unless you count some little juvie—”

“For anything. Ever,” I repeated, icing my voice, letting him know I
was
going to do the job I’d been ordered to do.

“What difference could that—?”

I had a choice then. I could have reminded him what his former paid protector had told him about not asking questions. That would get me an answer, but it would be a lie. When a guy comes into prison for the first time, the cons call him a “fish.” Smart cons know there’s all kinds of fish. Some you catch and throw back, some you eat, and some you don’t want to be in the same part of the ocean with. A big fish doesn’t necessarily mean a dangerous one, but even when they’re easy to hook, they still have to be played.

This freak was as reactive as a rheostat, and you had to use a feathery touch on his dial. Frightening him would be easy work, but fear makes people untrustworthy…which is why torture isn’t the way to get truth.
Only an amateur thinks being scared works the same way on everyone,
I thought, flashing back to what happened that time in prison, when Lenny had overplayed his fear-dealing hand.

“These kids trusted you,” I said, making my voice into a blanket I could wrap around us both. “I mean, sure, they were scared out of their punk minds, but, if you think about it, what they trusted was your
rep,
see? Not just that you knew your way around, but that you’d never talk. When I was coming up,
everybody
did juvie. It was, like, some test you had to pass. Not just because those places are full of muds, and you have to stand up or they’ll have you for supper. No, there’s something else. Something that would count heavy with shaky kids.

“Nobody wants to be Inside,” I rolled on, catching the knowing nod from him I’d been waiting for. Nibbling, but the hook wasn’t in deep enough yet. “The juvie officers, they know that even kids with minor-league beefs probably run with
other
kids. Which means they know things
about
those kids. So—you get dropped, you almost always get the chance to slide, provided you got something to trade.”

I felt him coming closer, now satisfied that I was coming to
him.
“The first time I went in, you know what it was for?” I confided, letting the bitterness in my voice come through, tightening the space between us. “Setting a fire in an empty house. Not to burn it down, just to keep warm. What total bullshit, right? But they took me in a little room, told me if I could tell
them
something I could go home.”

“I get it now,” he said, echoing my words from before—the hook finally set. “And you know what, I think you might even be right. In the town where I lived, going away was a
big
deal. It’s supposed to be this huge secret—they can’t put your name in the papers, nobody’s even allowed inside Family Court—but word gets around.”

“How long were you down?”

“The first time, it was only for a couple of months,” he said, no longer worried about being judged, now that we had the same respect for each other. “I wouldn’t have gone in at
all,
but my asshole ‘father’ thought it would teach me a lesson or something.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So I shot a lousy alley cat with my pellet gun. I’ll bet half the kids in town did things like that. I mean, who doesn’t?”

There it is!
I thought. But I just nodded, this time to keep him going—I knew there was more.

“The second time was
really
lame,” he said. “Attempted this; attempted that. All bullshit beefs. I didn’t actually
do
anything. If I’d been in regular court, they would have thrown it all out.”

“Attempted…?”

“Just a couple of houses down from where we lived, there was this woman. Big, stacked blonde. I don’t know if her husband was out of town a lot, or just got home late, but she was always getting ready for bed by herself. Put on a real show doing it. No
way
she didn’t know she had an audience. She loved it.”

“So they caught you in her yard and—”

“And dropped about a thousand different charges on me,” he said in a stepchild’s voice.

You had your pellet gun with you that time, too, didn’t you?
I thought.
Or some ninja crap you bought out of a catalogue. Or…whatever it took to show the cops that you had plans for that blonde. Who do you think
called
them, you freakish little maggot?

“They offered you a deal?” was all I said aloud.

“No,” he said, making that dismissive gesture again, telling me it wouldn’t have mattered—a stand-up guy like him wouldn’t have given anyone else up, even if someone else had been with him in the woman’s yard that night.
As fucking if.
“I don’t even think it counted.”

“Counted?”

“As juvie time. They sent me to this place. It was all white this time. First thing I noticed. All we had to do was talk. All day, every day. Talk to them, talk to each other—you end up talking to
yourself
in that fucking nuthouse.”

“How long that time?”

“Six months. Six months to the day. It wasn’t a sentence, it was a fucking ‘program.’ By the time I got out, I was too old for the kiddie system anyway.”

“And you never took another fall until—”

“Until when I met Claw, that’s right.”

Dumb fuck should have told me his Brand name, just in case,
I thought.

“So you
did
have a rep,” I stroked him. “People knew you went away. They didn’t know what for, but they
did
know you came in by yourself, didn’t give anyone up.” Still feathering that rheostat—no point pretending he’d been a for-real AB, like I was supposed to be, but he
hadn’t
ratted anyone out, and that
was
a credential.

In our world, “time will tell” has a different meaning. Six months in the County doesn’t entitle you to call yourself a convict, even though that’s more than enough time to get yourself seriously dead if you don’t make the right moves.

“Yeah,” he said, being all modest about it.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s go there.”