Choice of Evil (21 page)

“But. . .?”

“But you can’t get juice from marble,” I told her.

“What does that mean?”

“How many different ways you want me to say it? You’ve got a stake in this. Not the same one Lincoln and those other guys have. Yeah, I know, you told me: You ‘love’ this guy. And you just want to protect him, right? Sure, fine. I’ll buy it, that’s what you want. And I played right along, didn’t I? You think I’d turn him over to the cops for a pass on one of my own cases, then don’t help. But you already
did
that, right? Checked me out. Found out some stuff. Enough to convince you that, whatever else I am, I’m not a rat. So here I am. And what do I get? Another strip show. More of your stupid teasing. And some questions about. . . bullshit crap that couldn’t be your business.”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“How do you know it isn’t my business? All right, I shouldn’t have said what I said. It was stupid. I’ll tell you what she. . . my friend. . . told me. She said there was a. . . cult or something. Or maybe just a ring of perverts. They were making torture films. Of little kids getting raped. The cops were looking for them, all over. There’d been a murder. . . a baby’s murder. It all got confused. But this is what they know for sure: They were all in a house. In the South Bronx, like I said. Some people went into that house and killed them. Every one of them. And they, the cops, they all say it was you. Your work. My friend asked, if they thought you did all that, how come you’d never even been arrested for it? You know what they said? They said they didn’t have any proof but it was the kind of thing Burke would do. They said you’re a homicidal maniac when it comes to. . . them.”

I heard Wesley’s machine voice in my head. “Every time one of those diddlers gets done, your name comes up on the radar screen. Killing people, it’s a business. You start making it personal, you’re dead meat yourself.”

I went with it and used it. Like I always do when Wesley talks to me. “Look, it’s no secret that I hate those freaks,” I told her. “But the rest of it, that’s just lazy-ass cop-speak for ‘We can’t find who really did it, so we’ll just chalk it up to Burke.’ How many people was I supposed to have killed, anyway? Couple a hundred?”

“No,” she said, her voice soft and serious. “But a lot. A lot more than were in that house, too.”

“And you believe that?”

She reached over and put her hand on the inside of my thigh. It didn’t feel sexual. . . more like she was checking for a pulse. “Yes,” she said. “I believe it. And this Wesley. . . he helped you, too.”

“Wesley’s dead,” I told her. Seemed like that’s all I’d been telling people for a while. “Didn’t your cop pal tell you that?”

“Yes. She told me about it.”

“All about it?”

“I. . . think so. Why?”

“You’re ready to do something for me, to trust me, because you believe I killed a bunch of baby-rapers, right? That’s your story.
Today’s
story, anyway. If you know how Wesley died, you know he didn’t go out alone.”

“I know what he did. That. . . explosion. At the school.”

“And who died in that?” I put it to her. “Kids, right? Lots and lots and lots of kids. You hate baby-rapers, you want to help me because I do too. You think I did a bunch of killings. You think Wesley was my partner. If that was true, then my ‘partner’ killed more kids in a few minutes than any of those freaks could do in ten lifetimes.”

Her eyes did that flicker-thing again. Not blinking—a light going on and off. It was over in a second. She took a deep breath. Not showing off this time—like she needed strength.

“Maybe he had his reasons,” she said.

“To kill kids?”

“Yes.”

“You pay your shrink by the hour or do you get a volume discount?”

“I don’t have a shrink,” Nadine said. “I don’t need one. I know what I need. And you have it.”

“I already said—”

“Stop! I’m not playing either. Just listen. The man the cops think ordered that murder—of the gay guy in the park—is someone named Gutterball Felestrone. And the name of the man who was killed is Lonnie Cork. ‘Corky’ is what they called him.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. Let it out. Looked directly into my eyes. “And the man Felestrone hired was your friend. Wesley.”

I waited, not wanting to cut her off if she had anything more. But she was done. She looked exhausted, as if saying those few words had wasted her.

“Okay,” I told her, starting to stand up.

She jumped to her feet and shoved me with both hands against my chest. I fell backward into the middle chair, Nadine on top of me. “Don’t even think about it,” she said into my ear. “You promised! You said if I got that information for you I could be in on it.”

My hand went to her back, fingers searching for the spot on her spine that would stop her cold if she ended up acting as crazy as she was talking.

“You
will
be in on it,” I said calmly. “What you just got was a piece of the puzzle. Maybe, I can’t even be sure about that. And it’s a
big
puzzle, girl. You think you were gonna just throw some clothes on and come with me? Right now?”

She grabbed the sides of the chair with both hands and pulled, hard, jamming her body into mine so deep I had to turn my head to breathe. “You think what you want,” she said into my ear. “You do what you want, too. But when you meet him, I have to be there. That’s our deal. Nothing else. Nothing less. Understand?”

“How could I guarantee—?”

“He
is
going to meet you,” she hissed at me. “I know it. I’m trusting you. What I told you. . . it might make it happen. And I’m going to be there. So that nothing happens to him, understand?”

“Yeah, sure. I got it. He’s the one man in the world you want to fuck, so—”

She punched me in the face so fast and hard that I didn’t have a chance to get my hand up. But I stabbed a two-finger kite deep into her heavily muscled rib cage before she could do it again. She gasped and slid off me.

“You dirty fucking
pig!”
she snarled at me from the floor. “I would
never
. . .”

My mouth tasted bloody. Some of it probably sprayed on her when I bent down to tell her: “Don’t ever do that again. What did you think, you insane bitch? We were gonna handcuff ourselves together until this is over?”

“You better not—”

“Don’t threaten me,” I said. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re with them. You were there when the deal was made. If I
do
get this guy to meet me, you can be there. And then I’m gone. Whatever you do after that, it’s on you. I’ll be all square then. Earned the money, right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Right?” I asked her again, shoving my face within inches of hers.

She didn’t flinch. Locked eyes with me for a long few seconds. “All right,” she finally said.

T
he whole crazy scene hadn’t taken long. There was enough of the night left for me to reach out for a woman who loved the dark.

It had been, what? Six, seven years. But this was her time. If the number was still good. . .

I found a pay phone and pushed the buttons, remembering you needed an area code to reach Queens from Manhattan now. It rang only twice before it was picked up.

“Hhhmmm?” is what it sounded like. It was enough.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I knew you would come.”

“I—”

“I know,” she said in her witchy voice. “Now, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Come,” she whispered.

I
was driving through a time warp. Nothing had changed. The same car, the same streets. And, when the Plymouth’s headlights picked it out, the same house. I drove around to the back, the way I always had. The garage door was closed. The house was dark. I got out, walked to the back door.

It opened while I was still on my way. She was wearing a red slip dress the exact same shade as her flaming hair. Even the spike heels and the lipstick matched. As if she’d had years to shop for this minute.

“Hello, Jina,” I said.

She stepped in to me, her face in my neck, hands locked around me. “Say my name,” she whispered. “My real name. You didn’t come for Jina. She’s not for you.”

“Strega,” I said.

She cooed, licked the side of my face like a cat. A silk-tongued cat, but one with fangs and claws. Then she turned and grabbed my hand, leading me through the house to that ice sculpture of a living room I’d spent so much time in. Terror time. The chair was still there, too. She pulled my jacket off my shoulders. I sat down. She went off somewhere. I closed my eyes.

“Here,” she said. On her knees next to the chair, holding my cigarettes and matches.

I lit the smoke, blew a jet out my nose.

“You look the same,” I told her.

“I will always look the same to you,” she said. “You know that. But that’s not what you came for. I know you. Tell me what you want.”

“It’s a long story. How much of it do you—?”

She climbed into my lap, snuggled against me. “Remember what we did, right in this chair?” she asked softly.

“Yes. How could I—?”

“Forget? I don’t know. You’re a man. I don’t know what men forget. I know what
I
don’t forget. You saved my Mia. You found Scotty’s picture. And you made that. . . filth dead. While I watched. I sleep with you inside me. Not inside my heart. You don’t want my heart. Not the part of it that’s left. That’s only for Mia.”

Mia was her daughter. That’s how I’d met Strega. She was being threatened. By some freak who’d been watching her jog in the nearby park, saying he was going to do something to her child if she didn’t. . . do what he wanted. Julio remembered me from the joint, and he called, gave me the job. He didn’t want it done by the Family, so he needed a mercenary. One he could trust, is what he said. Made sense.

There wasn’t much to the job. Max and I found the freak. We hurt him. He didn’t like pain. We promised him much more if he ever came near the woman again. He never did.

But then it whirlpooled. Her daughter had a pal, a little kid named Scotty. And somebody in a clown suit had taken a Polaroid of Scotty being raped. Scotty thought they had captured his soul, and his therapist couldn’t convince him otherwise. Strega hired me to get that picture back. And she helped too. Witch’s help. We had sex in this chair. She didn’t want to use anything but her mouth. And I had to tell her she was a good girl every time she was done. I should have known then, but I was too focused on staying alive. The maggot who had taken Scotty’s picture was half of a husband-and-wife team. And they’d hired muscle—a White Night gang I knew from Inside. I had to walk that tightrope. Then I had to sit in a room with a human so foul that killing him would have given me an orgasm. And listen while he spooled out evil, showing me how pedophiles computer-networked their traffic in trophies. . . pictures of raped babies. It ended in murder and arson. Later, two more fires: one in Strega’s hands as she burned the Polaroid I’d found in front of Scotty; one in her eyes as she told me the truth about her Uncle Julio.

It was years later when that score got squared. The vicious old gangster had used me once and gotten away with it, but he went to the well once too often. He started it with Wesley, then he couldn’t make it stop. So he tried to middle me, figuring the ice-man would kill the messenger and forget the message. But it was Julio who went down—his neck broken on a bench near La Guardia, Strega watching from the car as it happened.

I don’t know how she did some of the things she did. But I knew her word was platinum, her heart was steel, and her touch terrifying.

So I told her the truth.

“
I
still don’t understand,” she said when I was finished. “You already have the money, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So. . . Ah, it’s the woman. This woman. Your woman. The one who got killed?”

“I. . . think so.”

“You’re a very religious man, aren’t you, Burke? It’s always in you. This isn’t for love. Did you love her?”

“I. . . guess I did.”

“But you can’t bring her back, no matter what you—”

“Did you ever hear anything about. . . a Gatekeeper?”

“Oh God, not
that
thing. Yes, you crazy, dangerous man, I’ve ‘heard.’ Do you believe it?”

“No. I just—”

“It’s only for the evil,” she said softly. “Or those who
did
evil. It’s from the same root. The revenge root. Are you saying you loved an evil woman? Is that why you came to me?”

“No. She wasn’t evil. The opposite.”

“So even if there is a Gatekeeper, what good would it do you?”

“None, I guess. I just. . . heard about it. And I thought I’d ask you.”

“Want me to kiss you?” she asked, hand drifting into my lap.

“No.”

“I know you don’t. But someone made that mistake, didn’t they? With a lot less evidence than this, huh?” she whispered, flicking her long thumbnail just under the head of my cock. The response was a match in gasoline, but she just kept holding me, gently, waiting for an answer.

“Yes. That happened.”

“Some woman thought you wanted her, but you didn’t?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s involved too?”

“I. . . think so.”

“But she doesn’t know you?”

“No.”

“Know how
I
know? That she doesn’t know you?”

“No.”

She grabbed my cock around the shaft, squeezed hard, made one of her little sounds deep in her throat. “
I
asked
you
what you wanted. That never works on you. It hurts you to say you want something. Anything. So you never say. But if I asked you. . . if I said, ‘Could I?’ you would have said something different, huh?”

I didn’t answer. It was like it always was with her. She frightened me past fear.

“Some men like to be asked. Begged, even. If I got down on my knees and begged, would you like that?”

“No.”

“Why wouldn’t you? It would be a very pretty sight, wouldn’t it?”

“Sarcasm isn’t pretty,” I told her.

“Ummmm,” she moaned. “I don’t beg, and you don’t take orders. It’s so hard, huh?” She squeezed my cock again, chuckling, enjoying her magic tricks. Like always.