Safe House (12 page)

“Which was?”

“He wanted the baby for the race,” she said. “The white race. Do you know what I mean?”

“Sure. Pure stock, right? What was he? One of those halfass Nazi geeks?”

“He’s an Aryan,” Crystal Beth said. “In his mind, a true Aryan.”

“And you’re one of the mud people, right?” I asked her. “And she’s a Jew,” I said, nodding at Vyra, maybe getting the connect between them for the first time.

“Yes. But he doesn’t know us. We’re not in it that way.”

“Isn’t there some shortcut on this road?” I asked her. I didn’t have much more patience. If these women thought all White Night followers were the same, they were too dumb to keep walking where they’d stepped.

“We’re being calm,” Crystal Beth reminded me. “If you listen too fast, you miss some of the words. He kept . . . hurting her. Burning her with cigarettes, making her . . . do things. Degrading her in front of other people. Before she got pregnant, he told her if she ever tried to leave him he’d kill her. Not shoot her, torture her to death. He liked to talk about that. He even had films of it. Torture tapes. Videos. I guess they were acting, I never saw one. But Marla said they looked so real, she couldn’t tell. He made her watch them. She said it didn’t change until he told her he was going to have his son watch them too. So he’d be ready.”

“What changed?” I asked her.

“That’s when Marla knew she was going to leave. She started to feel it when she was deep in pregnancy. Maybe her seventh month, she doesn’t know for sure. She told me she knew they—her husband and his friends—would take her baby. The baby would be one of them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her son torturing one of those women like they were in those videos. She couldn’t bear to kill the baby either. . . . That’s what killing herself would mean. She knew she couldn’t wait until she went into the hospital—she’d be lost then. So she ran away. And she found us.”

“How did she know she was going to have a son?” I asked her. “This happened before she gave birth, you said.”

“Sonogram,” Vyra put in. “Everybody does them now.”

“We have lawyers who advise us,” Crystal Beth said. “They told us Marla would get custody, no contest, but he’d get visitation. Some kind of visitation. Probably even unsupervised, sooner or later. That would be enough. He could just take the child and disappear into the underground. She’d never see him again. One of the other women—‘breeders,’ he called them—would raise the baby. Raise him to be them.”

“So she’s gonna disappear?”

“No. She doesn’t have the resources. It will take time before she learns enough skills to support herself and the baby. And if she took Welfare, it would be easy enough to track her. We came up with a better way. When she left, she took a lot of his stuff. He kept . . . records of what he did. Him and his friends. There’s enough there to put him away for a long time. It’s all set up. She had him served with papers. Legal papers. At the place where he works. He has to come to court. She’s suing him for a divorce. And child support.”

“How’s that going to—?”

“When he shows up, he’s going to be arrested. And they’re going to hold him without bail. A . . . what do they call it?”

“Remand,” I supplied.

“Yes, that’s right! Remand. They set it up perfectly. She called him a couple of times when she was on the run. They have it on tape, him saying what he was going to do to her. To scare her, he reminded her of some other stuff he did. To other people. Him and his friends. They have that evidence too.”

“How do you know you’re not being hosed?” I asked her.

“What’s ‘hosed’?” Crystal Beth asked.

“Tricked. Scammed. Hornswoggled. Whatever you want to call it. To really set this guy up, you’d need more than a friendly cop, you’d need a DA.”

“We have that,” Crystal Beth said. “Guaranteed.”

“So who’s the Man?” I asked her.

“Not a man,” she said with a gentle smile. “A woman. Her name is Wolfe.”

G
ood thing I hadn’t taken Crystal Beth’s hand. A lifetime of practice could keep my face flat, but she would have felt my pulse jump at the name. Wolfe. Former boss of City-Wide Special Victims, a sex-crimes prosecutor so intense one newspaper said she drank blood for breakfast. She spent years on the front lines slugging it out with every verminous predator they threw at her—rapists, child molesters, kidnap gangs, it didn’t matter. She was a warrior woman, at her loveliest doing her work, a sleek mongoose who could clean out a nest of cobras without breaking a sweat. But a politically greasy DA took her down, sacrificed her to the only god humans like him worship.

When Wolfe had been on the job, we’d bumped paths a few times. She wouldn’t go an inch over the line, but she’d tightrope it pretty good if it meant dropping a freak. When they fired her, she went outlaw. At least that’s what the whisper-stream that runs under the city said. She ramrods a private intelligence cell. Does it for the money, the way it’s told. But Crystal Beth was doing some telling of her own. And it looked like Wolfe couldn’t stay away from the war.

Wolfe could get it done, I knew. There were still some prosecutors who stayed true to what she’d stood for. Not in City-Wide—that whole crowd had all rolled over like the knee-pad wearers they were. But there were other bureaus, other operations. And some of them would still work with Wolfe. They couldn’t bring her into the courtroom, but they could bring her information there. And use it.

She knew cops too. Good, tough old-school cops, most of them members of the KMA—“I already got enough time in to retire, Lieutenant, so Kiss My Ass”—Club and all too clean to be intimidated out of meeting with her. Cops she’d worked cases with for years before they took her off the beat. Wolfe had handled mostly sex crimes, but some of the freaks touched other nerves too: Homicide. Narcotics. Anything gang-related. So she knew cops from all over the city, in every bureau.

Yeah, Wolfe could get it done.

I took a shallow breath, thinking that all through in less time than it took to exhale fully. “Okay,” I said to Crystal Beth, “you’ve got him, right? He comes in, he goes down. What’s the problem?”

“There’s another man,” she said. “Like I told you. The falconer. And he’s after me too.”

A
ll I could see of Vyra’s face was a pale oval in the dim light. Her chest was easier to focus on—whiter because of the blouse she wore, bigger because of what filled it. But she was quiet, holding Crystal Beth’s hand, waiting.

I waited too.

“I know this is complicated,” Crystal Beth finally said. “But I don’t know a simpler way to tell it.”

“This other man?” I prompted. “He’s with Marla’s husband? One of the Nazi crew?”

“The opposite,” she said, a tremor in her voice telling me she wasn’t as sure of that as she tried to sound. “He’s a hunter.”

“After Marla’s husband . . . ?”

“Lothar, that’s his name. Well, not truly, I guess. His real name is Larry, but he changed it. He said Larry sounded Jewish. Anyway, he’s not really after Lothar either. He’s . . . Oh, I’m not
sure,
okay? I just don’t know.”

“You know he’s after you, though?”

“Yes! That didn’t take any guesswork. He told me—”

“Who told you?” I interrupted her.

“The man. Mr. Pryce. Pryce with a “y,” not an “i”—that’s the name he said to call him.”

“Pryce is the one after you?”

“Yes!” she snapped impatiently. “Just let me . . .” She stopped herself, pulled a deep centering breath through her nose. Her hand on my knee went limp. Then she spoke slowly, being clear with herself more than with me. “This Pryce said he knew about the plan. To bring Lothar into court. He said we couldn’t do it. We could either call it off, or he could stop us, whatever we wanted. ‘It’s your choice,’ is what he said. But there isn’t a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Vyra piped up.

“Save it for something you know,” I told her. “This isn’t about shoes.”

I felt the jolt pass from her all the way through Crystal Beth to me, but she stayed quiet.

“Vyra’s in this too,” Crystal Beth said, her tone both defending and defensive. “If we go ahead with the plan, he’s going to hurt her too.”

“How’d he say he was going to do that?”

“With . . . information,” Crystal Beth said. “That’s what he has, information. Secret information. When I first heard his voice, it was on the phone. On a special line I keep. Unlisted, in someone else’s name. It doesn’t connect to me in any way. We use it for . . . business. He knew my voice. Said he had listened to it on tape enough times to recognize me easily.”

“So he got a phone number. Pulled a wiretap. That don’t make him James Bond.”

“He has it
all,
Burke. Everything. He knows things about my own father that I never knew. About what happened with my mother. Even Starr’s name. He knows how we run our operation, who owns this place. And some things I . . . did. A long time ago. He could close us up, make everything disappear.”

“He’s just trying to spook you. What would he get out of—”

“It’s not just me,” Crystal Beth whispered urgently. “He could put Lorraine in prison. And he could hurt Vyra too.”

“How?”

“With my husband,” Vyra said, her voice dead.

“I thought he didn’t care about . . .” I said. Vyra had told me plenty of times that her husband thought it was fun that she slept around. All he wanted to do was listen to the details, take topless photos of her, lick her shoes and pay the bills.

“He’d care about this,” Vyra said in the same tone.

I waited, but she wasn’t coming off anything more.

“Okay, this Pryce guy could take it all down. Fine. What does he care?”

“Care?”

“About this Lothar geek. Why does he want to protect him so bad?”

“We don’t know,” Crystal Beth said, flat-voiced. “That’s the job. The one Vyra said you could do.”

I
was in a room with two women. Within the last few days, one had held my hand in the street, sat on my lap and told me secrets. The other had paraded around in her new shoes and sucked my cock. Now they were together, and they wanted me to do something.

It wasn’t easy, telling them that I had to get paid for what they wanted.

So I stalled.

“I don’t know if I could do it or not,” I told them. “I’m not even sure something can be done. There’s no schematic for a thing like this.”

“Will you at least talk to him?” Vyra asked.

“This guy, he’s an information-freak, right? Got stuff on both of you, on other people. That’s his weapon. Me, I’d be going in there without one. And maybe, he gets a look at me, I go on his list.”

“You scared of him?” It was Vyra talking, but I’d heard that kind of thing from women all my life. And from girls before them. I have the scars to prove it—ones you don’t need a Ph.D. to see.

“Damn right,” I said. “Add it up. You got some Nazi loon who wants his kid to help seed the Master Race. And you got somebody else running interference for him. Somebody who knows a lot he shouldn’t know. And you want me to ‘talk’ to him. How about spelling that one out?”

“You know what we want,” Vyra said.

“No you don’t,” Crystal Beth corrected her, standing up and bending toward me. “Remember what you did for Harriet? Well, maybe something like that. But not . . .”

There it was. “I got paid for Harriet,” I reminded her. “And there wasn’t any major risk in it. At least, not like this.”

“I have money,” Vyra said.

Crystal Beth rolled herself a cigarette. When she got it burning, she held it out to Vyra . . . who took one short drag and handed it back. Now they were waiting.

“How do I find this Pryce?” I asked. Thinking, if he’s as good as they were saying, he probably already knew about me.

“I have to call this number,” Crystal Beth said. “Tonight. Before midnight. Then he’ll call back. I’ll tell him then. And I’ll call you.”

She left Vyra where she was, took me down the stairs to the back door. Stood on her toes, her lips next to my ear. “I’ll tell you everything soon,” she promised, holding on to the front of my belt with two fingers, keeping me close so I’d listen.

I stepped into the biting-cold night, eyes on the clear sky. And walked away slowly, the weight of treachery yoking my shoulders.

I
t was almost nine when Clarence’s Rover swooped down, plucking me off the corner. I climbed into the front. The Prof’s hand dropped onto my shoulder.

“You was a long time in there, Schoolboy. You get enough of a look to pull Herk off the hook?”

“It was never about Herk,” I told him. “He was never the game. The poor bastard just stumbled in.”

“Figures,” the little man said acidly. “So we’re out?”

“I’m not,” I told him.

And then I told him the rest.

“
Y
ou can never shed a street-brand, honey,” Michelle said. Sitting in my booth at Mama’s—next to the Prof, facing me and Clarence. She was perfectly coiffed, wearing a red satin jumpsuit with a wide black belt, her lovely face slathered in full war-paint, getting ready to work. I’d asked her once why she dressed up just to work the phones. “It’s all feeling, baby. If you
feel
it, you can
be
it.”

Michelle does tele-sex. She’s the best at it. If you could run fiber-optic cable under a glacier, her honey-silk voice would melt it. And she’s the finest natural hustler I’ve ever known.

Michelle is my sister. No biology there, something closer to the root. We had the same father and the same bond: the State and our hate. She’d been born a toy. By the time she knew the medical term for what she was—a transsexual—her freakish family had found a dozen ways to use her. So she ran. Headlong, like a man jumping off the top of a blazing oil rig into the black ocean water below, knowing whatever was down there couldn’t be worse.

She’d known she was a woman trapped in a man’s body even before puberty tortured her from both sides of that twisted line. In the bent-sex underground where Michelle survived, the sadistic trick nature played on her raised the price of the tricks she turned. She climbed into the front seat of cars and dropped to the floor, each time wondering if the driver would be that life-taking psychopath all hookers know is out there somewhere.
Always
out there, his pounding blood seeking another’s.