Terminal Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  BEGIN READING

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ANDREW VACHSS

  COPYRIGHT

  for…

  Judith Moore,

  who used her sweet, soft heart to break the cruelest of all chains.

  You were never a fat girl to me, beautiful.

  I got to the job site a couple hours early. The kind of work I do, you show up too late, sometimes you don’t get to go home when it’s over.

  Gigi was already planted in his spot, his enormous body mass taking up most of a wooden bench, a half-empty pitcher of beer on a little table to his right. The behemoth had a perfect sight-line on the front door, but his tiny eyes were too deeply flesh-pouched for me to tell where he was looking. Wrapped in a faded gray jersey pulled over drawstring pants of the same material, he looked like a moored battleship.

  I found a stool at the far end of the bar. The guy behind the stick had a little slice of forehead and less chin. His eyes showed signs of life—I guessed somewhere around geranium level.

  I ordered a shot—nobody does brand names in a joint like this. The inbred blinked a couple of times, then brought me some brown liquid. I asked him for a glass of water. He stared at me for a minute. You could see his mind working—it wasn’t a pretty sight. Finally, enough tumblers fell into place. He reached under the bar and came up with a glass the EPA wouldn’t allow you to dump without a permit.

  The TV set was suspended from the ceiling by cables at the opposite end of the bar from where I was sitting. Some baseball game was on. I was too far away to hear the sound, or even make out who was playing, but I watched the moving images. Reminded me of being Inside. They rig the TV in the dayroom the same way, probably for the same reason. Most guys want to be outdoors every chance they get, but there’s cons who know their soaps better than any housewife.

  Usually, I drink the water, slip the whiskey into the water glass, let the ice melt into it, and then ask for another. If I think anyone might be watching close, I transfer by mouth. I was raised in places where you learn to do that with meds you don’t want, watched by “staff” who hoped you’d refuse—restraints and hypos were more fun for them.

  Eventually, the bartender takes away both glasses, brings me a “same again,” and everybody’s happy. Any regular interested in the stranger sees a man drinking solo, dedicated to his work. In a place like this, you sit by yourself not drinking, it’s like a red neon arrow pointing at you. Down at you.

  But I watched how other guys at the bar had to practically scream to get the inbred’s attention. He mostly just stood there, in the Zen state of just being the mouth-breathing genetic misfire that he was. So I nursed my drink the way a crack-addict mother nurses her kid—if it could figure out how to drink itself, fine.

  Forty minutes later, a man in a bone-colored leather sports coat shoulder-rolled in and sat down in an empty booth. Late thirties, with a tanning-bed complexion. He sported a hundred-dollar short haircut—gelled, not spiked. His wristwatch was crusted with diamonds; a three-strand loop of eighteen-karat draped against a black silk collarless pullover.

  The battleship slowly broke loose from its mooring and started across the room. From behind me, two torpedoes cut across his wake. As the first passed by where I was sitting, I slid the length of rebar out of my sleeve, gripped the taped end, and took out his knee from behind. The other whirled at his partner’s scream, but I was already swinging. His collarbone snapped under the ridged steel whip.

  The guy in the bone-colored jacket never made it out of his booth.

  I was one of the men who flowed around Gigi like river water around a big rock, all of us heading for the door. The sidewalk was empty, except for a squat-bodied man in a wheelchair. He had a begging cap on the ground next to him, one hand under the army blanket spread across his lap. Nobody gave him a second glance.

  The battleship was docked at a pier overlooking the Brooklyn Navy Yard, behind the wheel of an ancient black Caddy. He covered more than half of the front seat; the steering wheel was hidden somewhere under his upper body. A thick skullcap of wiry black hair covered his bowling ball of a head. I was standing next to him, talking through the opened window. I’d done time with Gigi—keeping something solid between you and him is always a good play.

  “Didn’t expect you,” Gigi said. “Never saw you before.”

  I shrugged, wasting fewer words than he had.

  “I did time with your boss. Thought he’d be sending Herk to watch my back.”

  I shrugged again. “Herk” was short for “Hercules,” named for his hyper-muscled physique. Everyone but Gigi called him “Big Herk,” but Herk’s 275 pounds of prison-sculptured, Dianabol-boosted chassis made him a middleweight in Gigi’s league.

  The man Gigi thought was my boss was me, the Burke he knew years ago. My face had changed—bullet wounds and trainee surgeons will do that for you—but the payphone that rang in the back of Mama’s restaurant still took my calls. And my voice was still the same…when I wanted it to be.

  “He still in your crew, Herk?”

  I gave him the look.

  “What?” he said, insulted. “You think I’m a fucking cop? They wanted to wire me up, they’d have to use a motherfucking bale of the stuff.”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re a dummy? You can’t talk, that it? Look, pal, I can see you’re not Herk, but I sure as fuck know you ain’t Max, either.”

  Gigi meant Max the Silent, a Tibetan combat dragon. Max can’t speak, but that’s not how he got his name.

  “I’m not a dummy,” I said, softly. “But I know when to dummy up.”

  “Not everyone does,” he said, a tinge of nostalgia in his guttural voice. “Things ain’t the same. These days, you got to pay a man to watch your back even when you get hired just to do a simple job like pounding on that mook. But with these punk kids taking over now, fucking bosses they are, you never know when they’re gonna watch too much TV, start thinking all plots and shit.”

  “Those two guys, you don’t think they were his?”

  “Mario’s? The guy in the pretty white coat? Yeah, they were his, all right. Even a fucking stugotz like him knows when he’s been put on the spot, marked down for some serious pain. But he’s still got to do business, got to make his rounds, show some face. It was just a matter of time. Wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.

  “Besides, if those guys you took out were from the…people who hired me, they would have been shooters. Those guys, they were just dumbass muscle.”

  I nodded agreement. If they’d been experienced bodyguards, one look at Gigi would have had them heading for the back exit. Probably a pair of strip-club bouncers, used to flexing their gym muscles at drunks.

  “Mario could’ve got himself some shooters, but he’d have to go to the yoms, get someone to do that for the kind of chump-change money he’s holding now. Can you imagine a nigger walking into that place? It’d be like one of them wandering onto our range, Inside.”

  I shook my head.

  “You know what, pal? This is seriously fucked. I get paid to do some work on a guy, I got to pay a piece of that just to make sure my back don’t get cold. Turns out, I wasted the money.”

  “You could have handled both of those guys, too?” I said, pretending mild surprise. I’d seen Gigi waddle up to whole groups of men Inside, then go through them like an enraged kid busting up balsa-wood model airplanes. He had all the speed of a fire hydrant, and about the same pain tolerance. Gigi wasn’t any good at chasing you down, but that’s the thing about prison…nowhere to run.

  “Ask your boss,” the battleship said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Hey, fuck you, you
don’t want to talk. Here’s the other half of your money. Tell Burke I still owe him a glass of vino.”

  Going back home to New York is like going back to an old girlfriend just because you remembered how great the sex had been. The minute you come, you remember all the reasons you’d decided to go the last time.

  It wasn’t that bad, not really. Being away from my family had hurt more than I’d ever imagined, but I had them back again. All the ones left, anyway.

  I didn’t have my old place, but the new one was better, once you got past the first couple of floors. I didn’t have my dog, but I could go for days without thinking about her now.

  What I didn’t have was my old ways.

  I couldn’t go back to scamming-and-stinging. I had always specialized in fleecing the kind of humans who couldn’t run to the Law, but the Internet boys had the freak market sewn up now. Promising kiddie porn I was never going to deliver was one of my bill-payers back in the day, but that’s all done—Cyberville’s full of places where freaks can sample the product for free before they buy.

  Selling info on how to become a mercenary is another dry well. Worked fine back when “mercenary” meant government-funded, no-risk slaughter—machine guns against machetes, that kind of thing. Every master-race moron with heavy experience killing paper targets wanted to get in on the fun. That’s a different game today, too. The real merc work is in overthrowing governments, and that takes specialists with track records, not fantasy-fueled freaks whose fetal alcoholism convinced them that they were the last hope of the White Race.

  I used to middleman arms deals, selling ordnance to…whoever. But that’s a no-touch ever since 9/11. The buyers could be Saudi-financed robots, or one of those neo-Nazi crews whose idea of “screening” is skin tone. And some of those are the kind of scum-sucking swine whose idea of a part-time job is being an informant for the federales.

  One surefire sting had been offering kids for sale, then strong-arming the exchange—the old badger game, cranked up to big-number payoffs. Who were the ripped-off buyers going to complain to, the Better Business Bureau? But, today, the human-traffickers have so much genuine product in their pipelines that the price keeps dropping. What you could sell twenty years ago for a hundred grand wouldn’t get you five today. Not worth the time and trouble to set up the mark, never mind the mess you sometimes make when they get all aggressive the second they find out what they really just bought.

  I heard there was good money selling electromagnetic shields to poor souls who were sure they were being targeted by psychotronic weapons, but I couldn’t make myself go there. Same reason I could never pluck the ripe alien-abductee fruit, even when it dangled so close to the ground.

  Can’t even rip off the dope men, anymore. They used to just truck the weight around, open for any hijacker with accurate info and the right skills. I’d done one of my stretches for a move like that. Had everything figured out: steal it, sell it back to the owners. Only thing is, they did call the cops. Their cops.

  Anyway, that’s all changed, too. Just read this whole frantic piece in the News about a new drug hitting the streets. Heroin cut with fentanyl. Supposed to have killed a few people already.

  Reading stuff like that always makes me sad. Not because of a few dead dope fiends, but I can’t figure out why anyone thinks that’s news, or why it matters. This “new” stuff isn’t new at all—it’s been killing addicts in Chicago and Detroit for a long time now. What kind of chump thinks hard-core addicts read the papers for street news, like yuppies checking their mutual funds? For the dealers, a few deaths are good for business. Proves they’ve got the real thing, not some stepped-on lemonade that won’t even buy you a mild buzz.

  A junkie worries about only three things: finding the money to fix, finding a seller with righteous stuff, and finding a vein to slam it home. Death? You try that ride every time. Part of the deal. That’s why the top dogs brand their stuff.

  Maybe they’ll make a movie about it.

  I used to find people. Kids mostly. I was good at it—the best tracker in the city, the whisper-stream said. But I’d finally learned that bringing kids back to the people who paid me didn’t always make me a hero.

  And the last job I’d done had changed that forever. The man who used to send me tracker work would never be calling me again, either.

  I scratch around now. Helping people go and stay gone, that’s something I know how to do. But there’s not a lot of that kind of work around. And most of it just vibrates with danger, like the hum in an electric fence.

  The thing about doing crime for a living is that you have to keep doing it. And, every time you do, the odds shift…in the wrong direction. I’m not going Inside again. Not for all the usual reasons—although every one of those is a good one—but because I can’t play that hand anymore. At my age, with my record, any sentence would come with a lifetime guarantee. So when I do violence-for-money, like covering Gigi’s back, I make sure I’m nowhere near the fallout zone.

  Still, in my world, being “sure” is just another way of saying you had cut down the odds. Nobody was supposed to die in the job Gigi had hired me for, but accidents happen. What I was sure of was that nobody was going to talk. Not because of some bullshit “code,” but because it was the smart play. The only play.

  Nobody was even going to call the cops, much less talk to them. And if some passing citizen had a cell phone, good fucking luck interrogating that bartender—he wouldn’t be playing dumb.

  With all that, I still should have passed. Anytime you cover Gigi while he’s working, you could end up watching a homicide.

  I’ve got some money. That last job had turned out to be worth a lot more than I’d thought it could be. Cost me a lot more than I thought I had, too.

  No reason why I couldn’t go the rest of the way on that one score. I live small. I have the whole top floor of a flophouse that’s been scheduled for the wrecking ball for years, but the bribery they call “paperwork” in this town had prolonged the process through two administrations already. In the meantime, I don’t pay rent. Or utilities.

  I don’t have a phone. For outgoing, I use an ever-changing batch of cloned cells the Mole puts together for me. For messages, there’s the same number the underground has been using for years. The same one Gigi had called.

  I’ve even got cable, a feeder line from the ground floor of the flophouse. I see whatever I want on the screen, but I never see a bill.

  Thanks to my sister Michelle, I don’t pay retail for clothing. Except when she gets in one of her “You need this now!” moods. Then I end up paying through both nostrils and a few assorted veins.

  My car is as maintenance-free as an I-beam, a ’69 Roadrunner two-door post. It looks like a derelict from the outside but underneath is an all-new chassis, complete with a transplanted Viper IRS, and a bulletproof, injected Mopar wedge, hand-assembled for torque. Purrs on pump gas, never uses a drop of synthetic between changes, and wouldn’t overheat in a Saharan summer.

  I shoot pool, but for nickels and dimes. I play cards, but only with my family—my brother Max is into me for over a couple hundred grand, but we agreed we’d settle up when we both reach the Other Side. He’s my partner in our two-man betting syndicate, too, but we’ve never gone more than a few hundred plus-or-minus there.

  I don’t drink. Even when I did smoke, I only bought Dukes—meaning straight from North Carolina, without those pesky New York tax stamps. Later on, I used one of those hundred-foot Indian reservations they have on Long Island, the ones they built to display the government’s deep respect for its favorite Native American tribe: the Casino Indians.

  I don’t use drugs for the same reason I don’t drink. Some kids who come up the way I did use stuff like that to get numb. Others, the ones like me, take hyper-vigilance as a sacred vow.

  No woman who ever loved me cost me money. But none of them are still with me. Some are dead; all are gone.

  Max has his family. His wife, Immaculata; his daughter,
Flower. The Prof, my only true father, has another child—a young gun he had picked up and lifted up, like he had done with me. I was way older than Clarence, but I’d never felt replaced; I felt added-to. He calls us both “son,” but, to the Prof, I’d be “Schoolboy” forever.

  He and Clarence had a crib together over in East New York. Michelle had the Mole; together they had Terry. I had snatched him from a pimp in Times Square years ago, before Giuliani cleared up midtown and left the boroughs to rot. Mama had all of us, but Flower, her granddaughter, was the pick of the litter, and none of us had a moment’s doubt about that.

  It wasn’t so much that they all had one another—I had them, too, and they me. It was that they all had something to do.

  I walked in the glass door with the taped-over cracks, found myself facing a man in a wheelchair, sitting behind a wide wooden plank that holds a register nobody ever signs.

  “Gateman,” I said.

  “Hey, boss. You had a call.”

  That meant someone had called me at Mama’s and she had left word with Gateman. I wouldn’t carry a cell on a job like the one I just did, and none of us would ever use an answering machine.

  I nodded, then handed him an envelope.

  “Thanks, boss.”

  “Count it.”

  “For what? We didn’t set no exact price.”

  “Yeah, we did. Remember?”

  “For real?”

  “Count it.”

  “There’s—fuck me!—five large here. What’d that humongoid pay?”

  “Ten. Knowing Gigi, he probably got twenty-five, minimum.”

  “He’s worth it,” Gateman said, reluctantly respectful. “That monster motherfucker never misses. And he don’t even know how to spell ‘rat.’”

  “True,” I said, remembering a conversation I’d had with Gigi on the yard, a long time ago.

  “I’m kind of like a whore,” the monster said, shocking me into silence. “I mean, we both rent our bodies, right? You know what makes me different?”