The Weight

  ALSO BY ANDREW VACHSS

  THE BURKE SERIES

  Flood

  Strega

  Blue Belle

  Hard Candy

  Blossom

  Sacrifice

  Down in the Zero

  Footsteps of the Hawk

  False Allegations

  Safe House

  Choice of Evil

  Dead and Gone

  Pain Management

  Only Child

  Down Here

  Mask Market

  Terminal

  Another Life

  OTHER NOVELS

  Shella

  The Getaway Man

  Two Trains Running

  Haiku

  SHORT-STORY COLLECTIONS

  Born Bad

  Everybody Pays

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Vachss

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vachss, Andrew H.

  The weight / Andrew Vachss.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37975-7

  1. Professional thieves—United States—Fiction. 2. Criminals— United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3572.A33W45 2010

  813.54—dc22 2009050945

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  About the Author

  Mom:

  I know you couldn’t wait any longer to be with Dad, but don’t fret—I’ll be with you both soon enough.

  I’ve got a few things to take care of first.

  Yeah, I know … I always did.

  And you know … I always will.

  Whatever it was the cops had snatched me up for, they had to believe I was good for it. But not all that good. Otherwise, why go tag-team on me?

  One of the cops on the second shift was an older guy. He looked the way some people say all cops used to: tall, big hands, straw-colored hair. Back then, they’d say, cops would catch a kid doing something wrong, they’d kick him in the ass, send him home, and go back to walking their beat. They never paid for a meal, but nobody thought that was graft. Some might even take money from bookies or whorehouses. But never from a dope dealer.

  Maybe cops were really like that once. I don’t know; I wasn’t around then. I only know how they are now.

  I’ll say this for the older cop: He dressed like a guy who lived on his paycheck. And he wasn’t there to dance. He walked in with his partner, sat down, and threw his Sunday punch: “This one just doesn’t look like your line of work, Sugar.”

  That told me he was sharp enough to do more than just check me for priors. Not by calling me “Sugar.” The first pair, they’d called me that, too. Sliding it out of their mouths like they knew something dirty about me. This cop, he just said it like it was my name.

  The first two cops, I think all they did was scan my record for a “Registered Sex Offender” ticket. When they didn’t see one, they were out of gas; it’s the only card they know how to play.

  The older cop shook his head, like he was confused about what they’d arrested me for.

  “I got to say, I don’t like you for this one at all.”

  “Then what am I here for?” I asked him.

  He made his eyes go sad, showing he was disappointed in me. It was a good trick. A guy who’s been around as long as him, he probably knew a lot of them.

  We’d already been sitting in the interrogation room for a couple of hours when he did that. Maybe it was part of his act, I don’t know. But it was as clear as if somebody wrote the rules on the wall for us all to see: As long as I didn’t say the magic words, we were going to play it like men. No disrespect, not in either direction.

  Those magic words could only come out of my mouth. Door Number One: “I want a lawyer.” Door Number Two: “Yeah, you got me.”

  I tell them I want a lawyer, they’d give me a look like I’d just screwed myself, cuff me back up, and have one of the bluecoats walk me into a holding cell.

  But if I started talking, they’d hold off until they squeezed as much juice out of the lemon as they could. Say I told them I wanted a deal. They’d tell me that I could get damn near whatever I wanted … depending on what I had to trade.

  The way they were working me, walking so soft, that was just to stop me from asking for a lawyer. Good cops—I don’t mean like they were good guys, just good at their job—they think the same way we do. They know if you get all impatient you can mess everything up.

  So they stayed decent and respectful, like I said. Not kissing my ass or anything; making it just three men, talking. The way they’d figure it, so long as they could keep me talking, talking about anything, there was always the chance I’d take Door Number Two. Or stumble through it.

  They had to know it was a-thousand-to-one against them getting me to confess. And I knew it was even worse odds against me convincing them they’d grabbed the wrong guy.

  A weak hand, sure. Who hits a gutshot straight-flush draw? But I wasn’t drawing dead, not yet.

  We each had our reasons for staying with it. They had all the time in the world. And that’s how much time I was looking at.

  So I had to stay to see the last card drop. Because, no matter what those sex-crimes clowns had told me, I knew this couldn’t really be about a rape.

  The rape they kept asking me about, it must have been a bad one. For the cops, the worst one would be if it happened to some kind of famous person. I hadn’t seen a paper for days, but I knew they’d been sitting on my place, waiting for me to come back. At least six of them, round the clock. That’s a lot of cops.

  I didn’t know how long they’d been waiting, but they couldn’t have started until after I left, and that was only a few days ago.

  Sending the sex-crimes cops in first, that didn’t mean anything—it could just be a hype to get me to take my eye off the ball. Misdirection, like three-card monte. They pull you in for something big, get you so scared of that charge that you drop your guard and give up something about whatever they’re really after you for.

  I knew they hadn’t bagged any of the others. If they had, they’d drop their names, so I’d know they weren’t just blowing smoke. Then they’d have their magic words. Door One: one of the other guys had turned canary, put all the weight on me, trying to cut himself a deal. Door Two: here was my chance to help myself before it was too late.

  Only the second pair of cops would try a move like that. The first two, the sex-crimes boys, they mostly made speeches. Or asked me stupid questions, like a TV camera was filming them. Big guy like me, all those muscles—what happened? I’d been on steroids so long I couldn’t get it up, and she’d laughed at me? I hadn’t meant to hurt her, just slap her around a little, maybe? Come on, isn’t that how it went down?

  I yawned in their faces.

  “Got nothing to say now, huh?” one of them had said. Like he’d just nailed me to the cross.

  I wanted to ask him if that pathetic crap ever worked. What kind of chumps show you their hand first and then try to bluff you off a better one?

  But I didn’t say anything. I’m a professional, not a pun
k with a pistol. You’ll never see my picture on a security camera sticking up a bodega. Or jacking some guy in a suit while he’s standing at an ATM.

  I’m a thief, and I do clean work. I don’t hurt people for money, I don’t set fires, I don’t do any of those sicko sex things. Stuff like that, it gets spread all over: the papers, radio, TV. Gets everybody paying attention. Specially when there’s big reward money out there.

  A man who does my kind of work, the only way he ever gets caught is if he goes in without a plan. Or if someone rolls over on him.

  You never talk about your work, period. Too many guys walking around with heavy charges hanging over them. Anyone gets caught holding K-weight powder in this state, it’s the same as a murder beef. A street cop catches a guy holding that heavy, he can make the bust, but all that’d get him is another one of those “commendations” every cop has a couple dozen of. What he really wants is that gold shield, so he’d rather have that guy on the street, working for him. Any outlaw is going to be able to go places no undercover ever could. So all he has to do is listen long enough.

  Guys like that, they’re all nothing but rats on leashes. If it wasn’t for informants, the cops would have to get damn lucky to ever make a case against a pro.

  They’ll pretty much always get the amateurs—the clowns who leave a trail you could follow even with one of those white canes tapping the way.

  The amateurs who stay out the longest are the ones who kill for fun. A random kill doesn’t even look like what it really is until the bodies pile up.

  There’s also people who get off on being a rat. Nothing in it for them; they like doing that kind of stuff.

  So it’s just as hard for people on my side of the law to sniff them out as it is for the law to sniff out a guy who does freakish stuff.

  There’s even people stupid enough to rat on themselves. A pro can be smart about work and dumb about other things. Say you talk about your work to your girlfriend: all it takes is for her to get mad at you one time to put a whole crew under the jail.

  A few years ago, that happened to a guy I’d worked some jobs with. He was real good-looking. Smooth talker, too. Always found some girl to pick up his tabs—I don’t think he ever paid rent in his life. This guy, he’d never talk about our kind of work, but any woman he ever stayed with, she’d have to know he wasn’t any W-2 man. Probably helped them get over the nights he didn’t come home. And explained the flashy way he always dressed, too. Whatever, they were always happy to help out with some cash while he was waiting on this big score he had coming.

  Only this last one, she couldn’t leave it that way. She just had to satisfy herself he wasn’t spending her money on some other girl.

  A lot of them do it now. They call it “playing detective.” You know what I mean: they buy their boyfriend a cell phone and pay the bill themselves. The mark thinks he’s playing her, but the person who pays the bill gets the bill. Which means she gets a lot of phone numbers.

  So, anyway, the girlfriend, she finds a number she doesn’t recognize, dials it while the guy’s sleeping. Wakes him up and goes off on him. She’s taking care of him, and he fucking cheats on her!?

  He should’ve just promised her he was done with that other girl. Better yet, just walked away and not come back.

  But, no, he has to be a big man. Throws a fistful of hundreds on the floor, tells her, “Here, bitch. Go pay your little cell-phone bill.”

  All their time together, she thought he was her kept boy, so seeing all that money sends her over the edge. A few minutes earlier, she was screaming at him to get out. Now she’s standing in front of the door. She’s got more to say, and he’s going to listen to it or …

  He should have let her scream herself dry. But, the kind of fool he is, he’s got to play his role, just like he did flashing the money. Ends up banging her around pretty hard.

  He’s not even a few blocks away when she goes 911 on him. They pick him up right on the street. Once they tell him what he’s being pinched for, he doesn’t say a word.

  This guy figures, they arraign him in the morning, he takes whatever they’re offering. What’s he looking at … thirty days and some anger-management class?

  But he’s only in a few hours when the girlfriend waltzes in and tells the cops she’s decided not to press charges. Stupid broad, she thought it was her case. When they tell her it’s not up to her, she loses it again. By the time she’s done running her mouth, they’ve got enough probable cause to take her home and have a look around. That was all it took.

  I’ll say this for that guy: maybe he played big-shot, but he paid for doing it, and he didn’t ask anyone he ever worked with to split the tab.

  When a whole crew gets pulled in at the same time, the first thing they do is cut you off from the other guys. There’s all kinds of ways to do that.

  But these cops hadn’t even mentioned the job, much less any of my partners on it.

  When they left me alone in the interrogation room—a lot of them try that—I had plenty of time to think.

  So, when they finally came back in, I thought I’d try that same trick myself, dividing them up.

  “Those other guys, they watch too much TV,” I said to the older cop.

  “Is that right?”

  “They found my DNA?” I said, making a joke of it. I knew these cops must have been watching while the sex-crimes buffoons took the first crack at me.

  The older guy’s partner—a black guy, closer to my age; clean-cut, sharp dresser—said, “DNA doesn’t lie,” making his voice all deep and serious, the way the sex-crimes clown had said it to me.

  “And I still didn’t start yelling for Legal Aid,” I reminded them.

  “Meaning …?”

  “I figured—I hoped anyway—they’d send in the A-Team sooner or later.”

  “You wouldn’t be stroking us now, would you, Sugar?” the older cop said.

  “I’m just saying, there’s cops and there’s cops. I mean, come on, if they really had any of that CSI stuff, they would have shown it to me by now. Waved it in my face.”

  “You think that’s what we’d do?”

  “No, I mean those other guys. Like I said, TV cops. But I know you couldn’t have anything—”

  “You were gloved?” the black guy cut me off, like he just saw an opening and needed to move fast before it closed.

  It was my turn to look disappointed. “That’s cold, Officer,” I said to him. “I thought we were going to play this straight.”

  “Cheap shot,” the older guy said. A cop’s apology, sure, but I trusted it at least enough to see if I could get them to say the wrong thing.

  So I baited the trap: “Something’s screwy here. Listen, I absolutely know you don’t have any of that stuff. You know why? Because I know it wasn’t me who did it.”

  “Simple as that?”

  “It’s the truth,” I said, dropping an even bigger hint. What I had in mind, it had to be their idea. It couldn’t come from me, or they wouldn’t trust it.

  “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right,” the older guy said. “Say we don’t have one single piece of physical evidence to tie you to the rape. That’d make it a tougher case in court, sure. But we’re still holding the ace.”

  “I got picked out of a photo spread?”

  “Got it in one,” he said. Smiled a little, too.

  “I don’t know what to say about that,” I said, real quick—before they realized they’d told me something I didn’t know. I’d already been in a lineup, but I’d just been guessing about the mug-shot book.

  So I kept going: “I mean, I’ve been in lineups where I was the only white guy on the stage, but this one was fair. Hell, a couple of those guys looked enough like me to be my twin brother.”

  The black cop laughed. Not the first time he’d heard that one, I guessed. “Probably so,” he said. “Only thing is—”

  “Yeah, I know. They were cops, right? And no cop ever did a rape.” />
  They looked at each other for a second—just a quick glance. I was walking pretty close to the edge of their line with that last one. They must have had some way of signaling each other. Or maybe they’d worked together so long they didn’t need to.

  “But you didn’t ask for your phone call,” the black cop said. “Which means you think you’ve got a shot at getting us to buy your story.”

  Yeah, I was right—he was smart, just like his partner. Maybe I would get that shot. “It’s no story,” I said, making sure I didn’t sound resentful.

  “You know what would turn it for you, Caine?” the older one said. “An alibi. That would pretty much trump our ace.”

  I’d been hoping for something else, but I rolled with the punch, and tried again. “For you, or for a jury?”

  “For you,” he hit back. “You know there’s no point giving us a piece of cellophane—that’d just make it worse. But you give us a real alibi, we’ll check it out. Check it out deep. Turn it upside down and sideways. If there’s a hole in it, we’ll find it; trust me on that. But if you’re telling the truth—and, like I said, I kind of think you just might be—that’d be good for you.”

  It’s not just the hard eight; now I’m down to my third throw, I thought. Why wouldn’t they just ask me to take a—?

  The older cop broke into my thoughts. “Here’s the good part for you, Caine. It’s not only you who knows how good we’d check out your alibi—the DA knows it, too. Believe me, my partner and me tell them your alibi’s rock-solid, no way those Ivy League wimps are going to take a chance on messing up their conviction rate.”

  “Hard enough to get them to prosecute good cases,” the black cop said. His mouth twisted when he said that. I took it for real, not a play. Probably watched some solid cases tossed out, and he hadn’t liked it much.

  I remember thinking what a fucked-up mess things were. See, I believed those cops. Mostly because they weren’t telling me anything I didn’t know. Every pro on both sides of the line knows the DA’s Office’ll always deal away the courthouse on a sex crime. Specially if the woman was the wrong kind. Like a hooker, or slow in the head, or even dressed too sexy. Or maybe she had booze or drugs in her blood when they ran the tests.