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  Years later, when McGowan finally retired, Morales went off by himself. He was an old-school street beast, a badge-carrying brute who’d always pick a blackjack over a warrant. He’d been dinosaured to the sidelines because nobody wanted to partner with a bull who knew every china shop in town.

  In his eyes, I was always a suspect—which was nothing special for Morales—but I’d saved his life once, and he hated the debt more than he did me. It was Morales who planted the pistol and the bone hand, calling things square in whatever crazy language he used when he talked to himself.

  It wasn’t just his feral honor that guaranteed Morales would never change the story he’d made up. When 9/11 hit, he was one of the first cops into the World Trade Center. When his body was recovered from the wreckage, the papers called him a hero. Down here, we know they got the answer right, but had figured it all wrong. Morales had charged into the flames with a semi-auto in one hand, a lead-weighted flashlight in the other, and a throw-down piece in his pocket, like always. The old street roller hadn’t been on any rescue mission; he’d been looking for the bad guys.

  Jeremy Preston wasn’t the first parent McGowan had sent my way. He never came right out and recommended me, exactly—he just wove my name into one of his long, rambling accounts of the shark tank that was the Port Authority Bus Terminal then, each newly arriving bus discharging chum into the water, the pimps circling.

  We’re not talking Iceberg Slim here. The Port Authority trollers were the low end of the scale: polyestered punks with CZ rings and 10K gold, not a Cadillac among them. They didn’t turn a girl out with smooth talk and sweet promises. For that breed, “game” was coat-hanger whips and cigarette burns. And gang rape.

  I lit another cigarette, watched Preston’s derma-glazed face through the bluish smoke. Said, “Well?”

  “Look, I don’t know for a fact that my daughter is with some…pimp.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Just tell me what you do know, okay?”

  By the time he was done, we’d agreed on a price. And I went hunting.

  My first rescue had been an accident. One thing I had learned from my last stretch Inside: steal from people who can’t go to the Law. And stick to cash. I had lurked for days, watching for what I thought was a good target. When he made his move, I followed him and the teenager he had plucked off a bus from the Midwest. The derelict building he took her to was a couple of notches below slum, the kind of place where the mailboxes were all wrenched open on check day, and the despair stench had penetrated down to the last molecule. There was no lock on the front door. I followed them up a few flights, listening to the pimp saying something about how this was “just for tonight.”

  The top floor was all X-flats—cleared of occupants because the building was waiting on the wrecking ball. The pimp had put his own padlock on the door. I figured he had another one on the inside, so I didn’t wait. I came up fast behind them, shouldered them both into the apartment, and let the pimp see my pistol—a short-barreled .357 Mag—before he could make a move.

  “What is this, man?”

  “I’m collecting for the Red Cross,” I said. “They take money or blood, your choice.”

  “Oh,” he said, visibly relaxing as the message that this was a stickup penetrated. “Look, man, I’m not carrying no real coin, you understand?”

  “A major mack like you? Come on, let’s see the roll. And move slow—this piece could punch a hole in you the size of a manhole cover.”

  The girl stood rooted to the spot, her eyes darting around the vile room, taking in the stained, rotted mattress in one corner, the white hurricane candle in a wide glass jar, the huge boom box, and the word “Prince” spray-painted in red on a nicotine-colored wall.

  The pimp reached…slowly…into the side pocket of his slime-green slacks, came out with a fist-sized wad of bills. At a nod from me, he gently tossed it over.

  I slipped the rubber band with my left thumb. A Kansas City bankroll: a single hundred on the outside, with a bunch of singles at the core.

  “Where’s the rest?” I said, gently.

  “Ain’t no ‘rest,’ man. I’m still working on my stake.”

  The girl walked over to the closet, head down, as if some instinct told her not to look at my face. She opened the door, gasped, and jumped back. I glanced in her direction. Inside the closet was a single straight chair. Draped over the back were several strands of rope and two pairs of handcuffs. On the seat of the chair was a thick roll of duct tape, and one of those cheap Rambo knives they sold all over Times Square.

  “Get the picture?” I said to her, nodding my head at the other item in the closet—a Polaroid camera.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  But she just kept saying “I’m sorry,” over and over again.

  So much for my big score.

  “Turn around,” I told the pimp.

  “Look, man, you don’t gotta—”

  “I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “I’m a professional, just like you. Thought you’d be carrying heavy coin. Now I’ve got to get out of here. So I’m going to put those handcuffs on you. Your friends will get you loose soon as they show up.”

  “I ain’t got no—”

  “Friends? Yeah, that’s right, you probably don’t. But you’re expecting some company, aren’t you, Prince?”

  “Shit, man,” he said, resignedly. He turned around, put his hands behind his back.

  The Magnum was a heavy little steel ingot in my right hand. I stepped close to him, tipped his floppy hat forward with my left hand. He was still saying “What you—?” as I chopped down at his exposed cervical vertebrae with all my strength. He dropped soundlessly—his head bounced off the wood floor and settled at an angle that looked permanent.

  “Come on,” I said to the girl.

  She followed me without a word.

  On the walk back to the Port Authority, I said, “You know what was going to happen to you, right?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I—”

  “Don’t say another word,” I told her. “Not until you get back where you came from.”

  “I don’t have any—”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “St. Paul. I thought I—”

  “Shut your stupid fucking mouth,” I said.

  Inside the terminal, I bought her a one-way ticket to St. Paul, handed her two ten-dollar bills, said, “I’m going to watch you get on that bus, understand? If you ever come back here, you’re going to get hurt worse than you ever imagined.”

  “I’m—”

  “I told you to shut up. Don’t say another word until you’re talking to someone you know.”

  I watched the bus pull out. She didn’t wave goodbye.

  I never got paid for that one.

  Like I said, that was back in the day. In Times Square, you could buy anything on the back streets, from a hooker to heroin, and some of the stores sold magazines with photos so foul you wanted to find the people who took them and make them dead. Today, Times Square is another planet: Disney World.

  You can’t buy porn from Disney. They’re all about family. Of course, they’ve got no problem hiring a convicted child-molester to make horror movies…about kids. Tourists think things have changed. People who live here, they know all that ever changes are the addresses.

  But even back then, freaks had to know their way around to find a baby pross. A girl pross, anyway; the little-boy hustlers were pretty much out in the open, working the arcades.

  You won’t find kids hooking in Times Square now. But it’s just like what happens anytime the cops crank up the heat on a drug corner—the traffic just moves to another location. You want an underage girl, there’s always Queens Plaza after dark, and dozens of other spots.

  A while back, two dirtbags grabbed a fifteen-year-old runaway, raped and sodomized her until she had nothing left, then put her out on the street. She wasn’t working back alleys, either. Last
arrest was on Queens Boulevard, in a nice section of Elmhurst. They took the girl to Florida for the winter, where the local cops grabbed her…and probably saved her life.

  Extradited to Queens, the dirtbags got the usual sweetheart deal from the tough-talking clown who calls himself the District Attorney. He threw out the rape, sodomy, and kidnapping charges, let them plead to “promoting prostitution.” Now they can prance around the yard Upstate, jacketed as pimps, not kiddie-rapists. When they get out, they won’t even have to register as sex offenders. With all the heavy cred they’ll have accumulated—what’s more max than being a player and an ex-con?—they’ll probably start their own rap label.

  I didn’t know where Beryl was, but I had a good idea of where she wasn’t. A snatched-up runaway wasn’t going to end up in a high-end house. Kiddie sex is a specialized business, and—back then, before the Internet—that meant a lot of risk for the money.

  I had the girl’s picture, half a dozen different shots. And a one-two punch: not only the promise of heavy coin if you turned her up, but the guarantee that, if you saw her and I didn’t get word, you better be carrying a lot of Blue Cross.

  It wasn’t me that scared anyone. It was Max at my side. And Wesley in the shadows. On top of that, the city was full of bad guys who thought kiddie pimps were a disgrace to their good name, and I knew a lot of them.

  I was a different man then. I was just making the transition from armed robber to scam artist, and if you pushed me anywhere close to a corner, violence was still Option One. I was still learning how to sting freaks: promising everything from kiddie porn to mercenary contracts, never delivering. Once I took your money, good luck finding me. And bad luck if you did.

  This part never changes: The best way to track someone down is to plant the word, burying the trip wires under sweet promises. Then you put on a lot of pressure, and wait for whoever you’re tracking to stumble over one of them. But when you’re looking for a kid who’s in the wrong hands, too much patience can be fatal.

  So I started in Hunts Point, the lowest end of the scale for working whores, then. They were all turning scag-tricks. Their only customers were truckers who had dropped off their cargo at the Meat Market, or serial killers who liked the odds of a desolate piece of flatland where you could find anything on earth except a cop.

  Getting any of that sorry collection of broken-veined junkies to talk was easy—for money they’d do anything you could imagine, and plenty that would give you nightmares if you did—but getting them to talk sense was near impossible.

  So I just cruised, with the girl’s photo taped to my dashboard. I came up empty a few days in a row—Hunts Point was a daylight stroll. Nights, I worked lower Lex, which was racehorse territory then. Fine, young, sleek girls, with much stronger, smarter pimps running them.

  I didn’t waste time down there, just showed Beryl’s picture around, told every working girl who came over to my rolled-down car window about the bounty, and moved on.

  Next stop, under the West Side Highway. Back then, it ran all the way downtown, and below Canal was Hookerville. Michelle worked that stroll in those days, when she was still pre-op. She got into the front seat of my car, listened to my story, and promised if Beryl showed she’d make sure she didn’t leave until I got there.

  That should have sounded like big talk, coming from a small, fine-boned little tranny. But Michelle hated humans who fucked kids as only a kid who’d been fucked could, and she’d learned a lot since prison. Now she was snake-quick with the straight razor she never left home without.

  It was almost two weeks before I got word that someone had a girl to sell. Not to rent, sell. Supposedly, an eleven-year-old virgin with a hairless pussy who loved to suck cocks and was looking for a permanent home with the right man.

  I called the number I had gotten from a guy who ran a private camera club—“The girls will pose any way you tell them, gentlemen. No film allowed.” As soon as I heard the voice on the other end, I knew this could be for real: He was a young guy with a sociopath’s chilly voice, talking from a payphone.

  “I don’t know you, man. All I know, you could be The Man, you know what I’m saying?”

  “So meet me, wherever you say, and I’ll prove I’m a legitimate purchaser,” I said, softening my voice as I pictured myself as the seal-sleek, middle-aged man who had told me how much money there was in “unbroken” little girls.

  The sleek man had come into my life just after I first got out. I thought he’d be the start of my career as a scam-master. Instead, he turned out to be a still-unsolved homicide. It took me a long time to get still enough inside myself so I could listen to one of his tribe without having to hurt him.

  “How you gonna do that?”

  “Surely you don’t expect me to say on the phone?”

  “I—Yeah, all right, I see where you coming from. This number’s no good for me after today, man. Leave me one where I can call you, when I got it set up.”

  “I’ll give you a number, but I am rarely there in person. My assistant will always know how to reach me, and I’ll get back to you within an hour or two, fair enough?”

  I raced back to Michelle’s stroll, saw her getting out of a white Oldsmobile. By the time I closed the distance between us, she had taken a slug of the little cognac bottle she always carried with her, rinsed and spit, and was already snake-hipping her way back toward the underpass. I took her over to Mama’s, set her up in my booth, and told her there was a hundred in it for her to just sit there until the last payphone in the row against the wall that separated the kitchen from the customers rang. The line was a bridge job, forwarded from one of the dead-end numbers I always kept for emergencies—the Mole had set it up so I could divert it by calling and punching in a series of tones.

  The phone rang while Michelle and I were still having our soup; the dealer was getting anxious to unload his merchandise.

  “It’s him,” is all Michelle said when she came back to the table.

  “Quick enough?” I said into the receiver.

  “You want to see quick, just fuck with me, and watch how quick you get yourself a problem, man.”

  “What’s all this?” I said, hardening my voice. The kiddie-trafficker whose ticket I had canceled had been steel under the sealskin. Stainless steel. If I acted too intimidated, it would be out of character; might spook the bottom-feeder I had on the end of my line. “I thought we were going to do business,” I said, “not sell wolf tickets.”

  “I ain’t selling no fucking tickets, man. I’m just saying—”

  “Just say where and when, all right? Then you can satisfy yourself I’m straight up, and we can do what we have to do.”

  “You know,” he said, barely suppressing his admiration for his own cleverness, “this jewelry we talking about, it’s expensive, man.”

  “I heard it was twenty.”

  “Twenty-five, man.”

  “If it’s as fine as you say it is—”

  “It’s finer. You’ll see.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight, maybe. If you check out. I’m nobody to fuck with, man. ’Long as you understand.”

  The pathetic amateur gave me the address of a vacant lot behind a deserted tool-and-die plant in South Jamaica. That wasn’t the amateur part. Telling me about a midnight meet at four in the afternoon, that was.

  By the time I pulled into the back lot behind the wheel of a gunmetal Mercedes four-door, Max was dialed into the molecular vibrations of the empty building as if he’d been part of the first concrete poured into the foundation. The Mole had dropped him off, driving one of those Con Ed trucks he seems to be able to “find” whenever he needs one. Probably the same place he had found the Mercedes.

  I got out, dressed in a dark-gray suit, a white silk handkerchief in the breast pocket matching the white shirt I wore without a tie. I spotted the target, but acted as if I hadn’t. He was lounging in the shadows of the back wall, cleverly dressed all in black. I lit a cigarette and paced in
tight little circles, glancing at my watch: 11:51.

  He let me wait a few minutes. Not because he was a pro, but because making people do what he wanted made him feel more like himself.

  He rolled up on me out of the darkness, like some movie ninja. I jumped back, fake-startled.

  “You got something to show me?” he said, voice swollen with confidence now that he was sure he was dealing with exactly what he expected—a nervous man with a heavy fetish and a heavier wallet.

  “Sure,” I said, keeping my voice soft.

  “I got to search you first,” he said. “You know the routine.”

  “What do you—?”

  “Oh, fuck it, man! Just turn around, assume the position. I got a piece, see?” he said, holding up some little pearl-handled popcorn-pimp special. “You do anything stupid, and—pow!—that’s all they is for you. Way out here, nobody find your body for a month.”

  “Listen,” I said, standing with my arms extended away from my sides, “just take it easy, okay?”

  His pat-down was just like him—rough and stupid.

  “All right, man. You can turn around.”

  “Can I see her now?” I said, a little too eagerly.

  “You know what I got to see first, right?”

  “Sure, sure. I brought it.”

  “You brought twenty-five K with you?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to…drag this out. You’re not going to rob me, are you?”

  “I fucking should, dumb as you are, man. Show it to me.”

  “It’s in the trunk. I put it in a briefcase, so you could—”

  “Well, open it, motherfucker.”

  “Sure. Just don’t—”

  I unlocked the trunk. As it slid up, I stepped aside, and the nose of the Prof’s double-barreled sawed-off went jack-in-the-box on the pimp.

  “Surprise!” the little man said.

  “Hey, man. I—”

  Max had him by then. The little pistol dropped from the pimp’s nerve-dead hand.