Mask Market b-16 Page 6

  “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.

  The Prof climbed out of the trunk, the sawed-off never wavering from the pimp’s midsection.

  “I think we should talk now,” I said.

  I nside the building, I used my pencil flash to illuminate a clear spot. Max crooked his left forearm around the pimp’s neck, grabbed his own right biceps, and curled his right hand over the top of the pimp’s head.

  “All he has to do is squeeze now,” I said. “You understand?”

  “Look, man—”

  “Sssh,” I said, gently. “There’s nothing for you to be worried about. I kept my word, didn’t I?”

  “I—”

  “Ssssh,” I said again. “You know I’m not a cop now, right?”

  “Yeah, man. I was—”

  “But you, you do have the girl, right?”

  “Nah, man. I was just trying to run a game, you know?”

  “If that’s true, you’re a corpse,” I said, not raising my voice.

  I brought my thumb and forefinger together. Max tightened the noose. The pimp’s eyelids fluttered. I moved my fingertips apart.

  The pimp gasped a few times.

  “Want to try again?” I asked him.

  “It ain’t what you think, man. I swear! It was all her idea.”

  “This ‘her’?” I said, showing him the photo with my flashlight.

  “Yeah! She came up to me, man. This whole thing—”

  “That’s enough,” I told him. “We don’t care how it happened. Some people put up a hundred grand for her. So we want her, and we want her right now. It’s worth the twenty-five we promised, you turn her up, okay?”

  “She ain’t here,” he said.

  “We know that,” I said, barely above a whisper. “That’s not the question you were asked.” I held up my thumb and forefinger again, letting him see the gesture.

  “No, no, man! Listen, I prove it to you, okay? She’s at my woman’s house. Few minutes from here. But she ain’t tied up or nothing, she just sitting there, watching TV. How’s that?”

  “That’s real good,” I said, soothingly. “Now let’s go pick up the package.”

  “T his place where your woman has the merchandise, is it an apartment or…?” I asked him. I was behind the wheel, the pimp seated next to me, Max behind him, the choke hold back in place.

  “It’s a private house, man,” he said, a wire-thin twist of pride in his voice. “You know where Union Hall Street is? You just—”

  “I know where it is,” I told him, keying the ignition.

  “H ey, man, this ain’t the way to—”

  “Just relax. Be very calm. You know the payphone down that way?” I said, pointing with my whole hand, so the sparkler on my finger would calm him. “A few blocks past the boulevard?”

  “That one? Man, that one hasn’t worked for years. It’s all ripped out and—”

  “It works now,” I promised him. “I’m going to pull up right next to it. We’re going to get out, all of us. What you’re going to do, you’re going to call your woman, understand? You’re going to tell her everything went down just like you planned. What you need her to do is bring the girl outside. Nice warm night, let them sit on the front stoop, so you can see them when we pull up. Soon as we’re sure it’s the right girl, we hand you this,” I said, making a gesture with my right hand. The Prof handed over a hard-sided attaché case. “Look for yourself,” I told the piece of toxic waste sitting next to me.

  He unsnapped the case on his lap. “Damn!” he whistled. “You for real, man.”

  “This is just business, like I told you all along. Maybe a little different than you thought, but it’s the same payoff, right?”

  “Right!” he said. “Look, man, you don’t need this noose around my neck, okay? I’m a businessman, just like you.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said, making a sign. Max released his hold. “We’ll trust you that much. But hand the money back over; we’re not going to have you jump out and run.”

  “I wouldn’t—” he started to say, then interrupted himself to hand over the attaché case. I casually tossed it into the back seat, where the Prof caught it deftly.

  “You ever get more like her?” I asked him.

  “Me?” he said, slyly, a man who had just figured things out for himself. There was no reward for the girl he was holding. We weren’t working for her father. That was all cover; we wanted the girl as merchandise, and we expected to get a lot more than twenty-five grand when we retailed her. “Sure! A man in my line of work, I gets all kind of—”

  “Then maybe we can do business again, if your stuff is together enough.”

  “What you mean, together? Didn’t I—?”

  “This place where you’re holding the girl, you said it was a private house? You mean one of those up-and-downs, or are you the only one there?”

  “Just me. And my woman, like I said. It’s perfect, man. Nice and quiet.”

  “Your woman, she got any kids?”

  “Yeah, man. She got a couple, but they ain’t around; the Welfare took ’em away.”

  “So you and her, you’re the only ones who live there?”

  “Yeah, man. Why you asking all this?”

  “Because we have…packages we sometimes like to have watched for a few days at a time. Before we can move them, you understand?”

  “Yeah,” he grinned. I was disappointed he didn’t have any gold teeth.

  “Okay,” I said, pulling up to the phone. “You call her. Tell her what you’ll be driving up in. She brings the girl to the curb. You get out of the front seat; the girl gets in, we drive away with her, you walk away with the twenty-five, and that’s all there is. Got it?”

  “How I know you won’t—?”

  “We already have the address,” I said, patiently. “Like you said, that building you brought us to, nobody would find a body there for a month. I think we can do business again. We’re not risking a murder rap for a lousy twenty-five G’s.”

  I attached the telephone receiver the Mole had given me with a set of alligator clips. The pimp dialed a number, holding the phone so I could hear both ends of the conversation.

  “H ey, man,” he said, on the way over. “Soon as you know it’s the girl you want, I just get on out, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So how about I hold the money? I mean, make it nice and smooth, so you don’t have to hang around.”

  I thought it over for a couple of seconds, then said, “Give it back to him,” to the Prof.

  T wo figures were standing by the front door to the house, turned into silhouettes by a lamp glowing inside the front window. When the taller one saw us, they both walked down toward the street. I didn’t see any sign of force or restraint.

  The pimp got out, the attaché case in one hand.

  “Get in!” he ordered the girl. “The man wants to look at you.”

  She climbed in docil
ely, a tentative smile on her face.

  “Hello, Beryl,” I said.

  Her mouth opened in a silent “O” of surprise. The pimp slammed the door behind her, and we took off. The pimp had about thirty seconds of triumph left…if it took him that long to open the attaché case, an identical twin of the money bag we’d switched it for.

  T he Con Ed truck was waiting where the Mole said it would be. I pulled over, and the back seat emptied out. In a few minutes, the Prof would dial the number Preston had left with me. When he heard a voice, he’d press the button on the little cassette player; and Preston would hear me say: “I’ve got her. We’re on the way. Sit tight and don’t make any calls.”

  I slipped the soft-riding sedan through the streets, heading for the Van Wyck. At that hour, the Whitestone Bridge was my best bet.

  “My father sent you,” the girl said to me. It wasn’t a question.

  “That’s right, Beryl,” I told her. “You’ll be home in an hour or so.”

  She didn’t say another word all the way.

  A s soon as the Merc’s headlights cut across his driveway, Preston bolted out the front door. He was tearing at the passenger-side door handle before I came to a full stop.

  “Beryl!” he half-sobbed, clutching at her like she was about to go over a cliff.

  The girl turned, gave me a look I couldn’t interpret, then surrendered to her father’s embrace.

  The two of them walked back toward the house, his arm wrapped protectively around her shoulders. I followed, keeping my distance.

  A woman’s backlit shape filled the doorway. Preston passed the girl to her like a baton in a relay race. The girl was pulled into the woman’s shadow. By the time I crossed the threshold, the shadow had vaporized.

  “Come on in,” Preston said, gesturing with his hand to show me where he meant.

  It was either a den or a library—hard to tell, because the walls were mostly bookshelves. I’m no appraiser, but the desk looked like a piece of one-off cherrywood, and the dark-burgundy leather chair hadn’t come out of a catalogue, either. Blond parquet flooring, with some kind of Navajo blanket used as a throw rug.

  “Sit, sit,” he said, pointing to a tufted armchair that matched the other furniture. For what it must have cost, it should have been more comfortable. The plate-sized brass ashtray on a wrought-iron stand next to the chair encouraged me to light a smoke.

  Preston closed the door, then walked over and seated himself behind his special desk. He fiddled with a pipe—something uncharitable in me guessed it was cherrywood—until he got it going. “Tell me all about it,” he finally said.

  “That wasn’t our deal,” I told him.

  “Well…I guess it wasn’t. But surely you understand that I’m—”

  “You wanted your daughter back. The reason you came to me was because you thought I might be able to do that. You never asked me how I was going to do it. I figured that was no accident—that was you being smart, protecting yourself.”

  “You mean, there’s things I wouldn’t want to know?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying we had a deal, right? Cash on delivery. And here I am, delivering.”

  “I’m not disputing that. I just thought…I guess I thought you, what you do, it isn’t just about money.”

  “I don’t know where you got that idea,” I said.

  “From the—”

  “I wasn’t asking.”

  “Oh. I…”

  His voice spooled out into silence until he finally accepted that I wasn’t going to say anything more. “Here’s your money,” he said, putting a neat stack of bills on the top of his desk. Probably dug it out of a safe somewhere in the house as soon as he heard my tape-recorded voice on his phone. I wondered how much he usually kept in there.

  I couldn’t tell if making me step over to his fancy desk to get the money was a little bit of nastiness because I wouldn’t give him the gory details, or because he was back to being himself already—a boss, paying off a worker.

  As I pocketed the cash, he answered the question. “Berry will tell me all about it,” he said, self-assured.

  I found a lot of kids back then. Sometimes it was the parents who paid me. Sometimes it was the people who I took them back from. Sometimes both. Every so often, neither.

  I hadn’t told Preston the truth. Not just because he was a citizen, and lying to citizens was one of the first things my father—the State—had taught me, but because of something Wesley told me once. “You can’t ever give them any reason but money,” the iceman whispered one night. “They think there’s something else in it for you, they might want to do you down on the price.”

  “I set the price in front,” I replied, a little hurt that Wesley would think I’d be such an amateur.

  “But you don’t get it paid in front,” he said. “And this thing you got about kids, it’s a marker. A way for people to find you.”

  “People know where my—”

  “Not know your address,” the iceman said. “Know you. They know that, your address don’t matter—they can get you to come wherever they need you to be.”

  That was a long conversation for Wesley. He had the same one with me, over and over again, right up to the time he checked out of the hotel he had hated from the moment the State had booked his room.

  I might have kept going like I was: working the edges of the fringes, a poacher on rich men’s estates, a liar, con artist, thief…and, sometimes, a man who found kids and brought them home. But after I shot a pimp, McGowan stopped recommending me. And the people who started coming to me for tracking jobs after that weren’t looking for rescue work.

  I might have kept going anyway—my lifestyle didn’t require a lot of income—but things kept…happening.

  I thought I was done with things like that.

  “W hy did you give me this?” I asked Mama. I held up my cup of soup as if I was toasting an audience, so there wouldn’t be any doubt about what I was saying.

  “You don’t like soup?” she said, ominously.

  “I don’t like this soup. I mean, it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s not yours.”

  “Ah!” she said, expressionlessly. “No time last night. Cook make soup himself.”

  Every year or so, Mama tests to see if I recognize the one thing in that restaurant she makes herself. It would never occur to her to question that I love her, but she occasionally needs some reassurance that I love her soup.

  I bowed slightly, brought my fingertips together. She removed the steaming tureen and my Barnard cup without another word.

  “Prawns today,” she said. “Cook fix them good, okay?”

  “I’m not hungry, Mama.”

  “Max coming?”

  “Should have been here already.”

  “Okay,” she said, getting up and walking over to her post by the front register just as Max loomed up behind me.

  As soon as he sat down, I made a gesture of ladling out a cup of soup, taking a sip. Then I made a face to indicate the soup was lousy today. Max nodded his thanks—Mama wasn’t going to waste a bogus pot of hot-and-sour without testing it on more than one of us.

  I was in the middle of regaling Max with Little Eric’s monumental triumph over the Forces of Evil—that’s the Morning Line, for all you hayseeds—when the Prof strolled in with Clarence at his side. He slid in next to me, spoke out of the side of his mouth in a barely audible prison-yard whisper: “What’s with the old woman, Schoolboy?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, charitably not mentioning that the Prof himself was older than corruption. Or that I knew why he was keeping his voice down.

  “She tells me it’s cold out, maybe I want some soup. It’s the off-brand stuff today, am I right?”

  “On the money.”

  “Damn, son. You’d think she’d stop trying to gaff us with that tired old trick after all these years.”

  “You want her to think up a new one?”

  The little man turned and g
ave me a look.

  “Where is my little sister?” Clarence asked, looking at his watch.

  “Michelle’s not in on this,” I said. “Not this part, I mean.”

  “I thought there was green on the scene,” the Prof riffed. “Something my boy found in that computer thing.”

  “There was money,” I said. “All over that CD Clarence looked at, sure. But—”

  “Right!” the Prof interrupted. “So—we did the scan, now we need a plan. And if we’re going to go in soft, we need our girl to walk point, don’t we?”

  “The money on that CD, it belongs to the girl the guy who hired me was looking for.”

  Max pointed his finger, ratcheted his thumb in the universal gesture of a hammer dropping.

  “Yeah,” I said. “The guy who got smoked. And, it turns out, he was some kind of money man. Other people’s money.”

  “So he wasn’t looking for the girl, he was looking for her stash?”

  “I…I don’t think so, Prof. But we can’t start looking for either one without some answers.”

  “But you know the girl, mahn,” Clarence put in. “That is what you said.”

  “I know who she is. But the last time I saw her, she was just a kid. You saw her, too, Prof. You, too, Max,” I said, miming the last sentence.

  The waiter brought a tureen of the booby-trap soup. Mama left her register just in time to see Max spit out a mouthful. He lurched to his feet, bowed an apology to the waiter.

  “What’s up with this stuff?” the Prof said, pointing to the tureen. “You serving us tourist food now?” He wasn’t faking the annoyed look on his handsome face—if there’s one thing the Prof hates, it’s being upstaged.

  “Oh, sorry,” Mama said. “Big mistake, okay?”

  “This isn’t Mama’s soup,” I explained.

  Max pointed an accusing finger at me, for not warning him.

  Mama’s lips twisted—whether with pleasure at her family’s immediate recognition of the impostor, or in admiration of Max’s drama-queen performance, I couldn’t tell.

  As soon as she left, I told Clarence about the time we had rescued Beryl Preston, watching the recognition flash in Max’s face, hearing the Prof say, “Oh yeah. That one,” next to me.

  “Her name is different now,” the West Indian said. “Why would that be?”