“W
hat are we looking for, boss?”
“I can’t say, Gate. Something that’s not right.”
“Whole motherfucking thing’s not right,” he said, his eyes as cold as the custom 9mm semi-auto that he carried the same way an artist would carry a paintbrush. “You’re thinking—what?—the blue boys got paid?”
“That plan won’t scan,” the Prof cast his veto. “Sure, a badge ain’t nothing but a license to steal, but something like this, there’s too many to pay to make them
all
stay away.”
Max made the sign of a man writing something in a notepad, looked up, cocked his head as if listening, wrote some more.
“Sure,” I agreed. “Reporters had to be all over this one, too.”
“Yes, mahn,” Clarence confirmed, looking up from his computer screen. “The coverage was all very critical; the police took a lot of heat for this.”
“Don’t forget the reward,” Terry added.
I nodded in his direction. “A hundred grand the girl’s parents put up. Thirty years ago, that was enough to shake every tree in the forest.”
Max rubbed his first two fingers and thumb together, then shook his head disdainfully.
“The dragon pulls the wagon,” the Prof said, pointing his finger at Max as if acknowledging a major contribution to a big score. “The Max-man’s clue is true. Any of their fathers had even
tried
a bribe, their kid would’ve ended up taking a ride.”
“You’re saying the cops really went after it?” Gateman said, skeptically.
“I think they did. Come on, bro: would the locals ever call in the Feebs if they weren’t desperate? It’s the same as admitting they don’t have what it takes.”
“FBI made the scene?”
“Yes, Father,” Clarence answered. “Many of the later news accounts refer to them, some by name.”
“So what’re we looking for?” Gateman asked, again.
“See this?” I said, pointing to the transcript of my conversation with Thornton. Everyone had a copy. “It should match. Well, not match, but not be…” I paused, trying to put words to the pattern-recognition software that keeps people like us alive. And makes us the best hunters on the planet. “Look, you’re rolling down the street,” I told them, signing for Max as I spoke. “Something’s just…wrong, okay? Some…disturbance in the visuals. Nothing major. Wrong posture on the guy near the lamppost. Wrong jacket for this time of the year. A flash of color you’ve seen somewhere before, earlier that same day, in another part of town. This isn’t like when a hawk’s in the sky and all the animals go quiet and still. Citizens won’t ever see it. But we will.”
“Like when a guy hits the yard walking robot?”
The Prof was talking about how a man who expects to be facing a blade will wrap himself with layers of newspaper under his jacket. Maybe not thick enough to turn a shank, but enough to stop it from getting all the way in.
“
Just
like that,” I confirmed. “Something that draws your eye, tells you something’s off. Yeah?”
The Prof nodded. Max and Gateman, too. Clarence was a lot younger, but he’d come up as a gunman, and he got it, too. For Terry, it was a theorem, not an experience. Still, he had his father’s mind and his mother’s soul—I knew he’d find his way to the same place. I didn’t want to tap any trigger-point in his past, but I couldn’t pretend it was anything other than what it was.
Even though we all wanted him to walk a different path, we knew he might someday need what we could teach him.
I
took the subway to a three-bedroom, two-bath rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side. It was occupied by an elderly lady with half a dozen diseases ravaging her wasted body. She didn’t have long, and she knew it.
Death didn’t scare her, but she wasn’t the type to hoard her pain pills, either. She knew, the second she checked out, the rent would rocket from $595 to maybe four grand, minimum. And that’s if the owner didn’t “improve” the unit, upping it even more.
The building’s owner would end up as swine-swollen as a CEO treating his “boys” to a night in an upscale strip club to celebrate the company’s latest creative-accounting triumph. Nothing like glancing over a glass of sucker-priced champagne to convince yourself it’s your raging testosterone that’s attracting such a cooing herd of for-sale flesh to your table.
But this pig had a problem—the old lady’s nephew. He occupied two of the bedrooms. And because she’d adopted him when he was nine, he’d inherit the right to keep occupying the place…at the rent-control price.
The nephew was around thirty years old. What his parents had done to him had bent his neurons and snapped his synapses. He had an incomprehensible mind, a one-occupant world of torture, degradation, and horror.
He never left the apartment.
He never had guests.
His brain didn’t register the past. He thought he’d been born when puberty struck, and the warp opened.
But his aunt’s mind was still as clear as Bush’s agenda.
And she never forgot.
So when she gasped out, “Theodore, this man is very special to me. You must do whatever he asks,” between hits of oxygen, all the damaged boy said was “Yes, Auntie.”
While he was waiting for me in his rooms, I again swore to the old lady that my lawyer—a bull elephant named Davidson—had the battle plan against the landlord all mapped out, and was looking forward to it. Her nephew was always going to have his home.
“I’ll be watching,” the old lady said.
I believed her.
“I
hate what they do to animals,” the nephew said. A demon-eyed wraith, he had a voice that was pure Asperger’s, utterly devoid of emotion. “Do you?”
“Yes,” I said, knowing there’s always a toll.
“What do you hate?”
“Zoos.”
“All zoos?”
I told him about my idea for virtual zoos. He nodded, bored. Not because the idea was so simple, but because his idea of protecting animals was to eliminate humans. He held his misshapen head in his hands for a minute, then looked up at me.
“You know those games where you can buy points from other players?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Online,” he said, as if that explained everything. His fractured-iris eyes searched mine, instantly registered my level of knowledge, readjusted. “Some of the games have thousands of players, all over the world. If you’re good, if you have skills, you can acquire different things. Like weapons, for example. Or maps to where they might be. You can
sell
these—to other players, I mean. For actual cash. So if you spend money, you increase your chances of winning.”
“I get it.”
“I’m designing a game. Right here,” he said, pointing to a computer housed inside a transparent casing full of vibrantly colored wires. “In
my
game, the prize—if you can get it—is that you can destroy it all.”
“The game?”
“Yes. People spend an
incalculable
number of hours playing. It’s kind of like The Sims, but what
you
do impacts the other players. If you can get enough points, you get to take the whole game down. It could take years to do it, but all those people, all they invested, it would be gone. Not just the money,
everything.
”
“But if the players knew something like that could happen, why would they—?”
He gave me a look of profound pity.
“Y
ou want a poison pill,” the nephew finally said, a couple of hours later. He had been listening to me, asking questions, listening some more. He was never impatient, never annoyed. I meant less than a cockroach to him, but when his auntie told him to do something, the one pipeline to humanity still inside him opened. He’d kill a planet to hear her say, “Thank you, Theodore. You’re such a good boy.”
“What’s a—?” I asked.
“Never mind. See this?” He held up a thin, rectangular piece of metal. “It’s disguised to look like a memory stick. Plugs into any USB port. All you have to do is insert it
before
you boot up the machine, and it recodes everything inside.”
“What good would that do?”
“You know what the Enigma Machine was?”
“Yeah. It was—”
“This is a thousand times more sophisticated. A team of top cryptographers couldn’t hope to crack it. Even a mainframe would fry its circuits trying.”
“But you could read it?”
“Yes,” he said, the way a polite person talks to a retardate.
“Could you make one that restores, too? So I could plug that one in, turn the whole hard drive into gibberish, then plug in the other and make it good again. Like the antidote for the poison?”
“Yes.” He sighed, as patient as Einstein explaining long division.
“W
hy did you design it in the first place?” I asked him. I’d long since gotten what I’d come for, but I didn’t want to disengage too abruptly. When you find yourself too close to a land mine, you back away very, very slowly.
“To hurt things,” he said, as if that was the only sensible answer to any question.
Satan must have been burning up in frustration that the nephew never left the apartment. If that mutated-by-terror maniac ever played his games with real people, he’d make Ted Bundy look like the Dalai Lama.
“W
as Theodore helpful?”
“Yes, ma’am. Very helpful.”
“It’s not his fault,” the old lady said.
“I know.”
“Will you come back? And visit, sometime?”
“Of course,” I lied.
“You are a good man,” she lied right back.
I
thought about her nephew on the way back to the subway. I guess there had always been creatures like him, but technology seems to have changed the game. It’s cool to be cruel now. Some human puke who thinks he’s “cutting edge” makes a video of puppies being doused with gasoline and incinerated. Putting that video on the Internet for all to admire is about what you’d expect from a maggot like that. But when people actually pay to
download
it, I wish I could get them all together and show them what “cutting edge” means to some of us.
On the side of a building, someone had sprayed DAM in huge yellow letters. To make sure the droll cleverness of the multimedia artiste was fully appreciated,
Mothers Against Dyslexia
was written out beneath it.
“I
don’t think we can wait,” I told the Prof late that night. We were in my Plymouth, parked at the end of a prostie stroll just a few blocks east of the Hudson. The real-estate agents call the area “Clinton.” Who’s going to want to pay seven figures for a bare loft in a neighborhood called “Hell’s Kitchen”? That’s why there’s no Lower East Side anymore. And why’s there’s a “TriBeCa,” and a “SoHo.”
But the name game isn’t just for the real-estate pushers. The Bureau of Child Welfare calls itself the Administration for Children’s Services now. Of course, it still pays its workers a ton less for dealing with humans who treat their children like garbage than the “sanitation engineers” who empty the cans people leave at the curb.
In this city, the agencies copy the criminals: when there’s too much heat, they just switch to an alias.
Dannemora used to be the state’s worst place to do time, a max joint so far north you could walk to Canada. That icebox was so synonymous with extreme isolation that we called it “Little Siberia.” It’s still there, still doing what it always does. Only now they call it “Clinton,” just like the neighborhood. But this one’s never going to be gentrified.
“You the one behind the wheel,” the little man said, mildly.
“Yeah. I know. I wanted to…”
“Right. You looking for truth, but all we
really
need is proof. This scheme is for the green, Schoolboy.”
“That check?”
“You got two packages from the Mole. That first one leaves us holding the gun. The other…”
“You’re saying, what difference?”
“Dead is dead. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Whatever that little girl was, she wasn’t one of us.”
“I can’t just scam my way past all the barriers that a guy like that—”
“There’s three of them.”
“But we only have that one check, Prof. Besides, if it happened like that Thornton scumbag says it did, how’s the one guy
not
going to reach out for the others? I don’t care how rich he is, why should he pay the whole thing himself?”
“You mean the money?”
“What else?”
The little man didn’t say anything. To him, I was a pane of glass, and he always carried a bottle of Windex.
T
he girl who poked her round, sweaty face into the side window of my Plymouth might have been sixteen under that amateur paint job. Maybe.
“You look like a man who wants a date,” she sex-whispered.
“Get your ass around this side,” the Prof snarled, speaking across my chest, jerking his thumb as a summons.
I watched her as she passed by the windshield. Cheap white halter top over cheaper red satin hot pants, baby fat jiggling. About as sexy as watching a drunk vomit on a curb.
“Hey!” she blurted out when she saw the Prof. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Old enough to be your father,” the little man shot back. “Young enough to be your daddy, too…if I was enough of a two-bit simp to be running some R. Kelly bait like you.”
“Hey! I’m—”
“I know what you are,” the Prof said, letting another organ-stop into his voice, shifting into a reach-out. “You some little child who ran away, got pulled by a punk who talked a lot of junk, and now you think you gonna be a star.”
“You’ve got it—”
“My song ain’t wrong,” he dismissed her. “They all the same, child. They charm you; then they harm you.”
“Tway-Z isn’t—”
“He isn’t
nothing.
And that’s what you are to him, child. You nothing but a piece of toilet paper to that slimy little snake.”
“I make—” she started to say, defensively.
“What you
make
ain’t the same as what you
take,
you dumbass little bitch. What you
keep
is what counts. Please don’t tell me how some faggot motherfucker is ‘taking care’ of you, either. You see this?” he said, holding up a thick wad of bills, fanning it so she could see nothing but hundreds. “You want some?”
She licked her lips, on home ground now.
“Sure, Daddy.”
“I’ll give you two yards for an hour.”
“I usually get—”
“You ‘usually’ get a twenty to suck some stranger’s cock, maybe a little extra if you take it without a rubber,” the Prof cut off her lie before she could finish it. “You hear me? Some
stranger.
Could be a psycho with a straight razor in his pocket, could be a freak with AIDS who wants to take a whole bunch of little whores with him when he goes. Could be
anybody,
ready to do
anything;
what do you know? You ain’t no ‘escort,’ bitch. You ain’t got no security, no protection, no nothing. Remember that word:
nothing.
That’s your
real
name.”
Her face twisted. The Prof grabbed her wrist. “You want money? I’ll give you the two bills for an hour of your time, and you don’t have to give up nothing.”
“What do you mean?” Scared for real now.
“There’s a place. In the Village. We drive you there. You talk to the lady inside. One hour. Then you do whatever you want.”
“I don’t…” She looked over her shoulder, breathing hard.
“You think your ‘man’ is out there, watching your back?” the Prof sneered. “You think, we wanted to snatch you, you wouldn’t already be snatched? You got a panic button? Nah, you don’t even know what one is. Your ‘man’ ain’t a man at all. Look, bitch, I’m not trying to pull you; I’m trying to pull your coat, get it?”