Mask Market (16 page)

Producers spun their Rolodexes, and the lucky winners got to be on television, “analyzing” what happened. None of them went near the truth. I knew that truth. The kid was a member of a bigger tribe than you could ever find on a reservation. My tribe. The Children of the Secret. We know.

The experts droned on about “communication” and “reaching out” and “peer rejection.” But this kid hadn’t flown under the radar. Everyone around him knew he was buried in despair. They probably figured they knew the outcome, too—the suicide rate on reservations is right up there with the alcoholism level.

That kid was just another of the invisible ones—bullied, beaten, and belittled every day of his marginalized life. If anyone had the slightest idea that he might be a danger to someone other than himself, they would have unleashed a snowstorm of “services.”

Suicide, well, kids do that kind of thing. Homicide—now,
that’s
serious.

Every high school in America has them, the invisible ones. They all silent-scream the same warning:
If you won’t
see
us, you’ll never see us coming.

But nobody ever starts the analysis until after the autopsy.

O
ne of the cell phones trilled. I looked at the label on its holster:

Ralph P. Compton. I’d only given that number to…

“Compton,” I answered, in a brisk, businessman’s voice.

“Mr. Compton? My name is Sophia…Sophia Ginsberg. You were at my house looking for—”

“Oh, I remember you,” I said, my tone of voice telling her she’d made a reverberating impression.

“Well, you’ll be glad I called, in any event. I did speak to the broker, and I got an address for Mr. Preston. I don’t know if it’s still a good one, of course. But it was certainly good at the time we bought the house.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Let me just grab a pen….”

“Oh, I can give it to you tomorrow,” she said, quickly. “I’m going to be in the city, and I thought you might like to buy me lunch.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Oh, good! I didn’t want to come off as too—”

“I would have called you anyway,” I told her. She took the lie like a deep-tissue massage. I gave her the address of a midtown bistro where I knew Michelle could get me treated right, even on short notice.

“I
don’t see where she gets her attitude from, after what you did for—”

“Let it go, honey,” I told Michelle, gently. Knowing she wouldn’t. Ever.

“You don’t need to know the reason to feel the season,” the Prof said. “Wish the weather was better, but…”

“I could be a Bible man again,” Clarence volunteered. He had a door-to-door routine down pat, came across as a bright, sincere young man on a mission to spread the Word.

“Wrong neighborhood,” I vetoed.

The Prof walked out of the room without ceremony. Came back with a chilled can of Red Bull and a small bottle of blueberry juice. Michelle poured the two together over a tall glass of shaved ice, sipped it delicately. My sister had a new personal drink every week, but the Prof and Clarence never strayed from their Red Stripe. I went with pineapple juice and seltzer.

We all sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Charlie’s a night man,” I said, finally. “How about I just pick a day, around noon, okay? I walk up to his front door and ring the bell, ask for Mr. Siegel?”

“I don’t like it,” the little man said. “What if he’s not home? What if his wife—got to have one, if he’s been there that long, I’m thinking—says he’s a traveling salesman, been on the road for months? He don’t come to the door himself, in person, we’re not making him pay to see our hole card, see?”

“It would be the same thing if I went there,” Michelle said. “It’s all chance, all luck.”

“Couldn’t you reach out for him, Burke?” Clarence asked.

“Anyone ever
asked
to meet with that motherfucker, he’d take off like a hellhound was on his trail,” the Prof said. “That’s not the way Charlie works it. He knows where to find
you;
you don’t never know where to find
him.
”

“That’s the truth,” I agreed.

“Next time he has a job for you, we follow him to his home?”

“That play won’t pay, son,” the Prof told Clarence. “One, could be months—years—before Charlie calls Burke again. Two, odds are, he don’t
go
home when a meet is over. Strike three, no way to shadow a man like Charlie Jones. Takes more than skill to do something like that; you got to have powers.”

The Prof and I shared a look. Wesley had powers. He was as relentless as obsession itself, a remorseless land shark. Not a great white, or a mako—no, Wesley was a bull shark, the deadliest of them all. A bull shark can work the deep ocean or shallow fresh water. It can take prey even in knee-high depths. And it’s the only shark with a memory.

It hit me then, why Wesley was the consummate shadow. He was one of the Invisibles. And nobody had ever seen him coming.

“Could we ask the Dragon Lady?” Clarence said, hopefully.

“To do what?” Michelle said, a slight tinge of sharpness in her voice.

“Hack the Con Ed records,” I answered for him. “Or Brooklyn Union Gas. Charlie probably never makes a call from that house, but he has to have the utilities turned on.”

“So, if this ‘Benny Siegel’ guy is still there…”

“Yeah. It won’t pin him down, but it might tell us if we’re wasting our time.”

“Or we could ask the Mole,” Michelle said.

“Ask him what?” said Clarence, retaliating.

“Oh, I don’t
know,
” she said, in a “don’t be dumb” tone. “He’s only the most brilliant scientific genius in the whole world, that’s all. If anyone can figure out how to—”

“We can take a ride out and see him,” I offered. Quickly, before the fuse burned down to the TNT.

N
o point in telling the Mole we were coming. He’s got a phone, but he never answers it if he’s working, and he’s just about always working.

Michelle fumed at me all the way. She’d been building her mood from the moment I told her we didn’t have time to stop at her place to let her change outfits, and hadn’t let up since. I ignored her—easy enough, since she was putting so much effort into ignoring me.

I slid one of my custom CDs into the slot, and let the music drift over us, tugging at the buried blossoms. Chuck Willis, “Don’t Deceive Me.” Johnny Shines swearing “My Love Can’t Hide.” Sonny Boy’s “Cross My Heart.” Timothea’s “I’m Still Standing.” Champion Jack’s version of “Goin’ Down Slow,” the one he called “Failing Health Blues.” By the time the CD got to the lush black velvet of Charles Brown’s “Early in the Morning,” my baby sister was back to herself.

“That young boy”—she meant Clarence, who was a long way from that now but, being younger than her, had to be a teenager, at most—“just wanted an excuse to see that woman,” she said, smiling now.

“The Dragon Lady? She’s married.”

Michelle’s the only woman I ever knew who can make a snort sound feminine.

“Fine,” is all I had in response.

“Burke, you know Mole will come up with something.”

“It’s not that, girl. No one respects the Mole’s stuff more than me. I was just thinking of something Wolfe told me.”

“Her? What would you even—?”

“Enough, okay? Just listen,” I said, as I wheeled the Plymouth off the Bruckner onto Hunts Point Avenue, heading for the badlands. “I thought I had a deal with her crew. Do a little surveillance on the address we had, see if they could get me a photo. Or anything that would lock it down as Charlie’s address. Then Wolfe pulled them off. She said it was because they just do paper stuff, no agents in the field. But there was something else going on, and I think I know what it is. Charlie Jones might not be much on his own, but anyone who tightropes over an alligator pit for a living gets to know the alligators pretty good after a while.”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t want him…”

“I know it, honey.
That’s
why I didn’t go running to the Mole right away, see?”

“Yes,” she said, crossing her legs. “I’m sorry. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“It’s fine,” I soothed her. “We’ll just…consult him, okay?”

Her smile was a floodlight.

W
e rolled through the badlands, while I thought about how it was probably the last piece of real estate in New York that hadn’t been gobbled up for new construction. Not yet, anyway. With the tidal wave of property-greed crashing over the city, some Trump-oid was going to find the money—other people’s money—to renovate the barren prairie sooner or later. As we made the turn to the Mole’s junkyard, I pointed out a prowl car, parked in the shadow of what had once been a building.

“ROAD officers,” I said to Michelle.

“What are those?”

“Retired on Active Duty,” I told her. “It’s a good spot for cops like that. Plenty of crime, but no citizens to report it. They need something for their activity sheets, they can always bust one of the prosties working the trucks out of the Meat Market.”

“Very nice,” she said, stiffly. Michelle had worked the streets for years, when she was still pre-op. She still had a working girl’s mind: hated the cops, feared the johns.

I’d known my little sister since we’d been kids. I was older; she was smarter. I was stronger; she was quicker. The only times we were apart was when I was Inside, or she was. She’d been distance-dancing with the Mole for years before they ever got together.

What finally pushed them over the bridge to each other was the same thing that got Michelle off the streets and onto the phones. Love. Not the love they had for each other—that had been there since the minute they met, arcing between them like electricity, searing the air. No, this was love for a kid. A little kid who’d been turned out before he ever got to kindergarten. I’d snatched him from a pimp in Times Square, back when that part of town was a festering pus pit.

I hadn’t thought things through, just did what I used to do all the time back then—hurt the pimp, took the kid. But this wasn’t a kid I could take back to his parents: That’s who the pimp had bought him from.

While I was still running through options in my head, Michelle had already adopted the boy, pulling him to her in the back seat of my car. She hadn’t let go since.

Terry was her boy—hers and the Mole’s. The kid had his father’s nuclear mind and his mother’s titanium delicacy. His
real
father’s, his
real
mother’s.

I nosed the Plymouth against the rusting barbed wire that wound through the chain-linked entrance to the Mole’s junkyard like flesh-tearing ivy. I knew the motion detectors would have already set LEDs flashing where the Mole could see them.

Maybe there was a hidden dog whistle, too. The pack assembled like it always did, moving with the slow and easy confidence of an inexorable force. I looked for Simba, feeling a needle poised above my heart. The ancient warrior was about a hundred years old; one day he wouldn’t answer the bell for the next round. Just as I felt my throat close, I spotted his triangular head cutting through the mob like a barracuda parting a school of guppies. The pack was silent except for a couple of yips from the young ones who hadn’t learned how to act yet.

“Simba!” I called out. “Simba-witz!”

The old beast looked at me, white-whiskered face as impassive as ever. His eyes were filmy with age, but one shredded ear shot up as he tracked my voice, ran it through his memory banks. He gave out a short half-bark of greeting just as the Mole lumbered up and began unlocking the back part of the sally port.

The Mole drove from the gate back to his bunker. I wasn’t worried about letting him behind the wheel of my Plymouth: The tiger-trap potholes would keep his speed down to a crawl, and he could see well enough in daylight, even with the trademark Coke-bottle lenses covering his faded-denim eyes.

Simba and I walked back together, the pack at a respectful distance.

“We’ve still got it, don’t we, boy?” I said.

Far as I was concerned, he nodded.

A
s usual, the Mole was miserly with his words. But he listened good. When I was done, he said, “Why does he matter?”

“Charlie?”

“Yes. Either he is no danger to you, or he does not know where to find you.”

“Because, if he was a danger, he would have already moved on me?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie middlemanned a meet between me and this guy who wanted me to find a woman. The guy left to get something from his car. A team boxed him in, and just gunned him down. They didn’t ask any questions, didn’t even search the body. They knew who they wanted, and what they had to do.”