Dead and Gone

Lune was smarter than me and Wesley put together, I think. But he had a special kind of mind. And he wasn’t raised where we were. So it was our job to spring him.

Once we figured out that they put Lune in that nuthouse because they really thought he was crazy, we knew they wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking for him. He had to be a throwaway kid of some kind, like us, even though Lune always said he had a family. A real family that loved him.

We knew he could never get out of the City on his own. Even if the cops weren’t looking for him, a kid traveling alone would get questions asked. And once they heard Lune’s answers, he’d be right back Inside.

We knew places where you could jump freights, but I didn’t think Lune could handle that. And Wesley said, even if he could, the older guys riding the rails would eat him alive. That was after he had tried to show Lune how to use the razor. Lune wouldn’t even touch it.

We found the answer where kids like us always found their answers. Wesley was even better than me at being invisible, but I was better at talking to people. Way better—Wesley didn’t like talking, and he didn’t like people.

The hooker’s name was Vonda. All we knew about her was that she got ten bucks for half-and-half, and that she had a pair of dreams. One was to go to Hollywood and be discovered. The other was to get away from her pimp—a gorilla who snatched her right off the stroll every night and made her turn over the take. He’d already shown her what would happen if she ever held out on him. With a coat-hanger whip and the glowing tip of his cigarette. She was too scared to ever run on her own.

Wesley and I figured she and Lune were a natural pair.

“He’ll never let me go,” she told us, standing under an overhang to get some shelter from the rain, but still scanning the street for a customer. “And I don’t ever have more than a couple of bucks at a time of my own, anyway.”

“We can get you two hundred and fifty,” I said.

“I guess maybe you could, you little hustler,” she said, giving me a grin. “But he’d come after me. No matter where I went. I know he would. He’s got contacts all over the country.” There was a twisted mixture of pride and terror in her voice.

“When he picks you up after work, where do you go?”

“Home.”

“With him?”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging at the silly question.

“Is he a heavy sleeper?”

“Like a fucking log. But it would only give me a few hours’ head start, and—”

“You’d have a lot more time than that,” I promised her. “But the deal is, remember, you have to take Lune with you. All the way to Hollywood. And you have to keep him with you—just a place to sleep and some food—until he’s ready to go out on his own.”

“Like I was his mother, right?”

“Yeah, like that.”

“I … It wouldn’t work. What’s to stop Trey from—?”

Then Wesley spoke. From the shadows, his natural home. He was a kid then, maybe twelve years old, I never knew for sure. But his voice was already ice-edged. “After he goes to sleep, just go downstairs and unlock the door,” he said.

I didn’t think Vonda had been taking us seriously until right that moment. She looked into the shadows where Wesley stood. And the gleam she saw wasn’t coming from his eyes.

“When do I get the money?” she asked me.

Wesley was right about the razor. The first cut did it. The pimp made some spastic movements, trying to hold his throat together with his hands … but not a sound came out of his mouth.

We’d made Lune wait downstairs, telling him to keep the hundred bucks we’d given him a secret, no matter what, until he made his break in California. We told him it wouldn’t be long—Vonda would be going back to hooking the second she got low on dough.

After we all made it downstairs, we walked for a few blocks. I gave Vonda the money. Then she hailed a cab, and I didn’t see Lune again for more than twenty years.

The cops never found me or Wesley. We both hooked up with a gang, and ended up busted a few weeks later. We gave them phony names, but it didn’t matter—when nobody came to claim us at Juvie, they put us back Inside. At least it wasn’t the nuthouse.

I never got a letter from Lune while I was Inside. Not for the juvenile beefs, not for the felonies that turned me into a two-time loser later. And during the times I was out, he never called me on the phone, either.

But he always knew where I was, somehow. One of the hacks would come by my cell, tell me someone had sent me a money order. They never actually gave you the money, they just put it on the books for you so you could draw against it for stuff they sold in there—like miners who could only shop at the company store.

The money orders were always from Vonda-something—the last names were always different. And they were always for the maximum amount the institution allowed. I always wrote to the return address, but the mail always came back. So I knew that it had to be Lune. And that he’d learned some tricks.

I had my own wires, too. I’d catch something about Lune every once in a while. Not by name. But there’d be something in the whisper-stream about an organization that did “forecasting.” You gave them the known facts, and they’d work out “scenarios” on a “probabilities scale” for you. Something a team of entrepreneurs could use, if they were thinking of opening a new restaurant. Or an armored car on its way to the bank.

When I finally saw him again, he was in Cleveland, a whole crew working with him. I couldn’t tell exactly what they were working on, but it all had something to do with “patterns.” They were like a gang of crazed journalists, gathering facts at random, checking and rechecking and cross-checking them until