Dead and Gone

Aydah, a tall, slender black woman, got to her feet to speak. “In New York,” she said, in a faint French accent, “when it comes to pedophiles, Mr. Burke is considered a homicidal maniac. An irrational, dangerous individual who is blamed—or, depending on the source, credited—with virtually every type of violence against them—assaults, murders, arsons, explosions.”

“Personality as perceived?” a guy from the far corner asked. He was white, medium-height, slim build—a good- looking kid with very close-cropped hair.

“Single most distinguishing characteristic is pathological vengefulness,” she answered him.

“Thank you, Aydah,” Lune said formally.

“But the operation itself,” an Asian kid with cold eyes offered, “…  the way it was coordinated, the assassins were certainly professionals. So it isn’t just a question of money, then. Whoever hired them had to know where to find them.”

“That’s right, Minh,” Heidi said, “and you can’t just find a contract killer in the Soldier of Fortune want ads anymore.”

“Maybe the connect is to Timmons and Ruhr,” Aydah said.

“That doesn’t authenticate,” the Latina argued. “Those white supremacists aren’t even good at killing, never mind gunfighting. It smells more like the government.”

“Oh, they’re real experts, all right,” Aydah shot back.

Lune held up his hand for silence.

“Burke, it’s your time now,” he said. “You have to sit down and start making out a list. It doesn’t matter how long it is, but it has to be as complete as you can possibly make it.”

“A list of …”

“Pedophiles who might want revenge for something you did. Or who might have had reason to believe you were hunting them.”

“That could be any—”

“You’re safe here,” Lune said. “Take all the time you need.”

I knew better than to do that kind of work without a break. Your body gets tired, it moves slower. But when your mind gets tired, it turns on you.

There was a heavyweight-championship fight on the giant-screen TV they had in one of the common rooms. Not many were watching: the white kid with the close-cropped haircut, the Asian they had called Minh, the Indian, the Latina, and a couple of others.

“Clint,” the white kid said to me, holding out his hand for me to shake. “This is my partner, Minh.”

I shook both their hands—they were the first ones I’d met there who offered them.

The fight was pitiful. One boxer spent most of each round leaning against the ropes like a wino using a wall to prop himself up. The other guy slapped at him as if he were trying to keep flies off a corpse.

“If I hit a guy like that on the street in front of a dozen witnesses, I wouldn’t even get arrested,” I said.

Clint laughed, offered me a high-five.

The Indian nodded a silent agreement.

The Latina glared at me.

Since neither of the boxers dropped dead of a heart attack, the decision went to the judges. I didn’t wait around for it.

I kept working on my list, following Lune’s parameters: they had to be either wanting revenge, or fearing it.

The first category was much longer than the second. The people I would have wanted to hurt the most—the ones who had hurt me so much when I was little—I didn’t know most of their names, much less where to find them. They wouldn’t even know I was alive.

Anyway, they would know what the dumb-fuck government doesn’t. Most of us, damn near all of us, we don’t turn on the ones who hurt us. No, we turn on ourselves, mostly. Or on you.

And then you say we were born bad.

You and Hitler. Yeah, you don’t like the comparison? Then, while we’re doing time for what was done to us, don’t fucking tell us, “It’s all in the genes,” okay?

Just thinking about it made the back of my neck burn. A guy goes to work and spends the day kissing the boss’s ass. So he goes home and kicks his wife’s. Makes him feel like a man. We know what he is. A lowlife coward. But a kid who finally can’t take it anymore and kills the people—you call them “parents”—who’ve been torturing him forever, he’s the one you send to prison.

I love it when some punk prosecutor tells a jury the kid didn’t have to kill his father. The father who’d been sodomizing him since he was six. Why didn’t the kid just, like, assault him, or something? I’ll tell you why. Because we all know. We know what happens if we don’t kill them. As soon as they recover, they’ll make us pray we had.

When babies are born to beasts, when the government pats the beasts on the head and lets them keep feeding, when the kids know they’ll never get away because their baby brother or sister will be next … Oh, there’s a lot of things kids can do. To themselves. That’s okay. But if they ever dare to do it to the beasts, they’re penitentiary-bound.

I was there for patterns. So I could see the truth. And maybe the whole process was getting to me. I was starting to see a pattern myself. People hurt their kids. And the government doesn’t do anything to protect the kids. Soon, one of the kids figures it out—he can’t go through life without backup, and he’s not getting it from where other kids do. Next thing, he’s in some juvenile institution. Learning to be everything they said he was when they put him in there.

Meanwhile, there’s all these people who would give anything to have a kid of their own. And they can’t get one. If the government just moved on humans who hurt their