shorten
And as the Prof held the crowd at bay with the hellfire of his preaching, I saw a pair of the homicidal children he was constantly fathering behind the Walls move in from the wings, eyes on the big man, hands concealed under loose jackets. By the time the big man figured it out, he was where he said he was going to send the Prof.
Nobody saw anything.
When the investigation was done, they blamed it on the serial killer who haunts every max joint in America: Person or Persons Unknown.
I never took my eyes off the perimeter again. When I hit the bricks after that stretch, I shifted into hijacking. Stole a load of heroin from the mob and tried to sell it back to them. Got dimed instead, and ended up in a subway tunnel holding the cops at bay with a pulled–pin grenade in my hand, waiting for Max and the Prof and the Mole to make it out the other end.
Back to prison. I knew how to jail by then. I had a name. I had people on the outside. And I never called another man's name. Not out loud.
Prison wasn't so bad that time. Bad enough that I wasn't going back, though. I put away the guns then. No burglaries either. Dope's too risky. I came from the same place as the hookers did, so I didn't want to be a pimp. Never minded doing some work on one, though, and I had a little business built up doing that until I shot one of them and he lived. I wasn't trying to wound him, and I guess he knew it, so he ran straight to the Law. A mobbed– up guy got me a pass on that one, and I paid him back by looking into something for him.
Turned out I was good at it: nosing around, working the edges of the angles, finding things out, keeping my mouth shut.
Then I discovered the freaks. Not 'discovered,' I guess—they were the ones who raised me. Them and the fucking State. I hate them both. All of us do. Children of the Secret, that's who we are. If we ever voted as a bloc, we'd elect the whole stinking Congress.
And if you ever put our hate together, this earth would shudder and spasm until it shattered like a spun–glass teardrop under a sledgehammer.
Baby–rapers. 'Pedophiles' they call themselves now. Like it was a religion. They fuck their own children and call it love. Stalk other people's children too. Fondle them, sodomize them, torture them. For fun. Freaks love their fun. Sometimes they take pictures of it. They hang around the playgrounds and the daycare centers. Get jobs in schools and orphanages. Volunteer as coaches or counselors. They lurk on the Internet. Marry women with children. Trade their Polaroid trophies like they were baseball cards. Fly to Thailand and rent children. They kidnap babies and raise them to
I love that last part, treatment. They take some sex–snatcher and raise his self–esteem, teach him how to talk soft and walk careful. So when he gets out, he has the social skills to slide up real close to his victims before he strikes. Like putting a silencer on a rattlesnake's tail.
But the freaks are always easy. Real easy. I sell them promises. And it's not just their money I collect.
Oh, I do other stings too. I work as a mercenary recruiter, do S&M and B&D intros, traffic in credit cards, move counterfeit—only bearer bonds and certificates, never cash. And I sell guns.
And if I get paid, I find things out. Sometimes, I find kids. Mostly, I find what's left of them.
So I guess I'm an investigator. But I don't have a license. I don't have an address. I don't even have a name. I gave all that up, whatever it was. I live in a loft building, on a small piece of the top floor that doesn't appear on the building charts. The landlord knows I'm there. I know things about him too. I don't pay rent.
I don't have a phone, just a line connected to the trust–fund hippies who don't know they have an upstairs neighbor. I can make calls—real early in the morning while they're still sleeping off last night's soft dope and stupid music—but nobody can call me there. Anyone who wants me, there's a number to call. It rings over in Brooklyn, gets bounced a couple of times until it ends up at the last pay phone in the bank of three on the back wall next to Mama's kitchen. She takes messages.
Mama gets my mail too. Over at one of her joints in Jersey. A driver picks it up every couple of weeks, drops it at the warehouse where Max lives with his woman Immaculata and their little girl. He has his dojo upstairs, but he doesn't teach anymore.
Unless you're stupid enough to try him in the street. And nobody ever comes back for a second lesson.
I own a small junk yard in the Bronx, but I'm not on the papers. The guy who's listed as the owner, he pays me a salary, like I work there. Pays Juan Rodriguez, actually. That's me, the name I use. Juan pays taxes, all that stuff. Even has a Social Security number. IRS wants to know how I survive, I got a story for them.
I live small. I have no real expenses. I can go a long time between scores. And I have. But I never put away enough to retire.
Mama came from the same place as the Prof. Different parts of the world, maybe, but the same place. That's why she raised her eyebrows when I said I wasn't working. Arguing with her was like waiting for Congress to vote itself a pay cut, so I told her I was going to check out some stuff and took off.
I found a pay phone in the street. The air had a sharp edge of cold coming on, but the sun was strong and I didn't mind standing out there for a while. I ran through the loops, looking for the Prof. Came up empty. What the hell, I decided to roll down to Boot's, see if he had any new Judy Henske tapes.
'Boot' is short for bootlegger. That's what he does, mostly from live performances, but he also steals from archives, vacuums off the radio, whatever. I heard he found a way to slip a recorder into the Library of Congress—I don't know if that part's true.
He runs a shop in the basement of a narrow building in the West Village, a couple of blocks off Houston. Boot deals only in cassette tapes: no 45s, no CDs, no 8–tracks. Whatever you want, he'll find it and put it on tape, but that's the whole deal. You can order a mix from him too, but he won't label it or break it down. Only way to crack the code is bring it back to him and play it on one of his machines. Then he'll tell you whatever you want to know. That's how I found a sweet, controlled harp version of 'Trouble in Mind' by Big Walter Horton. And a different, much rougher take on Paul Butterfield's trademark 'Born in Chicago.' Not a studio edition, you could tell Mike Bloomfield wasn't there that night. Boot doesn't do Top 40, and he thinks rap should be against the law. But he's got the biggest collection of blues and doo–wop on the planet, so he pulls a wide crowd—anytime you visit his joint, you can find Army Surplus side–by–side with Armani.
There's no headphones—everything sounds like it was coming out of a radio speaker in the fifties.
I hit the long shot. The Prof was there, standing on a milk crate, treating a half–dozen guys and one Swedish–looking girl in floor–to–ceiling black to one of his lectures, holding forth like he used to do on the prison yard. He acknowledged me with a quick, sharp movement of his head. I got the message—he was having fun, not working.
'Hey Boot!' he yelled. 'Here's Schoolboy. You know what my man wants, right?'
'I got a new one,' Boot said, looking out from under the green eyeshade he always wears. 'Live. From Dupree's, in San Diego. Not even a month old.'
'How many cuts?' I asked him.
'A full cylinder,' he said. 'Six beauties. Clear like you was right there too.'
'Boot,' the Prof put in, a teasing tone to his rich voice, 'you get many calls for that Henske broad?'
'Yeah, we get
'Half' was half a yard, fifty bucks. The usual tariff for one of Boot's tapes was a hundred—you got a discount if the artist was popular enough to justify him running off a decent number of copies. I handed over the money, declining the offer to listen to it first. I knew Boot's stuff was always perfect. Besides, I only listen to Judy when I'm alone—what we've got, it's just between me and her.
'Do you have a No Smoking section?' a guy in a denim shirt asked, frowning at the Prof lighting up.
'Yeah,' Boot told him. 'It's right out front. Under the lamppost.'
I stayed there a couple of hours, just listening. To the music and to the Prof getting it on with anyone who wanted to try him. Nice to be in a place where you could play the dozens without it ending up in blood.
A young guy with a Jewish Afro and granny glasses got into it about who was the strongest bass in all doo–
