Safe House

take him back. Finally, he puts her in the hospital. Not just the E-Ward, like he did before—they had to operate. On her face. I guess she was too fucked up from the drugs they gave her to cover for him, I don’t know. Anyway, the rollers took him down. He went easy,” Herk said, his voice veined with a hard-core convict’s contempt for anyone who doesn’t automatically resist arrest. “Anyway, she says she ain’t gonna press charges, and you know what the Man said? You ain’t gonna believe this, Burke. They don’t need her—they could just go ahead and lumber him anyway, no matter what she wants. I mean, they could make her come to court. Jesus.”

I took a pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, offered one to Herk. He shook his head. Same way he was in the joint. A serious bodybuilder, the only drug Herk would play with was Dianabol, and he’d stopped the red-zone steroids when we’d pulled his coat to the cold light at the end of that tunnel. But the Prof snatched the butt out of my hand before I could light it. I heard a match snap into flame behind me. “Thanks, bro,” he said sarcastically. I lit another one for myself. “What’s the rest?” I asked the big man.

“He gets some bullshit baby-time. Six months on the Rock, out in four. She gets one of them Orders of Protection, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“But that don’t mean nothing. He calls her. Right from the House, calls her. Collect, okay? After a while, she don’t take the calls. Even changes her number. So he writes her letters. Real weird shit—like he loves her and he had a dream that he sliced her face into ribbons.”

“He’s still locked up when he does this?” the Prof asked.

“Yeah.”

“She show them to the cops?” I wanted to know.

“Sure. But dig this: there’s nothing they can do, right? I mean, this time she wants to prosecute his ass, and they don’t do nothing. They told her those letters, they wasn’t threats, just talking about his dreams and stuff. Stupid mother—”

“—and then he gets out . . . ,” I prompted, cutting off the flow.

“Uh-huh. And he starts it right back again. Calling her on her job, leaving notes in her mailbox, all like that. He’s got her scared now—”

“And you’re dipping your sorry wick, right, sucker?” the Prof stuck in.

“No, Prof. I swear,” Herk said in a hurt tone of voice. “I mean, I never even met her, okay? It wasn’t like that.”

“So what was it like?” I asked him.

“You know Porkpie?”

“Yeah,” I told him, nervous now. Porkpie was a minor-league fringe-player. One of those maybe-Jewish, maybe-Italian, Brooklyn-edge boys. He didn’t have muscle or balls or brains, so he played the middleman role. A halfass tipster and two-bit tout—he wouldn’t touch anything with his own hands, but he always knew a guy who would. Or so he said. He wasn’t mobbed up. Didn’t have a crew, worked out of pay phones and the trunk of his car. Only a citizen or a stone rookie would do any business with him.

Herk wasn’t either one, but he was just thick enough so it didn’t matter.

“Okay, so Porkpie tells me about it,” he continued. “The job, I mean. He says they need someone to lean on this guy, give him the word, tell him to get in the wind, let the broad alone, understand?”

“Sure.”

“A grand for a few minutes’ work, that’s what he told me.”

“You was gonna move on this guy, do work on him, let them turn the key for one lousy G?” the Prof snarled. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, boy? You been down twice. You can’t ride that train—it ain’t nothing but pain. You go bone-busting, you get called to the Walls. That’s your idea of good pay for a few minutes’ work?”

“It wasn’t that, Prof. Honest. Porkpie said the guy was a stone pussy, okay? All I hadda do was muscle up on him, maybe bitch-slap him once. Porkpie said he’d give it up in a minute, kinda guy beats a woman. . . .”

“All kinds of fucking guys beat on women,” the Prof told him. “That don’t tell you nothing. You been enough places to know that, Herk.”

“It don’t matter now,” the big man said sadly.

“Bottom line,” I said. “Let’s get to it. Come on.”

“Porkpie gives me a picture, okay? What the guy looks like and all. And he drives me to the spot where the guy gets off work.”

“You braced him in daylight?” I asked, already shuddering at his stupidity.

“Nah, Burke. He’s a security guard, like. Gets off after midnight. In this big building on Wall Street. He has to go right through this alley to where they park their cars. Porkpie said I could grab him there.”

“And . . . ?”

“I snatch him, okay? I slam him up against the wall, tell him I’m the girl’s cousin. Porkpie told me to say that, so he’d know I was serious and all. He tries to talk to me, but I’m not playing. I told him, he wants to get down, let’s do it. Right there. He drops his hands, puts his head down. I figure that’s it. . . . Then he comes out with a piece. I didn’t . . . think about it, man. I just plunged him.”

“You shanked the motherfucker?” the Prof asked quietly, leaning forward over the back of the front seat.

“Right in the gut,” Herk said. “I didn’t mean to, but . . . once I stuck him, I knew he was gone. I could see it in his face, like when the light goes out, you know? He was off the count.”

“Anybody see you?” I asked. It was business now.

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. Porkpie said he didn’t see nobody.”

“When was this?”

“Two nights ago. I mean, it’ll be two nights when it gets dark.”

“What do you need, Herk?” I asked him.

“I need a stake, Burke. I got to get outa here. Outa this city.”

Herk couldn’t say it, but he could feel it. He was a mine-shaft canary, just beginning to smell the fumes, fluttering his wings against the cage. I looked back at the Prof. He nodded.

“I’m gonna take you someplace,” I told him. “You’ll be okay there. Meanwhile, I’ll see what’s going on, okay?”

“Sure, Burke,” he said, smiling. A big, sweet dumb kid.

“This one ain’t no Fourteenth Amendment citizen, is he?” the voice on the phone said.

“He’s the same fucking citizen I am,” I said, keeping my voice down to a jailhouse whisper—soft with threat.

“No offense, man,” the voice said quickly. “But you know how I have to play it. I mean . . .”

“No offense. A yard a day, right?”

“Right. Ten-day minimum.”

“He’ll have it with him.”

I checked on the wire. The police had it down as a mugging that went wrong. At least Herk had been smart enough to grab the dead man’s watch and wallet. And toss them into the nearest Dumpster, where some foraging wino was sure to pick them up. He’d never touched the dead man’s pistol, leaving it where it was. The cops had no suspects.

But I did. Herk was the third day into his hideout before we found Porkpie. He was coming out of a dive in Red Hook, wearing a snazzy dark overcoat and his trademark little hat with a fat little white feather sticking up from the band. A zircon glistened on his hand, bloodshot from a faded red neon sign in the window of the bar.

“Hey, Porkpie!” I yelled at him, closing the distance between us, hands empty at my sides.

He stopped in his tracks, making up his mind. Before he finished, Max had him.