Safe House

Ruth wanted to be married. Have children. A house. She wanted me to have a job. Be a citizen. Her eyes were the color of nightclub smoke.

She came from the same place I did, but she wasn’t going to stay there. And she’d wait for me to join her, however long it took.

I knew how long it was going to take. And I felt so bad about it I had to go.

But I couldn’t make her see it. When I told her we were done, she said maybe someday I’d understand that she had true love for me and I’d want her back. And she’d come, she said. All I had to do was leave a notice in the paper. People did that then—before the personals columns got degenerate the way they are now—left messages for someone they actually knew.

“Just say ‘kitten,’ ” she told me. “And I’ll know it’s you.”

“But I wouldn’t know it was you,” I said. And told her how I used that name. How it was nothing special.

I told myself I was just being honest, squaring up with her like she deserved. But I saw something die in her eyes right then.

Every once in a while, I would feel that again. First time I heard Barbara Lynn singing “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” I felt that way. Sorry. For me. A lot of things happened since then. I never broke up with a woman for her own good again.

No, they went away from me. Or died.

When I thought about that, only Hate kept me from drowning.

Crystal Beth stood up. Held out her hand. Then she pulled me in.

The Plymouth swam over the Manhattan Bridge, dwarfed by the Brooklyn-bound trucks. It rolled past the car-repair shops and topless bars on Flatbush, me safe inside, listening to the truth girl-growling out of my cassette player, Magic Judy warning her sisters everywhere—if you’re dumb enough to brag about your man to your girlfriends, they’ll double-cross you every time.

Ten in the morning on a weekday, the Plymouth was invisible in the moderate traffic. I crossed Atlantic, hooked the first sharp left and motored a couple of blocks past the abandoned Daily News printing plant—they do all the work in Jersey now—looking for a place to park.

I found one close enough. Got out and walked back to the bridge over the railroad yards. Wolfe was standing there, waiting. At the curb across from her a dark-green Lexus GS sedan stood idling—I could see smoke from the exhausts. Pepper waved at me merrily from the driver’s seat, a small, pretty dark-haired girl with an electric smile. I could make out a much larger shape in the back seat. Not the rottweiler, a human shape.

I lit a smoke, cupping my hands against a nonexistent wind so I could glance over my left shoulder. Sure enough: a young woman with long winter-blond hair in a bright-orange jogging outfit strolled by past the entrance to the bridge behind me, walking like she was cooling down from a long run. I knew who that was. Chiara, one of Wolfe’s crew. I remembered her from our last meeting; her and that honey-colored pit bull she had on a short leash. They both stopped walking and watched me, making no secret of it.

A lot of security for Wolfe to bring to a meet with me. Or maybe it was just the neighborhood . . . ?

A pair of Puerto Rican kids ambled up the block, approaching Chiara. One of them was holding a spike- collared pit bull of his own on a bicycle chain wrapped around his wrist. The dog was a big, chesty beast, caramel- colored and shovel-headed. He was out of one of the classic red-nose lines, and his strut was pure testosterone. He stopped suddenly and growled something at Honey, tugging at the bicycle chain. Didn’t sound like a threat . . . more like pit-bullspeak for “What’s your sign, baby?”

Honey snarled something back. Easy enough to translate that too: “Skull and crossbones, sucker! Want to play?”

The big pit didn’t back off, but he stopped tugging. And he didn’t protest when the Puerto Rican kids took off, eyes glancing at me over their shoulders. Like their dog, they’d figured out something was going on . . . and they wanted no part of it, whatever it was.

Chiara just stood there, calm and watchful. She had a cellular phone in a leather holster over one shoulder. At least that was what was in the holster the last time I’d seen her.

I turned back toward where Wolfe was waiting across from the Lexus, walked over and handed her a newspaper clipping about the guy Herk did in that alley. Seemed like a long time since that happened. “This guy,” I said, “I need anything you can get me on him.”

“The victim?” she asked, quickly scanning the news clip.

“The dead guy,” I said.

“Oh,” she responded, getting it right away. “This is an Unsolved?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you’re looking to—”

“Find out everything I can on the dead guy.”

“You got a TPO. Wouldn’t the cops—?”

TPO. Time and Place of Occurrence. Enough of a locate key for any cop who could tap into the computer. “I don’t want to ask them,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want you to either.”

She nodded. An amateur might have been confused, but for Wolfe it was a large-scale road map—with the route I wanted to travel etched in neon.

“I don’t care about the . . . about what happened,” I told her, drawing the boundaries. “I’m looking for background. As deep as you can go. His mother’s maiden name, where he went to school, military, if he did time . . .”

“It says here he was a security guard.”

“So that means he never did time?”

Wolfe chuckled at that. “No, I just want to know if you want his employment record too.”

“Everything.”

“You mind telling me what you’re looking for?” she asked. “It might narrow the search, make it quicker. You do need it quick, right?”

“Real quick,” I acknowledged. “I’m looking for a Jew,” I said.

Wolfe’s map-of-Israel face hardened. “Any particular Jew?”

“I’m not particular,” I said, so she’d get it clear. “What I need is some Jew in his background. A female relative. His mother would be perfect, but if you can’t do that, then—”

“So you think one of those Nazi groups did—?” Wolfe interrupted.

“Yeah,” I said, planting the lie. Wolfe traffics in information. She wouldn’t shop me, but she might peddle something she picked up while she was working. And if she did that this time, it would blend seamlessly into the whisper-stream. Right where I wanted it.

“If it was one of them who did the job, you’re looking at an ex-con,” she said quietly.

“Why would you say that?” I asked her, alarm bells ringing all around me.

Her gray eyes were clear, not a hint of guile in them. “A knife, that’s a jailhouse weapon. It takes a different head to stab than to shoot. Those misfits running around cross-dressing in swastikas, they don’t like to work close-up.”

“Skinheads don’t seem to mind,” I told her.

“But this was a one-on-one, right?” She dismissed me. Wolfe was too experienced to be played off—every act of skinhead violence law enforcement ever heard about was always a group activity. If you wanted to earn your spiderweb tattoo, you needed a witness, for authentication. “It was me,” she said, “I’d look for someone who was a member of a Nazi prison gang. Probably AB.”

AB. The Aryan Brotherhood. I flashed on my old pal Silver, buried for life Upstate. I didn’t want Wolfe nosing around there. “That’s my piece,” I told her. “You work the opposite end of the tunnel.”

“And stay out of yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she agreed. Too easily? I let it pass. “The security-guard thing should make it simple,” she said. “They’ll have his Social Security, date of birth, all that. Give me . . . how long?”

“Can you get it today?”