Choice of Evil

“Vincent told us—” Lincoln started.

I held up my hand in a “stop” gesture. “Vincent’s not here,” I reminded him.

“Not about. . . you. Vincent was the first one who. . . Look, gay-bashing is. . . lynching, okay? Like that poor kid in Wyoming. I mean, what happened to him, it’s always happened. But it doesn’t get reported much. Not for what it is. And—”

“And you’re all over the map,” I cut in. “Lynching is when they string a guy up for stealing horses without waiting for a trial. When they total a gay guy for being gay, that’s a hate kill. And those’re never about individuals.”

“I—”

“He’s right, Lincoln,” the brunette in the tank top said, her voice harder than her face. “Save the politics, okay? If I listen to one more dumb-fuck discussion about whether we’re ‘queers’ or ‘gays’ or ‘homosexuals,’ I’ll hurl. Just tell him what Vincent told us. . . told some of us, anyway—I wasn’t there.” Reminding him. A smart, tough girl, that one. I couldn’t tell where she was from. There’s no such thing as a “New York” accent. Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx. . . they all carry speech-markers. Her voice didn’t have any of them.

Lincoln made a gesture like he was wiping sweat off his brow, but he wasn’t sweating, so I took it for some kind of prelude-habit. Then he said: “Vincent said it was never going to stop by itself. He said we had to. . . hit back.”

I waited, but he’d obviously said his piece. Or thought he had, anyway.

“Is this supposed to be some kind of test, pal?” I asked him. “Am I supposed to guess the rest? Or maybe you want some. . . what, credentials? Look, far as I’m concerned, you can all—”

“Vincent said that,” he cut in. “That’s what he said about you. He said you were the most unprejudiced straight man he ever met in his life.”

“So you went through all this to give me some kind of award?”

“What Vincent said,” he continued, like he hadn’t heard me, “was that you just plain didn’t give a fuck. One way or the other.”

“That hasn’t changed,” I told him. “So what? You got something to say, let me hear it. And it better end in cash.”

“To maintain your wardrobe?” some little twerp in a Godfather-movie gangster suit threw in.

I looked over at him, still patting Pansy. “No, pal. To feed my dog. She eats a lot. And she’s not the only bitch in this room, I see. Look, I don’t do dish, okay? Show me some cash or show me the door.”

“That’s enough, Sean,” Lincoln told the twerp in the gangster suit. “Mr. Burke, what Vincent told us was that we needed to. . . practice violence. Deliberate violence, not self-defense. That we needed to patrol our own streets and. . . interdict the enemy.”

“Sounds smart to me,” I told him.

“Maybe it was,” Lincoln said. “But none of us would go for it. It sounded too. . . ugly. We didn’t want to turn the other cheek or”—some fool cackled far in the back, but I couldn’t make out what he said—“anything, but we’re just not. . . like that.”

I guess Vincent hadn’t told them everything about our past dealings. One of his friends had ended up with a steel plate in his head after a night in the Ramble. Vincent convinced the guy to go to the cops. They caught the perps easy enough—the little freaks were trophy-takers, and one of them still had the gold chain he’d pulled off the guy whose skull they’d bashed in. And the DA even prosecuted. But only one of them got time, and he didn’t get much of it. That’s when Vincent first came to me. Later, I was working a job and I needed a place to meet a guy. A place I could haul him out of against his will, if it came to that. Vincent set that one up for me. He was glad to do it. He hated baby-rapers worse than fag-bashers, and that was a lot of hate.

“Who’s ‘we’?” The brunette challenged the silence Lincoln’s little speech had produced. “If I had been there, I would have—”

“Sure, Nadine, we know. We heard it all from you, a thousand times,” Lincoln told her without taking his eyes from me. “Anyway, we took a vote. And Vincent lost. That was the end of it.”

“So?” I asked him.

“I mean, it was the end of. . . ‘us,’ I guess. Vincent said he didn’t want anything to do with us. He. . . mocked us. He said, when we traded in our leather drag for lavender bullets he’d be back.”

“So?” I asked again.

“So he. . . died. From a heart attack. But now it’s like he’s. . . back.”

“You think it’s Vincent taking out all these freaks?” I asked him. “You should’ve gone to Ghostbusters, chump.”

The brunette laughed again, more harshly this time. Her body went along for the ride—quite a sight, and she knew it. When she caught my eye, she shrugged her shoulders to write that in italics.

“Look,” Lincoln said, “you’re not making this any easier. But I. . . we didn’t expect you would. We don’t want you to do anything illegal, all right? There’s nothing against the law in looking for somebody. Or solving crimes either.”

“You said a lot more than that,” I reminded him.

“Lincoln always says more than he has to,” the brunette he’d called Nadine said, snorting. She got to her feet, walked over to stand next to him. She was shorter than I’d thought she’d be, legs as heavily developed as her arms. “What we want you to do is find him,” she went on. “That’s all. Just find him, and tell us where we can find him too.”

“Vincent said—” Lincoln started, but Nadine chopped him down quick with: “Nobody fucking cares, okay, Lincoln?” She turned to face me, hip-shot, her eyes asking me if I liked her as much from the waist down. “Vincent told them you had contacts outside the country. That you’d been a mercenary, and that there was a. . . ‘pipeline’ or something you could send somebody down if they wanted to disappear.”

I let my eyes tell her she was, in fact, just as fine from the waist down. “Now you are talking about committing a crime,” I said. “Whole bunch of crimes if I remember my legal training.”

“You’re a lawyer?” she asked.

“No,” I told her truthfully, “but I’ve been in plenty of courtrooms.”

“So you’re not interested?” she asked, a quick lick of her lips telling me she knew how double-edged her words were.

“In what? Solving some crimes? Or committing some?”

“Right now, I’ll settle for either.”

“I might be. . . in the first. If the money was right.”

“What makes you think you could solve. . . I mean, find him?” Lincoln asked.

“I don’t know, pal. What makes you think I can? Vincent?”

“Vincent said you. . . do things for money. He said he. . . helped you with one, once.”

“That’s nice,” I replied. “Only thing is, I don’t have any old stories for you, friend. You want to check me out, do what you have to do. Or maybe you already did that. But I don’t have a crystal ball. Or promises either.”

“But you could try, couldn’t you?”

“Sure. I could try. But I don’t do bounty hunting.”

“What does that mean?” Nadine asked.

“It means I don’t do COD, understand?” I said, holding her eyes. “I get paid for work, not for results. You want to pay me to look, I might do that. You want to pay me only if I turn him up—if it’s a ‘him’ at all—forget it.”

They all went silent again. Nadine turned and walked back to her little table, showing off what every man on the planet was missing. I could tell she’d had a lot of practice.

I went back to scratching behind Pansy’s ears. If they didn’t learn anything else from all this, they’d at least discover I could outwait a tree.

Lincoln went over to a far corner. A number of them clustered around. The skinny blonde at Nadine’s table started to get up, but Nadine grabbed her wrist and wrenched her back down.

I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Nadine and I played with each other across the distance. It was as