Choice of Evil

are him.”

“I think I can do that. . . if he bites. Just get word to me. I’m counting on you, all right, Xyla?”

“I’m straight-edge,” she said, finger flicking at one of her razor earrings.

I sat there for a long time after Xyla left, thinking it through. Even if the killer got in touch, I wouldn’t be any closer to him, not really. Sure, he had to be in the city—or, at least, he had to have been in the city—to do his work. But he could have already vanished. All we really had was his footprints. And, like the Prof had said about Wesley, that trail only ran backward.

Still, I couldn’t see this guy living some double life. Couldn’t see him as a stockbroker or running a bodega. He wasn’t making his own porno flicks, the way a lot of serial killers do. And he didn’t roam the way most of them do either. He had no definable piece of work he had to finish—the way a mass murderer who comes into the workplace shooting and then eats his own gun does, or a wife-beater under an order of protection who’s going to take himself out as soon as he blows her away.

No, this one was a different breed. And he was. . . close. Had to be. As if he wasn’t so much compelled to do his work as to see its results.

Maybe he was just nuts. Or I was. I couldn’t track him in my mind the way I could other kinds of predators. Those, I knew about. Spent my life with them. They raised me. I did time with them. And I studied them close— because I knew someday I’d be hunting them. That was the prayer I put myself to sleep with every night, from when I was a little child. That I wouldn’t be prey. Inside, where I ended up, there was only one alternative to that.

That’s why he said he was doing it too—revenge. But I couldn’t connect with him. Couldn’t see him. . . feel him. Nothing.

“Burke, you take this one, okay? Say important.”

“Huh?” I felt Mama’s hand on my shoulder. Figured out she must mean the phone. Glanced at my watch. I’d been there. . . Jesus, almost three hours. That kind of thing happened to me every once in a while, but ever since I’d lost my. . . home, I guess. . . it was happening a lot.

I got up, walked to the back, picked up the dangling receiver.

“What?” is all I said.

“It’s me.” Wolfe’s voice. “I have your stuff.”

“Great. When can I—?”

“Now, if you want. Remember where we were the last time you saw Bruiser do his stuff?”

“Sure.”

“An hour?”

“I’ll be there,” I promised.

There’s places along the Hudson River where you can pull over. Sort of big parking lots. Maybe the city planners thought the rich folks on Riverside Drive would promenade over for picnics, who knows? Today, the spots are used for everything from romance to rape. Daytime, they’re pretty full, especially when the weather gets nice. At night, it’s a little different, but there’s enough room to give everybody space to operate, and the assortment of cars parked there didn’t set off any of my alarms.

I backed the Plymouth into an empty space—too near the middle for my taste, but the corners were already occupied. I was twenty minutes ahead of the meet, so I kicked back and watched.

It wasn’t long before that rolling oil refinery Wolfe calls a car rumbled in. I shuddered as she reversed, slowly and deliberately, then backed in so she was close to me. . . but this time she missed by a couple of feet. I opened my door and waited, not surprised to see that malevolent Rottweiler of hers jump right out the passenger-side window and pin me balefully, waiting for the word.

“Bruiser, behave yourself,” Wolfe told him. Not a command I’d ever heard for a dog before, but the brute seemed to understand, visibly relaxing. At least as far as I was concerned—his heavy head swiveled as he swept the surrounding area, maybe remembering the last time Wolfe had met me here. Some clowns in a four-by didn’t see me—just Wolfe standing alone—and thought they’d try their luck. Then they saw Bruiser coming for them—a skell-seeking missile already locked on to his target—just in time and peeled out before he could do his job.

“I got it,” Wolfe said by way of greeting.

I hadn’t expected a hug and a kiss, but this was a bit cold-edged, even for her.

“You also got a problem?” I asked her, getting right to it, ignoring the cheap white plastic briefcase she held in one hand.

“I might have,” she said evenly. “The word’s out that your. . . friend may be back.”

“You believing rumors now?”

“Not any more than usual. But I know a trademark when I see one.”

“Spell it out,” I said quietly, understanding now why she wanted the meet outdoors.

“I’m still. . . in touch,” Wolfe said. Not news to me. The cops Wolfe had worked with for so many years hadn’t broken off contact when she’d gone outlaw. They knew what she trafficked in, and they’d made more than one beautiful bust off info she’d provided. The only way she could walk into a courtroom and own it the way she had for so long as a prosecutor would be as a defense attorney, and she just wouldn’t go the side-switching route like so many ex-DAs. So, even though her license was gathering dust, she was still law enforcement in the eyes of a lot of working cops.

“What is it you want to say?” I asked her, watching her gray eyes.

She took out a cigarette, waited for the wooden match she knew was coming from my end, hauled in a deep drag, leaning back against her Audi’s crumpled hood, and blew a jet of smoke into the darkness.

“You trust me?” she finally asked.

“Yes,” I told her. No hesitation. I could maybe never tell her how I really felt about her, but I could tell her that. And even as that one simple word left my mouth, I knew it was a commitment. . . that I’d have to prove it.

“The drive-by—the one that started this all?”

“Yeah?”

“Two shooters. Plus one driver, okay?”

“Far as I know. Although the driver could have been shooting too. . . so maybe one less man.”

“Seven victims, two fatal.”

“I thought it was less, but. . . okay.”

“One of them, your girlfriend. This Crystal Beth?”

“Yes.”

“Only her ID didn’t say that. It said she was someone else.”

I shrugged. The woman asking me the questions was holding a briefcase full of documents as phony as a talk show host’s tears for the pathetic parade of damaged creatures she used and abused every day.

“You know one of the guns was a Tec-9, right?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“You hear a lot. But not enough, I don’t think. You know what the other piece was?”

“No,” I said, focusing now.

“It was a Magnum Research Lone Eagle.”

“Oh Jesus. . .”

“Chambered for.22 Hornet.”

“So it had to be a—”

“Hit. That’s right. An assassination.”

I lit a smoke of my own, more to have something to do with my hands than anything else. She was right— what else could it be? Magnum Research is a subsidiary of Israeli Arms. And the piece she was talking about was a Mossad special: single-shot, with a rotary breech like an artillery cannon. You rotate the breech cap to expose the chamber and slide in the cartridge, then you lock it up again. No way to reload it in the time a car would pass by. . . impossible. But a sharpshooter, even using open metal sights, could hit a half- dollar at a hundred feet from a moving car with a piece like that. And nobody could be sure the car even was moving before the spray from the Tec-9 started.

“They found the slug?” I asked her.

“A piece of it, anyway. He was hit right in the base of the skull, dead before he dropped.”