Choice of Evil

am, right? You know it all, don’t you? Trouble is, your yardstick don’t work on everyone. You want to sit in, you have to ante up. You don’t have what it takes to back your own hand, get out of the game.”

“But if the police are wrong. . .? If it’s not this man they think you know. . .?”

“Yeah, if they’re wrong, if it’s someone else, what have they got to offer me anyway? A pass on some cases? If they really had me on those cases, I’d be Inside right now. They had me down to the precinct once already. If they had any kind of hammer, they would have showed it to me. Fuck, they would have used it on me.”

“What’s the bottom line?” she asked, standing up suddenly, looming over me, breasts swinging down close to my face.

“You think we’re all alike,” I told her. “Men, anyway. You’re wrong. You think because I like your legs better in spike heels that tells you I’d turn rat? That’s your idea of knowing stuff? You don’t know anything. You sure as hell don’t know anything about me. Want to know some truth? Go ask this friend of yours. Ask her to ask. . . Ah, I’m not giving you any references—you’d just think it was a setup. Let her ask anyone she wants about me. Tell her to ask two questions: Would I rat out my own? And what would I think of a guy who’s going around blowing up baby-rapers? When you’re all done with that, you still want to help, let’s do it. You’re not satisfied, go your own way.” I finished, getting to my feet, forcing her to step away from me.

I stopped near the door, turned to face her. “If you make that decision. . . if you go your own way. . . you better stay the fuck out of mine,” I told her. “Ask your little friend about that, too.”

If she said anything, I couldn’t hear it through the door.

“Is it true?” I asked Morales. “NYPD really believes Wesley’s back in town?”

He rubbed the blue-black stubble on his face, like he was deciding how much to tell me. But I knew the gesture for what it was—a habit, not an indicator. We were standing under the overpass to the LIE, just off Van Dam Street. A good place to meet if you wanted to do a deal and keep the peep for the rollers at the same time. Even better if you wanted anyone watching to think that was what you were doing.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “Some of them do. The older guys. But nobody’s saying it out loud.”

“You?” I asked him bluntly.

“Nah. Motherfucker’s dead. The feds’ve pulled some strange shit. . . . I know that whole thing about 26 Federal Plaza last year stunk, okay?” He gave me a hard cop-look when he said that. Another habit—he knew it wouldn’t get him anything, just wanted to tell me I was a suspect. Again. In another crime. Nothing changes with a cop like Morales.

I gave him a blank look back. Nothing changes with me, either.

“The way I figure it, somebody’s glommed his action,” Morales said. Not sure of himself, just throwing it out.

“Wesley’s?”

“Sure. He was the best, right? Money in the fucking bank. You paid—you got a body. Never a problem. Fucking Torenelli had to go off, start that war. That was bad enough. Then Julio double-crosses Wesley. Stupid motherfucker had to know what that was gonna cost.”

“You think Wesley did Julio before he—?”

“No way. I think the Family took him out. They knew whose fault that whole thing was. You don’t pay Wesley, you open the gates of hell. If they hadn’t offed Julio, fuck, Wesley, he would’ve wasted every mob guy in the city, the way he was going. They just cut their losses, that’s all. Not the first time.”

He didn’t sound like he was fishing. Good. The truth was buried with the body. I was innocent of a lot of things I was suspected of, but Julio was mine all right. I had met him at the spot where we were going to make a trade: a letter he wrote a long time ago—a letter about a little girl—for a bundle of cash. As we made the exchange, I vise-gripped his hand. He struggled to get free, his eyes insane with what he knew was coming. Max took him out. While Strega witch-watched from the shadows, a little girl no more.

That killing had been part of a trade. And Wesley kept up his end, like he always did. I hadn’t lied to that crazy Nadine. Wesley was a pure sociopath; that’s what all the psychs said. But they didn’t know. There was a piece of him that still connected. Not enough to keep him here, but enough to give me that one last gift.

At least this Homo Erectus loon had his own motives. All Wesley ever had was a list. And all it took to get put on it was money.

Money. Maybe Morales was right after all.

“You think someone’s stepping in? Taking over?”

“They’d have to blood-in, right?” he growled back at me. “No way anyone’s gonna fork over the kind of bucks Wesley got without knowing they was getting the real thing. This guy, whoever the fuck he is, he knows how to make bodies.”

“So what? They’re just random hits,” I said, fishing now myself. “It’s not like anyone ordered them done. Not like these guys had bodyguards or anything. Any freak can do a lot of kills if there’s no motive, you know that.”

“Yeah,” Morales agreed. If he knew anything about some mobster hiring a hit man he thought was Wesley, it didn’t show on his face. And I bought it too—Morales isn’t that good at keeping his face from talking even with his mouth shut, and he wasn’t the kind of cop they’d let in on an organized-crime thing anyway. Maybe the brass had called him a hero in their press conference when he got the credit for killing that psycho Belinda, but he was marked forever as a dinosaur street-roller. They couldn’t let him work narcotics, because they knew him for a flake-and- bake guy from way back. Put him in the gang unit and you’d have corpses by the end of the week. Vice was out of the question—he was too full of puritanical rage to work anything that took delicacy. Undercover was impossible— he reeked of cop. So he worked job-to-job, always roving, never partnered up. Which was okay with him. He wasn’t going anywhere. No promotions in his future. And they couldn’t fire him. So he was just doing time.

I knew all about that.

I also knew one place I could get what I wanted. . . if Nadine’s friend was really all she said she was.

“He was a man,” Morales said, surprising me out of my thoughts.

“Who?” I asked him.

“Wesley,” Morales said, touching the brim of his hat as a goodbye. Or maybe a salute.

Driving away, I shoved in a cassette and let the blues flow over my thoughts. What’s a “man” to Morales, anyway? Someone who walked his own way, I guessed, same way Morales himself did. What was he saying, then? That this Homo Erectus guy. . . wasn’t?

It was like trying to knit a sweater from cigarette smoke. I gave it up.

The whisper-stream isn’t all lies. I’d never heard of this “Gatekeeper” the Prof had talked about, but I knew who might. Queen Thana, the voodoo priestess who had told me the truth about myself. My destiny. And, maybe because I understood she already knew—I guess I never really will know why—I told her the truth about myself, too. What happened to me when I was a little kid. First time I ever said it out loud. She told me I was a hunter. That was true—I’d been looking for a missing baby when I’d come to her, following a twisty-scary trail. She told me two more things: I had to be what I am—I could change my ways, but I couldn’t change myself. And not to come back.

After that, it all happened. I went into a house of beasts looking for a captured kid. At least, that’s what I told myself. But I went in shooting. Killing, really. The only gunfight was at the end. And if they hadn’t had guns down in that basement—where a kid was trussed up for the sacrifice, the videocams ready to turn blood into money—it would have been just killing then, too. In the exchange, they all died. Even the kid.

I’d gone into that house hunting my childhood. Not the ones who did those things to me. They were gone. I couldn’t dig them up and kill them again. But their descendants. Their heirs. Their. . . tribe. When it was done, it almost did me too. No rationalization worked. I know who killed that kid. I know it was me. I know I didn’t mean to. I know they were going to kill him anyway.

None of it helped.

For a long time, I wouldn’t touch a gun. I prayed for Wesley’s ice to come into my soul. He was my brother. We had suckled at the same poisonous breast. Only he could save me from going down into the Zero, it was pulling at me so hard.

Things happened since then. A lot of years. And the last time I held a gun in my hand, it was to protect my