Choice of Evil

She grabbed the sides of the chair with both hands and pulled, hard, jamming her body into mine so deep I had to turn my head to breathe. “You think what you want,” she said into my ear. “You do what you want, too. But when you meet him, I have to be there. That’s our deal. Nothing else. Nothing less. Understand?”

“How could I guarantee—?”

“He is going to meet you,” she hissed at me. “I know it. I’m trusting you. What I told you. . . it might make it happen. And I’m going to be there. So that nothing happens to him, understand?”

“Yeah, sure. I got it. He’s the one man in the world you want to fuck, so—”

She punched me in the face so fast and hard that I didn’t have a chance to get my hand up. But I stabbed a two-finger kite deep into her heavily muscled rib cage before she could do it again. She gasped and slid off me.

“You dirty fucking pig!” she snarled at me from the floor. “I would never. . .”

My mouth tasted bloody. Some of it probably sprayed on her when I bent down to tell her: “Don’t ever do that again. What did you think, you insane bitch? We were gonna handcuff ourselves together until this is over?”

“You better not—”

“Don’t threaten me,” I said. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re with them. You were there when the deal was made. If I do get this guy to meet me, you can be there. And then I’m gone. Whatever you do after that, it’s on you. I’ll be all square then. Earned the money, right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Right?” I asked her again, shoving my face within inches of hers.

She didn’t flinch. Locked eyes with me for a long few seconds. “All right,” she finally said.

The whole crazy scene hadn’t taken long. There was enough of the night left for me to reach out for a woman who loved the dark.

It had been, what? Six, seven years. But this was her time. If the number was still good. . .

I found a pay phone and pushed the buttons, remembering you needed an area code to reach Queens from Manhattan now. It rang only twice before it was picked up.

“Hhhmmm?” is what it sounded like. It was enough.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I knew you would come.”

“I—”

“I know,” she said in her witchy voice. “Now, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Come,” she whispered.

I was driving through a time warp. Nothing had changed. The same car, the same streets. And, when the Plymouth’s headlights picked it out, the same house. I drove around to the back, the way I always had. The garage door was closed. The house was dark. I got out, walked to the back door.

It opened while I was still on my way. She was wearing a red slip dress the exact same shade as her flaming hair. Even the spike heels and the lipstick matched. As if she’d had years to shop for this minute.

“Hello, Jina,” I said.

She stepped in to me, her face in my neck, hands locked around me. “Say my name,” she whispered. “My real name. You didn’t come for Jina. She’s not for you.”

“Strega,” I said.

She cooed, licked the side of my face like a cat. A silk-tongued cat, but one with fangs and claws. Then she turned and grabbed my hand, leading me through the house to that ice sculpture of a living room I’d spent so much time in. Terror time. The chair was still there, too. She pulled my jacket off my shoulders. I sat down. She went off somewhere. I closed my eyes.

“Here,” she said. On her knees next to the chair, holding my cigarettes and matches.

I lit the smoke, blew a jet out my nose.

“You look the same,” I told her.

“I will always look the same to you,” she said. “You know that. But that’s not what you came for. I know you. Tell me what you want.”

“It’s a long story. How much of it do you—?”

She climbed into my lap, snuggled against me. “Remember what we did, right in this chair?” she asked softly.

“Yes. How could I—?”

“Forget? I don’t know. You’re a man. I don’t know what men forget. I know what I don’t forget. You saved my Mia. You found Scotty’s picture. And you made that. . . filth dead. While I watched. I sleep with you inside me. Not inside my heart. You don’t want my heart. Not the part of it that’s left. That’s only for Mia.”

Mia was her daughter. That’s how I’d met Strega. She was being threatened. By some freak who’d been watching her jog in the nearby park, saying he was going to do something to her child if she didn’t. . . do what he wanted. Julio remembered me from the joint, and he called, gave me the job. He didn’t want it done by the Family, so he needed a mercenary. One he could trust, is what he said. Made sense.

There wasn’t much to the job. Max and I found the freak. We hurt him. He didn’t like pain. We promised him much more if he ever came near the woman again. He never did.

But then it whirlpooled. Her daughter had a pal, a little kid named Scotty. And somebody in a clown suit had taken a Polaroid of Scotty being raped. Scotty thought they had captured his soul, and his therapist couldn’t convince him otherwise. Strega hired me to get that picture back. And she helped too. Witch’s help. We had sex in this chair. She didn’t want to use anything but her mouth. And I had to tell her she was a good girl every time she was done. I should have known then, but I was too focused on staying alive. The maggot who had taken Scotty’s picture was half of a husband-and-wife team. And they’d hired muscle—a White Night gang I knew from Inside. I had to walk that tightrope. Then I had to sit in a room with a human so foul that killing him would have given me an orgasm. And listen while he spooled out evil, showing me how pedophiles computer-networked their traffic in trophies. . . pictures of raped babies. It ended in murder and arson. Later, two more fires: one in Strega’s hands as she burned the Polaroid I’d found in front of Scotty; one in her eyes as she told me the truth about her Uncle Julio.

It was years later when that score got squared. The vicious old gangster had used me once and gotten away with it, but he went to the well once too often. He started it with Wesley, then he couldn’t make it stop. So he tried to middle me, figuring the ice-man would kill the messenger and forget the message. But it was Julio who went down—his neck broken on a bench near La Guardia, Strega watching from the car as it happened.

I don’t know how she did some of the things she did. But I knew her word was platinum, her heart was steel, and her touch terrifying.

So I told her the truth.

“I still don’t understand,” she said when I was finished. “You already have the money, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So. . . Ah, it’s the woman. This woman. Your woman. The one who got killed?”

“I. . . think so.”

“You’re a very religious man, aren’t you, Burke? It’s always in you. This isn’t for love. Did you love her?”

“I. . . guess I did.”

“But you can’t bring her back, no matter what you—”

“Did you ever hear anything about. . . a Gatekeeper?”

“Oh God, not that thing. Yes, you crazy, dangerous man, I’ve ‘heard.’ Do you believe it?”

“No. I just—”

“It’s only for the evil,” she said softly. “Or those who did evil. It’s from the same root. The revenge root. Are you saying you loved an evil woman? Is that why you came to me?”

“No. She wasn’t evil. The opposite.”

“So even if there is a Gatekeeper, what good would it do you?”

“None, I guess. I just. . . heard about it. And I thought I’d ask you.”