Choice of Evil

     “Who is ‘they’?” I asked her.

     “Them.”

     I did not press the point, preferring to establish as harmonious a relationship as possible.

The screen flickered, indicating he was done. I called Xyla in, and waited for the rest. It didn’t take long.

>>Mortay? Wesley’s work? Yes or No?<<

Was this maniac into myth-busting now? Mortay had been the reigning champ of the anything-goes death matches some degenerates were holding in a giant basement, but he couldn’t handle the whisper-stream saying Max could beat him. He put it all on the line. Threatened to kill Max’s baby to force a match. Right after he said that to me, one of his men was shot from a nearby rooftop. The real target was Mortay, but he’d moved faster than any human I’d ever seen, and the sniper picked off what was left. The sniper wasn’t Wesley. . . but that’s what everyone thought.

Mortay finally got dead. Although the cops couldn’t be certain-sure about it, the whisper-stream knew. After I’d shot him a bunch of times in that deserted construction-site excavation, I’d kicked a grenade into his mouth, folded his hands over his face, and pulled the pin.

In a way, that’s what started all this. I didn’t know until much later that Mortay was already on Wesley’s list. The freak was too out of control for the mob guys who paid him to make snuff videos—taking hookers right off the street for actresses—so they gave the work to Wesley. But before the ice-man could get it done, our crew had handled it ourselves. It cost Belle her life, and me my love.

If I’d known the maggot was on Wesley’s list, I would have just stepped aside and waited for the inevitable. But after the way it went down, the whisper-stream gave me the hit-man tag. A street brand that I could never shed, not in some places.

And then the stupid cafones who’d contracted with Wesley said they wouldn’t pay off, because he hadn’t done the job; I had.

That’s when Wesley started killing them all.

Was this guy asking me who was on the roof that night Mortay almost got smoked? Or was he trying to find out what kind of a man I was? Didn’t matter. No way I was going to have Xyla type El Canonero’s name into her machine. He had been the only other pro sniper working the city then, but he wasn’t with me. He was a soldier for some Puerto Rican Independentistas, doing a job for me that night in exchange for something I would do for them. And I wasn’t going to say I did Mortay myself, either. So I played his question straight.

no

is what Xyla sent him.

When you’re interrogating a suspect, you can sometimes get him to tell you the truth by letting him think you already know it. Did the killer really understand the “blowgun dart” message I’d sent him? Or was he playing me, waiting patiently?

And was he asking me about Mortay because he already knew the truth, testing to see how reliable my answer might be to something he didn’t know, down the line?

No way for me to even guess. But I knew this much: It was still Wesley, to him, all Wesley, somehow.

“Nothing,” Hauser told me two days later.

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“I mean nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not one case meets your search criteria. There were cases where a child disappeared. . . but no ransom demands. There were cases where there was ransom demanded and paid, and the child was later found. . . dead. But nothing along the lines you told me to look for.”

“Fuck!”

“You’re still on this, right?” Hauser asked.

“Yeah.”

“So I’m still in it if there’s something I can—”

“You have my word,” I told him, and hung up.

His next message just picked up from where the last one left off. I was as locked to it as if the previous one had still been on the screen, seamless.

     Children vary as widely as adults. Perhaps more so, as they are still in the process of formation, and their possibilities and potential have not yet adapted to the dictates of socioeconomic survival. This child, however, was different in a way I had not observed previously. Some children go almost mute with the trauma of separation, some are garrulous. But, always, they are intensely self-absorbed—understandable, I acknowledge, in the circumstances under which I come into contact with them—wondering “What is going to happen to me?” to the exclusion of all else. This child, however, expressed such an apparently genuine interest in the mechanics of my art that I found myself in discussions which had an eerie “peer” quality about them.

     [Of course, had she been older and more sophisticated, she would have concluded that discussing the specifics of my methodology with a person who could later describe same to the authorities would be counterindicated. Indeed, the fact that I remained unmasked throughout should have been sufficient to provide a clue as to each child’s fate. None seemed to notice. Or, perhaps, they were determined not to notice—I am not a psychologist.]

     But this child seemed utterly fascinated with the mechanics of kidnapping. And hers was not the gory fascination of a child, but the mature fascination of an interested adult. This was no difficult deduction on my part. Indeed, her first question was:

     “Aren’t you worried they could trace the ransom note?”

     I was temporarily taken aback by her question, but, rather than ensuring my silence, it seemed to almost compel me to disclosure. An egotistical desire to share my art, perhaps? I do not believe so. After all, that is the purpose of this journal.

     Still, I showed her how I used only electronic ransom notes. I tape complete television series—sit-coms are the best because they are more likely to possess the requisite longevity—in order to acquire a word bank. “All in the Family,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Brady Bunch” had sufficient running time to provide all I needed. Next, I use a digitizing apparatus to separate the individual words. The final edit assembles the note. The child had a little bit of difficulty following me—I realize that my vocabulary is occasionally excessive and that I tend toward the pedantic—but when I explained that my technique was the same as clipping words from newspapers and pasting them to paper, she grasped the principle perfectly. When I demonstrated—by forming the message “Angelique is a pretty girl” from “The Brady Bunch” (actually, the best source of girl’s names, for some reason unknown to me—I have never actually watched an episode) word bank—she clapped her hands.

     After she had something to eat—I let her choose from a variety of foodstuffs I had assembled. . . it reduces the feeling of powerlessness in the captive—I showed her that the messages were on micro-cassettes. All I had to do was dial the target’s home number and, when the phone was answered, play the tape. Good luck to the FBI and its so-called “voiceprints.”

     “My father has a. . . thing on his phone,” the child piped up. “They’ll know where you called from.”

     Was she mocking me? It didn’t seem so—her little face was serious. Almost. . . concerned.

     So I took out some more of my equipment and explained how a blue-box system worked. A telephone recognizes a hyper-specific series of electronic beeps. When I dial out using the box, it goes into an 800 loop—the best ones to use are those which have chronically heavy traffic. . . any of the conventional credit-card services will