Choice of Evil

when they start going after us again, well. . . who says we can’t write letters to the newspapers?”

“Sure, but they only printed the letters because they were authentic,” Lincoln said.

Nadine got to her feet. Eye-swept the room a couple of times to make sure everyone there was riveted to her. She took a deep breath.

“We could make ours authentic too,” she said. Softly. But everyone in the place heard her.

“This is Tracy,” Nadine told me in the alley outside the room where they’d met, a nod of her head indicating the chubby blonde.

“Pleased to meet you,” was all I could think to say.

“Turn around,” Nadine ordered her.

The blonde did it.

Nadine stepped over to the blonde, pushed her until the other girl’s face was right against the wall. Then she reached around the blonde girl’s waist, and did something with her fingers. The blonde girl made some sound, too low for me to understand. Nadine yanked down the blonde girl’s jeans and her underpants in one two-handed pull.

“Stay!” she said.

Pansy stayed too. Watching. She didn’t know what was going on, but the hair on the back of her neck was up.

It was dark in the alley.

“Light one of your cigarettes,” she said to me, just this side of a command.

I did it, wondering why even as the match flared. She snatched it out of my mouth. Looked at the glowing tip. Smiled ugly. “Want some of that?” she said, pointed at the chubby blonde.

“No,” I told her.

“Then go away,” she said, dropping her voice. “I’m going to play with her. Right out here. In public. When I’m done, she’ll carry my brand. Think about that. And remember your promise. I cleared it with the rest of them. You got your money. But you better not be—”

“I’m still working,” I said.

Then I snapped my fingers for Pansy to heel and walked out of the alley.

Why did that crazy girl think she could pull me in with sex games? I couldn’t figure it out. Couldn’t understand the cigarette thing either. That wasn’t me. Ever. It always made me. . . I could never get it, never get the part where people yearned for what other people had done to me. But I guess I did get it after all. The freaks, they set things in motion. Sometimes they make more of themselves. Sometimes they create their own hunters. I guess they don’t. . . know. Or care. I never asked one. Except when I was a kid. I remember crying, “Why?” And I remember him laughing.

I never knew what to do with all that hate until Wesley told me. A long time ago. “Fire works.” The ice-boy never played, not even back then. Not even with words.

“Rocco LaMarca,” Strega whispered to me late the next night.

“You’re sure?”

“He ran a big crew. Mostly in Westchester. The carting industry. But he lived in Connecticut. New Canaan. Very classy. Not even a whisper about him. Called himself Ronald March.”

“And he was—?”

“The cops thought it was a mob hit. An ice pick in the eye. You know what that means—he saw something he shouldn’t have. And they cut his tongue out too. Saying he said something about what he saw.”

“But how do you know he’s—?”

“It wasn’t a sanctioned hit. The Family doesn’t know who did it. But they knew about his daughter. He made. . . films of her.”

“For money? Like—?”

“No. Just to. . . show off. His. . . power. I mean, he said it was business. Showed the films to a few of the boys who were in that end. You remember Sally Lou?”

Strega, telling me she knew everything. Sally Lou ran the mob’s kiddie-sex business before Times Square felt the Disney steamroller. I love it. Disney cleans up Times Square, but they hire a convicted child molester to direct one of their movies. People protested, but the studio ranted on about giving people another chance. Sure, once it came down to money, all of a sudden, Disney’s got more faith in “rehabilitation” than an NCAA recruiter.

Sally Lou had gone down around the same time Mortay did, all part of that same horror show that cost me my love and launched Wesley on his last rampage.

A lot of thoughts. But all I said to Strega was: “Yeah.”

“Well, Sally Lou was one of the ones who saw it. But LaMarca never turned it over. So Sally Lou, he asked around; like, what was the guy up to, right? And that’s when the word came back. He had a daughter. So they put it together. The filthy slime. He was—”

“I know,” I said, stroking her hair. “What happened to her? To the daughter?”

“Nobody knows,” Strega said.

Meaning she didn’t. But she knew everything else. And her answer to my next question was the last tile dropping into the mosaic. I could read it then, even through the haze of blood.

“It was almost fifteen years ago,” Wolfe said quietly. “September twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-four.”

“I got him now,” I told her.

“You’re really working this?” she asked, disbelief the strongest element in her voice.

“I’m not a good liar,” I lied. “There’s nothing more for you to do. You got paid. We’re square. You think what you want about me. Make your judgments. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.”

“Why ‘maybe’?”

“I think you know,” I told her. “I think you’ve always known. You don’t want. . . me. I got that. I’m doing this for me. The way I do everything, right? For me, that’s what you think. But you had me wrong, and one day you’ll know that. Even if I don’t tell you myself.”

“Burke. . . wait!”

I just kept walking.

“Write it down on a piece of paper,” Xyla told me. “I can’t tell how to spell it from what you’re saying. And what if you’re—”

Her mouth popped open as her computer screen shifted.

>>name?<<

was all it said. And

gutterball felestrone. 50-50

is all she typed back.

“He did find me,” Xyla said. “Christ, he’s good. I could never have found him.”

“I did,” I told her. “Get ready. He’s going to come back. And pretty soon, I think.”

I guess he wanted to make sure I wouldn’t miss it. Gutterball’s last meal had been in his favorite restaurant, a mob joint deep in what of Little Italy still survived the all-borders Chinatown encroachment. Nobody walked in there and blasted him, but someone had gotten into the kitchen. Gutterball was dead before the EMS ambulance managed to bull its way through the clogged streets. Gutterball always had the same thing: spaghetti and sausage with oregano-laced sauce—gravy, he called it. The newspapers had all that. The autopsy report was made public. The sauce had a little extra spice in it, that night. “Enough ricin to kill a regiment,” the pathologist was quoted as saying. “After the first swallow, he never had a chance.”

“Would it be a true death?” I asked the woman. Her office was jumbled and serene at the same time. She had no desk, just a couple of easy chairs and a couch. No computer screen, not even a file cabinet.

“It. . . could. Do you know if there were any others?”

“No.”

“Do you know—?”

“I told you everything,” I said. “Everything I know. Doc said you’re the best there is. At. . . this stuff.”