Choice of Evil

The speaker spit out, “You could not. . .” but his voice trailed off.

“You know the truth,” I told him, calm and quiet and centered as deeply as I ever had been in my life. “You only killed Angelique. That’s when your art was done. When you found out the real reason why you did it. She taught you. She’s not lying. You are her father. But she was the one who gave you life.”

“My life is art. And my art is death.”

“Yes. And you’re done now. You’re Wesley. You can’t die. So you can’t stay either.”

“I know,” he said. A human voice now. He must have switched off the distorter in the microphone.

“Take Zoe with you,” Nadine begged him. “I wanted to go with you then. I can help you now. I can be with you. I don’t want to be here.”

She was crying then. I didn’t move, even when the cigarette started to burn the tips of my fingers.

“Come here, child,” he finally said.

Nadine walked forward. Touched the yellow button. And stepped into the darkness.

I heard a faint click as the Lexan door closed again.

I sat there, frozen, watching the barrier.

A white-orange fireball exploded in front of my eyes. The room rocked.

I got off the floor, surprised I was still there. I knew what was coming next. Wesley was going out again. The same way. I wondered how much time I had even as I ran toward the waiting elevator.

“Reprogrammed,” the maniac had said. I didn’t touch any of the buttons in the elevator. I climbed onto the railing and shoved the flat of my hand against the ceiling. The security panel yielded. I climbed out of the car and looked across. Empty black space. Sure—only that one car went to the secret top floor. But the blackness ahead of me wasn’t the Zero. There had to be other cars. I slipped the gloves onto my hands, wished for a flashlight. The stairway was sealed at the bottom. This way was my only shot. And a timer somewhere was ticking away my life. How much was left before he turned into Wesley for real?

I jumped, reaching out for the cable I couldn’t see. I hit it with my chest, grabbed on as hard as I could. Got a grip but it was too greasy—I lost it and started to free-fall. I. . . crashed onto the roof of the car below. Felt the wind go out of me. Didn’t fight it, waiting even as my mind screamed the opposite command. I got a breath. Clawed around frantically until I found the panel’s handle. Yanked it up and dropped inside. Stabbed the button for the ground floor, willing the damn thing to drop like a stone.

It opened into the lobby. I sprinted toward the thick glass doors and pulled with all my strength. Locked! Sure, the son of a bitch wouldn’t do anything without a backup plan. Alive, I could tell the truth. I pounded on the door. Useless. I looked around frantically, knowing it was coming and. . .

The night lit up. The quad beams of my Plymouth, aimed right at the door. I semaphored wildly. The Plymouth backed up, tires squealing, spun into a J-turn, and shot toward me, rear end first like they do in Demolition Derbies. I backpedaled toward the elevator as the Plymouth roared right up the steps and crashed into the doors, splitting them wide open. I ran for the passenger door, wrenched it open, and dove inside as the big car lurched forward, bouncing down the steps, fishtailing as it hit the street, then shot toward the FDR.

I looked over at the driver and caught Wolfe’s Satan-slayer smile. “Controlled collision,” she said. “The Mole wanted to work the lock, but the Prof said it was probably rigged. So we waited. When we saw you, it was time.”

“I. . .”

“I know you do,” Wolfe said, as the night behind us turned into flame.

It was probably getting light outside somewhere, but none of it penetrated into Mama’s.

“All she did was love him,” Wolfe said. “And he must have hated all the freaks, just like she did. Why didn’t he just go on and—”

“It was his choice,” I told her. “She knew his secret. She loved him for it, but he had no love left in him. He wanted to go, but he wasn’t going to leave anyone who would make excuses for him. You know how they talk about a choice of evils? He had all the choices. And evil was the one he chose.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Wolfe said. “I think he loved her. The only way he could.”

“He was just. . . what, then?”

“I don’t have a name for it.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s gone now.”

“You’re not,” she said, leaning toward me, her hand on mine, gray eyes soft with something I’d never seen before. “And it’s your time now. Your time to choose.”

An excerpt from

DEAD AND GONE

by ANDREW VACHSS

Soon to be available in hardcover from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

You know what it takes to sit across the table from a man, listen to him talk, look into his eyes. . . and then blow his brains all over the wallpaper?

Nothing.

And the more of that you have, the easier it is.

“You pick a spot yet?” The voice on the cell phone was trying to come across as bored with the whole thing, but I could pick up little worms crawling around its edges. Impatience? Nervousness? No way to know for sure.

“No,” I told him. “And if I can’t find one in a few minutes, we’ll have to do it next time.”

“Hey, pal, fuck you, all right? There don’t have to be a next time.”

“Up to you.”

“Hard guy, huh? I guess that’s right—it’s not your kid.”

“Not yours, either,” I said, my voice level and unthreatening, sending my calmness out to him. “We’re both professionals—how about we just keep it like that? This is a trade. You know how trades work. Soon as I find a safe spot, I’ll pull in, just like we agreed, okay? We’ll hook up, do our business, and everybody gets paid.”

“You don’t find a spot soon, nobody gets paid.”

“I’ll get back to you,” I said, and killed the connection.

It had taken weeks to get this close. A missing kid. Too young to be a runaway, but there’d been no ransom note. Just a. . . vanishing. That was almost ten years ago. It wasn’t a media story anymore. The cops told the parents they were still looking. Maybe they were.

The parents were the kind of people the cops would put out for, that was for sure. She was a gynecologist; he did something in biochemistry. But they were also first generation Americans; Russians. So when they got a call from a man who spoke their language, a man who said he ran a “recovery service” on commission, they took their hopes and their fears to Odessa Beach. Not the one on the Black Sea, the one in Brooklyn.

In the Russian mob, even the grunts have a hierarchy. You can read their rank right on their bodies—the specialists mark themselves with prison tattoos. The symbols tell you who’s the thief, who’s the assassin, who uses fire, who does bodywork. But they didn’t have anyone who does what I do. So Dmitri, the boss, reached out across the border. To a Chinatown restaurant run by a Mandarin matriarch who trafficked in anything except dope and flesh. She didn’t sell food, either.

“Half a million dollars?” I asked her, seated in my booth in the back, the third bowl—of a mandatory three—of hot-and-sour soup in front of me.

“They say,” Mama answered. Meaning: she wasn’t endorsing it herself; she wouldn’t vouch for anyone involved at the other end.

“And a hundred for me?”

“For whole trade,” she said, reminding me that I hadn’t found this job on my own—they’d called her. The whisper-stream knows a phone number for me. After it bounces around the circuits, it eventually rings at one of the pay phones in the back of Mama’s restaurant.

“Six hundred,” I added it up. “And Dmitri, he’s going to taste too, right?”