Pain Management

“After that, I saw him all the time. He drove a taxi, but I couldn’t see where he had much business.

“This was when Portugal was still a major colonial power in Angola . . . and having trouble holding on. That’s why they were big players in Biafra—pretty hard to fly bombers from Lisbon all the way down to southern Africa. If the rebels had won in Nigeria, the Portuguese who backed them would have had themselves a perfect launching pad.

“But Sao Tome itself was unstable. I kept hearing talk about some ‘independence movement,’ but I never actually saw any signs of one . . . not even so much as a piece of graffiti.

“One day, we’re in the bar, talking, and Evaristo points to me, says ‘Biafra?’ And I think, Here’s my chance to make a plane connect, so I tell him, ‘si,’ like I’m a real native. Then he goes, ‘?Soldado?’ and I say, ‘No.’ He tries ‘Jornalista?’ and I shake my head again. Then he moves me up the ladder even more. ‘?Medico?’ But I have to shrug him off again.

“He makes a ‘What, then?’ gesture. I figure now’s the time to tell him I’m on this humanitarian mission, so I try to figure out what the word for ‘social worker’ would be . . . and I come up with ‘socialista.’ ”

“Burke! You didn’t!”

“Yeah, I did. And Evaristo, all the blood goes out of his face. He looks around, makes a ‘Shut the fuck up!’ gesture at me.

“I didn’t think anything of it until a few hours later, back in my room. When I heard the slides being racked.”

“Slides?”

“On the machine guns.”

“Oh!” Gem gasped, like it was the most terrifying thing she’d ever heard in her life. Women.

“La policia wanted to talk to me,” I told her. “I guess I fit the Outside Agitator profile.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I couldn’t speak Portuguese. And, after that, I wasn’t about to try. After a couple of hours, they took me to a priest. He translated. Or maybe he didn’t. I never knew what he told them, but, finally, they left.

“The padre told me I better do the same. Right then. Don’t go back to my room, don’t do anything. Just get to the airstrip and catch the first thing smoking.”

“You did that?”

“Yep. Evaristo, he was waiting outside, with the motor running. The plane was on the strip, propellers already spinning. The back was open. I just jumped on, like hopping a freight. One of the mercs looked me over, asked me, was I from the Company? I said I was, and that was it.”

“You were so lucky,” Gem said, her palms together in a prayerful gesture.

“More than I even knew at the time, honeygirl. They made two runs every night. The late run was the best —darker, less chance of getting hit by enemy fire going in. But I didn’t have any choice. The one I took was the early run.”

“Why was that so—?”

“That night, the late run went down.”

“Ah,” she said, accepting. That was the real Gem. A child who had developed fatalism to keep the fear from stopping her little heart. Grown now. But with the same core.

“I have to meet someone,” I told Gem later.

“On your case?”

“Supposedly. I’ve been digging—well, maybe not digging, little girl, scratching around the edges, more like— for a while now, and there isn’t a whole hell of a lot I found that I’d take to the bank.”

“You believe she is here, though?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“Because . . . ?”

“She’s in touch with her little sister. Leaves her notes.”

“She could be using a—”

“Sure. And if she is going through a cutout, I’ve got a candidate for that, too,” I told her, seeing Jenn’s calm, strong face in my mind. “But, the big thing, I’m sure she’s alive.”

“You had doubts, then?”

“Sure. The streets eat their young. Vampires at one end, vultures at the other. And I thought maybe her father . . .”

“What?”

“That he killed her. And hired me as a red herring for the cops. But I don’t think that anymore. I think he believes she’s out there. Close. He’s been feeling me out.”

“For . . . ?”

“He’s just touching the edges. Nothing that would incriminate him even if I was wired,” I said, flashing on the elaborate phone-recording system in his private den. “But he’s real interested in my capacity for . . . violence.”

“Some wealthy people seem to be excited by such things.”

“I know. It doesn’t feel like that to me. Ah, maybe a little bit . . . But I think he’s really asking if I’d cap his daughter, if it comes to that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, miss. It’s almost as if he wants the option, you know? A ‘just in case’ kind of thing.”

Gem got up and stalked over to the kitchen table, her movements agitated. “Burke, this is not a good thing for you to do.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You are not known here. Not truly known. But, on the streets now, it is getting around. You are a man for hire. You are looking for this girl. If she turns up dead, your true identity would quickly become known. And once the police learn of your . . . background, it would be bad. Very bad.”

“Detective Hong tell you that?”

“What?” she snapped, her voice sharp. “Is that your interest, then? Not what I know, but how I know it?”

“Not mine,” I lied. “But this ‘man for hire’ stuff on the streets . . . you didn’t pick that up. These streets, they’re not your territory. So I figured maybe your—”

“My what?” She chopped off my sentence. “My . . . boyfriend? My secret lover? Is that what you really want to know?”

“That’s your business,” I told her.

Gem turned her back and walked out of the room, not a trace of wiggle in her hips.

I went out to meet Ann.

I called her from the car, went through the voice-mail routine, got her on the line. She told me where to park.

Ten minutes after I pulled in, the Subaru rolled up. It sat next to the Caddy, idling. I couldn’t see into the car: the window glass was too heavily tinted.

As if reading my thoughts, the passenger-side window whispered down. Ann was in the driver’s seat. She made a “Come on!” gesture.

I climbed into the Subaru’s bucket seat and we moved off.

I didn’t ask where we were going. It turned out to be a black-windowed storefront on a narrow side street. It looked like a porno outlet that hadn’t gotten around to painting the “XXX” on the windows yet. When I followed Ann inside, I saw that the place was actually a triple-wide, extending out on either side into what looked like a blank wall from the street. It was a used-book store of some kind, with floor-to-ceiling shelves made up out of whatever some after-hours scavenger had found lying around on a construction site.

And it was full of kids. All kinds of kids, dressed all kinds of ways. A boy who looked about eighteen, and straight off a farm in Iowa, stood next to a girl whose age I couldn’t guess under all the Goth makeup. If they even