Only Child

Nights, we rode. Me driving, Max charting. We knew what we were looking for—a place big enough to store a couple hundred humans. Remote enough so there would be no casual traffic, and close enough to the drop point to make it a quick trip. We found what we wanted easy enough. Only thing was, we found it a dozen times in the first few tries.

Back at the house, I held my hands apart, then slowly brought them together, looking a question at Max. He shrugged, no closer than I was to any factors we could use to narrow down the search.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told the Prof and Clarence. “It doesn’t matter where they mean to keep their stash. I know how it could be worked now. Only thing is...it’s not for us.”

“Need too many guns?” the Prof asked.

“Too many uniforms,” I said.

“Let’s hear it run, son.”

“Like you said already, it’s military-scale. But it’s still a hijacking. And the best way to work one of those is to have the drivers take a little taste themselves.”

“Pay them off?” asked the man who’d taught me that trick.

“The opposite,” I told them. “The way to make it work is to have INS—or what they think is INS, anyway—roll up and take them all down. So it’s a bust, right? We take possession of the cargo, and the snakeheads are all in custody.”

“Here comes the mordida, right, Schoolboy?”

“Sure. We let the snakeheads bribe their way free. The negotiations take a few hours, maybe.... That works easy enough; they’re not going to have that much cash on them, so they’d have to persuade us that they’re good for it. Meanwhile, the cargo’s on the move. We cut the snakeheads loose, what are they going to do? Go tell their bosses...what? Good way to get themselves killed. They’re likely to stay here in America, go underground.

“Ever since nine eleven, INS isn’t exactly concentrating on Chinese. But whatever their choices, they’re bad ones. Main thing is, we get the cargo, nobody gets hurt...and nobody’s going to talk.”

“Except...?”

“Except that we’d need fifty men. Maybe more. All uniformed, full arms, and communication gear. Marked vehicles, the whole works. We’d have to pull a dozen jobs just to put the financing together. And even if we were bankrolled, we couldn’t find that many rat-proof professionals still working.”

“Mama had to know that, going in.”

“Amen, brother. I don’t get it any more than you do.”

“I do not like to say this....” Clarence hesitated, looking around the circle for approval. We all gave it to him, silently. He nodded his head, as if registering the vote, then went on: “We would need many men to capture them. But, in the dark, by surprise, we would not need so many to...”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “The way I laid it out, there’s nothing left to show anything happened. We leave a bunch of bodies lying around, we turn a no-case into a feast for the federales.”

“That clue is true,” the Prof agreed, putting into words what we all thought—Mama would draw the line at stupidity a lot quicker than she would at murder.

Max stood up, went into the kitchen. He came back with a box of toothpicks. In ten minutes, he had a whole scene constructed on the table. He looked up, made sure he had everyone’s attention, then showed us where we’d gone wrong, his fingers drawing it as clear as a blueprint. We watched the trucks line up near the shoreline. Saw the ocean-goer sit offshore, the smaller boats go out to it to vacuum off the cargo. The cargo got offloaded, and the trucks went to the warehouse. Max tapped my wristwatch, ran his finger around the dial a couple of times to show the passage of time. Then one of the trucks pulled out of the warehouse, loaded. He put himself behind the wheel, driving. Pointed next to him, shook his head “No.” Then he pointed at Clarence, touched under his left armpit, and shook his head “No” again.

Sure, he was right. Each of the cargo-haulers would be alone. And unarmed. A thin smile spread across the Prof’s lips.

Max’s toothpick truck motored along. He quick-built a little roadblock, spread his hands in a “Why not?” gesture.

I bowed my head just enough to let Max know he was a genius. The bow wasn’t just out of respect—slapping five with Max was a high-risk move. “Max has got it,” I said aloud. “There’s a ton of ways to stop a single truck. Hell, a flat tire would do it. Taking down one driver...we could do that in broad daylight. And what’s he going to do after we’re gone, call the cops?”

“We couldn’t keep dialing that number,” the Prof said, deliberate-voiced. “It’d be a one-shot. And we’d need some kind of watch on the plant, to know when the right one was leaving.” He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “You think that’s what Mama wants? All this planning and scanning just to kick one of them loose?”

“She’s done it before,” I reminded him. “And that’s her style, too, swooping in from the wings. But, even for Mama, this is extreme sideways.”

“So...?” the Prof tossed out.

“We ask her,” I said.

The Prof rode with me on the drive back. When we got to the on-ramp for the LIE, I nailed the Plymouth, gobbling ground for the sheer hell of it. We were over eighty in a slow eye-blink, the tach laughing and loafing around three grand. I backed it off, listening to the restrictive mufflers mute the throb of the torque-monster.

“Like your old ride never died, Schoolboy,” the Prof said approvingly.

“Faster, actually. Corners a lot better, too.”

“But it don’t feel the same, right?”

I thought about it for a minute, avoiding where he was going, the only father I’d ever known.

“No,” I finally said. “It’s sweet, but...”

“...but it ain’t got no holes punched in the trunk,” he said, pinning me. I looked at my right hand. At the tiny heart tattooed between the last two knuckles, hollow and blue. My old Plymouth had the trunk all fixed up for her, complete with the air holes the Prof was talking about. Many’s the time I popped the trunk from inside the car so that Pansy could be a surprise guest at a party people planned for me.

The last time I’d done that was the last time for her. She’d gone out the way she wanted, taking one of the enemy with her.

I always see her. On the screen inside my head. A flash of dark gray against the black night, charging across that stretch of waste ground, hell-bound for the man who’d shot me. Dropping him as he tried to run. Rearing up, a chunk of the shooter’s throat in her mouth. Taking fire from the others who’d been in on the ambush. Going down. Getting up again. When they closed in to finish me off, I could still see her...trying. It was the last thing I saw before I went someplace else.

I had come back. Pansy hadn’t.

“You evened it up, honeyboy,” the Prof said softly.

“Doesn’t bring her back,” I told him, through clenched teeth.

“Go on Oprah, fool. That lame game ain’t for folks like us.”

Truth.

I breathed through my nose, centering myself.

It wasn’t even midnight when I dropped the Prof off. Way too early to meet with Mama. I headed back to my place, figuring on killing a few hours.

If Gateman saw me come in, you couldn’t tell it from his eyes; they stayed as neutral as cancer.

I poured myself a beer mug full of ice water from the fridge. New York City tap water is as clean as any of that glacier-grown crap they sell in fancy little bottles. Tastes better, too.

I fired up the TV, kicked back, and watched some of the races from the Meadowlands on cable. Reminded myself I would need to find a new bookie—if there was one guy on earth who’d know my voice on the phone, it was old Maurice.

Later, on the drive over to Mama’s, I found CBS-FM, Don K. Reed’s Doo-Wop