Only Child

The mall seemed to be on a strict schedule: near-empty in the mornings, stuffed with adults at lunchtime, and swamped by a wave of teenagers in the afternoons. Then came hordes of married-with- children until mid-evening, after which the teens took over again and carried it to closing time.

In-store security was tight—undercovers so obvious that they must have been hired as deterrents, lots of fiber-optic cams, especially wherever they sold CDs or clothes—but the corridors and the outside grounds didn’t get any real coverage. At night, they tightened up the perimeter a little. But it was mostly rent-a-cops, eye-fucking wannabe lowriders who spent hours draped over their not-much cars.

Malls are like cities; they have whisper-streams, too. But without a native to front me, any attempt to tap in would draw way too much attention.

So I kept sniffing around the area, looking for openings. I found some places where hanging out for a few weeks could make you into enough of a regular to talk with people without drawing suspicion, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Anyway, I couldn’t picture Vonni’s crowd spending hours in a low-rent tavern, or at the local OTB parlor.

After the Plymouth dusted off a poseur Firebird with more tire than motor on Hempstead Turnpike, a hardcore Nova slid in alongside me a few lights down. The driver looked over, raised his chin in a question I answered with the Roadrunner’s cartoon horn. He cracked his throttle deep enough to let me know he was carrying heavy. I held the engine against the brake just a little past idle, quiet as a turbine.

We both left on the cross street’s yellow. He got out first, but I drove around him just before the Torqueflite grabbed second gear on its own.

The Nova’s driver passed me as I backed off, made a “Follow me!” gesture out his window. In the diner’s parking lot, I got an invite to a not-yet-completed section of the LIE, where they were running for money.

Later that night, I stood off to one side and watched the drivers of a couple of trailer queens go at it. Negotiations first. They argued about lengths and the bust—who got to leave first—for what seemed like hours. When they finally got down to it, the race was over in less than ten seconds.

There was a lot of buzz in the crowd, but it had nothing to do with a murder. Everybody wondering if some guy named Gary was really going to show. I listened close, but all I could pick up was that this Gary was from Island Trees originally, moved to the Midwest a long time ago. Supposed to be the fastest gun on the East Coast years ago. Supposed to be coming back now. Maybe so, but it didn’t happen that night.

Still nothing. When you’re man-hunting, you can buy information. Lots of it’s always for sale—separating the diamonds from the dirt is the trick. I knew the kind of people to ask, and I knew where to find them. But I didn’t have a target. And I couldn’t offer anything as good as what the cops would have already put on the table, a year ago.

I went through the motions, but I didn’t lie to myself about it. I was marking time, waiting for Wolfe.

I was watching a fight on ESPN2 when my cellular buzzed.

“You want to come here?” I asked Wolfe, holding the phone to my ear as I looked out the window into the darkness.

“Once was enough,” she said.

“Just say where and when.”

“Right now. You’re close enough.” Then she gave me an address on lower Broadway.

A large office building, diagonally across from Federal Plaza, a few blocks away from what the tour operators like to call “ground zero.” The man at the security guard’s desk was hunched over a paperback, his back to me. I made enough noise to let him know I was there. He turned and looked up. Mick.

He walked into the freight elevator, me following. There was no floor indicator, but I could feel us going down.

Mick still had the paperback in his hand. The Bottoms, Joe Lansdale’s long-running smash.

“You like that one?” I asked him. “Me, I like his Hap and Leonard stuff the best.”

Mick pulled the lever and the car rattled to a stop. He pulled back the gate and pointed to the left—all the answer I was going to get.

I stepped out, moved toward the only light. Heard the elevator door close behind me, the whirl of the machinery as the car went back up to the lobby floor.

Some kind of storage room, near as I could tell. Wolfe was perched on a two-drawer lateral file cabinet, wearing blue jeans and a pink pullover with matching sneakers, her hair in pigtails. In that light, she looked like a teenage girl.

With a hostile Rottweiler.

“Ah, shut up, Bruiser,” I said to the beast. “You know me.” He snarled softly in agreement.

Wolfe pointed to a carton on the floor. Looked like it was stuffed with paper. “That’s all the hard copy that’s coming,” she said. “The rest, you’ll have to hear it from me.”

“Fair enough.”

“You’re paying a lot of money for not very much,” she said, like she was warning me against a bad investment.

“It’s not my money.”

“I know whose money it is. And I’m guessing there isn’t a lot in here that they don’t already have.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“I’m not. I know stuff’s for sale. But, sometimes, there’s no way the potential buyer can make contact without telling the seller more than what he wants him to know, right?”

“Sure. And you’re saying you’re just a cutout? They only hired you to get...what I’ve got?”

“If that’s all they wanted, they could have used a go-between a long time ago. This town, you can find a thousand lawyers to do anything by the hour. In an hour. It’s just like I told you it was— they hired me to find out who did it. And why.”

“If there is a ‘why,’” she said.

I wasn’t going to argue with Wolfe about that one. She’d prosecuted hundreds of humans who did freakish things without a “why” that would make sense to anyone else. “Yes,” is all I said.

“What do you want first?”

“It doesn’t—”

“The stuff on the killing? Or on your clients?”

“Oh. The killing,” I said, opting for the secondhand stuff before whatever Wolfe had dug up on her own.

“It is a Queens case, technically. But most of the spadework was done by the Long Island cops. That’s where the girl lived, where all her friends were, where she went to school...you know.”

“Did they form some kind of—?”

“Joint Task Force?” she said mockingly. “But of course! And it appears the feds got to play, too.”

“Profilers?”

“Yep. But you know how that works. They—if they’re very good—can tell you the kind of person who might have done it, but that’s a few miles short of an ID. And, with a kill like this one, there isn’t much guesswork involved. A freak or a frenzy. Or both.” She took a deep drag off her smoke. “Or a cold-blooded attempt to make it look that way.”

“They don’t even have a guess?”

“Truly, no. Not that they didn’t try. But there never was anybody they really liked for it.”

“Because she had no one that close—?”

“She had boyfriends,” Wolfe said. “Nothing super-deep. She wasn’t pregnant. In fact, the autopsy said she was a virgin.”

“So she wasn’t—?”

“Raped? No. Or sodomized. No indications in her mouth, either. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a sex crime. Not with all that stabbing and slashing. You know how some of those maggots love their in-and-out.”