Down Here

hand plus one thumb. “Ten to the sixth” means a million to anyone raised on street-shorthand. I sliced my hand down, signifying “half.” Max nodded.

“Mama’s holding enough of mine for the points,” I told them. “But I don’t know how long it would take for her to put her hands on the green. And we’ll still need a bondsman who’ll write the paper for a number that high.”

“Big Nate?” the Prof said.

“He’s the only one I know I could lean on that hard,” I agreed.

“You who?” the Prof said. “Big Nate won’t get on the case if he don’t know your face, Schoolboy. Burke be dead, remember?”

“That’s what they say about Wesley, too, Prof,” I said, very soft. “What some say?”

“You going to be the ghost with the most, huh? All right, son. Let’s ride.”

That night, Wesley was riding with us. He had once been the most feared assassin in the city. An artist of death. His reputation went all the way back, and not a word of it was a lie. Wesley was the ultimate contract man. The only way he ever interacted with the human race was to remove some of it.

Wesley didn’t make statements. He just made people dead. And he only did it for money. Nobody ever saw him; nobody ever wanted to. Everything was done over phones and dead-drops.

I’d known Wesley since we were little kids. Both State-raised, without parents we ever knew. Back then, I was always scared. I was incubated in terror, and it took only a glance, a gesture, or even a smell to open the floodgates inside me.

But nothing scared Wesley. Fear is a feeling. “I’m not a man,” he told me once. “I’m a bomb.”

When I was a young man, he was everything I ever wanted to be. Ice-cold, remorseless, never-miss efficient. You could kill Wesley—at least, that’s what some people thought—but you could never hurt him.

I finally found my family. The one I chose; the one that chose me. Wesley never looked for kin. Only for targets. No friends, no family, no home. And, finally, no reason to be here anymore.

The end kicked off when a Mafia don named Torenelli didn’t pay Wesley for some work. Bodies started dropping all over the city, all family men. Torenelli went into hiding. Wesley kept killing, sending the message. When that didn’t make the Mob give him up, Wesley decapitated Torenelli’s daughter, right in her own upscale co-op. Telling them he didn’t play by their Hollywood “code.” Rules and roles didn’t matter to a man who believed the difference between a priest and a pimp wasn’t what they sold, only what they charged.

Then Torenelli played his last card. An old viper named Julio I’d known since prison. Years before, Julio had hired me to do something about a freak who was sex-stalking his niece. That was a straightforward job, and I got it done easy enough. Julio said he had hired me, instead of using one of his own men, because he was Old School— you never mixed private business with family business. It had sounded right when he said it.

But when Julio hired me to meet Wesley, offer him whatever money the assassin wanted to call off the hit on Torenelli, I knew I was being middled. Just carrying the offer would be enough to convince Wesley I had gone over.

It didn’t happen like that. Julio thought Wesley and I were stalking each other, but what we were doing was making a trade.

After a while, they all got dead.

That should have ended it. But by then, Wesley’s hell-bound train had finally jumped the tracks. A decade before Columbine became an American nightmare, Wesley walked into a suburban high school with enough ordnance to take out every living creature in the place. After lobbing some grenades, then gunning down dozens of random victims, he released a deadly gas from the truck he had driven to the scene.

While the cops thought they were still negotiating with the maniac they had trapped inside, Wesley climbed to the roof of the high school. Before the police helicopters could even get off a shot, he held a bunch of dynamite sticks taped together over his head, like a psycho version of the Statue of Liberty, and blew himself into atoms.

We watched him go. Live on TV. It was on every channel, just like when they cover a war.

The package arrived a couple of weeks later: a nine-by-twelve flat envelope, thick with paper. His dark thumbprint was at the bottom of the last page.

That part of the package found its way to the cops. My inheritance from Wesley, a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, taking the weight for some of the things I’d done.

But there was another part to it, one the cops had never seen. A pocket-sized notebook, filled with Wesley’s precise printing. His accounts book.

Our kind don’t make out wills. But we do leave legacies.

We went over the plan as Clarence drove. At that hour, even the FDR wasn’t crowded; we were over the Willis Avenue Bridge and into the South Bronx badlands in minutes. The Plymouth blended right in.

My cell phone buzzed.

“What?” I answered.

“You tell me, sweetheart.” Michelle.

“Honey, have we got anybody out on the Rock, in the Women’s House?”

“I can find out. What’s up?”

“Wolfe’s been arrested. Just got arraigned. Judge put a half-million bail on her. She may be there for a while. I don’t want anything to—”

“Wolfe? They’ll probably build a throne for her, as many wife beaters as she’s put away.”

“Still . . .”

“I’m on it, baby.”

Michelle rang off just as we found what we were looking for. Big Nate’s place was a freestanding cinder-block building with cross-barred windows—it looked like a small-town jailhouse sitting on a prairie. A faint dirty-yellow glow came through the glass. Red neon promised bail bonds in several languages.

We gave it one slow circuit before Clarence docked the Plymouth, backing it into getaway position.

“Everybody set?” I asked.

“You going heeled, mahn?” Clarence asked, patting his chest to the left of his heart, where his nine- millimeter always rested.

“No,” I said. “We’ll do it the way I laid it out.” I had a never-registered .357 Mag in a hidden compartment next to the Plymouth’s fuel cell, but I didn’t want to chance a pat-down at the door.

The Prof held up a small bundle, wrapped in an old army blanket. He didn’t have to say any more. When I first met him, he was on his last prison stretch, and part of his rep was as a master of the twelve-gauge sawed-off.

“All right,” I said. “One more time. Me and Max go in. I’m the front man for a sweatshop that just got raided. I’m looking for someone to write a lot of little bonds—get the workers out and gone before they say something stupid and put INS on alert. Max is with me, covering the tong’s end of the deal . . . if they even ask.

“If we come piling out the door, you know what to do. Keep it high, Prof. Soon as they hear your scattergun, they’ll probably get back inside. And, around here, nobody’s calling 911.”

“You drop the name, you gotta carry the game, son,” the Prof warned. He unwrapped the sawed-off and laid it on the seat next to him.

I rang the bell. Waited for whoever was running the security camera to buzz us in.

The place hadn’t changed. A pair of low-grade industrial desks, a wall of khaki file cabinets. A splattering of hand-lettered signs, all warnings of one kind or another.

There was a man at each desk. One was in a cheap brown suit jacket, sitting behind some kind of ledger. The other was in a black nylon windbreaker, feet on the desk, a copy of Soldier of Fortune open in front of him. I figured the suit for the money man, the windbreaker for a bounty hunter.

The bounty hunter looked barroom-tough. The money man looked weasel-dangerous.

Max moved so he was standing against the left-hand wall. I walked over to the money man.

“I want to see Nate,” I told him.

“There’s no Nate here, friend,” he said. “You want a bond, you came to the right place. Otherwise . . .”

“He’s here,” I said, letting my eyes drift over to the door against the back wall. The one that said “Men” on it, with a “Closed for Repairs” sign plastered across its face. “He doesn’t let anyone else drive his Rolls,” letting him