Mask Market

“I’m—”

“I told you to shut up. Don’t say another word until you’re talking to someone you know.”

I watched the bus pull out. She didn’t wave goodbye.

I never got paid for that one.

Like I said, that was back in the day. In Times Square, you could buy anything on the back streets, from a hooker to heroin, and some of the stores sold magazines with photos so foul you wanted to find the people who took them and make them dead. Today, Times Square is another planet: Disney World.

You can’t buy porn from Disney. They’re all about family. Of course, they’ve got no problem hiring a convicted child-molester to make horror movies…about kids. Tourists think things have changed. People who live here, they know all that ever changes are the addresses.

But even back then, freaks had to know their way around to find a baby pross. A girl pross, anyway; the little-boy hustlers were pretty much out in the open, working the arcades.

You won’t find kids hooking in Times Square now. But it’s just like what happens anytime the cops crank up the heat on a drug corner—the traffic just moves to another location. You want an underage girl, there’s always Queens Plaza after dark, and dozens of other spots.

A while back, two dirtbags grabbed a fifteen-year-old runaway, raped and sodomized her until she had nothing left, then put her out on the street. She wasn’t working back alleys, either. Last arrest was on Queens Boulevard, in a nice section of Elmhurst. They took the girl to Florida for the winter, where the local cops grabbed her…and probably saved her life.

Extradited to Queens, the dirtbags got the usual sweetheart deal from the tough-talking clown who calls himself the District Attorney. He threw out the rape, sodomy, and kidnapping charges, let them plead to “promoting prostitution.” Now they can prance around the yard Upstate, jacketed as pimps, not kiddie-rapists. When they get out, they won’t even have to register as sex offenders. With all the heavy cred they’ll have accumulated—what’s more max than being a player and an ex-con?—they’ll probably start their own rap label.

I didn’t know where Beryl was, but I had a good idea of where she wasn’t. A snatched-up runaway wasn’t going to end up in a high-end house. Kiddie sex is a specialized business, and—back then, before the Internet—that meant a lot of risk for the money.

I had the girl’s picture, half a dozen different shots. And a one-two punch: not only the promise of heavy coin if you turned her up, but the guarantee that, if you saw her and I didn’t get word, you better be carrying a lot of Blue Cross.

It wasn’t me that scared anyone. It was Max at my side. And Wesley in the shadows. On top of that, the city was full of bad guys who thought kiddie pimps were a disgrace to their good name, and I knew a lot of them.

I was a different man then. I was just making the transition from armed robber to scam artist, and if you pushed me anywhere close to a corner, violence was still Option One. I was still learning how to sting freaks: promising everything from kiddie porn to mercenary contracts, never delivering. Once I took your money, good luck finding me. And bad luck if you did.

This part never changes: The best way to track someone down is to plant the word, burying the trip wires under sweet promises. Then you put on a lot of pressure, and wait for whoever you’re tracking to stumble over one of them. But when you’re looking for a kid who’s in the wrong hands, too much patience can be fatal.

So I started in Hunts Point, the lowest end of the scale for working whores, then. They were all turning scag- tricks. Their only customers were truckers who had dropped off their cargo at the Meat Market, or serial killers who liked the odds of a desolate piece of flatland where you could find anything on earth except a cop.

Getting any of that sorry collection of broken-veined junkies to talk was easy—for money they’d do anything you could imagine, and plenty that would give you nightmares if you did—but getting them to talk sense was near impossible.

So I just cruised, with the girl’s photo taped to my dashboard. I came up empty a few days in a row—Hunts Point was a daylight stroll. Nights, I worked lower Lex, which was racehorse territory then. Fine, young, sleek girls, with much stronger, smarter pimps running them.

I didn’t waste time down there, just showed Beryl’s picture around, told every working girl who came over to my rolled-down car window about the bounty, and moved on.

Next stop, under the West Side Highway. Back then, it ran all the way downtown, and below Canal was Hookerville. Michelle worked that stroll in those days, when she was still pre-op. She got into the front seat of my car, listened to my story, and promised if Beryl showed she’d make sure she didn’t leave until I got there.

That should have sounded like big talk, coming from a small, fine-boned little tranny. But Michelle hated humans who fucked kids as only a kid who’d been fucked could, and she’d learned a lot since prison. Now she was snake-quick with the straight razor she never left home without.

It was almost two weeks before I got word that someone had a girl to sell. Not to rent, sell. Supposedly, an eleven-year-old virgin with a hairless pussy who loved to suck cocks and was looking for a permanent home with the right man.

I called the number I had gotten from a guy who ran a private camera club—“The girls will pose any way you tell them, gentlemen. No film allowed.” As soon as I heard the voice on the other end, I knew this could be for real: He was a young guy with a sociopath’s chilly voice, talking from a payphone.

“I don’t know you, man. All I know, you could be The Man, you know what I’m saying?”

“So meet me, wherever you say, and I’ll prove I’m a legitimate purchaser,” I said, softening my voice as I pictured myself as the seal-sleek, middle-aged man who had told me how much money there was in “unbroken” little girls.

The sleek man had come into my life just after I first got out. I thought he’d be the start of my career as a scam-master. Instead, he turned out to be a still-unsolved homicide. It took me a long time to get still enough inside myself so I could listen to one of his tribe without having to hurt him.

“How you gonna do that?”

“Surely you don’t expect me to say on the phone?”

“I—Yeah, all right, I see where you coming from. This number’s no good for me after today, man. Leave me one where I can call you, when I got it set up.”

“I’ll give you a number, but I am rarely there in person. My assistant will always know how to reach me, and I’ll get back to you within an hour or two, fair enough?”

I raced back to Michelle’s stroll, saw her getting out of a white Oldsmobile. By the time I closed the distance between us, she had taken a slug of the little cognac bottle she always carried with her, rinsed and spit, and was already snake-hipping her way back toward the underpass. I took her over to Mama’s, set her up in my booth, and told her there was a hundred in it for her to just sit there until the last payphone in the row against the wall that separated the kitchen from the customers rang. The line was a bridge job, forwarded from one of the dead-end numbers I always kept for emergencies—the Mole had set it up so I could divert it by calling and punching in a series of tones.

The phone rang while Michelle and I were still having our soup; the dealer was getting anxious to unload his merchandise.

“It’s him,” is all Michelle said when she came back to the table.

“Quick enough?” I said into the receiver.

“You want to see quick, just fuck with me, and watch how quick you get yourself a problem, man.”

“What’s all this?” I said, hardening my voice. The kiddie-trafficker whose ticket I had canceled had been steel under the sealskin. Stainless steel. If I acted too intimidated, it would be out of character; might spook the bottom- feeder I had on the end of my line. “I thought we were going to do business,” I said, “not sell wolf tickets.”

“I ain’t selling no fucking tickets, man. I’m just saying—”

“Just say where and when, all right? Then you can satisfy yourself I’m straight up, and we can do what we have to do.”

“You know,” he said, barely suppressing his admiration for his own cleverness, “this jewelry we talking about, it’s expensive, man.”