Mask Market

me.”

“Her? What would you even—?”

“Enough, okay? Just listen,” I said, as I wheeled the Plymouth off the Bruckner onto Hunts Point Avenue, heading for the badlands. “I thought I had a deal with her crew. Do a little surveillance on the address we had, see if they could get me a photo. Or anything that would lock it down as Charlie’s address. Then Wolfe pulled them off. She said it was because they just do paper stuff, no agents in the field. But there was something else going on, and I think I know what it is. Charlie Jones might not be much on his own, but anyone who tightropes over an alligator pit for a living gets to know the alligators pretty good after a while.”

“That’s right. I wouldn’t want him…”

“I know it, honey. That’s why I didn’t go running to the Mole right away, see?”

“Yes,” she said, crossing her legs. “I’m sorry. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“It’s fine,” I soothed her. “We’ll just…consult him, okay?”

Her smile was a floodlight.

We rolled through the badlands, while I thought about how it was probably the last piece of real estate in New York that hadn’t been gobbled up for new construction. Not yet, anyway. With the tidal wave of property-greed crashing over the city, some Trump-oid was going to find the money—other people’s money—to renovate the barren prairie sooner or later. As we made the turn to the Mole’s junkyard, I pointed out a prowl car, parked in the shadow of what had once been a building.

“ROAD officers,” I said to Michelle.

“What are those?”

“Retired on Active Duty,” I told her. “It’s a good spot for cops like that. Plenty of crime, but no citizens to report it. They need something for their activity sheets, they can always bust one of the prosties working the trucks out of the Meat Market.”

“Very nice,” she said, stiffly. Michelle had worked the streets for years, when she was still pre-op. She still had a working girl’s mind: hated the cops, feared the johns.

I’d known my little sister since we’d been kids. I was older; she was smarter. I was stronger; she was quicker. The only times we were apart was when I was Inside, or she was. She’d been distance-dancing with the Mole for years before they ever got together.

What finally pushed them over the bridge to each other was the same thing that got Michelle off the streets and onto the phones. Love. Not the love they had for each other—that had been there since the minute they met, arcing between them like electricity, searing the air. No, this was love for a kid. A little kid who’d been turned out before he ever got to kindergarten. I’d snatched him from a pimp in Times Square, back when that part of town was a festering pus pit.

I hadn’t thought things through, just did what I used to do all the time back then—hurt the pimp, took the kid. But this wasn’t a kid I could take back to his parents: That’s who the pimp had bought him from.

While I was still running through options in my head, Michelle had already adopted the boy, pulling him to her in the back seat of my car. She hadn’t let go since.

Terry was her boy—hers and the Mole’s. The kid had his father’s nuclear mind and his mother’s titanium delicacy. His real father’s, his real mother’s.

I nosed the Plymouth against the rusting barbed wire that wound through the chain-linked entrance to the Mole’s junkyard like flesh-tearing ivy. I knew the motion detectors would have already set LEDs flashing where the Mole could see them.

Maybe there was a hidden dog whistle, too. The pack assembled like it always did, moving with the slow and easy confidence of an inexorable force. I looked for Simba, feeling a needle poised above my heart. The ancient warrior was about a hundred years old; one day he wouldn’t answer the bell for the next round. Just as I felt my throat close, I spotted his triangular head cutting through the mob like a barracuda parting a school of guppies. The pack was silent except for a couple of yips from the young ones who hadn’t learned how to act yet.

“Simba!” I called out. “Simba-witz!”

The old beast looked at me, white-whiskered face as impassive as ever. His eyes were filmy with age, but one shredded ear shot up as he tracked my voice, ran it through his memory banks. He gave out a short half-bark of greeting just as the Mole lumbered up and began unlocking the back part of the sally port.

The Mole drove from the gate back to his bunker. I wasn’t worried about letting him behind the wheel of my Plymouth: The tiger-trap potholes would keep his speed down to a crawl, and he could see well enough in daylight, even with the trademark Coke-bottle lenses covering his faded-denim eyes.

Simba and I walked back together, the pack at a respectful distance.

“We’ve still got it, don’t we, boy?” I said.

Far as I was concerned, he nodded.

As usual, the Mole was miserly with his words. But he listened good. When I was done, he said, “Why does he matter?”

“Charlie?”

“Yes. Either he is no danger to you, or he does not know where to find you.”

“Because, if he was a danger, he would have already moved on me?”

“Yes.”

“Charlie middlemanned a meet between me and this guy who wanted me to find a woman. The guy left to get something from his car. A team boxed him in, and just gunned him down. They didn’t ask any questions, didn’t even search the body. They knew who they wanted, and what they had to do.”

“So?”

“So maybe Charlie’s found himself another line of work.”

“As a Judas,” Michelle said.

“Even if that is so, it wasn’t Burke he betrayed,” the Mole said, reasonably.

“There’s a hundred other possibilities,” I said, lamely. “I just want to talk to him.”

The Mole gave me a look.

“You have a photograph?”

“I’ve got nothing,” I told him. “And a physical description wouldn’t do any good—it’d fit a million guys. All we’ve got is that address I told you about. If it’s still good, he spent a long time building that nest. That’d give us something to bargain with.”

“So you want a photograph?”

“Exactly.”

“Couldn’t you hook up some kind of—?” Michelle started to say, but I cut her off with: “No, honey. Now that I think about it, Wolfe’s right. Surveillance isn’t the way to go. No way we could put a stranger into a neighborhood like that, it’s too—”

It was the Mole’s turn to interrupt. “I know,” he said.

We were all quiet for a couple of minutes. Fine with me. I liked sitting out there in the fresh sunlight, my hand resting on the back of Simba’s neck.

“You have one of those new phones?” the Mole asked Michelle. “One that takes pictures?”

“Mais oui,” she said, insulted that anyone would think she was a fraction of an inch off the cutting edge…of anything.

“Everybody has them now,” the Mole said, as if Michelle had just made his point.

“So it wouldn’t make Charlie nervous, seeing one,” I said, picking up the thread.

“No,” the Mole said in a voice of finality. Then he launched into a string of Yiddish. The only word I recognized was landsman.

The bistro was called Le Goome. Before I could say a word, a guy who looked like he should be bouncing in a waterfront dive—except for the lavender satin shirt with the first three buttons undone to display a hairless swatch of chest—walked over, said, “Mr. Compton, yes?” His voice was right out of a cellblock.

“That’s me,” I told him.

“Michelle is very special to us,” he said, making it sound like a warning. “We have a lovely, private table for you, away from the window, yes?”