“Yes, mahn. So they can send him over again. But with much pain.”
“That would make them as bad as. . .”
“Sure,” the Prof cut me off. “That’s why it so crazy. Don’t make no sense. I ain’t arguing with you ‘bout that. Not saying it true. But I know this. Some people believe things. And if they believe things, then they do things.”
“So you think this maniac is trying to raise Wesley from the dead? Because he wants him to die all over again? Only. . . hard this time?”
“It ain’t strong,” the Prof conceded. “But it may not be wrong neither. What we gotta do, we gotta find out more about the guy who died.”
“You mean the guy in the park? With Crystal Beth?”
“Yeah. That’s the one. Not the others, that’s not Wesley. Some of those guys this new guy did, they died slow. Wesley did a lot of hits, sure. But they was like. . . surgery, okay? He wouldn’t torture nobody—he was a killer, not a freak. Except for that one. . . on Sutton Place, remember?”
I did remember. Impossible to forget an image that I never saw but that was still whispered about. This was back when Wesley had the only kind of dispute he ever cared about—he hadn’t gotten paid. So he started killing people. When that wasn’t enough, he decided to spook them, start them running wild. Same way a stalking cheetah shows itself to a herd of antelopes—the stampede reveals the cripples. He got into the Sutton Place apartment of a connected guy’s daughter. When her husband came home from work, he found what was left of his wife. . . arms and legs spread wide on their bed, wired to the posts. With her severed head propped up between her legs, staring at him. They say he’s still in a padded room.
That started the stampede Wesley wanted. He’d left a message—on the bedroom wall, in the woman’s own blood—saying the butchery was the work of some lunatic cult, but that was just to dazzle the cops. The wiseguys knew he was promising a whole lot more.
And he kept it up, right to the end. They never found him. Wesley went out by his own hand. Not because they were closing in—they were too busy hiding to look for him. And not because he was afraid—the ice-man didn’t have any of that in his once-in-an-eon DNA. He left because he was tired. Sick and tired. He didn’t want to be here anymore, it was that simple.
A lot of us felt like that. Some of us all the time. And some of us went out that same way. But only Wesley decided he knew who the “them” was that we—all of us State-raised kids—blamed for what had happened to us.
Wesley was pure hate. The kind that metastasizes, year after year. The kind that never goes away, no matter what treaties are signed, no matter whose hands are shaken, no matter who intervenes. Permanent. As deep as your father’s father’s father’s father’s firstborn.
Only difference is, Wesley’s father was the one he hated. The one we all hated—the State. That viciously uncaring, humiliating, experimenting, lying, exploiting, torturing, unstoppable juggernaut. Wesley’s hate was a match for all that. He was us—distilled, crystallized, hardened beyond comprehension, focused past megalomania.
When Wesley went out, he wanted company: the seeds “they” were cultivating for the next generation.
So even if the poor insane bastard on Sutton Place who’d come home to that horrible greeting wanted to bring Wesley back, to give him a greeting of his own. . . and even if the legend was true, and even if he could find this Gatekeeper. . . he couldn’t ever bring enough for the tolls, like the Prof said.
It didn’t leave me anywhere.
Wolfe wouldn’t help me anymore. Maybe she wasn’t sure. . . but I could tell, from the way her gray eyes looked at me just before we parted, that the weight was mine to carry. And I’d have to carry it a long way before we could ever be. . . whatever we were to each other. . . again.
She’d given me all I was going to get. The new ID. And the information.
So I made the phone call.
“Why do you want to come here?” Nadine asked me. “You didn’t seem so. . . fascinated the last time.”
“You said you wanted to be in on it,” I told her. “There’s more to do now.”
“You mean you—?”
“Not on the phone.”
“Can you come tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Now?”
“What happened?” is how she greeted me, still wearing her business clothes, even though she’d had plenty of time to change.
“I may have found a way to—”
“Find him and—?”
“No! To get a message to him. And to put enough in it so he’ll read it, anyway. Now, what I need is to put something in the next one so he’ll want to see me.”
“And you want me to. . . what?”
“Your friend on the force?”
“Yeah. . .?” she said, warily.
“I need some other stuff. Not about the murders, okay? She doesn’t have to go near any of that. Not anymore. But there’s another case. The one that kicked all this off.”
“The drive-by?”
“Yes. But I don’t want anything about that one either. At least, not anything direct. The cops. . . they know a lot more than they’re letting out. Not because they got a sudden dose of class, or because they want to play it professional. This piece, the one they’re holding back, the media would have them for lunch if they knew about it.”
“And you want her to. . . get it?”
“Not ‘it.’ Not the whole thing. Just a name. And whatever information they have about the name. That’s all.”
“How is that going to—?”
“I’ve got a. . . theory. Probably a long shot, I don’t know. But it’s the only card I have to play. I’ve been looking everywhere,” I lied, “asking everyone. But there isn’t a trace of this guy. He’s about as lone a wolf as it gets. No partners. Whatever stuff he’s using he got a long time ago. Like he’s got a warehouse full of it or something. Like this isn’t anything new.”
Her eyes flickered when I said that. Flickered, not flashed, the blue going from cobalt to cyanotic and back, switching on and off for just a split-second. If she noticed me staring, she didn’t react.
“Anyway, she can do that, right?”
“I. . . don’t know.”
“I thought you said she’d do anything you—”
“Anything she can do,” Nadine snapped back. “I’m not insane. If it’s there, and if she can get it, I’ll get it, sure. But I don’t know. . . . She told me they have, what do they call them, ‘firewalls’ or something, inside the department. ‘Access Only’ places, when they’re working on stuff. Mostly political, I guess, but she doesn’t know. And I sure don’t.”
“It’s nothing like that,” I told her, with a confidence I didn’t feel. “I even know where it probably is. NYPD has the same thing as the feds—some Organized Crime unit, whatever they’re calling it this week, I don’t know, but it would be the same thing. That’s where she has to look.”
“He would never. . .”
“He? I thought you said—”
“Not my. . . friend. Him. He would never have anything to do with organized crime.”
“Not even to kill a few of them?”
“Oh! But why would he. . .?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s true. But before I can ask my questions, I need what I told you.”
She stood up and started to pace, unbuttoning her jade silk blouse, leaving the off-white blazer on over it. The black bra underneath was frillier than I expected, for some reason I didn’t focus on. “Sometimes it’s hard to breathe in all this stuff,” she said. “When it’s hard to breathe, it’s hard to think.”
There was so much truth in what she said that I focused on that, slitting my eyes as she walked back and forth. She stopped at one point, stood on one leg, and pulled off her shoe, then switched legs to do the other, so she was in her stocking feet. By the third circuit, she was down to sheer pantyhose.