“Out that door, Sue Ann.”
“Please please please please.”
He yelled at her. “I’ll do it if you make me. I don’t want to.”
The door opened. She sprawled out onto the shoulder, one hand before her face, palm out. She slipped and fell heavily, crying out.
Leaning across the seat he said, along the length of the knife, “Now you stay gone.”
“Jerry, dear.”
The door slammed. The station wagon leaped forward, kicking up dirt. It picked up speed, rushing south, full of towering mindless power. In the rear mirror he saw her staring after him, her figure dwindling, hidden by a gentle rise, reappearing smaller as the road rose again, still motionless, a huddle of pink by the white highway. Perhaps looking after him.
Five miles down the road, he saw her gray yarn purse on the floor. He cranked down the window. After a moment’s hesitation, he opened the purse, opened the worn brown wallet inside. It contained a dime, a nickel, seven pennies. He shook the change onto the seat, dropped the wallet into the purse. Then he hurled the purse from the window. It bounded among the road weeds, leaping flying twisting.
The sun was low now. It was hard to see where the purse had gone.
He drove in silence for ten miles, listening to the radio.
At last he said, “She could have come on to Florida if she wanted to.”
He began to sing softly with the music. He had a pleasant baritone voice, warm and with a sort of lilt to it.
Andrew Vachss
(b. I942)
Andrew Henry Vachss writes of a dark — indeed, pitch-black — world, one that he not only has visited, but still inhabits. In his early years, Vachss’s work experience was wide-ranging and intensive. He was a case worker for New York City’s Department of Social Services, a special investigator for Save the Children in Biafra during its bloody civil war, and director of a maximum-security institution for juveniles. All these occupations, as well as his current work as a lawyer in New York City, seem to reflect the subject that has absorbed Vachss for more than fifteen years — the saving of children from neglect, dispossession, victimization, physical and sexual abuse, and all the attendant horrors that can be inflicted on them by adults.
An angry man, Vachss writes to make others angry, to make them sit up and sweat. His fury is relentless and unforgiving; in his public pronouncements on the subject of sexual abuse, there is an Old Testament thunder to his disgust. In Vachss’s writing, old-fashioned vengeance is often a trigger to the action. In his novels, his chief weapon against the fearsome dark forces is the character Burke, a renegade who lives in New York and has no papers, no Social Security number, no official identity. Technically, he does not exist; yet he lives, furiously in fact, righting wrongs with savage abandon. He is aided by a group of similarly dissentient outcasts, including former madam Mama Wong (who serviced the military at Fort Bragg during the Korean War), the midget Prof, the Mole, Max the Silent, and Michelle the transsexual hooker, who all bear an uncanny resemblance to the 1930s pulp hero Doc Savage and his disparate and bizarre team.
Vachss started his novel-writing career with Flood (1985), a weighty tome about the search for an unhinged rapist-murderer. Gradually, over the years, his style has been pared down to the bone and become distinctly minimalist. His books hurtle along at white-knuckle pace. “It’s a Hard World” is his earliest crime short. The protagonist is not Burke, although he demonstrates all of Burke’s ingenuity in staying ahead of the game — in staying alive.
J. A.
It’s a Hard World
(1987)
I pulled into the parking lot at LaGuardia around noon and sat in the car running my fingers over the newly-tightened skin on my face, trying to think through my next move. I couldn’t count on the plastic surgery to do the job. I had to get out of New York at least long enough to see if DellaCroce’s people still were looking for me.
I sat there for an hour or so thinking it through, but nothing came to me. Time to move. I left the car where it was — let Hertz pick it up in a week or so when I didn’t turn it in.
The Delta terminal was all by itself in a corner of the airport. I had a ticket for Augusta, Georgia, by way of Atlanta. Canada was where I had to go if I wanted to get out of the country, but Atlanta gave me a lot of options. The airport there is the size of a small city; it picks up traffic from all over the country.
I waited until the last minute to board, but it was quiet and peaceful. They didn’t have anybody on the plane with me. Plenty of time to think; maybe too much time. A running man sticks out too much. I had to find a way out of this soon or DellaCroce would nail me when I ran out of places to hide.
Atlanta Airport was the usual mess: travelers running through the tunnels, locals selling everything from shoe shines to salvation. I had a couple of hours until the connecting flight to Augusta, so I found a pay phone and called the Blind Man in New York.
“What’s the story?” I asked, not identifying myself.
“Good news and bad news, pal,” came back the Blind Man’s harsh whisper. He’d spent so much time in solitary back when we did time together that his eyes were bad and his voice had rusted from lack of practice. “They got the name that’s on your ticket, but no pictures.”
“Damn! How did they get on the ticket so fast?”
“What’s the difference, pal? Dump the ticket and get the hell out of there.”
“And do what?”
“You got me, brother. But be quick or be dead,” said the Blind Man, breaking the connection.
The first thing I did was get out of the Delta area. I went to the United counter and booked a flight to Chicago, leaving in three hours. You have to stay away from borders when you’re paying cash for an airline ticket, but I didn’t see any obvious DEA agents lurking around and, anyway, I wasn’t carrying luggage.
With the Chicago ticket tucked safely away in my pocket, I drifted slowly back toward the boarding area for the Augusta flight. It was getting near to departure time. I found myself a seat in the waiting area, lit a cigarette, and kept an eye on the people at the ticketing desk. There was a short walkway to the plane, with a pretty little blonde standing there checking off the boarding passes. Still peaceful, the silence routinely interrupted by the usual airport announcements, but no tension. It felt right to me. Maybe I’d try for Augusta after all; I hate Chicago when it’s cold.
And then I spotted the hunters: two flat-faced men sitting in a corner of the waiting area. Sitting so close their shoulders were touching, they both had their eyes pinned on the little blonde, not sweeping the room like I would have expected. But I knew who they were. You don’t survive a dozen years behind the walls if you can’t tell the hunters from the herd.
They wouldn’t be carrying; bringing handguns into an airport was too much of a risk. Besides, their job was to point the finger, not pull the trigger. I saw how they planned to work it; they had the walkway boxed in. But I didn’t see what good it would do them if they couldn’t put a face on their target.
The desk man announced the boarding of Flight 884 to Augusta. I sat there like it was none of my business, not moving. One by one, the passengers filed into the narrow area. The sweet southern voice of the blonde piped up, “Pleased to have you with us today, Mr. Wilson, and my eyes flashed over to the hunters. Sure enough, they were riveted to the blonde’s voice. She called off the name of each male passenger as he filed past her. If the women passengers felt slighted at the lack of recognition, they kept quiet about it. A perfect trap: if I put my body through that walkway, the little blonde would brand the name they already had to my new face, and I’d be dead meat as soon as the plane landed.