"Hard Candy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vachss Andrew)

5

I SLIPPED MY PLYMOUTH through Chinatown, heading for Mama's. The car didn't feel the same since Belle left. I couldn't make it sing the way she could. Her Camaro was cut up into a thousand pieces in the Mole's junkyard. Her body was in the ground. She left her clothes at my office, her life savings stashed in the hiding place in my garage. I burned the clothes. Kept the money. Like she would have wanted.

It was the fourth day I'd made the run past Mama's, checking the dragon tapestries in the window. One red, one white, one blue. Mama's a patriot. But not a citizen. None of us are.

The blue tapestry had been up for days. Cops. The newspapers said the porno theater had been blown up by some extremist group. The searchers found enough evidence to drop Salvatore Lucastro- drop him hard. His snuff-film business was as dead as the little girls he made into movie stars. Sally Lou was looking at a bunch of life sentences, running wild. Some flowers can only grow in the dark. The local badges had a bad attitude. They weren't surprised that the federales snatched the evidence. They knew Sally Lou's ass was going to be RICO'd. Continuing Criminal Enterprise. But there was supposed to be something left for them. A couple of bodies. I left pieces of one all over a construction site in Times Square. Took the other one with me to the junkyard. Put it through the recycling program: it turns freaks into dog shit.

That was months ago. By now, the cops knew they'd never find the bodies. But they knew where to find me.

It played the same way it had for the last few dead months. The cops would come around, ask their questions, make their threats, go away.

When they got tired of sending around the hard boys, they sent McGowan.

"I thought we had a deal," he said, his cop's eyes sad and hard at the same time. A good trick. Pimps can do it too. He and his partner, Morales, they had let me run a massage parlor in Times Square with police cover. The perfect bait for a maggot who took his pleasure in women's pain. Blood-orgasms. I was supposed to leave them something when I cleared out, but I took it with me. And left it in a junkyard.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yeah you do. You think you walk away from this, you're wrong. I don't give a good goddamn about another collar. You know that. But you're on the list now. I don't know how you made the shooter disappear, but they found pieces of that karate freak all over the lot."

The karate freak who'd crippled the Prophet to send me a message.

"What karate freak?" I asked him.

"You want to play it that way?"

"I'm not playing."

"Not anymore you're not," he said, getting up to leave.