Blossom - Andrew H. Vachss [17]
It's easy enough to beat the scanners they use in the security corridors at the airport, but I was traveling clean.
A handful of loose change spilled on the floor. Pansy snarfed at it experimentally. I let her play with the coins. I wouldn't even tell a dog to drop a dime.
19
TERRY OPENED the gate for me at the junkyard. It seemed like he was bigger every time I saw him. He wouldn't have a kid's body much longer. His eyes hadn't been a child's even when I found him. When he was for rent on the streets.
The dog pack swirled around Terry, growling and snapping, eyes down. Waiting. Simba bounced into the circle, his ears up, tail rigid as a flagpole behind him. "Simba–witz!" I greeted the beast. He ignored me, eyes pinning Pansy. The Neapolitan watched him from her higher perch, calm as stone if you didn't know her. But I saw the hair on the back of her neck bristle and felt her tail swish rhythmically against my leg. Terry jumped on the hood of the Plymouth and I pressed the gas. Some of the pack yapped after us, but Simba stood rooted, confident that he had faced down the new arrival without bloodshed.
I followed the path Terry pointed out, planted the Plymouth in a spot between two gutted yellow cabs. I gave Pansy the signal and she didn't protest when Terry came close. We walked the rest of the way to the Mole's bunker.
"I'll get him," the kid said, disappearing down the tunnel, leaving me outside with my dog.
"You'll be okay for a couple weeks, girl," I told her. "You've been here before, remember?" She growled an acknowledgment, not bitching about it.
The Mole shambled up to us, seating himself on the cut–down oil drum he uses for a deck chair. Greeted me the same way he answers his phone…by waiting for someone to speak.
"Mole, I got to go away for a while. An old buddy of mine got himself in a jackpot in Indiana. You can keep Pansy for me…let me leave the Plymouth here too?"
"Okay."
"The Prof will be calling you. Once a day, all right? I need to get a message to him, I'll leave it with you."
"Okay."
"You working on anything?" I asked. Just to give him room—I couldn't understand the stuff he does if I had another life sentence to study it.
"The Mole's teaching me about heavy water," the kid piped up.
"I'm sure your mother will be pleased," I said to the kid, giving the Mole an opening.
"Michelle called you?" he asked.
"Mole, you know the deal. She said she was going to Denmark. That's a name, a name for what she wants done. Not a place. She could be in Europe, could be down to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. She'll call when she's coming home. You know that."
"I get letters," the kid said. Proudly.
Michelle, the beautiful transsexual hooker. The slickest hustler I ever knew. The woman who made Terry her son. The strange, lovely woman who danced for years with the Mole. Never touching. But she'd never change partners. When I was coming up, I always wanted a big sister. Big sisters, they taught you to dance, told you how to act around girls, stepped into the street for you when it came to that. Showed up on visiting days when you were locked down. Sold whatever they had to pay for lawyers. Little sisters, they were nothing but grief. You had to jump in anyone's face who messed with them. And their girlfriends, by the time they were old enough for you to play with, your little sister didn't bring them home after school. They'd get married, get beat up by their husbands. More work to do. I told Michelle once she was like a big sister to me, trying to tell her I loved her the only way I could. All she heard was "big." Like she was older than me. She told me I was a pig and a guttersnipe, ground her spike heel into the toe of my shoe and stalked out of Mama's restaurant. Didn't speak to me for weeks. Until I got in trouble and she came running.
She'd been threatening