Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [101]
But there were plenty of other ways.
Lucky for us, it was summer. Lots of kids on the streets. The cops wouldn’t give us a second look once we got some fresh clothes. That I knew how to do. Not shoplifting. That was for the artists. All I knew was snatch-and-run.
I wouldn’t let Lune come with me when I hit the stores. It wasn’t just to protect him—I knew he’d screw it up.
Once we had clothing, we hit the strolls, looking for working girls who’d pay me a little for steering, like I’d done for Sandi. But as soon as they saw Lune, they couldn’t stop fussing over him. They all wanted to pat him, or give him a kiss, or cuddle him … that kind of stuff. If I heard “dollface” or “angelpuss” one more time, I was going to puke. But at least they never bothered me with any of that sappy stuff. And some of them gave us money, too.
People were a lot more careless back then. Stealing was easy. The hard part was finding places to sleep. I knew kids from reform school, but I didn’t know their last names, or their addresses or anything—just where they’d be hanging out if they were out.
There were gangs all over the City back then. Small ones, mostly, with four-block squares of turf, although there were a few that could call out a hundred guys for bloody battles that only the newspapers called “rumbles.” I knew I could work into a gang as a Junior—I had all the credentials. But I also knew Lune wouldn’t be able to handle the initiation, so we steered clear of them.
Finally, I found Wesley. Or maybe he found me. He knew places down by the docks that were perfect for hiding out. Wesley couldn’t figure out what I was doing with Lune, but he let him come along. That was Wesley then. If you were with him, anyone with you was with him, too.
Years later, after he’d made his mark so deep the whisper-stream trembled every time he went on the stalk, people said he’d been born a killing machine. They didn’t know Wesley when he had a heart. A heart of napalm, ready to explode into flame for anyone who would love him.
Lune was one of the softest, gentlest people I’d ever known. And Wesley became an assassin so deadly that even his own death didn’t stop his name from invoking terror. But when they were kids with me, they had the same heart.
Late one night, I told them about the fire. Wesley said I could have made sure if I had done them all first. I said I’d thought of that, but I’d seen kids stabbed and not die from it—even turn on the kid holding the shank and fuck him up. And I knew he had, too; we’d watched it together.
“That was in there,” the ice-boy said. “It’s different out here.”
“How come?” I asked him, puzzled.
The next day, we went into a pawnshop. Wesley bought a pearl-handled straight razor for two dollars.
And that night, he showed me how good it worked.
We had a little more than three hundred and fifty dollars put aside—a lot of money, back then. It was time for Lune to go. I thought he’d kick about it, want to stay with me and Wesley. But he kept telling us that he couldn’t find his parents hiding out—he had to go looking for them. Lune figured his parents couldn’t be from New York. The way he reasoned it out was, the place where we’d been locked up—the nuthouse—that was in New York. So his real parents, if they were from New York, they would have found him.
He asked us about our parents, once. We just told him we didn’t have any. When Lune asked us if we wanted to try and find them, Wesley gave him a look that would have scared a scorpion.
Lune was smarter than me and Wesley put together, I think. But he had a special kind of mind. And he wasn’t raised where we were. So it was our job to spring him.
Once we figured out that they put Lune in that nuthouse because they really thought he was crazy, we knew they wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking for him. He had to be a throwaway kid of some kind, like us, even