Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [27]
“That’s not a short list,” I said.
“Might be a real short list, we can get alone with those Russians for a few minutes.”
“I don’t think Anton—the guy who took over from Dmitri—I don’t think he was lying.”
“These people must be registered,” Clarence said, suddenly.
“What?”
“Immigration, mahn. I know about this. I do not know how much truth there is in what you were told, but, if they were from another country, they would not be citizens so easily. They could move, but they would have to notify …”
I exchanged a look with Mama. She nodded.
I thought about it later, watching alone as the gray dawn drove off the black night. I knew the best info-trafficker in the City. And what I had to do.
“A public place is the safest,” Wolfe said over the phone, unaware she was echoing me from … before it happened.
“Safer for who?” I asked her, trying to reach across the barrier I’d built between us.
“Me,” she said, flat.
“You think that …? You think I’d ever …?”
“What’re you saying to me?” she challenged. “That I know better, right? That I know you?”
“I thought you did.”
“So did I,” she told me.
After so many years of wanting to be with her, I’d finally … had a chance, is the best way I could put it.
When you come to a fork in the road, you’re supposed to stop and consider your choices. Me, I never even checked for oncoming traffic.
I’d had a chance. A real one, not some convict’s fantasy. Whenever there’s a choice, there’s a chance. You know how men are always fearing they’re getting past it, that they won’t be able to do the things they once did? Not me. I wish I had been past it. Wish I’d changed.
But I’d gone right back to my old ways with that Albanian arms deal. Then blood came up. Pansy’s blood. And it filled my eyes until I went blind.
I might have gotten Wolfe to listen about the guns. Maybe. Plenty of citizens here thought we should have been arming the Kosovars. But it was just a matter of time before her wires dipped deep enough into the whisper-stream to pick up on who did Dmitri right in his own joint.
When I’d killed Dmitri, I’d done the same thing to my chance with Wolfe.
It’s harder to spot tags in bad weather. You see a guy behind you wearing a ski mask in July, you don’t have to be a CIA agent to know something’s off. But with the sleet coming down New York–style—cold, dirty, and crooked—everybody was bundled up.
I docked the yellow cab, watchfully. The cab stand was empty—weather like this, every hackster in the city was out there scoring. I rent a cab whenever I need to move around invisibly. For years, I had a deal with a dispatcher for a fleet. He’d pull a cab out of service, let me use it for a shift. I’d pay him for the use of the cab, and give him whatever I put on the meter, too. It would go on the books like he was driving himself that day, and we were both happy.
But the fleets are just about gone now. What you have is individual owners or mini-fleets—two cabs and up. TLC medallions are limited, and they go for a fortune when they’re auctioned off. The only way to buy one is to finance it through a broker, and the new owners have to keep their cabs in motion around the clock to make the payments. So what they usually do is drive one shift themselves, then rent their cab out for the others. It’s called a horse-hire. The renter pays a flat fee, keeps whatever he pulls in.
It’s a gamble, especially since the renter pays for his own gas, too. Some of them cut the odds with removable meter chips—reprogrammed to click off extra mileage—but most of them work seven days, never stopping, urinating into plastic soda-bottles, eating while driving, saving every dime … so they can buy one of those precious medallions for themselves. Midtown Manhattan