Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [83]
“I don’t understand.”
I reached up, grabbed a fistful of her thick, glossy hair, pulled her face down so it was close to my mouth. “Is it important?” I asked her.
“To me, yes. It is very important.”
I leaned back. Gem dropped into my lap. I took my hand from her hair and put it around her shoulders. She made a little noise. Then she settled in against me, waiting.
“When I was a kid, people … did things to me,” I told her. “Ugly, vicious, evil things. But I didn’t die from any of them. When I was older, I spent some time in a war. I didn’t die from that, either. You know what they call me?”
“A man who—”
“No,” I said, cutting her off. “A ‘survivor.’ For both. And that’s wrong.”
“Why is it wrong? You did survive.…”
“No. In war, they’re supposed to try and kill you. Not in families. It’s not the same. And that stupid label, it makes us all the same.”
“Children of war and …”
“Children of the Secret. All of us who were raised by fucking beasts. Like it’s a brand we can’t shed. But we don’t all go the same way. Some of us, we … copy whatever was done to us. Some of us just hurt … ourselves. And some of us, we hunt … them.”
“So. You are one of those … hunters. And you do not forgive.”
“In therapy—the kind they give you when you’re a kid and they know you’ve been … hurt—they tell you, if you want to heal, first you have to forgive. You have to ‘let go’ of your rage.
“But you know what, little girl? When you’re a kid, when they hurt you and hurt you and fucking laugh when you cry about it, rage is your friend. It stands by you. Stays close. Carries you when you can’t walk on your own. It’s cold and clear and … clean. When everyone else is lying, it gives you the truth. And the truth is, any fucking ‘therapist’ who tells you to forgive the people who hurt you—they’re working for the enemy.”
“I have no enemy to forgive. Or to hate.”
“You’re a child of war, like you said. But your parents did their job, honey. They did their best to keep you safe. You can’t hate a whole national insanity. But tell me you wouldn’t kill Pol Pot if he was standing in front of us right this minute.”
“I … don’t know.”
“I would.”
“You? Why? You had no—”
“I’d kill them all, sweet girl. I swear I would. Every one of them.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know what to call them. Torturers, maybe. The freaks who like to play with electricity in dungeons. The gang rapists. The death-camp guards. The secret police. The mutilators. It doesn’t matter what you call them. I’d know them. Every single one. And if I could ever get them all in one place, I’d be the biggest mass murderer in the history of this planet.”
She shuddered against me. “Wouldn’t that make you as bad as—?”
“To some people. Not to anybody who counts with me.”
“Is that why you are looking for …?”
“What did you think, Gem? Somebody tried to cap me. I don’t know why, but I’ve got to figure they’ll try again.”
“They could not find you now,” she said, urgently. “You said so yourself.”
“There’s two ways to be safe, child. One is to hide. The other is to hunt. When I was a kid, I only had one way. I figure, whoever they are, they had their chance. Now I want mine.”
She pressed herself against me so hard it felt as if our clothes had melted from the heat. I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my turn.
“I told you,” she whispered, finally. “I told you, before. Ever since I was a small child, I made decisions very quickly. I don’t wait. I am your woman now. So even though I know what you want … I will help you do it.”
After she went back downstairs—she called it “going below,” but even the sound of that made me nervous—I tried to make some decisions of my own. In my world, people deal themselves in—or out—all the time. But there’d be no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow I was chasing. What I wanted was more of what Pansy had taken with her last breaths.
I didn’t know what Gem did for money, but I figured her for an outlaw—no way she’d be connected to Pao’s network otherwise. And my best guess was that the Mexicans were about as legal as angel dust. So it all came down to her backing my play