Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [101]
As Flood looked up at me I wrapped my arms around my biceps like I was giving myself a hug. “A psychopath has everything he needs right inside himself. He doesn’t need an environment, doesn’t have to work with it. He doesn’t see people, he sees things. And he could move these things around or throw them out and break them the same way you might rearrange furniture.”
Flood looked at me, her face calm and composed. “A whole lot of words.”
She had me there. I got my things together, and then Flood and I got out her wok and burned up the whole Goldor file. Pablo wouldn’t want it back and I wasn’t about to be walking around with it either. We sat together and watched the flames eat Goldor’s dossier. No answers rose with the smoke.
I told Flood that I had to make some arrangements before we could go and visit Goldor, that it might be that very night, and she was to stay home and wait for my call. She nodded absently—her thoughts were somewhere else. She walked me to the door, stood on her toes to kiss me goodbye.
38
IT TOOK ME a while to get back to my office. I never go there in a straight line anyway, but ever since I watched that videotape I had the feeling that Goldor somehow knew I was coming for him. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced Pablo’s profile was on the money. Goldor did think he was untouchable. “The man who knows Wilson made a movie star out of a corpse,” Michelle had said. Maybe she didn’t know the name, but his product was on the street for everyone to see. We were all just so many bugs to him. He wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep worrying about a Wilson rolling over on him. Sure, he would know the Cobra—he would know anyone in the kiddie-sex business, but the lion doesn’t fear the jackal.
I checked the office carefully this time, but nobody had come calling. Pansy was as glad to see me as she usually was—once she satisfied herself that it was really me she went back to sleep. I made enough noise moving around the office so she realized I would be there for a while, and I let her out onto the roof while I sat at my desk and went over everything one more time. I would have to go back to the Bronx, but this time to the other end of the world. I couldn’t use Max for this one—who knew how much protection Goldor would put on himself? Flood was in it to the end because it was her beef.
Too much time had passed without a strike. I would have to call back the phony gunrunners tonight with a way to take some of their money or lose that pair of fish. Time was compressing in on me, I needed room to breathe. I guess when big executives get like this they go to the country, or even out of the country if they’re big enough. I could go them one better—one short trip to the Bronx and I could go right off this planet.
The Plymouth was waiting for me, kicked over on the first shot like it always does. I worked my way over to the East Side Drive and took the Triboro to Bruckner Boulevard and 138th Street, then nosed the Plymouth into the maze of abandoned side streets and kept driving until I was sure I was flying solo. When I spotted the rusty old cyclone fence wrapped with razor wire I edged the Plymouth along its perimeter until I found the open entrance, drove in a few feet, shut the engine, and waited.
I didn’t have long to wait. I saw a flash of dark fur, heard a thump on the hood and found myself looking through the windshield at the ugliest Great Dane in the world—a battered old harlequin, black and white, missing an eye and with teeth broken in front. He just sat there on the hood like he was some kind of bizarre ornament, bored with the whole thing. I kept my eyes straight ahead, but I could sense the other dogs gathering around the car. No barking, just low-pitched grunts like wolves nosing the body of an elk they had just downed. The dogs came in all shapes, sizes, and colors. I could recognize traces of their original breeding in some of them, but they were all one version or another of the American Junkyard Dog—loyal, tenacious,