Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [127]
“I think she’s not waiting for hotel rooms anymore, Michelle—she’s packing. I think she would’ve blown me away right in the car if she’d had the chance.”
“It’s so sad. I talk to her sometimes, Burke, but I can’t help her. Those freaks put her on another planet, what they did to her.”
“Pass the word on the bounty, okay?”
“It’s for real?”
“You bet your ass,” I said, opening the door for her.
“Baby, please, not for a lousy thousand dollars,” said Michelle, stepping out of the Plymouth to do her work.
I set out to make a few more stops, spreading the word. I wanted every dope addict, every hustler, every take-off artist in our area to be looking to score on this one.
As I rolled back uptown I looked across the highway and saw JoJo, still sitting on the same piece of concrete, smoking her cigarette and waiting for her connection. I thought about the steel plate in her head and got another chill. I’d never show her another picture—of anybody—ever.
I found the industrial building on West Twenty-fifth Street, took the freight elevator to the roof, walked across to what looked like a pair of greenhouses stacked side-by-side. The hand-lettered sign on the door said PERSONALIZED GRAPHICS: SAMSON/LTD. I rang the bell and waited. I heard the click that told me the door was open, turned the knob, and stepped inside. Two men working at individual drafting tables—one in his late thirties, very short hair, tight tanned skin with prominent cheekbones and delicate clean hands, wearing a blue oxford-cloth buttondown shirt with narrow rep tie—the other, shorter and heavily muscled, long blond hair and an earring in his left ear. He was wearing a cut-off dungaree jacket with no shirt underneath, showing a giant tattoo of a daisy on one bicep. The clean-looking one said “Burke?” and I walked in and laid the photo of the Cobra on his drafting table. “He been in here?”
“I never talk about my clients.”
“Neither do I.”
He looked back up at me, down again at the picture, and said no in a quiet voice. I said, “Call me if he does,” and walked out. One of the “personalized graphics” they did was passports.
The next stop was a print shop I know where they would let me use their machinery and pay for whatever I did without looking at it—they didn’t want to know. One of the few legitimate things I’d learned in reform school was how to run a printing press. Making up some WANTED posters with enlargements of the Cobra’s mug shot was no problem. The photo blew up nice and clean, hard to miss. I set the type so the posters read WANTED FOR GENOCIDE AGAINST HISPANIC CHILDREN in bold red type and added a long list of the Cobra’s alleged rapes.
Pablo’s people would put them up all over town, especially in Times Square. Una Gente Libre wouldn’t put their own name on anything like this, especially after Goldor, but the word would get around and the Cobra would know there were some serious people on his trail.
I threw the bundle of posters in my trunk and bought a paper—nothing on Goldor yet, so I went to a pay phone and called Toby Ringer. I told him that I’d heard Wilson had snuffed Goldor so I was giving up my search for him. The harsh intake of breath at Toby’s end told me that he knew Goldor was dead. My phone call would make sure there’d be an APB out on Wilson.
Over to another phone, where I called my preppie reporter pal and gave him the hot scoop on a genuine mercenary recruiting operation right in the middle of Manhattan—putting together a string of soldiers of fortune to fight in Rhodesia and South Africa. A terrible scandal and an affront to black people everywhere, he agreed. I promised to call him back in another day or so with names and locations and he said he would go in there undercover and expose the situation for his readers. Christ.
It was getting into the late afternoon by then, so I rolled the Plymouth back toward the warehouse looking for Max before I made the call to the phony gunrunners. I pulled in, killed