Mask Market by Andrew Vachss

the alley, vomiting, bleeding, and crying at the same time. I leaned down quick, before he passed out, said, “Next time you beat on your wife, we’ll snap your fucking spine.”
    When the soft-spoken man came back with the other half of my money, he was shaking his head apologetically.
    “What?” I said.
    “We’ve got a problem.”
    “We?”
    “The girl. Our…friend’s sister. She saw her husband in the hospital and she just went off. Started screaming.”
    “So?”
    “So she’s the problem.”
    I didn’t say anything.
    “Your…friend, there’s nothing anyone can do to him, okay? But your friend, he’s our friend, too, understand?”
    “No,” I said, lying.
    “Then let me spell it out for you,” the man said. “The sister, she knows more than she should. Instead of…appreciating what her brother wanted to do for her, she’s decided that her husband is this innocent victim. So she made a phone call.”
    “To the cops?”
    “To my boss. But her next call will be to the cops, unless things get made right.”
    “Which means…?”
    “An apology. And some money.”
    “So apologize. And pay her the money.”
    “It’s not her,” he said. “Him. He wants ten large to forget the whole thing.”
    “Why tell me all this?”
    “Because you didn’t do the job right.”
    “I did what I got paid to do.”
    “You got paid to fix it so he stops using the girl for a punching bag, not to bring heat down on my boss.”
    “It’s not me who’s doing that.”
    “Exactly,” the man said, soft-speaking the threat.
    I lit a cigarette. Watched the smoke drift toward the low ceiling. Pansy shifted position in her corner, the movement so slight it might have been the play of light on shadow. The soft-spoken man was trapped. But nowhere near as bad as I was.
     
    “S he’s my only sister,” the man on the other side of the bulletproof glass said to me through the phone.
    “I’m sorry about that,” I told him. “But I didn’t pick the people you sent to me, you did. And it’s me they’re putting in a cross.”
    “I can talk to them,” he said.
    “You already did that,” I told him, guessing, but real sure of the guess. “It’s her you have to talk to.”
    “She missed her last two visits,” he said. “And she didn’t answer my letter, either.”
    “Call her.”
    “I did. She wouldn’t accept the charges. She never did that before.”
    “You understand what they asked me to do?”
    “I can figure it out,” he said.
    “I’m not doing it,” I told him. “But there’s plenty who would.”
    “What if…?”
    “If she went as far as she already did behind what happened, what do you think she does if something heavier goes down?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So?”
    “I only wanted to help her,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
     
    I thought I had more time, but I was wrong. While I was visiting the prison, the soft-spoken man’s boss was making a phone call. To Wesley.
    Husband and wife went together. Two surgical kills the papers called “execution-style.” The apartment had been ransacked. That made it “drug-related.”
    I was sad about everything. But I learned from it.
     
    J ust because I’m good at waiting doesn’t mean I like to do it. I’d been good at doing time, too.
    It took me another three full spins through the CD before I snapped that, for all the info this “financial planner” had put together on his target, he had nothing from her past. If he didn’t know her birth name, he didn’t know where she had grown up.
    I’d met Beryl when she was a runaway. Now, maybe, she had run back home.
    People with records learn not to keep records. I’ve got a memory so sharp and clear that, sometimes, I have to wall off its intrusions before they finish the job the freaks started when I was a little kid.
    Every one of us feels those spidery fingers sometimes. There’s no magic pill. Therapy works for some of us. Some self-medicate: everything from opiates to S&M. Some of us go