Shella by Andrew Vachss Page A

found her right there. I went to visit herin the jailhouse. At first, it was like she didn’t recognize me. I held her hand. Then her eyes snapped and she knew who I was. I asked her what happened. She just said … ‘Flashback.’ That’s all she said. Flashback.
    “At her trial, the doctor said something happened to her when she was a kid. He didn’t know what it was. Rose wouldn’t tell him. Rose looked like a million bucks at the trial, flashing those long legs, smiling. The doctor said it was more important to her not to go back where she was—it would cost her too much.
    “They found her guilty. Got a life sentence. I kissed her goodbye. She was still smiling.
    “It wasn’t even a year later that I read about it in the papers. She escaped. With a guard that was working her section of the prison. He was married, had two kids. They never found either of them.”
    “What do you think happened?” I asked her.
    “I don’t know. Something ugly.”
    “No, I mean …”
    “Oh. I figure Rose got the guard’s nose open. Some men, they’ll give up everything for a taste.”
    “You think I’m like that?”
    “You? No, honey. I don’t think you’re like anything. Whatever you buried, you put it down deep.”

    I tried to think about it. The chocolate bar, when I was a kid. How it felt when I broke Duke’s face open with that sock full of batteries. Swinging that sock, I knew if I didn’t finish him I’d be gone. There’d be nothing left of me, I’d just disappear. Like every part of my body was in my arm… it felt like a feather when I moved it, but it weighed a ton when it came down. Little explosions in my head, like light bulbs breaking. Pop. Pop. Pop. A thousand of them.
    They still go off in my head when I work. But only a couple of them now.
    I tried to think about what Shella said that time. But all I could think about was that she went to Rose’s trial. Said goodbye to her before she went down.

    The phone rang in the morning. I picked it up, didn’t say anything.
    “I’m on my way up.” The Indian’s voice.
    The front door to the apartment opened. The Indian stepped in, a key in his hand. We sat down in the front room.
    “What do you want to know?” he asked me.
    “Just where it is.”
    “The work?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s not that simple.
You’re
not that simple. You think that crazy little man in that high office can’t make somebody dead if he wants them gone? He’s a rogue. Some kind of genius, I guess. I don’t know the name of the agency he plays for. Every time I have to meet him, he’s in a different place. Always with his machines, like a guy with bad kidneys—he has to be hooked up every day or he dies. One of our brothers is in the basement at Marion. You know what that is?”
    I nodded to tell him I did. Marion’s the max-max federaljoint, the hardest one they have. And the basement is for the men who are monsters even in there.
    “He can fix it. Get our brother out of there. He can’t spring him free, not put him on the street. But he can get him transferred to another place. Where we can work something out later.”
    “What did he do, your brother?”
    “What he did was, he took the weight. They got him down as a big-time serial killer. Ten, twelve bodies, all over the country. They dropped him for one. Cold and clean, no way around it. It was a setup. He came out of the room holding an empty shotgun. They let him do the work, then they took him. The crazy man sent for him—he had his machines hooked up right inside the jail where they were holding him. He told our brother he knew about the tribe, made him an offer. Our brother, he pleaded guilty to all the hits we did going back a few years. The cops cleared the books, the heat’s off us. And our brother’s down for forever.”
    “And he springs him for what?”
    “For finding you, which we did. For bringing you to him. Which we did. And for you doing that piece of work.”
    “He’ll do it?”
    “Sure.