Another Life by Andrew Vachss

I needed was to get him back on track, close the deal, and protect my father. So all I said was “Okay. You tell me what you want; I do it, period. For that, I get the Prof and Terry…and that other stuff you mentioned. Done?”

He nodded.

“What if I can’t pull off…whatever you want?”

“You still get everything I promised. But you have to go at it with everything you’ve—”

“This is a blood contract,” I cut him off. “I’ll do it, or I’ll die trying.” I gave him a few seconds to scan me, opening myself up to whatever truth-detecting skills he thought he had. “Deal?”

He held out his webbed right hand. I grasped it. Tight, like it was the Prof’s only chance to live.
    * * *
    H e opened with: “A missing kid.”

“You want to me find—?”

“Prince Fazid el Kandal wants you to find. Not you personally—he doesn’t know you exist, and he never will. He wants his son, Amir Aziz Ghazi, returned. And our…government wants his wish granted.”

“Runaway?” I asked. No idle question: runaways may end up on the Most Wanted lists, but most of them start out on the Unwanted one.

“The boy is two years and seven months old,” he said, cutting out my next hundred questions.

“Snatched?”

“Four days ago. No ransom demand, despite the well-known fact that the father has unlimited assets.”

“So did Lindbergh.”

“Meaning what? Lindbergh never got his kid back.”

“Not alive, he didn’t. But they executed a patsy to make it all come out even.”

“This isn’t about covering up a crime,” Pryce said, “or finding someone to pin it on. If it was, we’d hardly need you. There’s a whole…department in place for that sort of work, and they’re very good at it.”

“Why me, then? You’ve got access to far more resources than I could ever—”

“Because, whoever took the baby, we think he’s one of yours.”

“I know you must mean something by that, but I don’t like riddles. Just get to it, okay?”

“Not one of your people, ” he said, as all-in-a-day’s-work as a doctor signing a fake Medicaid claim. “One of…those you hate. The kind you used to hunt. One of your sworn enemies. By tribe, not name. Whoever took the child, he’s somewhere in a world that nobody knows better than you do.”

“And you know this because…?”

“We have a deal?”

“You want me to just keep saying that, or you want me to get to work?”
    * * *
    “W e need you, Father. Please come back to us,” Clarence whispered urgently, as if the presence of all the gleaming, pristine machinery had put the steel back in his voice.

“He is trying,” a white-uniformed nurse said. She was a slender woman with an achingly beautiful café-au-lait complexion, and midnight hair so lustrous it would make a raven jealous. The pain she saw every day had turned her exquisite dark eyes into occupied territory. Any other time, any other place, Clarence would have been siren-called.

But he didn’t even look up. “Father,” he prayed. Very softly, holding the Prof’s hand.
    * * *
    W e never left the Prof’s side, handling it in shifts. Except for Clarence, who always seemed to be there.

Michelle spoke, Max touched, the Mole hovered.

We expected Gateman to show. But when we saw Terry pushing his wheelchair, Michelle threw the Mole a look that would have made Godzilla flinch.

The Mole didn’t even blink. Neither did the kid.

Mama came, too. Seeing her outside her restaurant was like running across a polar bear sunbathing in Tucson. The nurse looked at the soup she brought, opened her mouth to say something, scanned the black-ice eyes in Mama’s ceramic face, and let it go.

Clarence finally passed out. The nurse, Taralyn, told us they knew it was going to happen, and they were ready for it. No shortage of “special beds” in this hospital.

I wasn’t there as much as the others. I was working. Paying the hospital bill.
    * * *
    “U nder the Basic Law, all human actions are on a continuum: obligatory, meritorious, permissible, reprehensible, or