Another Life by Andrew Vachss Page A

forbidden.”

“Spare me,” I told Pryce.

“You think Shari’a is—”

“A fraud? No more than any other god-control crap. The rules are fine. But any fucking pervert can ‘interpret’ them, like that ‘God Hates Fags!’ tribe of degenerates in Kansas. And everyone knows rules don’t apply to bosses, anyway.”

“Everybody?” he half-scoffed.

“Everybody who’s not a serious candidate for a CAT scan,” I said, slamming back his lob, but working extra hard on using a mild tone. Non-believers can still be fanatics, and evangelical atheists can be dangerous. “You think the high-school football players who kneel in the locker room before a game don’t know that the guys on the other side are doing the same thing? What, they think God has a point spread? The Sunnis and the Shiites who slaughter each other both swear they’re serving Allah. Enough, already.”

Pryce didn’t move.

“It doesn’t matter what oath you take, who you pray to or swear behind: the bosses are always the bosses,” I said. “Like that omertŕ handjob the movie boys love so much—you ever met a don you couldn’t turn?”

“Gotti—”

“—was dimed out by his personal hit man. Gotti was the top of the pyramid, so what did he have to trade? You know how it works: you have to rat up, not down. He’d reached jurors before; maybe he just liked the odds. Or maybe he already knew he had cancer, and wanted to take his rep along for the ride.

“Besides, it’s not like he had a choice. Any soft-sentence deal prosecutors make, they have to sell it to the media first. That’s what counts. That’s all that counts. You think New Yorkers would have gone for the sweetheart package they put together for the ‘Preppy Killer’ if the DA’s Office hadn’t talked the victim’s mother into holding press conferences supporting it?”

“So you think—?”

I made a chopping motion with my hand, telling him I was done talking. I’d let myself slip, temporarily forgetting how information was plutonium in Pryce’s hands. He’d rather pick a brain like mine than the lock at Fort Knox.

“This isn’t about me,” I said. “How about we stop this debate-society routine and get to the part that is.”

His blue-for-today eyes held my one good one for a long second. Then he moved his head in a barely perceptible nod, released a shallow breath, and then laid it out.

“Prince Fazid el Kandal’s car was found at approximately 3:05 a.m., near an abandoned pier off the Hudson, south of Canal. He was slumped in the front seat, immobilized. The vehicle was his personal car: a bespoke Rolls, rebodied as a ‘shooting brake.’ You know what that is?”

“Brit-speak for ‘station wagon.’”

“Close enough. This one had a lot of custom work, including a column shift, a fold-down padded panel between the front buckets, and a permanent slot for a baby seat, centered in the back. That seat was for his son. The Prince was in the habit of taking the child out in that car during the evening, just the two of them.”

“Not even a—?”

“The windows were prescription glass; you’d need an astigmatism to see inside, especially at night.”

“But he still got nailed?”

“This wasn’t an assassination,” Pryce said. “In fact, whoever’s responsible went to a lot of trouble not to go that way. It’s easy enough to detonate any car if you have the right equipment. Or a tank, for that matter. But what this team wanted was inside the vehicle, so it had to be a surgical extraction, not a scorched-earth blast.”

I waited, listening to a faint echo of admiration in his voice for whoever had put such a complex operation together.

“The Prince had been chemically restrained; some sort of full-body paralytic. Whoever hit him with it knew exactly what they were doing.”

“You talking about how they hit him, or the dose?”

“What does that matter?”

“If you want to get a specific result with a drug, you need to know a lot more than chemistry.”

“Such as?”

“Weight, blood-alcohol