Mask Market by Andrew Vachss Page A

took them and make them dead. Today, Times Square is another planet: Disney World.
    You can’t buy porn from Disney. They’re all about family. Of course, they’ve got no problem hiring a convicted child-molester to make horror movies…about kids. Tourists think things have changed. People who live here, they know all that ever changes are the addresses.
    But even back then, freaks had to know their way around to find a baby pross. A girl pross, anyway; the little-boy hustlers were pretty much out in the open, working the arcades.
    You won’t find kids hooking in Times Square now. But it’s just like what happens anytime the cops crank up the heat on a drug corner—the traffic just moves to another location. You want an underage girl, there’s always Queens Plaza after dark, and dozens of other spots.
    A while back, two dirtbags grabbed a fifteen-year-old runaway, raped and sodomized her until she had nothing left, then put her out on the street. She wasn’t working back alleys, either. Last arrest was on Queens Boulevard, in a nice section of Elmhurst. They took the girl to Florida for the winter, where the local cops grabbed her…and probably saved her life.
    Extradited to Queens, the dirtbags got the usual sweetheart deal from the tough-talking clown who calls himself the District Attorney. He threw out the rape, sodomy, and kidnapping charges, let them plead to “promoting prostitution.” Now they can prance around the yard Upstate, jacketed as pimps, not kiddie-rapists. When they get out, they won’t even have to register as sex offenders. With all the heavy cred they’ll have accumulated—what’s more max than being a player and an ex-con?—they’ll probably start their own rap label.
    I didn’t know where Beryl was, but I had a good idea of where she wasn’t. A snatched-up runaway wasn’t going to end up in a high-end house. Kiddie sex is a specialized business, and—back then, before the Internet—that meant a lot of risk for the money.
    I had the girl’s picture, half a dozen different shots. And a one-two punch: not only the promise of heavy coin if you turned her up, but the guarantee that, if you saw her and I didn’t get word, you better be carrying a lot of Blue Cross.
    It wasn’t me that scared anyone. It was Max at my side. And Wesley in the shadows. On top of that, the city was full of bad guys who thought kiddie pimps were a disgrace to their good name, and I knew a lot of them.
    I was a different man then. I was just making the transition from armed robber to scam artist, and if you pushed me anywhere close to a corner, violence was still Option One. I was still learning how to sting freaks: promising everything from kiddie porn to mercenary contracts, never delivering. Once I took your money, good luck finding me. And bad luck if you did.
    This part never changes: The best way to track someone down is to plant the word, burying the trip wires under sweet promises. Then you put on a lot of pressure, and wait for whoever you’re tracking to stumble over one of them. But when you’re looking for a kid who’s in the wrong hands, too much patience can be fatal.
    So I started in Hunts Point, the lowest end of the scale for working whores, then. They were all turning scag-tricks. Their only customers were truckers who had dropped off their cargo at the Meat Market, or serial killers who liked the odds of a desolate piece of flatland where you could find anything on earth except a cop.
    Getting any of that sorry collection of broken-veined junkies to talk was easy—for money they’d do anything you could imagine, and plenty that would give you nightmares if you did—but getting them to talk sense was near impossible.
    So I just cruised, with the girl’s photo taped to my dashboard. I came up empty a few days in a row—Hunts Point was a daylight stroll. Nights, I worked lower Lex, which was racehorse territory then. Fine, young, sleek girls, with much stronger, smarter pimps running