Mask Market by Andrew Vachss Page B

them.
    I didn’t waste time down there, just showed Beryl’s picture around, told every working girl who came over to my rolled-down car window about the bounty, and moved on.
    Next stop, under the West Side Highway. Back then, it ran all the way downtown, and below Canal was Hookerville. Michelle worked that stroll in those days, when she was still pre-op. She got into the front seat of my car, listened to my story, and promised if Beryl showed she’d make sure she didn’t leave until I got there.
    That should have sounded like big talk, coming from a small, fine-boned little tranny. But Michelle hated humans who fucked kids as only a kid who’d been fucked could, and she’d learned a lot since prison. Now she was snake-quick with the straight razor she never left home without.
    It was almost two weeks before I got word that someone had a girl to sell. Not to rent, sell. Supposedly, an eleven-year-old virgin with a hairless pussy who loved to suck cocks and was looking for a permanent home with the right man.
    I called the number I had gotten from a guy who ran a private camera club—“The girls will pose any way you tell them, gentlemen. No film allowed.” As soon as I heard the voice on the other end, I knew this could be for real: He was a young guy with a sociopath’s chilly voice, talking from a payphone.
    “I don’t know you, man. All I know, you could be The Man, you know what I’m saying?”
    “So meet me, wherever you say, and I’ll prove I’m a legitimate purchaser,” I said, softening my voice as I pictured myself as the seal-sleek, middle-aged man who had told me how much money there was in “unbroken” little girls.
    The sleek man had come into my life just after I first got out. I thought he’d be the start of my career as a scam-master. Instead, he turned out to be a still-unsolved homicide. It took me a long time to get still enough inside myself so I could listen to one of his tribe without having to hurt him.
    “How you gonna do that?”
    “Surely you don’t expect me to say on the phone?”
    “I—Yeah, all right, I see where you coming from. This number’s no good for me after today, man. Leave me one where I can call you, when I got it set up.”
    “I’ll give you a number, but I am rarely there in person. My assistant will always know how to reach me, and I’ll get back to you within an hour or two, fair enough?”
    I raced back to Michelle’s stroll, saw her getting out of a white Oldsmobile. By the time I closed the distance between us, she had taken a slug of the little cognac bottle she always carried with her, rinsed and spit, and was already snake-hipping her way back toward the underpass. I took her over to Mama’s, set her up in my booth, and told her there was a hundred in it for her to just sit there until the last payphone in the row against the wall that separated the kitchen from the customers rang. The line was a bridge job, forwarded from one of the dead-end numbers I always kept for emergencies—the Mole had set it up so I could divert it by calling and punching in a series of tones.
    The phone rang while Michelle and I were still having our soup; the dealer was getting anxious to unload his merchandise.
    “It’s him,” is all Michelle said when she came back to the table.
    “Quick enough?” I said into the receiver.
    “You want to see quick, just fuck with me, and watch how quick you get yourself a problem, man.”
    “What’s all this?” I said, hardening my voice. The kiddie-trafficker whose ticket I had canceled had been steel under the sealskin. Stainless steel. If I acted too intimidated, it would be out of character; might spook the bottom-feeder I had on the end of my line. “I thought we were going to do business,” I said, “not sell wolf tickets.”
    “I ain’t selling no fucking tickets, man. I’m just saying—”
    “Just say where and when, all right? Then you can satisfy yourself I’m straight up, and we can do what we have to