“With his stripped down, stark prose and darkly evocative sense of place, Vachss introduces us to a world most of us would rather not know about—and then hooks us with a stunning story.”

—
Milwaukee Journal

“Well done and well worth it.”

—
Dayton Daily News

“Vachss’s prose is Hammett-tough, and Burke’s world is unsettling if not psychologically dangerous for the first-time reader.”

—
Huntsville Times
(Alabama)

“Vachss is one of my favorite writers, and I never miss one of his books. He brings incredible passion and flair to the mystery genre.
Safe House
is one of Vachss’s very best.”

—James Patterson

“
Safe House
comes at you with the speed of a bullet train, a style as spare and stripped down as origami and Andrew Vachss’s usual black-as-pitch theme—the abuse of innocence. Yet for all of the their dark modernity, Vachss’s novels are inheritors of nineteenthcentury social criticism, as much Dickens and Defoe as Hammett and Chandler.”

—Martha Grimes

“Andrew Vachss’s work is all about horror, outrage, moral indignation and the blood of commitment. Vachss is the voice of righteousness confronting a powerful and cowardly evil.”

—James Ellroy

“Among writers of suspense, Andrew Vachss’s work stands out for its substance, integrity and absorbing readability.
Safe House
has all the distinctive Vachss virtues—a seductive style, a thought-provoking story and the creation of an utterly convincing world. I read it compulsively and with great pleasure.

—Richard North Patterson

“Outside the herd of self-serving, navel-magnifying American novelists, one man walks tall and almost alone: Andrew Vachss. You can read him for razor-edged entertainment, or you can read him for help in understanding the monsters who stalk America’s streets. Either way, read him: he deserves that, and so do you.”

—James Grady

SAFE HOUSE

V
yra twisted her body to catch the pale mid-afternoon light purring against the white mesh curtains in the window of the downtown hotel room. She was nude except for a pair of sheer stockings and sunburst-yellow spike heels with black ankle straps. Posing, she stood in front of me, one foot on a straight chair she’d pulled away from the desk, watching me over one shoulder, wheat-colored hair hanging straight down her back. As she slowly turned to face me, her enormous breasts came into view, appearing even more massive on her thin, curveless frame. She raised her hands high above her head, looking down.

“Aren’t they just perfect?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” I assured her.

“They’re so beautiful, I just hate to take them off.”

“They won’t get in the way,” I said.

V
yra’s idea of foreplay is putting on a fashion show. But she makes up for it—a couple of cigarettes is about all the after-play she ever has time for.

Me too.

I’d known Vyra for years—I wasn’t the only key that had ever fit her lock. But my timing was good. Her husband did something that brought in beaucoup bucks. Or his people left him a bundle, I could never remember. Vyra changed her stories about as often as her shoes, but she loved them both. All I really knew about her husband was how he worshipped those humongous, incongruous breasts. That’s why she kept them, she said, just for him. They strained her scrawny frame, hurt her back. The heavy underwire bra she had to wear cut harsh marks into her pale skin. Her body looked like a cartoon drawn by a fetishist.

Vyra had a sweet, lonely heart. And a deep borderline’s void. When she got bored, she shopped. And volunteered for all kinds of organizations. Suicide hot lines, animal shelters, like that.

Vyra doesn’t know what I do, but she knows I’m not an accountant. She gets nosy every once in a while—just to keep in practice, I think. But she doesn’t push, and it never comes to anything.

Vyra knows where to find me. Or where to leave word, anyway. She never calls unless she’s already got a hotel room. And if I’m around when she calls, we get together and do what we do.

But only if I’m around when she calls. I never think about what she does when I’m not.

I
sat up slightly, reached down and tangled her hair in my hand. Pulled gently. She kept her mouth locked around my cock, shook her head no. I pulled harder, warning her. She stayed where she was, making little grunting sounds until it was over.

After a minute or two, she slithered up my body, her breasts trailing against my stomach, stopping at my chest. She looked down.

“Is it different when a woman does it?”

“What?”

“Blows you. If your eyes are closed, does it make any difference?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you were . . . in prison, weren’t you?”

She brings that up a lot. I don’t know why—it’s important to her in some way she never explained. And I never asked.

“Yeah. So?”

“Were you in a long time?”

“What’s a long time, little girl?” I asked her gently, running my thumb over her sticky mouth.

“More than . . . I don’t know, a year?”

“Sure.”

“So what did you do for . . . sex?”

“Went steady with my fist.”

“But I heard . . . I mean, if you have sex in prison, it doesn’t make you gay.”

“So?”

“Is that true?”

“Prison’s like the rest of the world. All kinds in there.”

“Is that why you never did it? In there? Because you hate them?”

“Hate who?”

“Gay people?”

I slid my right hand around to the back of her neck. She smiled down at me. I suddenly twisted my hand, shoving her face down into the mattress. I moved to one side, held her down with my right hand while I pressed my left thumb into the base of her spine, hard. I leaned down and put my lips to her ear.

“You like this?” I said softly.

“
No!
Let me—”

“Rape is rape,” I whispered. “It’s not gay, it’s not straight. I don’t give a good goddamn how people fuck, long as it’s what they
want
to do, understand?”

“Yes.”

I let her go. She popped up on one elbow. “I didn’t mean anything, honey,” she said, a fake-contrite tone in her voice. “I was just curious.”

“You’ve got a sweet little nose,” I told her. “Just watch where you stick it, okay?”

“
You
watch,” she giggled.

I
pulled away from the hotel an hour later. Winter was against the ropes bleeding, but it refused to go down for the count. That gray day in March, spring was still a whore’s promise—nylons whispering, but no real juice waiting.

I cursed the cold as the Plymouth slid around another corner, its wipers all but surrendering to the leaden sleet sneering down from a sullen sky. The anemic sun had vanished along with Vyra.

The Plymouth was an anonymous drab shark in an ocean of quicker, brighter little fish—all of them darting about, secure in their front-wheel drive, ABS-equipped, foglight-blazing perkiness—at war with glowering pedestrians, all engaged in a mutual ignorance pact when it came to traffic signals. I feathered the throttle, knowing the Plymouth’s stump-puller motor could break the fat rear tires loose in a heartbeat, wishing the guy who had built what he thought was going to be the ultimate New York City taxicab had lived to finish the job.

The meet was set for just off Frankfort Street, under the Brooklyn Bridge. The downtown subway system was a disease incubator in winter, and I’d be damned if I was going to walk in the miserable weather. I hadn’t set the meet up, and I couldn’t change it. When I’d called in, Mama had given me the done-deal message.

“Man call. Say name. Herk Kew Leeze. Say friend. From Upstate.”

Hercules. Big strong good-looking kid. I’d done time with him, years ago. Solid as a railroad spike. And just about as shrewd. He was stand-up all the way. Dead reliable. Inside, those two words intersect a lot. But we couldn’t let him crew up with us on the bricks. The Prof had cast the veto. “Boy can’t go pro,” the little man told us. “Heart don’t count the same as smart.” I’d heard Hercules was heavy-lifting for hire. Not a made man, not even part of an organization. He was a disposable samurai, and whatever he wanted to tell me wouldn’t be good news.

“What did he say, Mama?”

“Say meet. Second shift. Butcher Block. Okay?”

Meaning: did I understand what he meant?—because Mama sure as hell didn’t.

“Sure. It’s all right. I’ll take care of it.”

“You need Max?”

“No, Mama. He’s a friend.”

“I not know him?”

“No.”

“Sure,” Mama said, cutting the connection. I wondered what I’d done this time.

T
he second shift meant prison time—three in the afternoon to eleven at night. When you set up a must-come meet the way Hercules had, you always give the other guy a wide margin for showing up. The Butcher Block is an abandoned loading dock under the Brooklyn Bridge. It got its name because thieves used to meet there to cut up the swag from the trucks in the nearby Fulton Fish Market. Hercules didn’t know where I lived. Guy like him knows that, he drops by one day, just to say hello. Maybe brings a six-pack. Or the cops.

I slid the Plymouth to a stop on Broadway, just across from the outdoor homeless shelter the politicians call City Hall Park. In another few seconds, the passenger door popped open and the Prof climbed in.

“If it’s Herk’s game, you know it’s lame. Gonna be some motherfucking sorryass shame,” the little man greeted me, his voice sour with disgust.

“You want to pass?” I asked him.

“You know I can’t do that, Schoolboy. Man was with us, right? He took the weight, we got to pay the freight.”

That said it all. We’d hold up our end. Obligation and honor, same thing. But that was no middle-class citizen’s one-way street. What drove us was the certain knowledge that, if we called Hercules from a pay phone in Hell, he’d drop right in.

You can’t buy loyalty like that. But you have to pay what it costs. In installments.

“Where’s Clarence?” I asked him.

“Clarence? That boy don’t have nothing to do with this, whatever it is. He don’t owe, so he don’t go.”

“Fair enough,” I told him, meaning it.

I
hooked left just before Vesey Street, doubled back up Park Row, ignored the entrance to the bridge and forked to the right, staying low like I was heading for the FDR. When I spotted the opening, I nosed the Plymouth inside, peering through the windshield.

“I got him,” the Prof said. “Over there.”

A man was approaching the car. A big man with long dark hair, looking even bigger in an ankle-length yellow slicker like traffic cops wear. The Prof jumped out and slipped into the back seat, leaving the front door open, a clear invite. The big man piled in, shaking himself like a damn Saint Bernard, showering me with icy water.

“Burke!” he said, extending his hand to shake.

“Herk,” I greeted him back, my voice low, sending him a message. Which he promptly ignored as soon as he spotted who was in the back seat.

“Prof! Hey, this is great!”

“Be cool, fool,” the Prof told him. “This ain’t no reunion. You got business, right?”

The big man shook his head again. Hard, like he was trying to remember something. Something important. “I’m up against it,” he finally said.

“Spell it out,” I told him.

“There was this girl. . . .”

“God
damn
it, Schoolboy. What’d I tell you? This chump is a bull, and gash is the pull.”

“Easy, Prof. Whatever it is . . .” I let the sentence trail away, turned to Herk, opened my hands in a “Tell-me” gesture.

“There was this girl,” he said again, like he was starting the tape from the beginning. “She was getting . . . stalked, like. You know what I mean?”

“No,” I said, edging my voice just enough to tell him to get on with it.

“Okay. Her boyfriend used to beat on her. All the time. For nothing. Then he’d say he was sorry and she’d take him back. Finally, he puts her in the hospital. Not just the E-Ward, like he did before—they had to operate. On her face. I guess she was too fucked up from the drugs they gave her to cover for him, I don’t know. Anyway, the rollers took him down. He went easy,” Herk said, his voice veined with a hard-core convict’s contempt for anyone who doesn’t automatically resist arrest. “Anyway, she says she ain’t gonna press charges, and you know what the Man said? You ain’t gonna believe this, Burke. They don’t
need
her—they could just go ahead and lumber him anyway, no matter what she wants. I mean, they could
make
her come to court. Jesus.”

I took a pack of cigarettes off the dashboard, offered one to Herk. He shook his head. Same way he was in the joint. A
serious
bodybuilder, the only drug Herk would play with was Dianabol, and he’d stopped the red-zone steroids when we’d pulled his coat to the cold light at the end of that tunnel. But the Prof snatched the butt out of my hand before I could light it. I heard a match snap into flame behind me. “Thanks, bro,” he said sarcastically. I lit another one for myself. “What’s the rest?” I asked the big man.

“He gets some bullshit baby-time. Six months on the Rock, out in four. She gets one of them Orders of Protection, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“But that don’t mean nothing. He calls her. Right from the House, calls her. Collect, okay? After a while, she don’t take the calls. Even changes her number. So he writes her letters. Real weird shit—like he loves her and he had a dream that he sliced her face into ribbons.”

“He’s still locked up when he does this?” the Prof asked.

“Yeah.”

“She show them to the cops?” I wanted to know.

“Sure. But dig this: there’s nothing they can do, right? I mean, this time she
wants
to prosecute his ass, and they don’t do nothing. They told her those letters, they wasn’t threats, just talking about his dreams and stuff. Stupid mother—”

“—and then he gets out . . . ,” I prompted, cutting off the flow.

“Uh-huh. And he starts it right back again. Calling her on her job, leaving notes in her mailbox, all like that. He’s got her scared now—”

“And you’re dipping your sorry wick, right, sucker?” the Prof stuck in.

“No, Prof. I swear,” Herk said in a hurt tone of voice. “I mean, I never even
met
her, okay? It wasn’t like that.”

“So what
was
it like?” I asked him.

“You know Porkpie?”

“Yeah,” I told him, nervous now. Porkpie was a minor-league fringe-player. One of those maybe-Jewish, maybe-Italian, Brooklyn-edge boys. He didn’t have muscle or balls or brains, so he played the middleman role. A halfass tipster and two-bit tout—he wouldn’t touch anything with his own hands, but he always knew a guy who would. Or so he said. He wasn’t mobbed up. Didn’t have a crew, worked out of pay phones and the trunk of his car. Only a citizen or a stone rookie would do any business with him.

Herk wasn’t either one, but he was just thick enough so it didn’t matter.

“Okay, so Porkpie tells me about it,” he continued. “The job, I mean. He says they need someone to lean on this guy, give him the word, tell him to get in the wind, let the broad alone, understand?”

“Sure.”

“A grand for a few minutes’ work, that’s what he told me.”

“You was gonna move on this guy, do work on him, let them turn the key for one lousy G?” the Prof snarled. “What the fuck’s wrong with you, boy? You been down twice. You can’t ride that train—it ain’t nothing but pain. You go bone-busting, you get called to the Walls.
That’s
your idea of good pay for a few minutes’ work?”

“It wasn’t that, Prof. Honest. Porkpie said the guy was a stone pussy, okay? All I hadda do was muscle up on him, maybe bitch-slap him once. Porkpie said he’d give it up in a minute, kinda guy beats a woman. . . .”

“All
kinds
of fucking guys beat on women,” the Prof told him. “That don’t tell you nothing. You been enough places to know that, Herk.”

“It don’t matter now,” the big man said sadly.

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