Free Mask Market by Andrew Vachss

parquet flooring, with some kind of Navajo blanket used as a throw rug.
    “Sit, sit,” he said, pointing to a tufted armchair that matched the other furniture. For what it must have cost, it should have been more comfortable. The plate-sized brass ashtray on a wrought-iron stand next to the chair encouraged me to light a smoke.
    Preston closed the door, then walked over and seated himself behind his special desk. He fiddled with a pipe—something uncharitable in me guessed it was cherrywood—until he got it going. “Tell me all about it,” he finally said.
    “That wasn’t our deal,” I told him.
    “Well…I guess it wasn’t. But surely you understand that I’m—”
    “You wanted your daughter back. The reason you came to me was because you thought I might be able to do that. You never asked me how I was going to do it. I figured that was no accident—that was you being smart, protecting yourself.”
    “You mean, there’s things I wouldn’t want to know?”
    “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying we had a deal, right? Cash on delivery. And here I am, delivering.”
    “I’m not disputing that. I just thought…I guess I thought you, what you do, it isn’t just about money.”
    “I don’t know where you got that idea,” I said.
    “From the—”
    “I wasn’t asking.”
    “Oh. I…”
    His voice spooled out into silence until he finally accepted that I wasn’t going to say anything more. “Here’s your money,” he said, putting a neat stack of bills on the top of his desk. Probably dug it out of a safe somewhere in the house as soon as he heard my tape-recorded voice on his phone. I wondered how much he usually kept in there.
    I couldn’t tell if making me step over to his fancy desk to get the money was a little bit of nastiness because I wouldn’t give him the gory details, or because he was back to being himself already—a boss, paying off a worker.
    As I pocketed the cash, he answered the question. “Berry will tell me all about it,” he said, self-assured.
     
    I found a lot of kids back then. Sometimes it was the parents who paid me. Sometimes it was the people who I took them back from. Sometimes both. Every so often, neither.
    I hadn’t told Preston the truth. Not just because he was a citizen, and lying to citizens was one of the first things my father—the State—had taught me, but because of something Wesley told me once. “You can’t ever give them any reason but money,” the iceman whispered one night. “They think there’s something else in it for you, they might want to do you down on the price.”
    “I set the price in front,” I replied, a little hurt that Wesley would think I’d be such an amateur.
    “But you don’t get it paid in front,” he said. “And this thing you got about kids, it’s a marker. A way for people to find you.”
    “People know where my—”
    “Not know your address,” the iceman said. “Know you. They know that, your address don’t matter—they can get you to come wherever they need you to be.”
    That was a long conversation for Wesley. He had the same one with me, over and over again, right up to the time he checked out of the hotel he had hated from the moment the State had booked his room.
    I might have kept going like I was: working the edges of the fringes, a poacher on rich men’s estates, a liar, con artist, thief…and, sometimes, a man who found kids and brought them home. But after I shot a pimp, McGowan stopped recommending me. And the people who started coming to me for tracking jobs after that weren’t looking for rescue work.
    I might have kept going anyway—my lifestyle didn’t require a lot of income—but things kept…happening.
    I thought I was done with things like that.
     
    “W hy did you give me this?” I asked Mama. I held up my cup of soup as if I was toasting an audience, so there wouldn’t be any doubt about what I was saying.
    “You don’t like soup?” she said, ominously.
    “I don’t