The Baby Merchant Read online

  A hundred years ago nobody did what he has to do.

  It used to make him feel useful. Now he feels bad. Even if he axes Zorn’s parameters and forages for an acceptable substitute—even if he manages to score an infant off the street and pass it off on Zorn and the wife, locating said substitute and prepping for the score is out of the question now. Jake Zorn is one mean mother-fucker; he says he’s going fucking live with Starbird’s fucking mother, and soon. Unless.

  Now, Tom Starbird doesn’t believe in human sacrifice but if that’s how it comes down, OK. He wants Daria Starbird startled and grateful, not reproaching him as Zorn raises his obsidian knife.

  If he’s discarded everything he knows and agreed to traduce himself, he is doing it to protect her: why? After everything, he has to be the hero to her. If he can’t, he’s really fucked.

  Scary who turns up on your speed dial, like she’s tracked you through a dozen cell phones, infiltrating your unwilling heart. Without thinking you hit call even though that person is long gone from your life. You don’t have time to think: Lady, don’t be there. If you have to be there, don’t pick up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Call me back, you’re breaking up.”

  “This is a new phone so don’t give me that crap.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  She knows who it is, all right. He could hang up now but they haven’t had the fight. “Isn’t it time you got caller I.D.?”

  “Oh.” The breathy little lift that surprises him. Like she’s almost glad to hear. “Hello Tom.”

  “Hi Daria.” This is one of those women you don’t call Mom. It’s a category she rejects. In these conversations there’s always a three-beat pause after which the woman who bore him usually finds something to say that makes his teeth crack; OK, lady. Let’s fight.

  “Why aren’t you talking?”

  “Nothing to say.”

  “What’s the matter, Tom, do you need money?” That wary tone. His last year in high school, he made it necessary for her to ask, but they’re a lifetime later. “Are you in jail?”

  “Hardly.” I am not in high school now. Make her wait.

  After a while she says, “Is something the matter?”

  “Why would anything be the matter?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just such a surprise.”

  “What is?”

  “You, calling. You haven’t exactly been in touch.”

  And this is the woman who left him bawling in the Star Market parking lot. Four years old. Snot dripping into the snow. His voice is tight. “Just checking in.”

  “That’s a first.”

  Use silence to smoke her out. He’s not sure what’s brewing here, but he’s trolling. For what? Reasons to cut her off?

  “Well, Tom.” Polite. “How are you?”

  “Look, if you’re busy I’ll …” But he won’t. If she doesn’t want to talk to him it’s up to her to end this conversation. Let her try. Then they can fight.

  “No, I’m glad you called.”

  “Really.” There’s the outside possibility that she is. It’s always this way. Two strangers circling in a mud wrestling pit.

  There is another of those awful pauses. “How’ve you been?”

  “Fine, Daria. I’m fine.”

  “Oh.”

  Excellent, he is thinking; I know all I need to know. She is just as fucking cold as she ever was. He can end this conversation and go. “Nice talking to you.”

  “Wait!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I have something to tell you.” That lilt. Good God she really is glad to hear from him, a fact he can’t let himself accept.

  “Take care. Talk to you.”

  “No, wait, Tommy. Wait’ll you hear! I’m going on TV!”

  Right. Zorn has scheduled the show.

  “I love you,” she says as he hangs up, the bitch. Binding him tight.

  He is definitely a short-timer now.

  In ordinary times what happened at the Food King would be a disaster, but when he’s delivered and Zorn hands over his Daria Starbird tapes and signs off on the transaction, Tom Starbird can walk free. After this project, he is done. Once he’s bought his freedom with this woman’s unwanted baby— remember, Newlife is an adoption agency, she’s asking for it, baby isn’t even chipped— once he’s bought his freedom with this unwanted baby, he is off the planet. So what if the supplier in this particular operation saw him, he’ll make goddamn certain she never sees him again. When he removes the subject she’ll be too smoked to remember who helped her at the Food King that day or link that to this. And that overweight punk that he threw out of the parking lot? This could be a plus.

  Turn the boyfriend— or stalker, whatever— turn the fat fuck into the big red herring that stinks up a dozen false trails. A woman whose baby disappears has to dial 911 even when she’s secretly relieved, so, cool. Let the Savannah cops fan out and tramp through every hamlet between Vidalia and Yemassee. By the time they come up empty, he’ll be out of the picture. There will be nothing where he once was. A Starbird shaped hole in the air. Because, he thinks— old poem he knows, by an old poet Daria recited instead of talking to him— because I do not hope to turn again.

  Get in, he mutters. Yes he is psyching himself. Get in and get on with it, get it over with and get out. In spite of the catastrophic glitch.

  Watch out, Starbird. You are blocking something, man. The thing that hung you up all day like a computer fixing to crash. The inconvenience is temporary, he tells himself, stripping for the shower. Temporary. Yeah, right. Like, Just leave your number and we’ll get back to you, or, The check is in the mail, or We’ll keep you on file. He starts the water and gets in without noticing whether it’s pouring down cold or hot enough to peel his skin.

  Then the memory he has been fleeing all day swings around and smacks him in the face.

  God. He didn’t only interface with the mark. They have spoken. Worse. They didn’t just talk and that was it. He let her stop him again when he could have gotten away clean and he still isn’t sure why. He and the girl have spoken twice. He stands under the spray, thinking. He stands there long after scalding water runs cold.

  Fatal error.

  Starbird is up against it. If the first encounter didn’t damn him, the second one will. He should have taken off after they talked; he should have crunched up onto the divider and driven out over the ornamental plantings, digging ruts in the peat moss as he hit the road. He bought enough time when he sent her running back inside the store: my baby! as if it actually mattered; why didn’t he split? He should have roared down the bank and disappeared into four lane traffic or ditched the car and taken off on foot, anything to quit the parking lot before the girl came running back outside, babbling thanks. Shit. What kept him there, was it circumstance or was it sense memory: the feel of her slight body under his hands, the bruised violet eyes? Did she make him so stupid that he wanted to see her again? If he’d mashed a few hedges he’d be OK right now, but like a car thief who makes a point of avoiding even minor infractions during the getaway, he stayed inside the lines.

  Like a good camper, he followed the double yellow line around to the exit lane. Twin signs stopped him at the entrance to the Food King. The automatic doors whished open as he hit the brakes. The girl came running out with the baby bobbing in its little ruffled bucket. When he hesitated, she stepped onto the tacky asphalt and all but threw herself onto the hood. She tapped on his window. He pretended not to see.

  She was laughing and calling, “Hey. Oh, hey.”

  Stonewall her, idiot. Drive away.

  “Hey, listen.”

  He pretended not to hear.

  “Please?”

  He rolled down the window. “What!”

  This program has performed an illegal operation.

  She leaned in to tell him nothing of any importance. “I just wanted to say. Thanks for that.”

  “It was nothing.”
What could he do? He couldn’t accelerate or he’d rip her head off. He couldn’t roll up the window; she filled the frame.

  “Believe me, it was major. I couldn’t handle it myself. It’s so. He’s so …” She couldn’t explain.

  “My pleasure. Gotta go.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done.” The way she hung on the car you’d think she was starved for conversation. To make it worse, she looked right at him when she smiled. Pretty girl. It’s been a while. A guy gets stupid when a lovely girl smiles at him and God help him she is, and she did. Sweet. “So, thanks and thanks again.”

  “No problem,” he said, stupid and soft as a weenie bun. Fucking idiot, fucking unprofessional. He should have split, but it was the kind of smile you had to return. My God, what if they put him in a lineup and she identifies him by the smile?

  Time is liquid now that he has seen her. No. Now that she has seen him. All Starbird’s warning lights are flashing. He hears the terminal beep that signals an irrevocable crash.

  And will be shut down.

  24.

  Careful, Tom Starbird. Haste begets folly. Move too fast and no matter how well you know the drill, you are doomed to mess up in at least one respect. This phase of the operation usually takes weeks; he has three days.

  In a preliminary maneuver, Starbird is scoping the DelMar. He has been here before, but at his leisure. This time he has to set the game plan. Which approach to use. Which diversionary tactic, the device that will separate the supplier from the subject just long enough for him to slip in for the pickup. He weighs: the credit check that sends the manager down to drag the girl into the office. The power failure. Dummy phone call. False alarm. Unexpected fire. No. Fire trucks. Broken pipe. Too messy. Think.

  Calculates: how long she’ll feel safe leaving the product alone in the unit. He has to lift the subject out of the crib with the supplier still on the premises— in the restaurant, in the office, down at the ice machine. How long will he have to lie in wait? Add time needed to enter, score and get away. He’ll do a dry run with his stop watch. Set the method: good old Domino’s delivery trick, he decides. He can slip the subject into the red plastic pizza sleeve. The pickup itself will take seconds. The issue is getting away.

  By the time he closes on the DelMar, it’s after ten. He wants complete darkness when he walks the perimeter, but it never really gets dark here in the industrial South. The mercury vapor sheen from the freeway, the sodium vapor haze above multiple parking lots and light pollution from the surrounding city turn the night sky an odd pastel. Whatever he does will unfold in a poisonous artificial glow. Starbird is as clever as he is careful. He drives into the sprawling asphalt mall parking lot on the artificial plateau above the DelMar. Shot with green from the mall’s fluorescent banner, the layer of smog glows with diffused light.

  Even a cartoon superhero would know to beware; the stillness is ominous, the toxic glow is ominous, but omens are a luxury Starbird is too rushed to entertain. His options have narrowed. He cuts the motor and coasts to a stop in a remote corner of the mall. The thousand-car lot is almost empty. Except for the movie theaters, the mall is closed. He trots the quarter mile over asphalt to the stand of pines that separates the raised parking lot from the DelMar, which sits at the bottom of the manmade drop. Quietly, he enters the woods, sliding through dead pine needles and discarded candy wrappers, Styrofoam clamshells and ripped condoms. Where the trees end, the earth drops off. He is at the top of a little embankment overlooking the DelMar. The motel nestles below, two dozen neat units with air conditioners humming in all the windows— all but the one he has identified as hers. So, what? Did somebody tell the girl air conditioning was bad for a newborn? Good situation. Easy access to the window and thick cover, he sees. The back of the DelMar is sheltered by azaleas so dense that they fill the little runoff ditch, swarming the low-slung building like escaped house plants that have grown to tremendous size in the wild.

  Lights on, he notes, in a number of the units. Not a full house tonight, but for a dump like the DelMar, as close as it gets. Music coming out of the diner: Johnny Cash. Reflected headlights of cars bounce off the trees overhanging the parking lot as regulars at the DelMar Diner come and go under the pink neon sign. Plenty of people around, which means this is either a bad time or the optimum time to scope the site. He needs to see the room where the girl and this baby have been living since she brought him home from the hospital. No. Quickly, he corrects himself. Never girl and baby, Starbird. Supplier. Subject. Get a grip! These aren’t people now. Not to you. They are no more to you than the means to an end. The product you will turn over to buy your freedom from Jake Zorn.

  In spite of his size Starbird is light on his feet. He is swift; if he sees you he can go to earth so fast that you’ll never know. Narrowing his body like a diver, he skids down the red clay embankment. Azaleas screen the back windows of the units, but Starbird knows which ones to part to see inside her room. He has, after all, been here before. Approaching, he moves silently. Inside, the supplier and the subject will be asleep. He knows from other surveillance runs that she crashes early most nights. Exhaustion, he supposes. It’s the kid. I’m doing her a favor here. He will look in without waking her. He wants to observe the subject and the supplier closely: the configuration of the bodies as they sleep, whether she keeps this one in its crib or whether they are together in her bed, whether her arm is curved around him and a pillow propped to protect him in case she rolls over because she’s scared of crushing him. Don’t go there, man. Too personal. This is going to be hard.

  In fact, Sasha Egan and her baby aren’t sleeping inside. They aren’t there at all. The unit is empty. Tonight the baby started crying and wouldn’t stop. Not sick, exactly, just bitching because something’s not right— she doesn’t know— is he sick? Is he already getting spoiled? When she couldn’t stand it a minute longer, when a disturbance in the bushes outside her window startled her, she wrapped him up and took him across the parking lot to the DelMar diner. She left with the baby before Starbird cleared the woods. By the time he reaches the stand of azaleas outside her window, she’s long gone.

  Sasha is inside the diner, ordering. She’s retreated partly because the baby wouldn’t stop crying but mostly because she’s a little scared. She heard something outside tonight— crunching in the bushes that was even worse because it stopped. Animal? Intruder? Has Gary followed her here? Is he prowling out there? She can’t be sure, but she thinks that this presence, or disruption— this difference in their surroundings is what set Jimmy off. He’s been crying for an hour. What if a crying baby is like the dog that senses danger before its master, who punishes it for howling when, my God, there are wolves closing on the sledge? If Gary Cargill is really out there— no, if she tells Marilyn she thinks a man is hiding outside her unit, Marilyn will call 911 before she can say, wait. Maybe they can face Gary together, she and the cops, but if the cops call Grandmother …

  No. Just don’t be alone right now. Uneasy, fretful and disrupted, she decides to hang in at the diner until closing. Let Marilyn and the regulars distract Jimmy; by this time she understands her baby well enough to know that when he cries, lights and company sometimes do the trick— anything but her, so fine, let Marilyn handle him; she can even purse that big wet mouth and blow on his feet and cuddle him up, if it will help. Anything, if he’ll only stop crying! With the baby depending on her for every little thing and twenty-something stitches beginning to draw and the terrible knowledge that Gary Cargill is in the area, it’s the only way she can keep from crying too.

  Starbird doesn’t know the unit is empty. He proceeds without making a sound. As he approaches the bushes that hide the girl’s window, the azaleas stir and flatten like grass in the first gust of an oncoming storm. Snorting and completely unaware that he’s not alone here, a dense, misshapen figure blunders out.

  Bristling, Starbird falls still. His breathing slows; he seems to exist without moving. An outsider on his turf, who is th
is? Pervert, marauder, competition, what? No. This is much, much worse. It’s the girl’s clumsy stalker at the Food King, and he’s belching drunk. The kind of drunk who’s looking for a fight. On a regular job Starbird would vaporize and come back later, he’s good at that, but he has interfaced with the mark on this case, and she hates the guy. He can’t forget her eyes when she begged him to help— that lovely, damaged face. He should vanish and come back later but he knows this one. No. The man knows him, and there will be no later.

  “What the fuck!” Blinking, the drunk lunges, trailing spit.

  “Quiet.” Starbird crosses his arms like a ref calling a foul.

  It’s like trying to stop a wild boar. “Fuck are you, anyway?”

  Starbird jams the heel of his hand into the fat drunk and spins him around in mid-charge. “What are you doing here?”

  “Fuck you doing here?”

  “Shut up. Keep it down!”

  “Fuck I will.” Gary is loud and clumsy and slimy with sweat and alcohol. He was drunk when he came here and he’s drunker now. Grunting, he pushes. “Onna baby!”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Fuck that,” Gary says, too loud.

  Grimly, Starbird hisses, “Keep it down.”

  “It’s my fucking baby. Wuddiyou, wanna fight?”

  “It’s not your baby …” End this, Starbird. End it fast. Like a dancer with an expert partner, he spins Gary Cargill so suddenly that Gary ends with his fleshy arm twisted behind his fat back and the blade of Starbird’s forearm pressed so tightly into his throat that all his breath comes out in a desperate wheeze. Grimly, Starbird finishes, “ … It’s hers. Now, go.”

  “Fuck right I’m going,” Gary gasps, straining for breath. Taut with fury, he hocks up a threat. “’Ma fuck going for the cops!”