Mask Market by Andrew Vachss

Author:Andrew Vachss [Vachss, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780375424410
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

Once I got onto Route 91, I had to break my vow to stay at the speed limit if I wanted to avoid calling attention to myself. I inserted the Plymouth into a clot of cars and let them pull me along with them. Our pack was running a little over eighty when a red Mustang shot past on the left. The driver gave me a hard look, like he’d just backed me down from a challenge. Probably practiced it in his rearview mirror whenever he was stuck in traffic.

When I left the highway, I was only about twenty miles from my target. The Plymouth blended right into a thin stream of mixed vehicles, everything from working-class trucks to luxo-SUVs, with a seasoning of anonymous Japanese sedans and the occasional kid’s jacked-up Camaro.

My ID said I was James Logan, who lived in a building in the Bronx that hadn’t gotten a mail delivery since a drunken squatter kicked over a kerosene heater a few winters back. License, registration, and proof of insurance all matched the plates. Jim Logan had taken early retirement from his job as a manufacturer’s representative, selling restaurant supplies. His hobby was restorations. The Plymouth was a work-in-progress, and now he was looking for an old farmhouse he could bring back to life, too. Friends had told him that southern New Hampshire had a lot of wonderful possibilities, but he preferred to look around on his own first, before dealing with brokers.

There was snow in the fields, but the roads were crisp and clean. A few flakes may be enough to paralyze cities like Charleston or Atlanta, but up here even a major blizzard wouldn’t slow things down for long. It’s always easier handling what you’re used to—that’s why people with my kind of childhood do so well in prison.

The town didn’t have a lot of street signs, and I wasn’t carrying a premarked GPS, so I just meandered around, getting a sense of the place as I searched for the address.

I passed it twice before I pulled over and checked what I had written down. The number matched, but my expectations didn’t. Instead of the semi-mansion and fancy grounds I’d expected—and I’d driven past enough of those to know the little town didn’t lack for upscale housing—it wasn’t a lot more than a cottage, set off to the side of an unpaved driveway.

I drove back, thinking maybe I’d been looking at a guest house, or some kind of artist’s studio, and the real thing was somewhere behind it. But the only other building I could see as I went up the driveway was a small garage, sided the same as the house, with a matching roof. The house itself was bigger than it had looked from the road, but no more than a couple of thousand square feet, I guessed. If you transplanted the whole thing to Westchester, probably cost you three-quarters of a mil. Up here, maybe a third of that? I didn’t know enough to even guess.

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