An excerpt from
Choice of Evil
by Andrew Vachss

Things were quiet for a few days. I invested a lot of time trying to put a sweet little sting together, but it wouldn't mesh. So I passed. That's the way I do business—safely or not at all. Impatience imprisons.

The city stayed nervous. Then the director of one of the above-ground pedophile-organizations turned the key to start his pretty new car and drove straight to hell. The radio report said the car exploded right in the freak's driveway.

First Amendment absolutists wrote frenzied letters to newspaper editors, bemoaning a country where a person could be executed for expressing unpopular opinions. They didn't sign their names. Talk shows were loaded with pious pigs droning about the wages of sin. The cops said they had some suspects, but no prime ones.

For all that, the smart money was that the hit was personal, not political. The major pedophile organizations love to publish their little "Enemies Lists," especially on the Net. But if they knew how long that list really was, they'd spend the money on bulletproof vests instead.

Still, the group the dead man had headed decided they needed it to be political, milk it for the mileage. So they announced a candlelight vigil would be held outside Gracie Mansion—the Mayor's house.

They were out there, mourning their loss for the TV cameras, when somebody who knew how to use a grenade launcher took seven of them out with one blast.

The snuff film was a big hit on the networks. But nobody put it together—in fact, most of them were a hundred and eighty degrees off—until the next letter arrived.

There are many ways to oppress gays. Fag-bashing is the most obvious, but not the most devastating. Physical attacks on homosexuals are not only tolerated by the general community, but covertly encouraged. These are known facts. What is not known is that much of the animosity against gays is fueled by the utterly false belief that a pedophile is a homosexual run amok. Journalism has been complicitous in this fraud. The very newspaper in which this is being printed is a prime example. Remember the headline: "Teacher Arrested in Homosexual Child Abuse"? That story involved a kindergarten teacher and a five-year-old boy. Ask yourselves—and this is addressed to the journalism community as well—if the victim had been a little girl, would the headlines have screamed "Heterosexual Child Abuse!"? You know the answer. Much of this is ignorance, but some of it is by design. Pedophiles have carefully self-styled as "gay," seeking to extend the continuum of tolerance for homosexual relations between consenting adults to the rape of children. How many pedophiles have camouflaged themselves as "gay activists" in order to use the old "First they came for the Jews" canard to terrify gays into some "common cause" nonsense? Gays hate child molesters as much as straights do. Some of us, more so. Some of us victims much more so. After careful consideration, I have concluded that pedophiles who insist on being labeled "homosexual" are equally guilty of fag-bashing. Now they will pay the same price. Watch your language!

It was signed with the "Homo Erectus" tag. Nobody questioned its authenticity—the body count had wiped out any doubts.

The city reeked of fear.

© 1999 Andrew Vachss. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from the novel Choice of Evil by Andrew Vachss.