Drawing Dead Read online

  The Asian had opened his mouth to say something when a pair of boa-constrictor arms wrapped Buddha’s biceps on both sides. “I’m sorry, Buddha,” the armor-muscled man said, his shiny skull reflecting the dim light. “Rhino told me not to let you—”

  Buddha slumped in his chair as if surrendering, but Princess slipped his hands over the blank-eyed man’s as if he expected the move.

  “We promised to let him go,” Cross said, quietly.

  “He will be our ally,” Tracker added.

  The Asian’s flat demeanor was stress-fractured, as if his face had been coated in aged-out pancake makeup.

  “We need a time line,” Cross told the Asian, as if nothing had interrupted an ongoing conversation.

  “It just…It just burst onto the screen.”

  “Not just your screen, everyone who was qualified to log on, too.”

  “Yes. It must have been so.”

  “So there was nothing special about the target, was there?”

  “The woman, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, no. It was just…like those old ‘Wanted’ posters they used to hang in the post office. Her face wasn’t on them. No woman’s was.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Yours,” the Asian said, not even hesitating a microsecond, as was his habit when confronted with any request for information. What answer would best serve me? “And one more. An Indian.”

  Tracker stepped next to Cross.

  “Yes,” the Asian said.

  “Just the two of us?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing. Just height/weight estimates. Not names, addresses…nothing like that.”

  “When?”

  “It was less than a month ago. I would have to access my own computer to be exact.”

  “You can do that when you get back to your place. We’ll give you a way to make contact to get us that info.”

  “I promise I will—”

  “Let him go, Princess,” Rhino’s even quieter voice rumbled.

  The Asian was almost to the back door when he realized that the behemoth wasn’t referring to him. It was his last thought—Buddha’s .177 hardball round was tumbling inside his brain before another synapse could complete its circuit.

  “HE MUST have put in a lot of work,” Cross said.

  “Boss, you’re really saying this had nothing to do with So Long?”

  “Not what that guy was doing. He was trying to win a game. Gaming, he’d call it—competing against others. But it was a fixed fight. His edge was huge, but it was an accident—it wouldn’t be enough for him to get paid. The tracing, from the pictures of me and Tracker, that was all his work.”

  “I don’t get this AI—”

  “Buddha,” Rhino said gently, “a man with his intelligence, confined to a prison but given outside access through the Internet, he might…amuse himself in a number of ways. He chose those…tapes. He probably even gave those three foul things the idea of hitting minorities to put them even more beyond the reach of the ‘profilers’ than they already were. Misdirection.”

  “But So Long—”

  “—knows me,” Cross said. “She’s never seen Tracker, but she knows my face. Knows it good.”

  “Boss, she’d never—”

  “I don’t think so, either. What would be in it for her? No, this Pekelo was just in the paper trail she needed to transfer all those properties, set up those bank loans, all that.”

  “If he—that man in the house we exploded—if he didn’t signal the Artificial Intelligence to hold off at some preset interval, it would go to work on its own,” Rhino said. “Revenge programming. It would target whoever was on its camera-feed. A live camera-feed, captured. That…man, he probably had the whole place rigged with lenses. Infrared, so even a full-black wouldn’t stop it. Backup generators in case whoever came for him cut the electricity first. You and Tracker, the cameras would have your images. Nobody else’s.”

  “That’s where the work came in,” Cross said, nodding. “This Pekelo had to find out who I was, first. Once he did that, then he could poke around until he got a lot of possible targets. But none of that would have meant a thing if he hadn’t seen Ace’s name—or Sharyn’s name, most likely—on one of those transfer deeds.”

  “So he set Ace up….”

  “That was what the AI paid off on. Ace would go insane if Sharyn was killed. That would expose us all. Pekelo, by then, he’d know that. That’s the flaw in all Artificial Intelligence—it can’t go outside its own data.”

  THE GANG leader’s summation was blunt.

  “Whatever he told the AI, that ended it. There’s no way for another player to enter the competition. It’s over.”

  The silence lengthened, as if waiting for darkness to emerge.

  “The AI is gone. It did its job. Or at least it computed that it did.”

  “I get it, okay?” Buddha snapped. “I screwed up. But that’s done, and there’s no way to fix it. We’ll never get to question those other ones now.”

  “They wouldn’t have known the answers.” Cross shut off the faucet. “The only one who could have told us anything, that…whatever it was Tracker and I found…we didn’t have time to listen. And we wouldn’t have known what questions to ask, anyway.”

  “We have to work with what we know.”

  “No, brother,” Cross answered Rhino. “We have to work with what he knew. He might have been smart enough to create that AI, but it couldn’t hold more than he poured in.”

  “You all can stop,” Tiger said, stepping out of the darkness and tossing her mane. “I wasn’t there before, but me, now, I’m in.”

  Cross was very still for several seconds. Then he said, “To get off on rape tapes, you have to be a certain kind of maggot. That’s the only requirement.”

  He took a deep hit off his cigarette. “But to find people who actually want those tapes, not so easy. And to find a whole damn market for that product, that’s much harder yet. You’d have to be inside…inside them, I’m saying. It’s not like a kiddie-porn ring. Not that hard to find one of those. Hell, find a lot of them, you want to—that’s just computer forensics.

  “But this guy, the one in that house, he was a different species. He had to find a market. Not a network: all individuals—they probably didn’t even know each other. And he also had to find a gang who wouldn’t want to just watch those tapes—they’d want to make them. Plus, he had to do all that without ever leaving his house.”

  “Prison.”

  “Huh?” Tiger suddenly erupted. “You said he was working out of his house.”

  “No,” Rhino told the Amazon, the squeak re-entering his voice. “Where he was, it wasn’t his anything. He couldn’t leave. Ever.”

  “If he was smart enough to—”

  “He couldn’t leave his own body,” Rhino said, more softly, but no less despairing. “The longer he stayed trapped in it, the less he could move under his own power, even if the door was wide open.”

  “I was there, remember?” Cross spoke to Rhino, his voice pitched at the same volume as the behemoth’s, but the thread running through it lacked even a trace element of Rhino’s empathy for the man they all thought of as some kind of creature. “And whatever in hell that thing was, however he got where we found him, he was some kind of genius, right?”

  “So what?” Buddha said, still defensive. “The only thing we know for sure about him is that he’s gone. And he’s not coming back.”

  “Neither is the guy you just killed. But there’s one difference between them. And that’s the one we have to focus on.”

  CROSS OPENED his left hand and lit another cigarette.

  “You know those clowns who do ‘threat assessments’ for people with enough money to make them walk around scared? That’s a nice racket, but we’re not customers.”

  “What are you saying?” Tiger snapped, irritated.

  “We know there’s a threat out there
, we take it out,” Buddha snapped back. “You got a thousand cockroaches in your house, what’s the point of killing nine hundred of them?”

  “I’m glad you said that, brother,” the gang leader said, not even a touch of sarcasm tainting his speech. “Because now we’ve got to talk to So Long.”

  “WE NEED your list,” Cross told Buddha’s wife. “The whole list.”

  “Why? This ‘list’ you call it, not valuable? You want something that is valuable, it is only good manners to—”

  “No bargaining, So Long. Just give it to him, okay?” Buddha said, his voice empty of anything but words.

  “Now you give orders?”

  “This isn’t about that,” the pudgy killer said. “There’s no choice.”

  “Always a choice.”

  “For you, only two,” Cross said, his voice as quiet and uninflected as when he first spoke.

  So Long looked at the man sitting in one of a matched set of armchairs. Always the same, she thought to herself. Cross. This is a man with no blood in him. Aloud she said, “You come to my house, to—what?—give me orders, like this is some restaurant, maybe?”

  Cross didn’t respond.

  “Well?” she said, turning to her husband.

  “So Long, you remember when Cross got us out of that jungle? Saved our lives?”

  “Saved your life. You told this man, if he wanted to take you back, I have to come, too, yes?”

  “Sure. That makes me a bad guy now?”

  “You? No, husband. Not you. But to…him, I was baggage. Extra baggage. And now he gives you that same choice, yes?”

  “No,” Buddha said, in a voice his wife rarely heard. “There’s something out there. We don’t know if it’s still out there, but it was trying for a kill. We’ve got it narrowed down to maybe just two targets—Cross and…a guy you don’t know.”

  “Yes?”

  “That note you got. It was from some degenerate freaks. And they would have done what they threatened to do, only now they won’t be doing anything like that. They won’t be doing anything, ever. The man I had stay with you one time?”

  “Black man. True gentleman. Like that giant. Very fine manners. Very respectful. Not like him,” she said, tilting her head slightly toward the man with the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand.

  “They don’t know you,” Cross said pointedly.

  “Huh! Very nice. But I told you already: Pekelo.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Another of your riddles? Better to do business. Like always, yes?”

  “Pekelo told a killer where to find Ace’s wife, So Long. And that killer came over to the house—the house you did all the paperwork on—to kill her. Following orders. Not because his boss needed her dead—he wanted to drive Ace insane, rage him to stepping into a trap. Then kill him.”

  “How is this—?”

  “Listen,” Buddha said, his tone so softly penetrating that even So Long shrank back in her chair. “The first target wasn’t Ace’s wife, it was my wife. You, So Long. And it worked. The trap, I mean. Only not like they thought it would. That Circle of Skulls gang, it’s gone. Every one of them. It didn’t have to be that way, but I lost it. They were dead before we could ask them any questions. And that’s on me.”

  “They wouldn’t have known the answers,” Cross said, hearing the bitterness of self-blame in Buddha’s voice. “But we all worked on this. Every single one of us. Because our brother’s wife was under threat. No other reason—he’s one of us, and that was enough.

  “That was all we had, to start with—that threat to rape you, So Long. And Buddha didn’t make the first strike; he didn’t even know about it. This drug boss, he was going to panic Ace out into the open, but he didn’t live long enough to make it happen.

  “That one is gone. His gang is gone. Pekelo was playing a game; that’s what he thought. If someone had to die for him to win, that was okay—no problem for him. You gave him the information he needed to win the game. Now he’s done, too. He won’t be playing any more games.

  “There were only two targets. Me and…this other guy. At least, that’s what we thought. Now we’re not so sure. And we have to be sure, understand?”

  “You were a target, So Long,” Buddha said. “That brought us all in. If Cross had refused to take you when we left that damn jungle, I would have stayed—I wouldn’t have left you—that’s true. But this is different. Don’t make me—”

  “She’s not going to, brother,” Cross said, cutting Buddha off before permanent damage could be done. “She knows how that would play out.”

  “Huh!” So Long snorted. “You would kill me?”

  “It wouldn’t get that far,” Cross said, in the same dead tone he’d been using since So Long stepped into her living room and realized her husband had brought company. Unwanted company. “Buddha could never let us do anything to you. But he couldn’t let anyone do anything to us, either. Only one way for him, then.”

  “Husband…?”

  “He’s right, So Long. I couldn’t kill my own people. I couldn’t let anyone kill you. Or kill me, either. So, you and me, we’d both have to…go home.”

  A long second passed. “I get you the list,” the hard-faced Hmong woman told Cross.

  “BOSS…”

  “It’s nothing, Buddha. So Long was always going to give up that list. It’s not like they were her own people or anything. But your wife, she is what she is. She had to test. If she saw any way she could get paid…”

  “But you took it so far.”

  “Someone always blinks first.”

  “Sure. Unless they don’t. Then what—?”

  “I would have come up with something.”

  “Yeah,” the pudgy man behind the wheel said, resigned to a truth he already knew.

  IF BUDDHA thought the next hour of silence would give way to the thread of the original conversation, he was disappointed.

  Expertly sliding the Shark Car between pools of shadows made the trip back to Red 71 longer than usual, but Cross was apparently comfortable with it. Safety first, Buddha thought. Safety for us, no matter what it costs anyone else.

  As he slid the gang’s car into a U-turned tunnel behind the building, Buddha tried once more. “Boss, you know what you would’ve come up with?”

  “No.”

  “But…”

  “Brother, I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t answer ‘What if?’ questions. Let it go, okay?”

  AS THE two men walked through the unlit tunnel, Buddha held back slightly, then moved to Cross’s left side.

  He can’t shoot worth a damn with his left hand, Buddha thought to himself. And then stopped in his tracks.

  Cross stopped, too. He didn’t know what Buddha had seen ahead of them, but he wasn’t going to break silence to ask.

  “What the hell is that thing doing now?”

  “Where? I don’t see—”

  “Not ahead, boss. On your face. Just below your eye. That…blue thing. It’s blinking on and off.”

  “Wait till we get back inside,” Cross told him, puzzled. How come it didn’t just burn steady? And how come I didn’t feel it this time?

  “GO LOOK inside the poolroom,” the gang’s leader told Buddha. “If any of us are out there, ask them to come back.”

  Before Buddha could return, Princess burst through the curtain face-first, as if the black steel ball bearings were cobwebs.

  “We won!” he burst out.

  “You got people to play nine-ball with Rhino?” Cross said, surprised in spite of himself—getting people to even approach the Goliath was never an easy task.

  “No! It was Sweetie! He did it! I’ve been teaching him. Like you said, Cross. When he does something good, I give him a command…and a chunk of meat. Like that was what I wanted him to do all along. That’s all. It just took a lot of…patience. Like you said. Nobody believed he could do it. But…”

  Rhino came through the curtain, his bulk parting it sufficientl
y to let Buddha pass through untouched.

  “Where’s that damn—?” Cross began, but caught Rhino’s gesture and clipped off whatever he had been going to ask.

  The subject of the uncompleted question followed Rhino inside. As calm as a man who chewed Valium to alleviate boredom, the big Akita walked over to Princess, scanned the room quickly, and flopped down at his armor-plated friend’s feet.

  “Boss, I swear, I never saw anything like—”

  “Rhino, can you tell me what in hell everyone’s going on about?”

  “Physically, it was impossible,” the behemoth said. “The dog—Sweetie,” he added quickly. “Sweetie stood on one side of table twelve. Princess bet everyone in the place that his dog could jump across, from one side to the other, long rail to long rail. We’ve got more room between the tables than in most poolrooms, sure. But not enough to get a running start.”

  “You saying…?”

  “Yes. Sweetie went into this crouch, as if he was transferring all his muscle mass to his back legs. Then he just launched right over. If I’d seen that in a movie, I’d know it was faked. But he actually did it.”

  “Who collected the money?”

  “Princess. You could see they all thought he was out of his mind, but here—in Red 71, I mean—they knew they were safe. If we had lost, they knew they’d have collected, too.”

  “You guys cleared—what?—ten G’s minimum, am I right?”

  “I don’t know, Buddha,” Rhino said, without interest. “Here, you want to count it for yourself?”

  “Duh-am!” the pudgy man exclaimed. “Closer to fifteen. What a score. Hell, I would have taken that bet myself.”

  Cross held his head in both hands.

  “I will ask what Buddha really wants to know,” Tracker spoke from one of the pools of darkness that made it impossible to gauge the size of Red 71’s back room. “How did you cheat?”

  Buddha shot a look in Tracker’s direction but didn’t pretend to be insulted.

  “There was no cheating,” Rhino said, almost pedantically. “We use professional-standard tables. The playing surface is nine by four and a half feet, but there is some additional room for the wood surrounds…where the diamonds are inset.”