Urban Renewal Read online

  THE BACK door of Red 71 shuddered on its hinges as Princess charged into the back room, just a step behind the black-masked Akita.

  “We won!” he announced. “You should’ve seen it, Rhino. Buddha was so far ahead of that other car—”

  “Damn waste of time,” Buddha told the others. “Race was for five large. After all the money I had to throw around, I maybe netted a couple a hundred.”

  “You wanted to do it,” Cross reminded him, not looking up from the board where he and Ace were playing some form of chess, using no pawns.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did. But what I really wanted to do was test that wireless connector—you know, between the flashlight and the dashboard.”

  “Must’ve worked.”

  “Worked perfect,” Buddha said. “But I didn’t even need the bust. Like Princess said, it wasn’t that close.”

  “So …?”

  “So I had to rewrap the car, and now I got to do it again, gotta refill the bottles, and—”

  “You wanted to do it,” Cross repeated, his eyes still on the board.

  “And it was fun!” Princess added, taking no notice of the dour expression on Buddha’s face.

  DAWN WAS just starting to crack the Chicago darkness when Ace looked up from the board.

  “Still a tie, brother.”

  “Always is.”

  “Where’s the fool?”

  “They’re all out in the poolroom, except for—”

  “Me,” Tracker cut in, the first time he had spoken in hours.

  “You know, I was raised to hate those damn things,” Ace said. “Dogs, I mean. Those German shepherds they used on us down south …”

  “You are not old enough—”

  “To what, watch TV?” the slim man said to the Indian.

  “Even then.”

  “I didn’t have to see it live, bro. Older people did, and they passed it on. When I was coming up, pit bulls, you’d never see them. But every black man in Chicago, he’d seen those shepherds. Some way too up-close. And they passed that fear of them on, right down the line.”

  “The dog Princess has, he is not—”

  “Man, I know that! But he kinda looks like a shepherd, don’t he?”

  “Same structure, perhaps. But they are known as German shepherds for a specific reason. Akitas were originally bred in Japan. Some speculate that the Axis could have been the—”

  “I wonder if anyone really believed that, even back then.”

  “What are you saying, Cross?”

  “I read a lot—”

  “Man never stopped reading,” Ace interjected. “Even when we were kids, locked up—Cross, he always had a book around.”

  “Here’s the way I figure it would have played out.” Cross spoke to Tracker, as if Ace hadn’t interrupted. “The Germans had this racial-superiority thing, right? Well, you think the Japanese don’t? If the Axis had won, one front would have fallen first. Maybe the Russians—they were the closest. Maybe here, although it doesn’t seem logical—Pearl Harbor was their best shot, and they missed with it.

  “Okay, never mind that. Let’s even say they might have tried to divide things up. But how long could that have lasted? The Germans were never going to leave Mussolini in charge of anything. And the Japanese were closest to everything in East Asia. Any way you slice it, sooner or later, they go after each other.”

  “Because each believed in their own racial superiority?” Tracker asked, frankly curious.

  “No. I mean, sure, they each believed they were better—genetically, I’m saying—than any other race. But, more likely, they’d turn on each other because they’d just run out of people to kill. Even if they stayed united, they could hit Africa, but they could never occupy it. They’d be there forever, trapped—you can’t occupy a jungle. The Middle East, now, that could’ve been a prize. All that oil. But, sooner or later, they’d end up with that same problem.

  “Nobody learns from anybody else. The Russians laugh at us for trying to take over Vietnam. We laugh at the Russians for trying the same game in Afghanistan. The Chinese lay in the cut, laughing at both of us. But if they think the Japanese don’t have long memories, they’re as loony as that tool they made baby-king in North Korea. It used to be all about this ‘arms race,’ but there’s probably more heavy-duty weaponry in Chicago now than anyone had on hand for World War II. And today, come on, who isn’t nuclear?”

  “Had they won, they would have killed each other,” Tracker said, very quietly. “That is how the world will end. Not today, but someday. All it would take is for the wrong buttons to be pushed.”

  “Those buttons were pushed a long time ago, brother,” Ace said. “I know you talking about the atomic stuff, but all that would do is speed things up. People—all of us people—we’ve been killing each other since we were people. Call it warfare, call it self-defense, it still means the same thing—you kill some of mine; I kill some of yours.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you call it,” Cross said, quietly. “The only rule is to hit first.”

  “And time it right,” Ace said, reaching across the board with his fist for Cross to tap.

  “YOU ALL moved out now?” Cross asked Ace.

  “Whole family, yeah. I never liked my kids living in that place, but … you know.”

  “The whole city is shifting,” Tracker said quietly. “When I first came here, there were more of my people in Uptown than on any rez. Now, mostly, we are gone.”

  “Why stay?” Cross said flatly. “There’s no money here anymore. And there’s casinos everywhere.”

  “That is bad money.”

  “Gambling is bad?” Ace said. “Since when? Come on, bro—you ever been anyplace where there wasn’t any? You think it was just Vegas, then Atlantic City? My people couldn’t live without those dream books for the numbers. And that thirst for rolling the bones, either.”

  “No. I say it is bad money because it makes us fat. Lazy, dependent, weak.”

  “I hear that,” Ace agreed. “You guys get to call it a ‘tribal allotment.’ We call it what it is: ‘Welfare.’ Only don’t nobody get well on it.”

  “When you’re inside an electric fence, you don’t have to see the barbed wire to know you’re not leaving,” Cross said.

  “That’s how my Moms got here,” Ace said, just the faintest twinge of sorrow in his voice. “She had me, and her man left. So we went to the Welfare. You know what they gave her? A bus ticket.”

  “To raise a child alone in this city …”

  “It’s been done,” Ace said. “But most just keep trying. You know, to make a family out of … whatever.”

  “How old were you when—?”

  “Thirteen,” Ace cut the Indian off in mid-sentence. “That sack of garbage, he beat on her one time too many.”

  “If you’d had a lawyer—”

  “Like the one you had?” Ace half-laughed at Cross.

  “That’s over. Been over a long time.”

  “My Moms’ been gone a longer time, brother. She didn’t even get to come visit me. I thought—I was just a kid, you know—that maybe she was mad at me for what I did. By the time I found out she died just a few weeks after I stuck that ‘boyfriend’ of hers, I was already back on the bricks.”

  “And by the time we were ready to spring Rhino, you already were in business,” Cross said.

  “Ever since,” Ace answered, again reaching his fist across the table. “And I’m not getting no gold watch when I retire.”

  “I AM here because we have another job,” Tracker said, announcing his entrance the next night. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah. There is one thing I gotta take care of, back where I used to crib,” Ace said.

  “You’re saying Big Luke’s woman—she’s still over there?” Cross asked.

  “Yeah. And I got to make sure—”

  “We only have the one house, brother.”

  “I know. And, big as that sucker is, it’s got no room left. Kids got rooms of th
eir own for the first time, you know they ain’t sharing.”

  “Couldn’t put those twins in the same house as—”

  “Oh, you got that right. I got three boys, all of them old enough to get real … distracted.”

  “I apologize if I have been slow to understand,” Tracker said. “But it is as if you are speaking in another tongue.”

  “Yeah. We kind of were,” Cross said. “So let me run it down for you.”

  Clara would never know that keeping her girls safe was more than just her sacred calling; it had been a job for others, unknown to her, bought and paid for in the hardest currency there is.

  There were five of them watching. Black teenagers with old eyes. Each already having proved impervious to every “rehabilitative” service the state of Illinois had to offer, from counseling to incarceration. Now they were a foul crew—wolves without the loyalty of the pack.

  “Bitch packs a piece, man,” one said. “Heard she shot one of the Disciples last year. Shot him cold. I cain’t understand that—you’d think they’d be looking for payback, right? But … nothing. Maybe she got friends we don’t know about.”

  “All that’s just talk,” another said. “But this much we know—she ain’t going for no elevator jam.”

  “All the time she been working, she got money,” another said. “Money in the house, too. I gotta get paid. She want to be stupid about that, too bad.”

  “You see her girls? Them twins. That’s what I want. Ain’t nobody had any a that stuff.”

  “Shut up,” their leader said. “Everybody get what they want outta this, we do it right. A vise, that’s what we need here: come at her from both sides. Her apartment’s on seventeen, right? We go up there, split into two sides, wait on the stairs. Soon’s we hear that elevator open, we jump her. Take her down. Her keys won’t help us—those girls keep the chains on from inside until they get the all-clear from Mama. So we make the bitch tell ’em to open the door. Then it’s game time!”

  “Bet!” one of the watchers said. “I’m gonna make them twins dance, man!”

  “Let’s move it. She making tracks now.”

  The pack split into two groups, cutting through the waste ground to reach the building before the woman did.

  The leader and two of the others waited on the stairwell, their harsh breathing loud against the concrete. The leader leaned forward, opening the door a crack.

  “I can hear the cable. She be comin’ soon,” he said.

  “Freeze!” a voice whispered. “We hear one sound, you’re all dead.”

  They turned slowly. The leader blinked at the sight of the whisperer, an unremarkable-looking white man, his back against the far wall. The dull-black Uzi in his right hand riveted their attention.

  “Hands up,” the man said. He walked over to the leader, who suddenly felt a clamp! over the back of his neck, lifting the now terrified youth off the ground. Pain bolts shot along the leader’s spine.

  “We’re all going upstairs,” the man holding the Uzi said. “To the roof. We’re going to walk up the stairs. Nice and slow. One man’s hands come down, you all die. Understand me? Die. I’m getting paid, bring you to the roof. I get paid the same, dead or alive.”

  The clamp released the leader, who slumped to the floor, hands still rigidly held over his head. He wasn’t about to look behind him—whatever that clamp had been was something he didn’t want to see.

  “Walk,” the white man said.

  The pack was breathless as they stepped out onto the roof. The white man herded them over to a far corner. As they approached, they saw their two partners, standing with their hands high. Facing them, a blade-thin black man in a long black leather coat and a Zorro hat.

  “Oh, shit!” the leader said. A visible shudder ran through his stocky frame.

  The five pack members were herded into a row, their backs to the roof’s edge.

  The man in the Zorro hat stood before them, so finely balanced as to appear weightless in the roof’s darkness. A leather thong was looped around his neck. At its end was a double-barreled shotgun, sawed off so far down that the red tips of the shells were showing.

  “What they call you, boy?” he asked the leader.

  “Dice.”

  “Dice. Yeah. Well, you just rolled snake eyes, boy. You know my name?”

  “Yeah. I mean … yes.”

  “Say it,” the thin man whispered.

  “Ace.”

  “You know how I come by that name, boy? You hear about me when you was telling stories in the dorms down-state?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell it.”

  “They calls you Ace ’cause you the Ace of Spades.”

  “Yeah, that’s about right. You know what I do?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The ace of spades, that’s the death card, right? Me, I make my living making other people dead. I’m a contract man, understand? I take the money, I take a life; you understand that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Now, listen. Listen real good. Listen the best you ever did in your lousy little life. That woman you was tracking? Clara? Well, somebody paid me money—good money. Told me make sure nothing happens to that woman. Nothing. Same for her girls, the twins. Get it? Now, you boys, you don’t get no flak from the bangers round here. This dump ain’t worth nothing now—city’s gonna level it soon. So you king of this little hill. That’s okay. You do what you do. But now I got a job for you. You want to work for me?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “That’s good. That’s real good. Now, here’s the job. You watch that lady. The way you been watching that lady. You watch them twins, too. And their crib. Anybody acts like they might be trouble, you take them out. You understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You been watching her; I been watching you. I don’t know what you see in her. Me, I see something in you. And what I see is potential. So—you do this job right, there’s work for you. Hard work, understand? Hard work pays hard cash. You got the heart to do it? I don’t mean smoke some sucker in a drive-by. I mean walk up to the man, put the piece in his face, drop the hammer, and make him dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You want to learn how to get that work? Steady work? You want to drive nice, dress nice, flash nice?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then pay attention. First thing, you always get the money up front.” The blade-thin man’s left hand went into a deep pocket. It came out with a thick roll of bills, wrapped in rubber bands. “This is four thousand dollars in centuries. That’s a G apiece. For doing what I told you. A contract, understand?”

  He put his left hand forward, almost in the stocky boy’s face.

  “Take it and we got a deal. That’s your word. In this business, your word, that’s your life.”

  The stocky boy took the money, ignoring that a thousand dollars apiece would have been five grand, not four. Maybe the deadly creature standing before them couldn’t count, but there wasn’t a doubt he could kill.

  “Now I’m gonna give you something else,” Ace continued. “Something even more valuable than the green, so listen close now. Which one of you wanted to rape the girls?”

  Silence covered the roof. Dead silence.

  “I ain’t gonna ask again. Anytime you got a pack like yours, you got someone in it got himself a sex Jones. Now, the thing about that is, sex fiends ain’t reliable. You can’t trust them. Their word is no good. You get dropped, they be the first to roll on you. Now, which one was it?”

  Nobody moved.

  “I guess maybe it was all of you,” the blade-thin man said in a tone of deep regret. “Too bad.”

  “It was Randall!” the stocky boy said. “He wanted to do the twins.”

  “Motherfucker!” one of the boys hissed. He was a tall, well-muscled youth, wearing a black-and-silver Raiders jacket.

  “You Randall?” Ace asked.

  “Yeah, man. But I was only playing.
I ain’t gonna rape nobody.”

  “That’s right,” Ace said, nodding at Cross. The white man slid forward so quickly Randall had no chance to move before he was hooked in the stomach with the same hand that held the Uzi. The youth grunted as he doubled over. Cross spun sideways and snap-kicked him off the roof.

  One of the other boys turned away, to vomit against the wall.

  “You got paid,” Ace said. “Anything happen to that lady or her girls, nobody gonna die as easy as that punk just did.”

  Silence.

  “Now you know why I gave you four grand, not five. Like I said, one apiece. Give me your cell—not the damn phone, fool, just the number. You get the same pay—one thousand American dollars—every single week. Not apiece, to split four ways. I call you, tell you where to come, pick it up. Got it?”

  The black man seemed to vanish as his words were still hanging in the humid air.

  THE CTA bus rumbled to a shuddering stop at the fringe of the ruins that had once been a fully occupied Housing Project. The front doors clacked open, and a tall black woman stepped to the sidewalk. She was dressed in a dark raincoat over a nurse’s uniform, the white stockings and shoes a dead giveaway, even in the black night.

  Adjusting her shoulder bag for maximum protection against a snatch attempt, the woman turned toward the cluster of mostly empty towers a quarter of a mile away. She walked past the bus-stop bench, her carriage proud and erect despite the exhaustion that suffused her body. She didn’t even glance at the slumped-over figure of a man, sensing rather than seeing the near-empty bottle of cheap wine clutched in the bum’s slack hand.

  “Tough working two jobs, isn’t it, Clara?”

  The woman whirled sharply, her eyes X-raying the seated bum as she shifted one leg behind the other to brace herself—either to run if she could, or to fight if she couldn’t.

  “Cross?”

  “Sit down,” the bum said quietly. “Have a talk with an old friend.”

  The woman took a tentative step forward, eyes wary. “What happened to your face?” she asked, peering into the darkness.

  “Just a little help from the makeup department, Clara. It’s me.”