Drawing Dead Read online

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah! I don’t know what was inside that house, and I don’t ever wanna know. The boss…I don’t know how this could be, but he must’ve got the address wrong.”

  “Hemp don’t make mistakes, you said. And you had it written down, too, remember?”

  “Hey! I’m saying this to you, bro; it ain’t for broadcast.”

  The driver slashed his right index finger across his lips.

  “You got it,” Antoine said, sealing their pact.

  A FEW minutes passed before the failed assassin looked up, suddenly realizing they were headed in the wrong direction.

  The wrongest direction. Instead of the crusher safely nestled deep into the West Side, they were within eyesight of the Badlands.

  “You stupid—”

  “It ain’t me who’s stupid, cuz. Ain’t even you. It’s Hemp that’s the sucker in this game. He thinks he’s gonna put himself on top behind taking out Ace’s woman? He’s got to be the stupidest—”

  “You gonna be the one to tell him that?”

  The supposedly stolen Infiniti slowed to a stop as the driver’s left hand came up. Before Antoine’s eyes could register the image of a dull-black pistol, the third hollow-point was already ripping through his upper body. He slumped forward, hitting his head on the dash. The airbag failed to deploy.

  The driver shot twice more. Fully jacketed rounds penetrated Antoine’s skull, each slug slamming into a flat-lined brain.

  Leaving the body untouched, the driver opened his door and climbed out, holding the pistol by the barrel in his upraised hand. Three to the body, two to the head, just like they told me.

  Within seconds, he was surrounded by a mixed-race mob of teens his own age. Their leader, a gaunt young man with a severely curved spine and a blue Mohawk coxcomb, waved his hand in a “Come here!” gesture.

  A pale-green Kia Soul pulled up.

  “That’s your ride to O’Hare,” the blue-Mohawked leader said, pointing. “And here’s your ticket. One-way to Phoenix. You land, you take a cab from the airport to the bus station. From there, you go wherever you want. Here’s your new ID. And here’s your money.”

  “I…”

  “Don’t waste time. You did your job, just like you was supposed to. So…here…you just got paid, too. Now all you got to do is to get gone.”

  “WHAT’S NEXT, Condor?”

  The young man with the blue Mohawk looked steadily at a powerfully built youth whose face was a mixture of Asian and African. “Next? What’d I tell you, A.B.? This job, we do it exactly like we was told to, the ‘next’ is that we move up. We get to take care of more business.”

  “You mean, this was for…?”

  “Never say names,” Condor warned. “That’s a bad habit.”

  “You say Buddha’s name all the time,” a slender Latino spoke up, keeping his tone reasonable—a question from someone who wanted to learn.

  “Buddha don’t care, ’Zeus,” Condor answered. “You’ve seen him do the card trick, right? And you’ve seen the Shark Car, too. No reason not to say his name, understand? Nobody shoots like him. And nobody else drives that car, neither.”

  “Look, I’m just…I mean, what’s going on?”

  “Again?” Condor sighed wearily. “Look: all we needed to know was, that guy who drove in here, he was the one who tipped what Hemp was gonna do. He got paid to make sure that didn’t get done. A man sets up his own boss, you think he gets to just walk away after? No. And here’s why: you do one thing for money, you’ll do another thing for more money. Everybody knows that.”

  INSIDE A stone-walled room, as dimly lit as an underground bunker. “That two-bit mope actually thought he was gonna just roll up and take out Ace’s woman, boss?”

  “I guess so, brother,” was the laconic response. The speaker was as unremarkable-looking as Condor had been distinctive. Only the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand distinguished him from a human generic.

  “Hemp is as good as dead.”

  “Already is. Part of the deal was the second sample case. Hemp keeps a lot of them around, thinks they make good cover. The guy we paid, he dropped a package into one of them.”

  “There’s nothing more for us to do?”

  “Buddha, what’s your problem? All those rubber checks we wrote are canceled checks now. You’re just—what—professionally insulted that anyone would even think about hitting one of us?”

  “I don’t see how that wet-brain could’ve even known there was any ‘us,’ boss.”

  “What difference?”

  “Next thing you know, maybe some fool tries to muscle in on the Double-X. Or maybe even—”

  “From what? A spaceship? We’ve got trip wires three layers deep.”

  “How about if we—?”

  “No pre-emptives, brother. You know that.”

  “Buddha’s always looking for an excuse,” said a man occupying the far corner of the Red 71 poolroom’s back office. His quarter-ton formless body was covered in a dull-gray jumpsuit, making him nearly invisible in the darkness. Despite his bulk, his voice was a falsetto squeak.

  “Cross…” Buddha appealed to the man with the bull’s-eye tattoo.

  “You know Rhino’s right,” the answer came. “Not that I blame you: I was married to So Long, I’d probably want to go around blowing stuff up, too.”

  “That was a cheap shot, boss.”

  “The cost of the ammo doesn’t change the result.”

  “I can’t win, huh?”

  The back door opened, and the man who had terrified Antoine burst in, the black-masked Akita bounding at his side.

  “You wouldn’t believe how good Sweetie was!” the outrageously overmuscled man thundered. “We were playing in the—”

  “We know,” Rhino said. “You’ve really got him trained, Princess.”

  “No, I mean he—”

  “We know about all of it,” Cross assured him.

  “Well, I bet Tiger doesn’t. And when she comes over, I’m gonna…” the huge child said, sulking at the disinterest everyone seemed to be displaying in this latest proof of his homicidal dog’s excellent manners.

  THE WOMAN who entered by the same back door had once been described as “an Amazon on steroids” by a man too dense to understand the inherent contradiction in his words.

  He didn’t live long enough to learn.

  “Tiger!” Princess boomed out. The woman whose striped hair matched her one-piece spandex outfit flowed forward, moving in five-inch spike heels—tiger-gold with black soles—as naturally as a jogger in running shoes.

  “Calm down, honey,” she said, as softly as the throwing daggers she wore strapped around one massive thigh could enter flesh. “Just give me a minute to find out what’s going on.”

  Princess instantly transformed from full boil to docile.

  “What was so…? Oh, I see,” she said, turning to glare at the man with the bull’s-eye tattoo.

  “You don’t see anything,” he replied, tonelessly.

  “Sure, baby. Whatever you say,” Tiger purred. She perched one perfectly curved haunch on the heavy wood slab positioned above a pair of iron sawhorses that Cross used as a desk, keeping her eyes pinned to just below the man’s right eye…where a tiny blue hieroglyph seemed to be burning without flame. The mark was unreadable even at close range, but the man who bore it had felt its dry-ice burn days ago.

  “Wait for Tracker,” Cross said. “No point saying the same thing over and over.”

  “And Ace,” Buddha added.

  “No,” Cross said. “This isn’t something Ace can be in on.”

  “Why is that?” A voice from behind Rhino.

  “Damn! When did you get here, Tracker?” Buddha asked. “That ghost-walking stuff you do is just plain spooky.”

  “I move as myself,” said Tracker, an Indian whose facial features were somewhere between Cherokee and Apache. “Just as you do, Buddha.”

  Cross swept his eyes around the
room, as if drawing all the others under the same outcropping in an enemy-occupied mountain range.

  “Somebody wants a seat at our table,” he said.

  “One seat, or the whole table?” Rhino squeaked.

  “What’s the difference?” Buddha sneered. “He sits in on our game, he’s already drawing dead.”

  “HEMP WASN’T the takeover man,” Cross said. “He was just a tool.”

  “Whose tool?” Tiger asked softly, her tone as sweet as sufuric acid.

  “Don’t know,” Cross told the whole room. “But, whoever he is, he’s not local.”

  “That’s got to be right,” Buddha said. “Nobody from around here would even—”

  “That’s not the puzzle,” the gang’s leader interrupted. “What have we got that’s worth a war? The club? This joint?”

  “That’s the truth,” Tiger agreed. “Who’d want a cement-block building standing inside a junkyard? For that luxurious poolroom of yours?”

  “We’ve been here a long time,” Rhino spoke, slowly and deliberately. “Plenty of mobs in Chicago know where to find Red 71. And Tiger’s right—there’s no ‘operation’ anyone could cut into here.”

  “The club?”

  “Come on, Buddha. Sure, the Double-X makes some money, but what’s it take to open a strip joint? There’s empty buildings all over this town, and never a shortage of girls who want to work. Add any lawyer who knows how to grease his way to a liquor license, and you’re all set.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There’s no ‘but’ in this,” the man behind the sawhorse desk said. “Plenty of joints way more upscale than ours. Plenty of others down the other side, too. And we’re not exactly taking in a fortune.”

  “The overhead,” Rhino squeaked his agreement.

  “Hey, we could cut that way, way down, if the boss didn’t want to turn a moneymaker into a…”

  “Domestic-violence shelter?” Tiger picked up the thread. “Anyway, I thought everything was voted on.”

  “Sure,” Buddha said, bitterly. “But there’s only five votes—you and Tracker, you started out freelance, so you don’t qualify. Cross and Ace, they did time together. That’s when they first put together a crew. Not big, but they went all-in on every hand until nobody wanted to play no more, see? Rhino was locked in there, too. And Cross got close to him—he was the only one who ever did.

  “Ace had a parole date, but Cross was never gonna get one. And Rhino was gonna do life in that wheelchair. The plan was, they were both supposed to hit the fence and go. But that dental-floss ladder they used wouldn’t hold the weight—Cross made it over the wall, but they put Rhino back in those chemical handcuffs.

  “Cross came back for him. All legal-like. Rhino’d never even committed a crime; they were just…holding him because there was no place to put him. And that made the first three OGs, see?”

  Buddha paused, making sure his audience was still attentive. Or, at least, not getting restless enough to cut him off.

  “Cross found me working a contract in Laos. He was coming over from Cambodia. So by the time we did that job down south, I was on the team, too. Why Rhino brought Princess back with us, I’ll never know. But he answered the crew’s prove-in, same as I did.”

  “Do you hate them?” Cross said, just above a whisper.

  “Yes,” Rhino answered. Exactly as Ace had, when Cross first asked that core question, back when they were both still incarcerated children.

  “Do you hate them all?”

  “Yes!” Rhino, Princess, and Buddha spoke as one.

  “See?” said the pudgy man with nerveless hands and eyes a falcon would envy. “If Ace was here, it’d be the same answer. So any damn vote is gonna be five–zip. Only way it can be. It don’t matter what any one of us might think is a better way to travel, we’re all going down the same road. Don’t matter who walks point, who walks drag—we’re one unit.”

  “So you all took a vote to make the Double-X into a DV shelter?” Tiger was not an easily deterred woman.

  “That does not matter,” Tracker addressed her. “What you see here, what you have seen before—what Buddha says now—that will never change.”

  “WHO’S GONNA tell Ace?”

  “Depends on what Sharyn actually registered,” Cross answered Buddha. “If all she saw was Princess and that beast of his scaring off a stranger, that wouldn’t be any big deal.”

  “Sweetie was just—”

  “Poor choice of words,” the gang boss said quickly. “He was just doing his job, Princess. We all understand that.”

  “And the kids love him!” Princess half-shouted, still not fully mollified.

  “We know,” Rhino agreed, his squeaky voice somehow making soothing sounds.

  “So if Ace doesn’t know…?”

  “He doesn’t.” Cross finished Buddha’s thought. “If he knew, we’d already have heard.”

  “Even a sawed-off blasting both barrels don’t make noise enough to carry this far, boss.”

  “We wouldn’t need noise,” Cross said, pointing at a thin strip of LEDs flickering against the wall to his left. “Police scanner. Rhino’s got it wired direct, all color-coded. If Ace had started taking out what’s left of Hemp’s crew, the whole strip would be flashing red. ‘All Units.’ Ace knows we have to work calm, but anyone going after Sharyn? No way he’d wait to start canceling tickets.”

  “Nobody would hurt Sharyn,” Princess said. “That’s crazy.”

  “That would be crazy,” Buddha agreed.

  “And suicide is crazy,” Tiger added.

  “Hemp was dead as soon as we got that first phone call,” Cross said, acknowledging the Amazon’s deductive powers. “We couldn’t be sure he’d be using one of his little sample cases anytime soon, but we know he keeps them on the top floor. That was part of the deal. By now, anything under fifty yards of Tracker’s scope is as good as gone.”

  “I NEED to talk to Tiger alone, okay?”

  “Just in time,” the Amazon said, as the others crossed through the hanging strands of black ball bearings that made up the “door” between the back office and the poolroom. “How come I’m the only one who didn’t know about this thing with Hemp?”

  “You know what a rolling bounty is?”

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “A rolling bounty is like a river, only it runs below ground. Everybody in Gangland knows, you got something that’s worth something—something to us, I mean—we’ll give you a fair price for whatever it is. And we’ll make sure nobody will ever find you, too.”

  “You got a call Hemp was going to have Sharyn killed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you—”

  “Took care of it,” Cross interrupted, deliberately avoiding any details. Tracker had reported to him, and it wasn’t a report he wanted to share with the others.

  “It was a head shot. Only way to make sure. At that distance, it’s easier to stop a high-speed round from being a kill-shot. Only time for one try—I wasn’t going to use a suppressor, not from that far away. If I couldn’t be sure, it would have to rain .50-cals, and that would be like calling 911 ourselves.

  “Only thing is, I put the one shot on the ‘X’ spot—he was dead before he dropped. But then his chest kind of…exploded. I couldn’t see that well through the scope, but the whole cavity opened, like it burst open from the inside.”

  “What’s with this secret-society stuff all of a sudden? If I’d known about it, I would’ve—”

  “You just answered your own question. The last thing we need is for one of us to step on a land mine.”

  “Killing Sharyn, that was just a play? To lure Ace out into the open?”

  “Ace? Sure. Him, and anyone else who couldn’t…control themselves. The hit didn’t even have to be successful. If Princess thought anyone had so much as tried to hurt Sharyn, he’d just stroll over to Hemp’s building, climb the stairs to the top floor where that punk has that f
amous ‘terrace’ of his, and start throwing pieces of him over the rail. And Rhino’d have to go with him.”

  “Hera!” Tiger chuckled, picturing a cartoon-muscled man in full war paint casually walking across town with a giant black-headed Akita on a chain that would take two strong men to lift, followed by a formless shape that dwarfed them both. A formless shape carrying an Uzi in each hand, with four more on straps around his telephone pole of a neck. “The only thing you’d shoot at any of them would be a cell-phone camera.”

  “Don’t leave out Ace. And he wouldn’t be walking.”

  “So it was just you and Buddha who could get cold enough to TCB?”

  “And Tracker.”

  “But not me?”

  “No, not you. Even if you could control your temper—which is always a guess—you’d draw a crowd.”

  “And Rhino and Princess, never mind Sweetie, they wouldn’t?”

  “Even a canned-heat-drinking schizophrenic off his meds would know enough to give them a wide berth. But every man you passed would just have to get a closer look.”

  “Huh!” Tiger half-growled, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “THAT PLAY didn’t work. But it won’t be the last one.”

  “Who?”

  “Hit the light switch.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “Tiger…”

  The room plunged into darkness.

  “I see it!” the Amazon whispered. “That’s their way of…warning you?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is, whatever they are, they’re not from here. And I don’t mean Chicago.”

  “You still think it’s this…tribal thing?”

  “Only way I could reason it out, girl. I’m not saying I did reason it out, just that I couldn’t come up with anything that made more sense. Ever since I got out of that basement in the MCC, it’s been there. Like a brand, only it’s…alive, somehow. I can feel it when it burns. And when I look, I can see it, too. But I’m the only one who can.”