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  “Surely you understand that not all military personnel wear uniforms.”

  “What I understand is that I had a drink in a bar with a gorgeous woman. And I woke up here. Wherever this is.”

  “Sometimes, it is necessary—”

  “What’s necessary is that I see someone in the chain of command. Someone that I know—not someone who wears campaign ribbons, or talks right. Someone I know personally. Like my CO.”

  “Unfortunately—”

  “Linton, James Thomas. Sergeant. Seven oh seven four nine one one.”

  “You are hardly a prisoner of war, Mr.—”

  “Linton, James Thomas. Sergeant. Seven oh seven four nine one one.”

  “There really is no point in this.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, there is. See, I gave you my right name. And you act like you already knew my MOS. But if you did, you’d know the serial number I just gave you isn’t a match.”

  “That isn’t our concern.”

  “Your concern is that you want me to dial someone long-distance.”

  “Well put.”

  “Linton, James Thomas. Sergeant. Seven oh seven four nine one one.”

  “I see. So an off-duty assignment, one that pays extremely well for less than a few hours’ work, that doesn’t interest you, Sergeant?”

  “I know what ‘extreme’ means to people like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “Like you. I’m supposed to buy that you’re CIA or something like that. But with that accent … Never mind that if the spooks wanted me to do a job they’d just order me, not put money on the table.… You picked the wrong guy.”

  “You are forcing me to … offer other inducements.”

  “Save your breath. I already know I’m dead. So I figure, whoever you want dead, the best way to serve my country is to let you just get on with it.”

  “There are worse things than death.”

  “No, there’re not. Just longer ones. And you’re not going that route, anyway.”

  “You know this … how?” the shadowed man asked.

  “You can’t torture a man into the kind of shot you need made. Oh, you use enough of … whatever you’ve got, you could probably make me pull a trigger. But nothing you do, nothing you threaten to do, could make me hit the target. And you’d never know, would you? Maybe some of your torture tricks might damage some nerve endings, mess with my eyesight … something like that.”

  “You are correct.”

  “I get another medal for that?”

  The faint light that shielded the shadowy man went black.

  CROSS WALKED past the man with the green eyeshade. As he reached the upper flight of steps leading to Red 71’s front door, the brand on his cheekbone burned so sharply he had to draw a breath.

  He sat down.

  The burning decreased.

  He started to walk back down in the direction of the poolroom. With every step, the burning decreased again.

  By the time he had pushed through the black-beaded curtain and was seated behind his makeshift desk in the back room, the burning was gone.

  Even rubbing the spot where he’d first felt the warmth didn’t bring it back.

  “HE WAS no use to us.” The voice of the man who had been shadowed when talking to the military sniper came through the Sat-phone’s speaker.

  “So you …?”

  “Eliminated any problem that might be associated with this,” the shadowy man finished the sentence, looking out through the bunker-slit of a thick-walled structure the same color as the sand on which it sat as he spoke.

  “Always the best way,” the voice agreed, less than a second before the bunker was hit by a drone missile.

  THE MAN seated in the back of a strip joint in the Near North section of Chicago was the heir to an empire awarded to him by those with the power to do so. He hadn’t expected such an opportunity. Still, he had to be cleared by the National Commission of any complicity in the deaths of both Costanza and his boss before the prize was awarded. He had not been present when that decision was made.

  “I don’t believe in luck,” one of those Commission members said.

  “Nor do I,” a much older man agreed. “But that doesn’t mean one man cannot profit from the mistakes of others.”

  “I still say—”

  “All respect,” the older man interrupted. “But if Damiano was skilled enough to orchestrate the near-simultaneous deaths of Citelli and Costanza, and did so in such a way that nothing pointed to him, Damiano would be molto pericoloso, would he not?”

  “How could he know he’d be the one we’d tap?”

  “If we picked a different man, and something happened to him, that’d be Damiano’s suicide note,” another man added.

  “Damiano asking to hit this Cross guy, may be the same thing? I mean, why come to us? Whoever he is, this Cross, he’s not part of our thing.”

  “Damiano, he’ll have some story to tell, no matter what,” the younger man said.

  “So. We are agreed, then?” the older man asked a question that none present took as such.

  THE SEATED man faced an audience of three men, who were also seated. Each of them had a man standing just to their right shoulder. The man in the center of the three had two men behind him. Neither of those men’s hands were visible—they weren’t there to light cigars or fetch drinks.

  “This town’s been full of contract men since way before I was born,” the man in the center said, softly. “But none of your people could find a single one willing to take on the job, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I wanted the job done a certain way,” the subordinate said. “Only that way. The closest anyone could get to the door of that Red 71 place is almost three-quarters of a mile away. And it’s not even a level shot—they’d have to be shooting down. That’s why I had to reach out so far.”

  “To Afghanistan?!?”

  “Yes. This guy, the one we wanted, we only knew about him because his spotter—that’s the guy with the range finder; he measures the wind, elevation … stuff like that—he talked too much. He was putting it around. The war was about to be dialed back, big-time, so him and his partner, they were, you know, looking for work.”

  “So?”

  “That guy, the shooter I mean, he couldn’t deliver.”

  “Not a man to ever use again.”

  “No one ever will.”

  “Yes, I understand. So you are saying, we have made no progress?”

  “I think we kind of have. This guy—Cross, he’s called—he’s a contract man. Best there is.”

  “That’s the guy you asked permission to hit?”

  “Yes. Because, see, we found out he already had a job. And the deal with this guy, he takes your money, you get what you paid for. Period. He’s strictly an outsider. He’d take money from anyone.”

  “So?”

  “So the guy he was paid to hit,” the subordinate paused for effect, “that was you.”

  “Me? How could that be? Before all that … craziness started, why would I be on anyone’s list?”

  “It was after,” the subordinate said. “But once we found he’d been hired, what I wanted to do was hit this guy—Cross, I’m saying—before he could make a move. That way, you’d be safe, no matter what. And we’d have plenty of time to deal with.…”

  The room went silent. “You’re crazy!” the subordinate sneered, to no one in particular. “What am I now, a fortuneteller? How could I have—”

  “Nobody said it was you, Damiano,” the man standing behind the left shoulder of the man sitting directly across from the subordinate said, very calmly.

  “Until just now,” the man standing behind his right shoulder added.

  “WE KNOW you already got paid,” the phone-voice said. “This is just to tell you, the man who paid you, he’s not going to need proof-of-performance.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.”

  “I’ve got friends in high places, now?”

>   “People told me you had a strange sense of humor,” the phone-voice said, just before the connection was cut.

  “WHY THE front door, boss?”

  “Got to test something, Buddha.”

  “You want me to go out first?”

  “If this works, nobody’s going out at all,” Cross said, touching high on his right cheekbone as he spoke.

  “SO WE’RE DONE.”

  “Unless you want to keep paying those punks to keep an empty apartment safe?”

  “Come on!”

  “And they’re not like most over that side of town, are they?”

  “Meaning …?”

  “They see you coming, they don’t run, they step to you.”

  “True.”

  “So, the way I see it, you owe them one more payoff.”

  “They always come all together, bro. Four of them.”

  “You drive—they know your car, right? Let Tracker and Buddha do the rest. We don’t need any noise when we finish this.”

  “I won’t even leave my—” Ace stopped, startled at the playing card he’d just pulled from his shirt pocket. He turned the card in Cross’s direction.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s an ace.”

  “Yeah. Supposed to be my ace. So how’d it get turned into the ace of hearts?”

  “Got me.” Cross shrugged, feeling the near-invisible blue brand burn against his right cheekbone.

  “I don’t like it,” Ace said, very softly. “You don’t think that those …?”

  “That’s not the question, brother. You’re thinking, could … whatever was here before … could it come back, yeah? Me, I’m wondering, did it ever leave?”

  “You’re not wondering,” Tiger said.

  All eyes turned toward the Amazon, but she was done talking.

  TWO NIGHTS later.

  “I want to show you something,” Tiger said to Cross. The two of them were alone in the back of Red 71.

  “I wish you would.”

  “Stop it! I’m not playing now. You know what a relay camera is?”

  “Picks up whatever it sees, and passes it over to a storage box. That way you can keep it running twenty-four/seven. The top security companies use them, so they’re not overwriting their own data.”

  “Not exactly a bodega cam.”

  “No. Those have to keep their tapes ninety days. If there’s nothing on them, they just hit the ‘Restart’ button. They aren’t exactly high-def to begin with, and after they’re on the third or fourth overwrite, whatever they pick up is just a jumble of black and white. Cops hate them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they end up looking for some dark-faced man in a black hoodie—guy could be anything from Greek to African, and even that’s useless if the stickup artist pulled a bandanna over his face. There’s no scale, so they can’t even narrow down the guy’s height. But the local TV stations will run the tapes—you know, that ‘Have you seen this man?’ crap—and when the cops don’t find the guy, people think they’re not doing their job. There’s tapes of two-bit ‘gangsters’ jumping over counters, pistol-whipping some poor bastard. Looks ugly. And it is, I guess. Still, those tapes, they’re really not much to go on.

  “But you know those nature shows? Where they set up a relay camera and just let it run, sometimes for weeks, or even months?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know how they make them real small now? The lenses not much bigger than the eraser on a pencil—you can plant them just about anywhere.”

  “Tiger, what’s with all this? You got something you want to tell me, spit it out.”

  Tiger ran both hands through her thick, striped hair, stretching like the big cat she was named for. Cross recognized the gesture. Not an attention-attracting move; it was a sign that the Amazon was in warrior mode, measuring the enemy’s strength, computing the odds.

  Cross lit a cigarette, saying nothing.

  He was already stubbing it out when Tiger said, “We found something.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Tracker. Remember, we were on the team that brought you in to get a specimen of …”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t pull it off.”

  “You sure?” Tiger said, very softly. She planted one haunch on the edge of the man-for-hire’s desk, a solid cypress plank that was balanced between a pair of wrought-iron sawhorses, and extended a long talon to tap Cross’s face just below his right eye. “Up close, I can see it.”

  “That blue thing?”

  “No. That only happens when … Well, I’m not sure what sets it off, but you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I can feel when it burns. But I don’t know what … activates it.”

  “It just looks like a tiny scar now. Nobody’d ever see it unless they were looking for it.”

  “I still don’t see where you’re going.”

  “Be patient,” Tiger said, a smile flashing across her lips so quickly that Cross couldn’t be sure it had ever been there.

  “I am,” Cross said, pointedly.

  “There’s a wall over on the South Side. The whole side of a building. Pretty much all that’s left of that building, actually. Ace showed it to us. It’s kind of a mural for graffiti artists. No gang tags. So nothing to overtag.”

  “Okay. So …?”

  “So what Ace told us was there used to be tags. All Vice Lords, but different sets, you know?”

  “Sure. That’s more West Coast crap—every few blocks, there’s something like another division of the same army. Gangs get so big, they start to subdivide. Supposedly started in Compton, but you can’t trust the wire on that. So you got Crips breaking into smaller units—48th Street Crips, like that. But here, even that’s not enough. Gangster Disciples may be the father, but it’s got a whole lot of sons: Maniac Gangster Disciples, like that.”

  “Right. But Ace showed us this wall. Like he wanted us to verify what he saw. Only it wasn’t there.”

  “Slow down, girl. Ace brought you over to show you something, but there was nothing to show?”

  “Yeah. And Ace, he’s the last guy on the planet to start seeing ghosts. That’s where we got the idea for the camera.”

  “Just show me,” Cross said.

  THE WALL had once been whitewashed, but time had faded it to a shade of ecru that seemed to blanket certain parts of Chicago. Parts known to be don’t-go-there dangerous.

  The DVD that Tiger was playing showed all kinds of ghetto artistry. Not tagging, more like murals. Mostly portraits and scenes.

  “Martin Luther King on the same wall as H. Rap Brown—haven’t seen those two together before. Look like the same artist did them both to you?”

  “It was the same artist,” Tiger said. “No secret about it. We talked to her ourselves. She said it was a ‘spectrum mural.’ Nobody bothered her while she was working.”

  “Who was watching her back?”

  “Nobody, is what she said. She’s not affiliated, and she wasn’t flying colors while she worked.”

  “That’s a lot of work.”

  “Took her a little more than two months, working every day.”

  “Neighborhood girl?”

  “Born and raised. But she’s not an artist, she’s an architect.”

  “So she could be earning some real coin.…”

  “Yes. Only she worked on that mural every day—I mean every day—and she didn’t have a night job.”

  “Somebody was paying her bills?”

  “I guess so. But she was living alone. By choice. I thought she was about twenty-two—but she’s damn near forty. Long-distance biker—bicycle, I’m saying, no motor—and she’s spent a lot of time in a dojo. Girl’s got legs of steel.”

  “Black girl?”

  “Mixed, I think. Not just her skin shade, her hair.”

  “You get Rhino to run her?”

  “All checks out. This girl—Antoinette—she’s all about off-the-grid stuff. Her building, where she lives, it looks like
about what you’d expect in that neighborhood. But there’s a solar collector of some kind on the roof. Rhino said she owns the building, but there’s no account with any utility. No bills for electricity, gas, phone, Internet—nothing. He was impressed … and you know what it takes to impress that man.”

  “What? He wants to put one of those solar things on top of Red 71?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Tiger …”

  “Tracker said you were very still inside yourself. He said he never knew a white man to be like that. How about you just relax for another few minutes, let me tell this my way, all right?”

  Cross lit another cigarette.

  “Okay,” the Amazon said. “Let’s add it up. This girl—and she’s a pretty girl—works on that mural every day. Nobody bothers her. Nobody even … I don’t know, it’s like she’s got protection everybody knows about, but it can’t be that. Like I said, she’s not with anyone.

  “Now, here’s the thing. Ace said there was a gunfight right across from the mural one night. Not late at night, just when it was getting dark. None of the bangers got hit, but a little girl took one in the back of the head as she was running for cover.

  “Just as Ace was coming back, first light, he sees a pair of playing cards on that wall. Huge ones, covering the whole mural. Two cards: ace of clubs, jack of hearts.”

  “Painted over what that girl was—?”

  “No. That’s just it. It was kind of like a hologram. Ace said he could see right through it.”

  “The girl—this Antoinette—she show up later?”

  “Yep. And went right back to work. The cards, they were gone. Like they’d never been there at all.”

  “Ace doesn’t see things. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, wouldn’t touch drugs.”

  “I know that.”

  “So that’s why you mounted the camera?”

  “Right.”

  “And …?”

  “See for yourself,” Tiger said, softly. “It’s just about to come up.”