Drawing Dead Read online

  “Except for me.”

  “Except for you,” the urban mercenary agreed. “And I have a guess about that, too.” He touched one of a series of buttons on the underside of his desk. “Just wait a minute….”

  TRACKER ENTERED the squid-inked back room as sure-footed as if it was a patch of sunny daylight.

  “Yes,” he said, answering an unspoken question.

  “But you can’t…I don’t know…read it?” Tiger asked.

  “A tribal symbol, maybe,” the Indian answered. “But no tribe known to me.”

  “Tracker saw it first. That’s how I know it has to mean something. Remember Buddha’s speech about OGs? He wasn’t wrong. There’s a five-man core—you and Tracker have your own work, and that comes first for each of you. So you don’t get a vote on what we do, but you’re not bound by any vote we take, either. You sign on or you don’t, job by job, always your choice.”

  “Just because you’re late to a party, that doesn’t mean—”

  “It is not the timing,” Tracker interrupted, managing to do so with an ingrained courtesy that stopped Tiger from being offended. Stepping closer, the Indian said, “You and I, we each have our own tribe. Our loyalty is first to our tribe, always. Is that not so?”

  Tiger flipped her striped mane in silent agreement.

  “Perhaps this is why only the two of us can see that strange blue brand. It must be tribal, but not from this earth.”

  Cross surprised them both by slowly nodding his agreement. “I don’t know exactly when it was…put on me, but I know it had to be when we were down in that prison basement, trying to trap that…thing, whatever it was.”

  “Goon squad,” Banner side-spoke to Cross, while looking in the direction the guards were running. “Must be some weird stuff going on over there again.”

  “What’s ‘over there’ mean?”

  “That whole block,” Banner answered, nodding his head in that direction.

  “Upstairs, it’s PC. Middle is for the psychos. Down is the Death House. Two rows of twenty cells each…with the Green Room in the middle.”

  “Green Room?”

  “Used to be the gas chamber, long time ago. Now it’s just an empty room. No executions here. For that, they have to move you to a Level Seven.”

  At the words “Death House,” a concrete-colored blotch semi-materialized high up on the wall behind the two men. As the goon squad moved in, “Death House” was repeated at below-human-threshold. Then…

  “Hit!”

  The guards began to club a prisoner repeatedly on his unprotected head, continuing even after the man slumped to the ground, blood running out of both ears.

  A mural flashed on the overlooking wall. The ace and jack of clubs appeared, then immediately vanished, leaving some convicts blinking. And the TV monitors blank.

  Cross sat next to Banner at the mess table. His mouth barely moved, but his body posture was so intense and urgent that other convicts moved as far away as possible.

  Finally, Cross stood up. Slowly and deliberately, he walked into the traditional No Man’s Land of cleared space between whites and blacks. A guard started to step forward but stopped in his tracks as Nyati arose from the black table and moved toward Cross.

  The entire mess hall was silent. Dead silent. The guards froze, knowing that if a full-scale race war jumped off in that enclosed space, they weren’t going to make it out alive.

  When Cross and Nyati were close enough to bump noses, Cross started to speak, his words inaudible to all but the leader of the United Black Guerrillas. When he finished, he stepped back an inch. Then he said, still under his breath:

  “If you buy it, there’s nothing else for me to say. I just told you all I know. For this one, it’s us against them. You believe that, then it’s the Death House. Bring whatever you want, bring whoever you want. But it’s only going to be the five of us doing the actual work. That means we all lose some men.”

  “All?”

  “All,” Cross confirmed. “No kind of body armor is going to keep them off for long. If they get to us before we’re ready, we’re done, too.”

  “Five? You and me, that leaves three short.”

  “Ortega and Banner.”

  “Banner? That Nazi’s already been breathing longer than he should. What do we need with two white men?”

  “Who’s the boss of the Hmongs?”

  “Recognized them right away, huh? They a seriously bad bunch. But they ain’t all same tribe, man. His crew, it’s also got Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese…probably others I don’t even know about. And, listen now, in here, they forget all that. They play it like an all-for-one mob. They got no choice. But you can see they really don’t like each other any more than they do us.”

  “It’s only the Hmong I want.”

  “Why him?”

  “I speak a few words of the language.”

  Nyati stared hard at Cross. And took the same in return.

  “Okay, man. It’s your show. What time?”

  “Midnight.”

  “Done.”

  “For the race!” Cross shouted. Before anyone on either color-side could react, Nyati echoed, “For the race!”

  Then, to the stunned surprise of the watching convicts, they stood in the middle of No Man’s Land and clasped hands.

  Midnight. The Death House area was clogged with convicts, still divided along racial lines, but not openly antagonistic toward one another. “Frightened” would be a better description of their mood; fear was the single unifying factor among them.

  Whites, blacks, and Latinos were all there, with a sprinkling of Asians. Everyone was armed with whatever they were able to procure from the broad spectrum of prison-available weapons.

  Soldiers just before combat act the same way in prison as they do on any battlefield: some smoke, some pace, some pray. Every man was anxious to get it on, and even more anxious for it to be over.

  Cross was standing with Nyati and Ortega, their backs against the gas chamber wall. One of the Asians approached, a short, thin man holding what looked like a strip of razor blades on a string. His face was unlined, but his eyes were not those of a young man.

  Banner detached himself from his crew and moved over to where the others were standing. “Deal me in,” he said.

  “Just you?” Cross asked.

  “Look around, brother. We’re all here. But it’s got to be me up front. I’m the shot-caller, so this is my place. Like you said, this is for the race. So, whatever goes down, I’m down with it. But I have to go standing up, see?”

  Cross nodded. He turned to Ortega. “Your man knows what to do?”

  “For this, I am my man, hermano. After you first talked with me, I reached out. What you say, it is true. It has always been true. All the way back to the Aztecs. The Mayans and the Incas. So it is just as you and Nyati called it out. For La Raza!”

  “For the race,” Banner echoed, but very quietly.

  Each man held up a fist, waist-high. And then they slammed them together in an unmistakable gesture of final unity.

  “You sure it’s coming, man?” Nyati asked.

  “Look around,” Cross answered. “If it wants to hunt the real life-takers inside these walls, we’re the best game in town.”

  The Hmong nodded but said nothing. Then he vanished.

  A shadowy blotch materialized within the densely packed men. It thickened and lengthened, gathering mass. Then it began moving like an anaconda through a swamp.

  Blood spurted wildly as individual men were torn into random pieces. Their body parts flew through the darkness until they hit the nearest wall, where a stack of ripped-out spines began to pile up.

  Some of the men tried to run; others stood their ground, desperately striking blindly at whatever was attacking them. This had no effect on the presence, which continued to work its way over to where four men stood against the gas chamber wall, two on each side of its door.

  The darkness was filled with screams as body parts co
ntinued to fly. A red haze formed, so intense it seemed to attack the darkness itself.

  Ortega slipped off to one side of the death chamber, Banner to the other. The Hmong was nowhere to be seen.

  Cross and Nyati remained, now standing alone. At a “Go!” from Cross, they both stepped back through the opened door of the gas chamber, still watching the inexorable progress of…something as it moved through the wall of human flesh.

  “Sweet Jesus!” Nyati muttered under his breath.

  “This is too soon,” Cross hissed. “I was sure they’d—”

  Cross cut himself off. The presence he felt to his right wasn’t the one gutting and discarding individual prisoners; it was the Hmong, joining them.

  The three men backed all the way into the chamber. Cross seated himself in the chair where condemned convicts were once strapped down. He lit a cigarette.

  Nyati took the other chair—dual executions were far from uncommon in Chicago’s past.

  The Hmong crouched in a far corner, covered entirely in a dark mesh blanket.

  A black mist approached the threshold of the death chamber. The men instantly realized the presence had been divided into small pieces by the slashing attacks of the mass of convicts it had oozed its way through. But then they all saw it begin to regroup into a unified mass. Slowly, it struggled to form a single entity. The black blob had been deeply wounded—chunks of its border were missing, and gaping holes were visible within its remaining mass. And yet it kept moving forward, as if the human flesh it sought would be the replenishment it needed.

  As the misty black mass entered the death chamber, Ortega and Banner slipped behind it and slammed the door closed. They dropped the heavy outside crossbar into place and took off, running.

  They didn’t run far. As soon as they reached the control room, both men threw a series of heavy switches, releasing cyanide pellets into a shallow pool of acid under the death chairs. A greenish gas immediately began to billow up, filling the chamber.

  “Now!” Cross yelled, reaching behind his neck and pulling into place a flat-faced mask with a dark filter over the front. Nyati and the Hmong did the same.

  Cross jumped to his feet, drawing a heavy bear-claw knife from behind his back. Nyati unsheathed a thick length of pipe and waved his wrist; a razor-edged arrow popped free at each end. The Hmong cradled a beautifully crafted blowgun.

  Without warning, Nyati and Cross attacked, slashing at the encroaching blackness…and finally penetrating the shadow-blob, which became more visible every time it took another hit.

  The Hmong was the last to act. Holding the blowgun as a brain surgeon would a tumor-seeking scalpel, he emptied his lungs to blast off a single shot.

  The shadow collapsed, breaking into patches of black on the floor of the chamber. But the patches immediately began to pool once again.

  Nyati crawled over to the mass, tentatively extending his hand.

  “It’s still alive. I can feel…something. Like a pulse, maybe. If we’re gonna finish it—”

  Cross pounded his palm hard against the door to the death chamber. Banner and Ortega threw off the crossbar and left it just long enough for two of the men inside to dive out.

  Cross pulled off his mask, opened his mouth wide, reached in, and wrenched the phony molar free. He pressed the top of the tooth, which immediately began to hum.

  “It’s down. In the chamber,” he barked into the mini-mike, his voice calm, precise…and urgent.

  The blond man was in the War Room, Wanda at his side. He was shouting into a fiber-stalk microphone. “All units. Go! Go! Go!”

  Percy was behind the wheel of the unit’s war wagon, cruising the highway closest to the prison. The human war-machine had picked up the blond man’s message and stomped the gas pedal, simultaneously hitting the red button on the dash that kicked in the twin turbochargers.

  Tiger and Tracker were already in the shadow cast by the prison wall. They moved in from different directions.

  Tiny black splotches began to reassemble inside the gas chamber. If the poison gas had any effect on this process, it was not apparent. Adapting its shape to circumstances, the blackness flattened itself to micro-thinness. Then it slowly began to probe the seals of the death chamber’s door, seeking an opening.

  Nyati, near death, was trying to stand, using a wooden spear as a crutch. Banner stood with him, still slashing with a prison-built sword. But he, too, was fading.

  Cross wasn’t doing much better. He opened his eyes just as the chamber door began to crack at one of the top seals, pushed open by something blacker than darkness. That blackness told him the Evac Team was going to be too late. He sensed the shadow calling to whatever pieces outside the chamber were still unattached.

  Calling them home.

  Ortega and the Hmong attacked the thickening blackness from either side of the door, but their knife thrusts no longer had any effect.

  Suddenly the shadow-mass stopped writhing. A tiny blue symbol glowed briefly on Cross’s right cheekbone, just below the eye. As the blue mark crystallized into what would be a permanent brand, Cross plunged into unconsciousness.

  The online edition of the Chicago Tribune screamed:

  RACE WAR AT FEDERAL PRISON!

  277 CONVICTS KILLED IN PRISON RIOT!

  “WORST IN HISTORY” SAYS BUREAU OF PRISONS

  “Tell me again, goddamn it!” the blond man said, almost incoherent with rage.

  “By the time we got there, they were gone,” Tiger repeated. “Maybe back to wherever they came from. The only trace they left behind was the body count.”

  “I’m done with this,” Percy said. “Taking one alive, yeah, that was a brilliant idea. Look what it cost! And all for nothing.”

  “As long as I’m the head of this outfit, I don’t give a damn what you think,” the blond man responded, back to his bloodless self-control. “Get out of my sight, all of you. I’ve got to work up another capture scenario.”

  Except for Wanda, all the others walked away.

  “WE COULDN’T pull it off—even that sealed gas chamber couldn’t hold it. A lot of men died. I didn’t. But that wasn’t some random thing, wasn’t just luck.

  “Luck, that’s like when a plane drops a bomb. It’s not aimed at any one man—it kills some, cripples others, and some just walk away. This…This was a choice. So that means there had to be a reason for it.”

  “You have any ideas?” Tiger asked.

  “Not a damn one. It wasn’t race—there were plenty of other white men down there.”

  “I mean this not as offense,” Tracker added. “But it could not have been some kind of moral judgment, either. You were not guilty of the crime that allowed you to enter that prison to hunt that…thing. That was a ruse. But you are not an innocent man, Cross. By law, none of us are.”

  “Princess is,” Tiger snapped. “He hasn’t got one evil molecule anywhere in that scary body of his. He’s like a huge child—”

  “I said ‘by law,’ ” Tracker interrupted. “Princess has no bad motives, but many things he has done would be crimes if judged by a jury. Rhino is no different. Had Cross not protected him when they were both very young, I don’t know what would have happened in his life, but if he’d had a choice, any choice, his would not be the life of an outlaw.

  “Ace kills for money. Buddha has no moral compass. Still, I feel that, somewhere back in their early lives, each was sent down a path from which no retreat was possible.”

  “Ace stabbed a man who was beating his mother,” Cross said. “If he’d had a real lawyer, the jury would’ve given him a medal instead of a jolt Inside. And Rhino should never have been near a prison. Buddha, all I can say is, the second I met him, I knew he was one of us.”

  Tracker nodded. “Only you are different, Cross.”

  “Me? What’s that mean?”

  “Of all of us, including myself and Tiger, you are the only one who is a true criminal.”

  The room went silent.

  A long mi
nute passed.

  Tiger’s hard-edged, sultry voice broke the quiet. “You can’t be born a criminal.”

  “This is true,” Tracker agreed, speaking as if only he and Tiger were in the room. “But Cross is…an enigma. He could have done many things with his life. He is extraordinarily intelligent, a master tactician, the finest strategist I have ever met. But all of these gifts are in the realm of crime. I don’t know why he was first imprisoned, but—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cross interrupted. “It was a long time ago.”

  THE MAN with the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand ground out his cigarette after the third drag.

  “This whole thing smells bad to me,” he said. “Hemp had to know what would happen if he took out Ace’s woman. That means he was trying to draw Ace out into the open. And there’s no upside to that move.”

  “Ace does not have your…coldness inside himself,” Tracker spoke. “He is an assassin, so not a man ruled by emotion. But if his woman, the mother of his children…”

  “I still can’t see it,” Cross said quietly. “There’s no way it makes sense. And nobody to ask about it.”

  Tiger slid off the desk and pointed a long fingernail at her wristwatch. The large digital display was flickering. “We may have somebody we hadn’t thought of,” she said. “We need a big monitor and some cords with heavyweight USBs on one end.”

  “Get Rhino,” Cross said to Tracker.

  As the Indian walked through the curtain of black ball bearings without seeming to disturb them, Cross turned to Tiger.

  “What?”

  “Mural Girl was working yesterday,” she said, again tapping her heavy wristwatch. “The camera’s still in place. Maybe the footage…”

  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 to you like the same artist did them both?”