Blackjack Page 4

  Cross merged his body with the shadows as he waited against the wall of a gas station. Long ago abandoned, the cement building was now an outpost on an urban prairie, surrounded by flatlands peppered with scraps of old cyclone fence. Rusted concertina wire trailed on the ground, derelict cars dotted the deserted street, half-starved dogs skulked in unconscious imitation of the rats they were reduced to hunting.

  A black stretch limo pulled up. An over-muscled, blank-faced man with a distinctly small head climbed out of the front passenger seat. He stood by the door, arms crossed over his chest, pumping himself up. After so many years, those movements were pure habit.

  Cross stepped out of the shadows.

  The window in the back compartment of the limo descended. A cancerous voice floated out: “You have it?”

  “Like I said,” was the only reply.

  The extra-wide back door swung open, a clear invitation. Cross entered, unaware that a tiny black blob had followed him. The blob was unseen by the bodyguard, who continued his posing before the mirror that was always in his mind.

  The only human occupant of the back seat was a toadish little creature. He held out a severely mangled hand, with clawed, yellowish nails. Cross dropped the book into his palm.

  The toadish man immediately began skimming through the book, following the entries with a skeletal finger.

  “¡Verdad! The real thing. ¡Dios mío! You are as good as they say.”

  Cross reacted to the praise with a question he has asked many others, many times.

  “¿Dónde está mi dinero?”

  “Huh! ¿Sabes español?”

  “Suficiente para esto.”

  “¿Esto?”

  “Mi dinero,” Cross repeated, making it clear that his language skills were limited to his sole area of interest.

  “¿Su dinero? Right here, amigo. Money, it means nothing. Here,” he said, handing over a slim aluminum attaché case, “count it for yourself. What I have purchased from you tonight is so much more precious. By next week, I will control all of Esteban’s territory.”

  Disdaining any gesture of respect, Cross took the toadish man up on his offer to count the money, quickly but carefully.

  As Cross counted, the toadish man said, “You know, amigo, I like you. I thought that little bit of unhappiness down south could become … perhaps a problem between us? But now I see you understand how the world truly works. That was only business then. And this is business now. What else matters?”

  Cross shrugged his shoulders, as if the statement was beyond debate.

  “You are a true professional,” the cancerous voice said. “Revenge, that is for amateurs. Children who may never grow up to learn the reality of life. We are a dying breed, you and I. Dinosaurs. It is good we can still do business with each other. Now, while there are some of us still alive.”

  He offered his mangled hand. Cross grasped it, the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his own hand clearly visible. Without another word, he stepped out of the limo, the attaché case in that same hand.

  As he did so, a blotchy mass coalesced across the top of the abandoned gas station, disturbing only the molecules of air it displaced.

  “Dying breed,” bubbled from the shadowy blob.

  Five seconds of silence followed. Then:

  “Me da una tarjeta de.”

  As the limo rounded the next corner, the blotchy mass flowed down the side of the gas station. It was still moving when Cross, unaware of any other presence, took the transmitter from his coat pocket and pressed its single button.

  The limo disappeared in a blast that looked low-yield nuclear in the fireball of its intensity. All that remained was a crater in the empty street. A few scraps of human flesh mingled with metallic flakes as they floated gently to the ground.

  By then, Cross was already several blocks away, behind the wheel of one of the “abandoned” cars. He drove for another couple of minutes, re-“abandoned” the car, and disappeared into the dark.

  He never saw the two playing cards floating down to the crater left by the annihilated limousine. Or the total disappearance of the shadow that had followed him inside the limo.

  The floating cards were a suited pair: the ace and jack of spades.

  CROSS DIDN’T go far. Against the back wall of a wood-planked, sawdust-floored bar, he walked over to a pay phone with an “Out of Order” sign plastered over the dial.

  Standing with his back against the wall, he picked up the receiver, waited a few seconds for a series of clicks, then said, “It’s done,” into the mouthpiece.

  Then he departed as unobtrusively as he entered, as visible to the patrons as a gentle breeze to an elephant.

  A SUBTERRANEAN poolroom was buried somewhere in the lower depths of the city. The building was not on any postal route, and the surrounding area had never been assigned a ZIP code. All of that property had been claimed by the city under “Eminent Domain,” and was marked on a planning map as a potential bypass to a nearby thruway.

  It would retain that status forever. In Chicago, politicians expect to be paid to “expedite” such projects, and not a dime had come their way since a developer had paid for the conversion to “Eminent Domain” status. That developer had conducted all his business over the phone, including the wire transfers. And had made no contact since.

  A sloppily sprayed red “71” on the side of the concrete-block structure might look like gang graffiti to a tourist. But there are no tourists in this part of town. On the far side of the “71” a red arrow pointed down, like the blood trail of a cape buffalo recently shot by a hunter.

  No experienced hunter would follow such a trail. The cape buffalo is the only animal which, when wounded, travels only a short distance … then turns and waits.

  To reach the building, it was necessary to traverse a vacant lot littered with abandoned machinery of every kind, from refrigerators to flatbed tow trucks. Concertina wire was strung randomly about, as if whoever had been setting it in place had lost interest at some point. Various dogs roamed at will. So did feral cats—the two natural enemies seemed to have reached a détente of some kind.

  There was no door at the outside of the building, just the red arrow leading to a dark, twisting flight of stairs.

  In Chicago, many things are whispered about the joint known as Red 71, but the only one that never changes is the street soldier’s credo: “If you don’t know, you best not go.”

  The owner of the apparently empty building was a corporation. Its officers had consistently refused all offers to sell during a prior real-estate boom. Word on the street was that the corporation had outsmarted itself, holding out for a bigger price during the long-since-gone “flip this house” mania.

  Another developer had razed the other buildings, cleared the land for new construction … and promptly gone bankrupt. Now the sole remaining building was worthless, surrounded by a huge lot choked with refuse and debris, with only the occasional weed poking its way toward the sun. It had been enclosed with a chain-link fence during its construction, but now that fence guarded nothing but garbage, and kept nothing from leaving—the dangerous dogs who ranged free inside its walls were clearly there by their own choice.

  The poolroom in the basement was the building’s only declared source of income, and that barely netted enough to pay the taxes … which it did, religiously.

  “We have to own our base,” Cross had told the crew years ago. “Own it legit. That’s the only way we can protect every square inch.” The entire crew had chipped in to make the buy, but, on paper, Buddha owned the whole thing via a closely-held corporation.

  Buddha was the only one with an above-ground identity, complete with an address in the suburbs and employment as a limo driver. He filed a tax return every year. Even collected a 20-percent disability pension from the VA, although it was paid to an individual who used another name. As per the corporate governance documents, half the building would go to his wife when he died. The other half would go to the children
of a man known only as “Ace”—those two were the only crew members with “heirs” of any kind.

  The poolroom was actually a subbasement. It stood at the foot of a winding stone staircase, and contained manicured green felt tables, spaced around the floor at a good distance from each other. Two corners of the room also featured small, round tables and empty chairs.

  Although some of the inhabitants were shooting pool, others used the felt surface as a dice table, or played cards standing up. Red 71 guaranteed the safety and privacy of all who entered for the transaction of outlaw business, from dealing contraband to putting out contracts. That guarantee no longer had to be demonstrably enforced. Word had long since conveyed the message that those who entered with a wrong idea of what awaited were never going to leave.

  The crowd was multi-ethnic, but there was no sense of rigid barriers, and the atmosphere was as non-violent as a Martin Luther King vision. No one entering the poolroom was searched for weapons—that would be equivalent to searching a street whore for condoms.

  Nor were there signs saying ACT STUPID AT YOUR OWN RISK—they would be superfluous.

  Red 71 was always kept well maintained, and usually stayed quiet. The similarity to a graveyard was too obvious to ignore.

  There was a fee for this atmosphere, payable to the elderly man who sat behind a flip-up steel counter, with a green eyeshade covering most of his face.

  The elderly man might be anyone at any given time. Looking too closely would be as absurd as asking him to make change. Or conversation.

  Cross was seated at one of the side tables, talking to a young woman whose back was to the room. He was positioned so that the two men seated to his right and left were between him and anyone who might approach. Even though completely unnecessary inside Red 71, the positioning was a habitual characteristic of this ultra-pragmatic man-for-hire.

  Cross, to quote a man who once did business with him, “don’t look like much,” but his economy of movement and hyper-vigilance marked him as a survival expert. There was a thick yellow lightning-bolt scar on his right hand, impossible to ignore. That hand held a smoldering cigarette. The woman was hunched forward, whispering urgently, studiously ignored by everyone present.

  Two young Chinese were playing a game of nine-ball in one corner. They dressed in traditional Hong Kong gangster style: black leather jackets over neon shirts, the top buttons opened to better display their gold-chain collections. Their hair was long and slicked straight back. As one chalked his cue, the other stepped close and whispered, “You sure that’s him?”

  “It’s him, all right. Just like Chang said. That scar on his hand, it’s like a brand—can’t miss it.”

  “Yeah? Well, I still don’t like this much. All of a sudden, we got some weird-ass white man in a cheap suit for a boss?”

  “That man ain’t our boss, man. It was Chang who told us what to do, not him. That’s our job, do what Chang tells us.”

  “I still don’t like that bleached-out dude. I don’t like nothing about him.”

  “Why tell me? You don’t want to do what some albino says, you know who you got to tell that to. Now go make a call, okay? Don’t matter to me who you dial. But if it’s not that blond guy, you on your own from then on out, brother.”

  Thus chastised, the young Chinese moved away, walking toward a bank of pay phones against one wall.

  INSIDE THE War Room, the blond man picked up a telephone and listened intently, his face a mask of concentration. When the speaker was finished, the blond man said, “Tell Chang, if this information was good, we’re all square. He’ll understand.”

  The blond hung up and immediately barked, “We got a locate! Basement poolroom—the one they call ‘Red 71.’ Get a team out there. Go!”

  “I don’t see why we can’t just bring him in,” Percy said. “I’ll bet I could make him a better listener.”

  “We don’t have that much data on him,” the blond replied, “but what we have indicates we’ll need a different approach if we want him to sign on.”

  “You spooks are all the same. ‘Data,’ my ass. He’s nothing but another mercenary, this Cross guy, right? If leaning on him don’t do the job, money will. One or the other always does.”

  He didn’t notice Wanda sadly shaking her head as she caught the blond man’s eye. “Show him,” she said.

  “Show me what?” Percy demanded.

  “The ‘data,’ ” Wanda answered, smiling evilly.

  WANDA THREW a toggle switch and the larger monitor came to life. An apparently abandoned building appeared, its status confirmed by a large sign proclaiming it an URBAN RENEWAL PROJECT.

  The camera’s eye moved closer. It showed descending steps, then a close-up of a man’s hand, rapping a pattern on a steel door.

  The door opened. A heavily muscled man with a circled black swastika on one biceps said, “Play or Watch?”

  “Play,” a man’s voice responded.

  “No charge, then. Players’ section is on the whole far side of the pit. See it?”

  “Yeah.”

  The camera panned to show several rows of unmatched chairs. Some looked more comfortable than others; most were already filled.

  The camera turned and looked directly at the door through which it was entering.

  “How’d we get all this?” Percy asked.

  “Undercover. Packing a fiber-optic multi-cam,” Wanda answered, speaking to Percy as one would a child. A slow child.

  “That’s a dogfighting setup.”

  “Uh … we see that,” Tiger said, disgust clear in her voice.

  “Oh, yeah; I forgot. You’re not just a psycho-killer dyke, you’re an animal lover, too.”

  “Not all animals,” Tiger hissed at Percy, the disgust in her voice now replaced with unmistakable threat.

  “Stop!” the blond man demanded. “You all signed on under the same conditions. What you’re looking at is the only footage we have of our subject, and—”

  “I don’t see no ‘subject’ there.”

  “Try some patience,” the blond man advised, wearily. His tone of voice clearly indicated this was not the first time he’d said that. To the same man. With the same results.

  Several minutes rolled by as the cameras swept the room. Shown: a betting board with records and odds posted, men negotiating private cash wagers, dog handlers setting out their instruments.

  And caged dogs. Some snarling, some in a near-frenzy, some eerily calm. All awaiting their turn in the just-constructed “pit” … which was nothing more than a square of piled railroad ties, with a white line spray-painted down its middle.

  “What’s that?” Tiger asked, pointing to what looked like a thin thread of black slithering across the top of the monitor’s screen.

  “Probably some little software glitch,” Wanda answered. “Not worth tracking down now. Besides, the show is about to start.”

  The crowd was mostly male, with a few overdressed women, all visible through a faint haze of cigarette and cigar smoke.

  A harsh white baby spot hit the center of the pit, illuminating a man wearing a short-sleeved red shirt over dark slacks. He brought a cordless microphone to his mouth and announced …

  “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we—”

  Suddenly, two men climbed into the pit area. One was white, thoroughly unremarkable in appearance except for a prominent lightning-bolt scar on his right hand; the other was black, with a triangular face defined by high cheekbones. He was immaculately and expensively dressed, his all-black outfit topped with a matching Zorro hat.

  A moviegoer might mistake the black man for a pimp, except that, instead of gold around his neck, he wore a very sawed-off shotgun on a leather thong.

  Before anyone could react to the intrusion, the black man swung the scattergun up and fired both barrels. The headless announcer’s body slumped to the floor as the black man calmly broke his shotgun, flicked his wrist to eject both spent shells, and reloaded both barrels using the same hand.

/>   The stunned silence was broken when several men in the audience reached for weapons.

  A high-pitched squeak—“No!”—momentarily froze those movements as a bunched group of spectators was torn apart by machine-gun fire.

  The momentary freeze turned permanent. Some in the audience held their hands away from their bodies in a clear signal of surrender. Others just stared, stunned and immobile.

  A large object sailed through the air and landed inside the pit. The camera moved in closer, showing that the object was a human body. Or, more accurately, was once a human body.

  The unremarkable man picked up the handheld microphone in his right hand and said, “May I have your attention, please?”

  If this was his idea of a joke, no trace of it appeared on his face, or in his voice.

  “Thank you. Now, please listen carefully. These are your choices: You may get up and leave this place peacefully, or you may stay. Those who choose to stay will not be given a second opportunity to leave. Anyone not moving when I stop speaking will never move again.”

  One of the dog handlers cupped his hands and called out: “Okay, man. Whatever you say. We’re out of here. Just give us a minute to grab up our dogs, okay?”

  A red blotch suddenly blooming on the handler’s forehead was the answer. Unlike the other gunfire, this kill-shot had been silent.

  “Nobody takes anything,” the unremarkable man said, in the same dry, flat voice.

  The black squiggle Tiger had pointed out moved along with the crowd. The multi-cam unit’s sound system was not delicate enough to pick up the single word, this time in English:

  “Hit.”

  Everyone still alive stood up. Players and spectators filed out, moving slowly, every hand held open and away from the body it was attached to.

  As the camera focused on the exit door, the voice of something close to human roared: “You started it!”

  The camera caught only a brief view of what looked like a human leviathan, moving inexorably as it tore through the dog handlers as the dogs would have torn into each other, ripping off body parts as easily as if dismantling cardboard.