Drawing Dead Read online

  “It was the same artist,” Tiger told Cross. “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.”

  “A mural like that one…a lot of work.”

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

  “Neighborhood girl?”

  “You could say it like that,” the Amazon answered. “Let’s add it up. This girl—and she’s a pretty girl, mind you—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. Rhino ran her through our system. No hits—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, when it was only just getting dark. None of the bangers got hit, but a little child took one in the back as she was running for cover. Died in the street, waiting for transport to a hospital.

  “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 pretty girl, the painter, 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.”

  The screen was still filled with the mural when a pair of playing cards materialized over it, just as Ace had described to Tiger. This time, it was the ace of hearts and the jack of spades.

  “Stayed like that for almost ten minutes,” Tiger said. “Then it just…disappeared.”

  “Same time?”

  “Yeah. Like it was filling in the crack between night and dawn.”

  “Got a date on that thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “You checked, right? So…anything happen that night?”

  “Anything…?”

  “Come on, Tiger. You know what I mean: violent deaths?”

  “Not in that neighborhood.”

  “But…?”

  “You remember that puny little ‘Führer’? The one that ended up with a long sentence for plotting to kill the judge who sentenced him?”

  “Sure. But that was—”

  “Few years ago, I know. Anyway, he put together some ‘followers.’ He’s locked in PC, but that Facebook page his ‘storm troopers’ put together claimed he was secretly running the AB from Inside. He went from a terrified little twit to shot-caller for the heavy hitters. Magical, huh? Only that was pure Facebook baloney. Still, somebody didn’t like it much.”

  “He got—?”

  “Not him. That little group of play-Nazis. The ones that put up that Facebook post. They had a storefront. And I mean ‘had’…past tense.”

  “Bomb?”

  “Nope. Five people—two female, three male, none of them over twenty-five—all got shot in the head. What the papers love to call ‘execution style.’ The shooters sprayed ‘AB’ over everything in there—walls, computers, posters.”

  “What happened to the Facebook page?”

  “Nothing, Rhino says. But it hasn’t been updated since that night.”

  “So where’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know, okay]”

  “Sssshhh, girl. There’s nothing to get worked up about.”

  “Really?” Tiger said, reflexively touching the knives in her holster. “I’ll buy that. I’ll buy it the minute you explain how Ace’s calling card changed color. How did the ace of spades turn into the ace of hearts?”

  Cross felt the spot below his eye burn, as if in answer to the warrior-woman’s question.

  THE MONITOR showed a blended-race woman dressed in a orange jumpsuit with DOC · ILLINOIS black-stenciled across the back. She was standing on an adjustable-length ladder that widened out to form a platform above the top rung.

  The woman was facing a freshly whitewashed stucco wall, dipping a variety of paintbrushes into an assortment of small cans, working steadily but unhurriedly. If keeping her back to an empty lot in “claimed” gang territory concerned her, she gave no sign.

  The mural was a thick ribbon of varying shades of purple, from pale lavender to a murky violet to a near-black plum, the ribbon itself flowing from ground level toward the top, the reverse of a river’s path down a mountainside. Within it were a series of portraits, men and women, all different races represented. Some were instantly recognizable, some not.

  “Who’s that?” Cross asked, tapping his finger on the monitor’s image of a sharp-featured young white man.

  “Wesley Everest,” Rhino answered immediately. “An icon to the Wobblies. Served in World War I, lynched in Centralia, Washington, in 1919. The IWW still has a Chicago office.”

  “This one’s loaded with faces like that. What’s the—?”

  “Some are symbolic,” Rhino said. “The police officer, see the ‘BOSS’ on his helmet? That was the old Bureau of Special Services, the Red Squad of the forties reactivated during the sixties to deal with the Weathermen and other anti-Vietnam activists. But see the looping arrow? It circles from that pile of black boulders back around to Fred Hampton. And—”

  “Who—?”

  “Fred Hampton was the leader of the Black Panthers in Chicago. A very small group, nowhere near the size of the street gangs. But the Panthers were a serious threat to them, anyway.”

  “How?”

  “The gangs always flew under the banner of community service. Some even got federal grants to run literacy programs, things like that. But they used most of the money to buy drugs and guns. The Panthers were actually trying to do those things: Breakfast for Children, GED programs…

  “And guns, sure—that was kind of a trademark with them, the way they first got started. But not to protect dope-slinging turf. The contrast could not be missed. It didn’t matter what the newspapers said; people who actually lived in the places they were writing about, they could see for themselves.”

  “How did that all play out?” Tiger asked.

  “Fred Hampton was killed in a police raid. The police said a tipster told them he was stockpiling bombs. The house he was living in was hit with enough rounds to kill a whole village. The ground-level belief is that it was an assassination. Cold-blooded slaughter. Either way, that was pretty much the end for the Panthers here.”

  “So those black boulders—”

  “Blackstone Rangers. The mural is saying they were the so-called tipsters. It was an everybody-wins deal. The Rangers re-invented themselves a number of times. But any claim that BOSS was some kind of patriotic force within the Chicago PD kind of went to hell when some of the Rangers made a deal with Qaddafi to blow up Sears Tower.”

  “What]”

  “It’s well documented, Tiger,” Rhino said calmly. “And this was decades before the World Trade Center. Qaddafi was a madman—Osama Bin Ladin to the tenth degree. It was his vision that he could become the World Leader of All Muslims, the Ultimate Ayatollah. That’s why he financed the Lockerbie bombing…and who knows what else.

  “Whether he was sending troops over the border to ‘reclaim’ Chad or paying famous people to entertain at his parties, being insane was always in there, somewhere.”

  “That’s him, over in the left-hand corner?” Cross asked, indicating a man dressed in traditional Muslim robes but wearing what looked li
ke a yacht captain’s hat.

  “Yes. That mural, it’s a connect-the-dots piece. Those young white people over to the other side—see the jail bars in front of some of the images? And the others kind of clumped together in some banquet room? Mural Girl, she’s saying calling them all ‘revolutionaries’ doesn’t make them comrades. Some came in from being on the run, worked out no-jail deals, wrote their books. But not all of them had those options. Some are dead from gunfire, some still doing their life sentences.”

  “So the message of that mural is supposed to be…what?”

  “That’s not what’s important,” Tiger said, confidence back in her voice. “Watch this.”

  The screen flickered. The image of the mural disappeared. In its place, a fan of five cards: three aces, two eights.

  “A full house,” Cross said. “Poker. Not those blackjack hands like before.”

  “Look closer,” Rhino said. “All three aces are spades, both eights are hearts.”

  “Dead man’s hand,” Cross said softly, “only with an extra ace. It’s not hard to read, not now. But how’s this help us?”

  As he spoke, the cards vanished and the mural reappeared.

  “I don’t know,” Rhino said. “But they…whoever they are, they’ve got their eye on Mural Girl.”

  “Five cards, Cross,” Tiger said, so softly she might have been speaking to herself. “Like Buddha said before, five OGs. So maybe they’re making sure you understand who their message is for.”

  FOR THE working outlaw, midnight is morning; darkness is dawn.

  “It ain’t like last time,” Ace said. “Not even close.”

  “Because last time we jumped it off? That whole ‘urban renewal’ deal So Long cooked up?”

  “Hey! That brought in a nice chunk,” Buddha said, defending his wife, a beautiful, seemingly ageless woman who wore larceny as another might wear lipstick.

  “Okay!” Cross shut down any potential sidetracks. “That doesn’t matter. Those cards, sure, that has to be a message from…I don’t know what to call them…‘Simbas’ doesn’t feel right, but that’s the closest I can come.”

  The room went silent, as if waiting for Cross to finish.

  “Look,” the gang leader said, very softly, “I know it’s all guessing about…them. But they’re not pulling Mural Girl’s strings. I don’t know why they’re protecting her, but she’s not just some channel for their messages—she’s got her own story to tell.”

  “For the bangers, maybe,” Ace added. “Something about unity, you think? Even the biggest gangs, they’re all broken down into sets now. There’s no central leadership, like before. And that spot Mural Girl works in, only time you don’t hear gunshots is when some fool’s using a silencer.”

  “Mural Girl is telling about the failure of a revolution,” Rhino squeaked. “Too many generals, not enough soldiers. No shortage of martyrs, though. Or of informants, either.”

  “Hemp isn’t the key to any of this,” Cross said, his voice as flat as ever. “There isn’t enough money in Chicago to make him send a hit man after Sharyn. He was a dead man as soon as he gave the word.”

  “Boss, he had to know that,” Buddha said. “Kind of like Mural Girl was saying. Everyone had to…I don’t know…maybe play a part to be a part, okay? But maybe Hemp wasn’t going for that. Maybe he wanted it all. Not enough for the sets to just consolidate, they all had to be slinging for him. That was the deal he put out there: anyone who doesn’t get the message gets dead.”

  “Shows that he can take out anyone who doesn’t go along? That’s what Ace was for? Send that message?”

  “Send it, yeah, that would do it…if he pulled it off. But say he did, he’d have to get all of us to make that work, and—come on, who’s that crazy? What was his plan? Set up a PO box in a graveyard? Turn zombie and open a bank account?”

  “Is it possible this Hemp was not actually responsible?” Tracker asked.

  “He’s sure as hell responsible for the hit ticket,” Cross answered. “The one who let us know, the guy who thought he was gonna get paid—paid by us—he spelled it out. And it went down just like he said it would.”

  “Who’s ‘us’?” Ace said. “Doesn’t matter who picked up on the rolling bounty we got out there, me, I wasn’t told.”

  “You wouldn’t be cold enough,” Tiger said. “I know that’s your rep, and you earned it. But compared to this one”—she nodded her head in Cross’s direction—“you’re always on full boil.”

  “It was the tactically correct decision,” Rhino said, to defend the only man he had ever dared to trust while in captivity. “Sharyn was never in danger. She was inside, with her children, in the safe room. I was behind the front door, Buddha at the back. The only thing actually in the yard was a speaker system. If the informant was wrong—or lying—it would not have changed the result.”

  “So what’s next?” Ace asked, grimly.

  “Whatever it is, we have to wait for it,” Cross said. “Whoever put this game together, they’re not some ghetto grabbers. For them, Hemp wasn’t a player; he was a chip.”

  THREE DAYS later, the entire crew was assembled in the back room of Red 71.

  Cross stood facing the others—a blue marker in his right hand, a blank whiteboard to his left. To a casual observer, he might have been the head of an ad agency, brainstorming with his team.

  “It’s been quiet,” he told the group. “Nobody’s made a move. Waiting, that’s fine. But it can’t be permanent. So let’s see what that leaves us.”

  “Guesses?” Tiger snarled. “That’s what we’re down to now?”

  “No,” Tracker said. “We have to start eliminating what we can before we—”

  “—start eliminating everything that’s left,” Ace sliced in.

  Cross patted the air in front of him with both hands, in a “Calm down!” gesture.

  The black-masked Akita made a sound deep in its throat.

  “Ssshh, Sweetie,” Princess told the dog, patting its triangular head. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  If any of this made the gang leader impatient, he didn’t show it.

  “One,” he said, writing the number on the whiteboard, “it was Ace they wanted. But they’ll never try Sharyn’s house again.”

  “And it wouldn’t matter if they did,” the slender man in his trademark black Zorro hat and matching leather duster said. “I sent them all back down home—Sharyn’s home, I’m saying. She still owns that little piece of land where she was born. Her daddy has a place there. He’s a real old man, but he ain’t never lived no place else. Got himself a lot of respect. People down there, they’d take a hard look at any stranger. If they didn’t like what they saw, he wouldn’t be a tourist no more; he’d be there to stay.”

  “Two,” Cross went on, as if Ace hadn’t spoken, “the real target was Hemp. He was a dead man from the second he gave that blackout order.”

  “That would be too elaborate,” Rhino squeaked. “Anyone who could hire Hemp to murder someone could hire someone else to murder him. Why move in circles? Why involve us at all?”

  “So what’s ‘three’?” Tiger snapped.

  “There’s more than three,” Cross said, calmly. “I don’t know how anyone could have wanted Sharyn dead. Who gains from that?”

  “Yeah, I was wondering when you’d get to that,” Buddha said, bitterly. “We all know how the Trust was set up. Everything’s in my name. This dump, the Double-X, the—”

  “So?” Tiger cut him off.

  “So it’s a tontine. The way it works, if we’re all gone, everything’s supposed to be split between Sharyn and So Long. And you all think she’d—”

  “There’s a safety net under that,” Cross said. “You know it, I know it…and So Long, she knows it. Nobody’s greedy enough to steal the money to finance their own funeral.”

  “Ah, he’s right,” Buddha said. “So Long, she knows how it would work. I’m not saying she was happy about it when I told her, but she’s got nothing to
gain from Sharyn being dead. I mean, all of us, we’re still alive and—”

  “She would not be,” Tracker finished the sentence.

  “You think Mural Girl knows what this is about?”

  “How could she? She’s got her own messages to spread. But that…that hologram thing or whatever it is, that’s tribal. And not on this plane. Something parallel to us, as near as I can figure.”

  “Yes,” Tracker said. “The Simbas. The tribe you described for those government people who hired me and Tiger.”

  “You back to that voodoo stuff again?” Buddha scoffed.

  “Every tribe has a name for what it fears,” the Indian answered, as if Buddha was actually seeking information. “Every tribe has a name for what it cannot explain. It has always been so.”

  “I never met a bulletproof ghost, myself,” the pudgy sharpshooter said, holding his position. Unchanging ever since the presence Cross called “Simbas” had entered the gang’s world.

  “Me, either,” Cross said. “But I never met a ghost, so it’s not something I ever tested.”

  “That does not mean what you call a ‘ghost’ has never met you,” Tracker said, his tone clearly communicating that he was done with the topic.

  THE ROOM went quiet.

  Cross opened his left hand. A flame sprouted from his cupped palm; he lit the cigarette he was holding in his right from it. Nobody reacted. They had all seen this too many times to be impressed. Collectively, they assumed that if Cross wanted them to know how that trick worked he would have told them.

  The gang leader took a long, deep drag, as if he was considering what he was about to say. Then:

  “You remember the lunatic? The one who never left that…attic, or whatever you call what his parents had built for him?”

  “They weren’t trying to protect him,” Rhino said, bitterly, “just make him invisible. But after they were killed by that drunk driver, he had to use what he had, all by himself. And he was a genius, with plenty of money.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It was a long time ago,” Cross told Tiger, as if that was all the explanation she’d need.