Urban Renewal Read online

  When he hit that club where Taylor danced, she might have warned the bouncer to be on the lookout … you never know. So if he had to stand for a pat-down, he’d be clean. But once he got back to his car …

  Besides, all he needed was to make certain she saw him. That alone might be enough to scare her into giving him back his things. All his things.

  One thing he knew for sure: Taylor had a friend. A friend with enough money to hire that moving crew. So she might not scare that easily. It might come down to something else.

  He’d been ready to take that big step-up once. And he was ready if it came to that again.

  AS A rule, J.B. never touched powder. But every once in a while, he used it for what he called “boost.” Sometimes, to work his game, he had to go without sleep for a couple of straight twenty-fours, and there was nothing like a hit of what the old pimp had called Girl to keep a man sharp and alert.

  When the old man had first confided this, J.B. was less than eager to embrace it. He knew Girl was cocaine, just as Boy was heroin. And he knew the old man’s core belief: women were both the most loyal and the most treacherous of all God’s creations; to the pimp once known throughout certain parts of Chicago as “True Blue,” it was just a matter of picking those from the first group. And it took more than knowledge to do that—you had to have that special instinct. Not something you could learn, no matter how well schooled you might be. This ability was a gift, like having an ear for music. Either you were born with it, or you weren’t.

  After the old man passed, J.B. moved slowly and with great care. But as the years went by, he came to believe that this gift had been implanted in him, as if the old man was schooling him from the grave.

  So how could I have been so wrong about Taylor?

  If she’d taken just her own things—especially that miserable, mangy cat—he would have chalked her up to The Life’s Unwritten Law: They come, they go. The circle never breaks. But his stuff! The custom-tailored suits, the handmade shoes, his jewelry … Not irreplaceable, of course, but certainly a big hit on his wallet. Now, that was just plain evil.

  In the past, women had cut up his clothes, or thrown bleach on them. And left some kind of note, too. Girls who did that, he knew he could expect them to come crawling back. And he knew they wouldn’t even try that unless they came with enough cash to replace everything they’d ruined, and then some.

  Yeah, this was different.

  So it had to be dealt with. The word would get out, and his prestige—far more important than any wardrobe or car—would be damaged beyond repair.

  Not going to happen.

  Not to him.

  Not ever! he thought to himself, not realizing that he was giving up the protective coloration the old man had warned him was a cloak of safety. The need to send a message to that bitch had overpowered the old man’s warnings in a finger-snap.

  Coke might kill you, if you didn’t handle it correctly. But ego, no doubt about it, that would kill you. And the worst ego of all was the one you didn’t know you had. The one that was sitting inside you, calling all the shots.

  J.B. WENT through five of his one-time-use burner cells before he gave it up. Some of Chicago’s truly bad men wouldn’t accompany him to the Double-X no matter how much he offered. He couldn’t even get the Motley brothers, twin gunmen who were reputed to have kept one undertaker in business for a decade, to come into the club by themselves and just watch his back.

  “You know whose club that is?”

  “What diff—?”

  “The Double-X, even damn winos know it’s run by the Cross crew.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Guess you never heard of Red 71, either.”

  “What’s that, another club?”

  “Yeah, man. Just another club. See if you can get a cabbie to take you there.”

  “I don’t need a cab, man. I’ll just go—”

  “You know, me and my brother, we charge for what we do. But I’m givin’ you this one for free: don’t go near that place. You walk in with bad intentions, they turn you into dog food.”

  “That’s just—” J.B. began, before he realized he was talking to a dead line.

  RUMORS RUN through Chicago like white-water rapids. Anyone could watch them from a cliff, but trying to ride them, that was a job for an expert. The street racers worked on the fringe of the Badlands. No worries about the Law out there, but crossing the semi-trailer that marked one entrance was never done twice … not without permission.

  The dope slingers wouldn’t work a place where they’d never see a customer. Even the hookers who worked streets nobody should ever walk down gave it a pass. Some of the always-in-motion gambling houses had their own protection from raids, be it the police or some get-rich-quick boys who thought going in armed would change the game. But they never set up shop in the Badlands, not even for one night.

  All Jean-Baptiste could learn was that Red 71 was supposed to be somewhere out there, at the other end of the marked entrance.

  “If you don’t know, don’t go.” The old man’s words, still echoing. So this Red 71, whatever the hell it was, he’d leave that for some other time. But the Double-X, that was just another strip club. He’d been there before. Time to stop watching the rapids from a distance and climb into that kayak.

  HE WAITED for a Friday night, when the place would be packed. Money flowing, waitresses always in motion, sometimes grinding it harder than the girls working the stage. Everybody was overworked, and the security staff would be no exception. “Take it outside!” was the only warning any patron would get. Once.

  J.B. had to wait, but he made good use of the time. He did a pass-by in broad daylight, and was even less impressed than he’d been during his first visit. The building looked like a grayish concrete lump, casually dropped onto an empty prairie. It didn’t have the class of clubs with canopies and liveried doormen, not even the grossly garish neon tubing twisted into the shape of impossibly endowed women at the other end of the scale.

  He watched cars go in and out, using a small set of folding binoculars to distinguish patrons from employees. But there was no angle from which he could view where the entering cars were parked.

  They wouldn’t want the girls to have to walk through a parking lot. Not to enter, and sure as hell not when they were leaving. And there’s nothing to see around the back of the place.…

  Shrugging away insane ideas like underground tunnels, or a helicopter pad on the roof, he tapped one prominent cheekbone with a slender forefinger, a subconscious telegraph that he was trying to think a problem all the way through.

  Behind the joint. That’s got to be where the girls go. So damn dark back there, I couldn’t really see much, but maybe they park in a far corner.…

  Finally, he shrugged his shoulders in resignation and turned his custom Lexus coupe back toward civilization. Thanks to Ronni—now, that was one loyal girl—he wasn’t short of money, and he could keep dressing to suit his role for weeks to come.

  Maybe he should just let it go. Chalk it up to … whatever. But the bitch taking his property, that made it personal. And Jean-Baptiste was not a man you could do like that.

  “WHO WANTS him?”

  “You tell the man it’s Howard and Harold.”

  “Funny, you sound like one man from here. You some kind of multiple personality?”

  “Hey! I call the man to do him a solid, and you pull this—”

  “Next time you see whoever sold you those calm-down pills, be sure and get your money back,” Buddha said, gently replacing the handset of the pay phone in the basement poolroom of a building identified only by the number “71” graffiti-sprayed in red, with the “1” forming an arrow. An arrow pointing down.

  The same red “71” was carelessly sprayed on the sides of various junked cars which surrounded the building. The stone structure was set in the midst of what looked like a scrap yard at first; but the carelessly scattered old appliances, chunks of unidentifiable mach
inery, and things that might have once been furniture combined to give it the look of an above-ground landfill. An astounding variety of animal life ran, jumped, crawled, and flitted in the shadows formed by the rusting metal: cats chasing mice while fleeing from dogs who lived on the plentiful supply of rats, snakes waiting for either prey to run past their ground-level hiding places. Crows and other carrion eaters perched, watched, and pounced when an opportunity opened up. Such movements always diverted the cats, and the high-speed evolution of new breeds of each species continued.

  The vicious Chicago winters changed nothing but the hunting-and-hiding patterns. Snakes who would sun themselves on hot metal in the summer found hibernation spots without difficulty; the warm-blooded mammals still found live food, working very close to the ground. And the birds that frequented this bizarre collection of predators-and-prey were not the kind who went south for the winter.

  The pay phone rang again. And it was answered the same way.

  “What?”

  “This is Howard Motley, okay? I want to speak to Cross.”

  “Then you know where to come,” Buddha said, cutting the connection again.

  THE PERFECTLY restored black 1973 Firebird Trans Am—“the last of the real ones, right down to the 455 cubes”—rolled slowly toward the scrap yard.

  “I’m not so happy about this,” the tall, rawboned man in the passenger seat said. He had a darkly shaded mark on his throat that looked more like a tumor than an Adam’s apple.

  “You ain’t exactly a barrel of laughs most of the time,” the driver replied. He was a mirror image of the first speaker, lacking only the purplish birthmark on his throat.

  They were dressed alike, in long brown leather coats, heavy jeans, red corduroy shirts buttoned to the neck, and steel-toed ironworker’s boots.

  As if the pair of over-under .40-caliber derringers each man carried in the side pockets of his coat might prove insufficient, the console opened on a 12-gauge pump holding three-inch magnum shells, its barrel slightly cut down to sixteen inches. And the trunk held a pair of scoped M14s chambered for NATO rounds. Although those were not far removed from the .30-caliber slugs favored by deer hunters, no deer hunter needed a full-auto.

  And no hunting license would keep ATF from seizing everything the twins carried, anyway. But the “going quietly” synapses had never connected inside their skulls. They could trace their lineage back to ancestors who’d mounted skulls of “strangers” on the walls of their cabins with great pride.

  As the Firebird braked gently to a stop, the passenger said, “Don’t we have to leave our pieces in the car?”

  “Harold, I told you about fifty damn times. They don’t care if you walk in carrying a damn bazooka. Nobody’s gonna search us.”

  “That’s weak.”

  “You’re the one who’s weak. Why they need to search us when we’re walking into a place where we’re in somebody’s sights as soon as we start down the steps?”

  “I still say this is weird.”

  “Lots of things are like that. So what? You and me, we’re businessmen. We do business. We get paid. We got some info that’s worth money, but the only way we turn it into money is face-to-face. Got to tell the man himself.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause that’s the way they want it. And they the ones with the money.”

  “LOOKING FOR Cross,” Harold said to a man who looked as if he’d missed his last appointment with the embalmer. The top half of his face was invisible behind a green eyeshade.

  “Nobody here with that name.”

  “Look, old man, I was told—”

  The light tap on his right shoulder cut Harold off. He turned, and found himself looking at a short, pudgy man with reflective black eyes slanted slightly at their corners, as if he had passed through more than one womb at birth.

  “Just follow me,” the man said, turning his back and moving away.

  The two men trailed behind him, exchanging looks but not speaking. The poolroom was about half full. Most of the tables were being used for something other than their intended purpose. Some held a display of handguns, others were surrounded by men watching a dice roller throw against a board held in place by a triangular brace. Some tabletops were covered with cards, others with kilo-calibrated scales.

  Every race, creed, and color was represented in some way, as if this were the basement of the United Nations, with only practicing criminals permitted entrance.

  The short man with the inanimate eyes led them to a table in a far corner. A man was seated there, the bull’s-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand clearly visible as he held a cigarette to his lips.

  In response to a silent direction, the twins took seats to either side of the man they had come to meet.

  The man took another drag on his cigarette, ground it out, and looked from one twin to another, still saying nothing.

  “We got some information we think you might be interested in,” Harold said.

  The man with the tattoo on the back of his hand still said nothing.

  “Information that’s worth money,” Harold continued.

  “Okay,” Cross said. “What is it?”

  Sensing that a lengthy conversation wasn’t part of the package, and no drinks were going to be offered, Harold got right to it: “Guy tried to hire us. To hit someone who works at that club of yours.”

  “What guy? What club?”

  “The club, that’s the Double-X. The guy, that’s what you’re gonna pay us to tell you.”

  “Pay you how much?”

  “Say, five grand?”

  “Say goodbye.”

  “No, you don’t understand. We can tell you more than the name he goes by. His car, what he looks like, you know—so you can see him coming.”

  “Tell me what you have. I’ll tell you what it’s worth.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “That’s how it works here.”

  The twins exchanged a quick look, telepathically communicating: We came here for money. We call this guy’s hand, get up, and walk out, we walk out with nothing.

  “Guy calls himself Jean-Baptiste. Some kind of pimp. Drives a charcoal Lexus coupe with matching wheels—big, but not stupid-big. Got that black fine-lining, too.”

  Cross said nothing.

  “There’s a girl works in your club. This Double-X. Just started. Name’s Taylor. Black hair, maybe twenty-five years old, built like you’d expect. That’s who he wanted us to take out.”

  “For how much?”

  “We never got there. Soon as he said ‘Double-X,’ we knew better. But he was … desperate, like. So we figure, sooner or later, he finds somebody to take the job. Just follow her to wherever she’s staying, drop her soon as she gets out of her car. No big job, but he sounded like he was willing to pay big money to get it done.”

  “Five grand.”

  “That’s what I said,” Harold replied. “Info like this is—”

  “Five grand would be what you’d charge to do the job,” Cross said, his voice a blend of mild and menace. “One grand, that’s how much what you just said is worth.”

  “Hey!” Howard protested. “You don’t know what we charge for—”

  “You’re Uptown guys, so you’ve got kind of a limited range. Twins, people tend to remember that. And your car, too. I can tell you half a dozen jobs you’ve done in the last couple of years. And your price for each one, you want me to.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. But, like you said, info is worth money. So, for every job I name, two hundred comes off the grand. You want to play? Or you want your money?”

  The twins again exchanged looks, this time not attempting to hide their silent communication.

  “We’ll take the money,” Harold said.

  “It’s at the front desk,” Cross told him, lighting a cigarette in a clear gesture of dismissal.

  The twins rose from their chairs as one, and walked all the way back over to the desk. The old
man was still there. And a thin stack of hundreds was there, too.

  Harold swept the money into his coat pocket without counting it, and the twins walked back up the stairs.

  “WHY DID you—?”

  “Because the grand isn’t all we got,” Harold cut off his twin.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. See, if Cross didn’t think we were coming to him straight, he wouldn’t have paid us a dime.”

  “So?”

  “So Cross, that’s a man you never want thinking you’re not playing straight with him. You remember that little guy? The one who took us over?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s got to be Buddha.”

  “Who?”

  “One of that crew. I heard he once won a ten-thousand-dollar bet from some sucker who thought no way a man could ever shoot a damn bumblebee at twenty feet. Hell, you can’t hardly see one at that distance.”

  “And he did that?”

  “With a pistol! That’s what people say.”

  “Real people?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Damn.”

  “I know. I just wish we knew someone who wanted that pretty boy killed. He’s as good as dead anyway.”

  “I guess,” Howard replied, already back to his normal state: total indifference to anything except a threat or a target.

  “YOU THINKING what I’m thinking, boss?”

  “It was a mistake to bring So Long back with you?”

  “Hey, brother! There’s no reason to be banging on me. Anyway, we haven’t laid out dime one, so why even go there?”

  “You’re right, Buddha. Sorry.”

  “Huh!” the pudgy man sniffed, brushing aside an empty apology for something that hadn’t remotely offended him in the first place. “What I was thinking was, if that new girl at the Double-X, if she wanted her problem taken care of …”