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  “I told him,” Cross went on as if Ace hadn’t spoken, “ ‘I know you’re not a retard, and I know you’re not crazy. Just nod your head if you understand me.’ And he did. He nodded his head.”

  “Ain’t that special?” Ace remarked sourly.

  Cross continued to hold Ace’s eyes, going on with his story. “So I asked him, ‘Do you hate them?’ And he nodded again.”

  Ace didn’t say anything to that, keeping his silence because he knew what was coming next, the same question Cross had asked him during those first long nights in the Isolation Unit.

  “I asked him, ‘Do you hate them all?’ And Rhino nodded again. That’s when I said, ‘Then you’re my brother.’ ”

  Ace looked away, then looked back at Cross, pursing his lips thoughtfully.

  “You got the address of that witness?” he asked. “Man like that, he’s probably fool enough to step on the third rail when he could have just taken a cab, specially with all that rain coming down like it is.”

  IN THE back room of Red 71, the one shielded by a thick curtain made up of carbon-black steel ball bearings on wire strings, Cross spoke to the assembled crew. “This Ronni girl, we’d never have a problem with her, not if things weren’t all messed up by that punk. He was the problem. But now she’s the one who’s dangerous to us. She’s not on our side of the law, which means we can’t know what she’s going to do next. We don’t know when he told her he’d be back. She’s probably used to him lying, so that’s no big deal … for now. But he didn’t take any of his things—that’s the clear message to this girl that he expected to be coming back. She’s going to wait, but not forever. Then she goes down to the precinct and reports her boyfriend is missing.”

  “The police ain’t gonna give a damn,” Ace said. “Especially about no fancy-dress nigger.”

  “And he’s an adult, they’re not married, and there’s no proof of him being the victim of foul play,” Cross agreed. “But he wouldn’t have been with her at all if she wasn’t bringing in money. If he’s not there to take that money from her, she’s going to have a pretty nice pile. More than enough to pay some PI to have a look. We don’t want that.”

  “She is not a wrongdoer,” Tracker said, solemnly.

  “That’s right,” Rhino chimed in.

  Princess didn’t say anything, but Cross knew setting him in motion was ruled out as soon as he’d heard Rhino cosign Tracker’s statement. Sensing the atmosphere in the room, Cross smoothly changed direction. “But I’ve been thinking. You guys’re probably right. It’s not like she knows anything.”

  Cross and Ace exchanged the same look they had just before Ace blew away that pesky eyewitness so many years ago.

  I still don’t get it, Ace thought, as he had many times. The man didn’t look like anything special when we was just kids, and he paid all that money for plastic surgery to look like another kind of nothing?

  BUDDHA DROPPED Tracker off, leaving just himself, Ace, and Cross in the car.

  “If she gets hit outside her place, no way the cops don’t toss her apartment,” Buddha said.

  “Probably divide all that punk’s stuff up between themselves, too,” Ace said, more to voice his opinion of police ethics than with any actual hope there would be nothing left that traced back to the “player,” whom nobody but his mother would miss.

  “Tracker said it was just one of those cheap condo-conversions. No doorman, no security, no cameras.”

  “So we can get in and—what?—carry all his stuff away?”

  Cross just shook his head at Buddha’s sarcasm.

  “Come on, boss. He’s probably got some kind of record, and even if we took every single thing of his, there’d still be his prints, his DNA.…”

  “Man, you in love with that big-bang stuff, huh?” Ace said.

  “The right tool for the job, that’s the rule,” Buddha defended himself. Lamely.

  “What we need is a fire,” Cross said.

  “And a homicide? Yeah, no way the cops ever make that connection.”

  “You guys want to let it go?”

  “Damn!” Ace snapped. “You know we can’t do that.”

  “So …”

  The car was quiet for several minutes.

  “If she was in the place when the fire started, and she couldn’t get out …”

  “The whole building? We can’t—”

  “Tracker said it was really a bunch of two-flats, in the shape of a horseshoe. And she’s got one of the end units.”

  “Still. Pretty hard to contain a fire that tight,” Ace said.

  “No reason to,” Buddha answered. “So Long says that most of the people who bought into those crappy condos would love it if they burned down. Some of them have already walked away. The others, even if they’re not upside down on their mortgage, they’d have their units insured for way more than they’re worth.”

  RONNI CLIMBED wearily out of her leased Camry. Another miserable night. She still hadn’t heard a word from Jean-Baptiste. And …

  Her thoughts were cut short by the neatly dressed white man. And anything she was about to say stuck in her throat when the man said, “Jean-Baptiste wanted me to come by and give you something,” as he took a small, neatly wrapped box from his coat pocket. “But you have to promise you won’t open it until later—he wants to be there himself, to watch you do it.”

  Oh God! That’s the right-size box for a ring, Ronni thought. Her mind was still swimming as the man accompanied her to her second-floor unit. He placed the little box on the night table next to the cordless phone, and turned to leave.

  Ronni followed him, so she could close the door after he left. Suddenly the man whirled and drove a fist deep into Ronni’s abdomen, taking the breath from her lungs.

  When she came around, she was seated, handcuffed to a chair, and gagged with duct tape carefully circled around a thick pad of gauze.

  Another man was there, too. A short man with dark hair and dead eyes. He tied off a vein in her left arm, and smoothly injected a go-home shot of damn-near-pure heroin. As soon as she slumped, he began to create a series of injection tracks, not only in both arms, but even between her toes, using a needle designed to create scarring. The police autopsy would note the track marks as “aged.”

  The two men removed the duct tape and handcuffs, gently placing Ronni under the bedspread, her head on a scented pillow.

  “The people downstairs gonna be leaving for work in a few minutes.”

  “I know,” Cross said. “And it’ll be light soon, too.” He lit a cigarette from the pack he found in Ronni’s handbag. Then he spilled an entire can of Roach-Murder so that the trail ran from the half-kitchen to the bed. Leaving the can where it had been, under the sink, Cross distributed the contents of three more throughout the closet, leaving the door open. Those cans went into a black plastic bag.

  As the two men slipped away, the flame trail had already begun.

  “Let the marshals look for some ‘accelerant’ now,” Buddha said as they drove away. “Ace was right—this one’s gonna be written up as just another dope fiend who fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand.”

  “Yeah,” the man in the passenger seat said. “Accidents don’t make decisions—they just happen.”

  THE SHARK CAR slowly crawled the length of the block. Guided only by its running lights, mufflers on maximum choke, it was a barely discernible presence.

  “Black on one side, Latin on the other,” Ace said.

  “But not one gang, either side?” Cross asked, in the manner of a man who wanted to make very sure a jury-rigged “bridge” of slatted timber would hold his weight.

  “Not even close, brother. The blacks all the same tribe, but what they know, they don’t show. Fools no different than they was back in the day—all about colors they wearing, not the color they are.”

  “Latinos even worse,” Buddha added. “Even if all the PRs could get it together, they’re out of luck now that MS-13 is supposed to be setting up shop. Tho
se locos get their supply straight from the Zetas. And La Eme is sticking a toe in the water, too. Now, that’s just business—so why get into a no-win war with the Norteños when they could just roll west?”

  “So this block is, what, like some kind of neutral turf?”

  “Worthless turf,” Ace corrected. “There’s no shortage of spots to sling dope in this town, so who needs this block, all full of civilians like it is? And if any pimp put his girls out here, the first condom some housewife spot in the street, you know the mayor’s phone gonna be ringing off the hook.”

  “And that’s taxpayers calling,” Buddha echoed. “Which means voters. Which means trouble.”

  “You think So Long’s play would work?”

  “Why not?”

  “Man wasn’t asking you, bro,” Ace said to Buddha. “You not exactly what us colored folk likes to call ‘unprejudiced,’ you see where I’m going?”

  “She fronts the money,” Cross said to Ace. “Every dime. And even with that army of crooks she calls brokers and lawyers, there’s no way to record a deed in this city without leaving a trail.”

  “True.”

  “And she can’t even cut the price she says a buyer paid—nobody’s going to be buying for cash in this neighborhood, so there’ll be recorded mortgage liens on everything.”

  “So what’s the problem, then?”

  “We know where to find people for just about anything in Chicago, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah? You know where we could find an honest contractor?”

  “YOU SAID I could have a dog!” Princess said petulantly.

  “A dog, sure. But that … thing is insane,” Cross answered, tilting his head in the direction of a huge white Akita with a black head who was doing his best to rip his way through the bars of a heavy-gauge steel cage.

  “You want him, he’s yours. No charge,” said the outlaw who specialized in training attack dogs for those who were always expecting unexpected visitors. “Some security-guard company had him. He tore three of them up. He’s probably been shot with tranquilizer guns more than all the psychos running around inside Kankakee put together.”

  “And you took him why, then?”

  “Well, look at him. That’s damn near a hundred and forty pounds of muscle. He’s faster than a cobra, too. Problem is, he’s ten times as mean.”

  “He’s beautiful,” Princess said.

  The trainer said nothing. He hadn’t stayed alive all these years by opening his mouth. Despite four grand juries, each of which had granted him full immunity, not a word of actual testimony had ever passed his lips. And he’d seen Princess walk over to one of his assistant trainers who’d just hit a Doberman with a “control stick.” A few seconds later, the assistant trainer was out of breath. Not from running, from the punctured lung, already pooling with the blood that would soon choke him to death.

  “He started it!” was all the maniac with the pansy paint had said. The trainer didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he wasn’t about to ask. That was one of his specialties, not asking. The unremarkable-looking man who occasionally visited always brought a big supply of bone meal with him. “A donation” was what he called it.

  “Rhino …”

  “Just go and talk to him, Princess. Don’t touch him. Don’t go in the cage. Just talk to him and—”

  “See if he wants to be friends, right?”

  “Right.”

  The bodybuilder’s arms were so overmuscled that he couldn’t walk without holding his biceps away from his body, giving him a rolling gait that didn’t affect his balance. The closer he came to the caged Akita, the quieter the dog got.

  Princess squatted down so his face was right against the chain link, level with that of the dog’s, who was now on all fours.

  “¿Quiere usted ser mi amigo?” Princess asked. As he had asked every man put against him in that cage in Central America years ago, ever since he’d been captured as a child. The snare was supposed to hold a jaguar, but the boy had almost torn his way free by the time the rifle-bearing killers reached the scene. They weren’t certain exactly what kind of feral beast they had snared, but they immediately realized it was worth more money than any taxidermist’s creation would be.

  Princess had endured what followed. Finally declared “¡Listo! ¡Listo perfecto!” by the sadists who were “training” him—anything to avoid actual combat with their own creation—Princess was thrown into the cage while still a boy.

  But Princess never wanted to fight—he wanted only to be friends. That wasn’t an option in a world where the only law was Inevitability. So, when the other fighter—fully aware of the rewards of victory and the price of defeat—would launch into an attack, Princess would overcome his disappointment long enough to fracture a skull, or snap a spine … whatever it took to make the fighting stop.

  “He started it!” began as his internal cue to create instant mayhem. Later, it became his war cry. Still later, his explanation. The only thing that remained constant throughout all those years was the final result.

  Princess didn’t like what he called “mean people.” Captured as a child, trained by bloodlust savages, he still had a child’s innocence. That changed forever one night. He had been riding next to Buddha and seen a gang of thugs attack a couple who had left a gay bar and went down the wrong street hand in hand. Princess relentlessly questioned the crew’s driver, repeating, “But why, Buddha?”

  Once he understood what Buddha had been telling him—that those men had been attacked simply because they were homosexuals—Princess asked, “But how could they tell? That gang, I mean?”

  Buddha patiently explained that the gang needed some visual cues, the more outrageous the better.

  From then on, Princess out-flamed Little Richard. It didn’t always work, but quite a number of gay-bashing gangs had overlooked the man’s obvious size and power under the instantly erased assumption that “fags won’t fight.”

  After that, it was the hospital for the lucky ones. Once they learned what had happened to the unlucky ones, silence was the survivors’ only option. They’d never seen who jumped them, but it had been at least a dozen of them.

  Word got around. Not only to the gay-bashers, to the police. That’s when Detective Mike McNamara, the man other cops called “King of the Confession Coaxers,” was brought in. “We need to know what’s happening to these gangs,” the chief had told him.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a crime, goddamnit! And we’ve had a lot of citizen complaints about it.”

  Some politician’s son must have gotten himself crippled for life, McNamara thought, but kept his face expressionless.

  “Look,” the chief said, “you know we’ve given you a long leash, Detective. You don’t share your informants. You don’t even register them. You roam around Cook County like you don’t even have a precinct. One day it’s Stony Island, the next, you’re in the projects. You snatch cars out of the asset-forfeiture pool whenever you want. We don’t even say a word when you go all over the damn world to fight in those tournaments—”

  “The International Police and Fire Games.”

  “Whatever. Those are supposed to be for amateurs, and you fought pro for years while you were on the job and never said a word to anyone.”

  “I always used my vacation time. And the Games aren’t for amateurs. The Russian team does about as much police work as I do competitive crocheting. All they do is train.”

  “Look, all I’m asking you to do is find out what’s going on, okay? I know you can. So let’s just say I’m asking you for a personal favor.”

  “I’ll do my best,” McNamara said. And walked away before he said something he’d regret.

  USING HIS single-malt voice—that uniquely Irish way of speaking that could sound so lyrical and carry so much threat on the same breeze—McNamara succeeded in piecing together a description of a man who would be too overdeveloped for a comic book.

  One visit to Red 71 had an
swered the question McNamara had been planning to ask Cross when he spotted Princess shooting pool with Rhino. Good Sweet Jesus! McNamara thought. That’s got to be him.

  Recognized by Rhino, McNamara crossed himself as if entering church, and was rewarded by a nod. In the back room, he found Cross, Ace, and Buddha. Whatever they had been discussing was of no interest to him.

  “That guy out there, the one playing pool with Rhino?”

  “What?” was all Cross replied.

  “He’s been ID’ed.”

  “By who?”

  McNamara laughed. “Whoever’s been busting up the gay-bashing crews, the chief wants them.”

  “DOA work for you?”

  The detective moved his head a quarter-inch.

  THE FOUR young men whose bodies had been unceremoniously dumped in a lot behind a Wilson Avenue flophouse were all known to the police. Records ranging from armed robbery to felonious assault.

  “Why would those guys get into fag-bashing?” the chief asked.

  “They probably got paid,” McNamara answered.

  It was the truth. The paymaster had been Cross. A meeting place had been set just outside the Badlands to lay out the job.

  After that, the only thing left was transportation to the dump site.

  And Princess was told he had to give up his hobby for a while.

  “I’M NOT letting that damn dog ride behind me,” Buddha said. “He decides the back of my neck looks good to him, then what?”

  “Sweetie wouldn’t hurt you, Buddha.”

  “Sweetie! You named that—”

  “Don’t hurt his feelings,” Princess said, solemnly. “He’s very sensitive. Besides, he’s going to ride in my lap, so you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  Buddha exchanged a look with Cross.

  “Don’t look at me,” the crew leader said. “Remember, this whole thing was your wife’s idea.”

  “THIS ONE,” Buddha said, nosing the Shark Car into the front yard of one of the five houses So Long now owned. He kept rolling around to the back. “It’s got the best sight lines.”