Drawing Dead (12 page)

“IT'S BURNING
bright
now,” the Amazon whispered.

“I know. I can feel it. But I'm just…sitting here. Not even…not even
thinking.
So whatever it is, it's not warning me off. Or pushing me harder. It…”

“It…what? Doesn't make
sense
?” Tiger filled in the blank end of the gang leader's sentence, her voice still at whisper volume despite the sarcasm.

Cross opened his left hand and lit a cigarette from the flame.

Three drags and out.

“The only person I ever knew who was…”

Another cigarette. On the second drag, the tiny blue brand was throbbing. On the third and last, it flickered.

“Tiger, I got a problem. One only you can take care of.”

“I already knew
that.
”

“Stop playing around. I'm serious.”

“And you think I'm
not
—?” The deadly beauty cut her own words in midstream. “What do you need?”

“I need to talk to Rhino. Talk to him
alone.
There's only one way to keep Princess out of the conversation.”

“Keep your eye on what you're missing,” she said, throwing an exaggerated wiggle at the man behind the sawhorsed desk as she hip-slapped her way through the ball-bearing curtain.

LESS THAN
a minute later, she stepped back through the curtain, this time courteously held open by Rhino.

“Anything else?” she asked Cross.

“No.”

“Well, I'm not going to sit around looking beautiful when I could be having fun,” she purred. “Princess, want to go shopping? Just you and me?”

“And we can take—?”

“Sweetie? Of
course,
” she told the mass of muscle. “We wouldn't leave him behind, would we?”

“No! You hear that, Sweetie? We're going with Tiger! I need some new—”

“What
ever
you need, Cross will pay for it,” she said, cutting him off. Turning to the gang leader: “Right?”

Cross nodded expressionlessly.

“Come on, honey. This place is gloomy enough without listening to
him.
I once asked Cross if he knew any jokes. You know what he said?”

“Nothing?” Princess guessed.

“That'd be about right,” Tiger said over her shoulder as she walked past the desk, Princess and his homicidal hound following close behind.

“WHY ALL
this?” Rhino asked.

“Because I just figured something out. And it was nothing I'd want Princess to hear.”

“I already knew that last part.”

“Yeah,” Cross said, lighting another smoke. “I know you did. But there's something I
don't
know.” Another pull on his cigarette briefly lit his shadowy face. “Why did you go back?”

“Back?”

“As soon as you looked over those photos of him we Minoxed, I could see it in your face. You went back to the house where that thing lived. Years ago. Long after the Circle of Skulls was done.”

“How could you know that?” Rhino said.

“Because I know you. We go back together as far as you can probably remember. You couldn't leave it where
we
did. What if whoever gave birth to you had treated you the same as him? Would you have…I don't know….Would your life have turned out the same?”

“Yes. I had to know,” the behemoth admitted. “I don't remember much. About being a little kid. I know I was…I was intelligent. I was big, but not anything like I am now, not when I was first locked up. So why would they have just…thrown me away?
His
parents didn't. They did everything for him they possibly could, but…he still turned out too vicious to leave alive.”

“You're saying what? He was born bad?”

“I don't believe that. I never believed that. You don't, either, Cross. None of us do. That's why we've got a right to hate them.”

“Hate them
all.
”

“Yes,” the huge man agreed, again cosigning the prove-in for the Cross crew. “We're criminals, but not like…not like
they
are. Even Buddha, he'd never hurt someone just for…entertainment.”

“You went back to see if you could find anything that would…?”

“Actually, I never went back to that house—not really—just drove by once. How could I search that place? I knew the little bit that was left of it would be wrapped in yellow tape for weeks. And probably watched for months after that. That…thing, he wouldn't be there. Even if he had been, somehow…even if he had answered any question I asked, how would I know if he was telling the truth?”

“What
did
you do, then?”

“I went back over his life. At least, that was the plan. It wasn't
that
long ago—every public record from that era is databased. So I just walked into them—all that ‘security' is a joke. Even for the places where they keep stuff that's supposedly not for public viewing.”

“So what did you—?”

“He never existed,” Rhino said, his squeaky voice coming out like the rumble of a diesel's exhaust pipes, as it always did when he spoke very quietly. “His parents, there was no child born to their marriage.”

“You mean the cops went back in and—”

“No. Not a wipe job. It's a good thing you took those pictures of him—it's the only proof that he was real. I don't know what kind of system he had rigged, but I guess he needed to rearm the safety switches to keep it functioning. Push a button every day, maybe.

“We'll never know. But the whole top of that house blew off. Straight up, like a rocket. It only rose maybe fifty yards, and then it disintegrated. Something like that, Homeland Security would trump every other agency, and they've got the best forensic tools in the world. But none of that would matter. Whatever was still there was as close to atomized as that glass from the Twin Towers.”

“That had to be one of those ‘options' he was telling the freaks who made the gang-rape tapes he had.”

“Probably the only one. He could never survive outside that one environment, the one that was built for him. No way, no matter
what
he was.”

“So how did you find out anything?”

“It was those pictures of him. Something like that, how could you hide it? But no matter where I searched, there were no deletions, no gaps. No place to start, so I couldn't move forward.

“I found the records of his parents easy enough, and with those I could go back as far as I wanted. Married a little late, but nowhere near late enough to explain…him. The father was just turning thirty, his wife was a couple of years younger. If they'd tried to have a child, some fertility treatments, maybe…But there was nothing like that. And nothing to show anything went wrong with a birth, either.”

“But how could you make something—whatever he was—how could you make him disappear? What about the hospital admission record?”

“
That
was what got wiped. All I could learn was just that. Whatever he was, he
never
was. Never born, never lived, never died.”

“You're saying…”

“The father was a whiz kid. Scholarships right through his M.B.A. All the best schools. Not a blue-blood: he had to earn his way. The mother, now, she was born to the manor. The one her father had inherited from
his
father. All the way back—DAR throughout the maternal line. At first I thought, okay, his father had the brains, his mother had the contacts, how could you mix a better formula for success?”

“He was a stockbroker?”

“Better. Capital management. He was good at it. Fast-tracked to upper echelons, other investment banks always looking to poach him. By the time he died, he was probably worth a few hundred
million.
Money like that, it can buy…”

“Anything that's for sale. And everything is.”

“Yes. The parents, they had a will. If they ‘perished in a common disaster,' the money would be split among the only two children anyone thought they had. But they still left plenty to…him. That piece went into some kind of blind trust. Multilayered, all offshore. Plus the house. So all that…all that thing they left behind had to do when he wanted something…or someone…paid, was to press a button.”

“That doesn't sound like they were…I don't know, cruel to him.”

“You mean, like, beat him, or starved him, or…?”

“Yeah.”

“There's worse things than that,” said the mammoth who had been chained to a wheelchair when the mega-tranquilizers started to lose their hold over a monster who seemed to feed on them. “They never
acknowledged
him. I don't know what kind of pre-birth screenings they had back then—they weren't fashionable, the way they are now. So they probably didn't really have any way of knowing. Not until they saw him. But then they'd know. Right at that moment, they'd know.”

“They wouldn't be the only ones,” Cross said. “The doctor, the hospital, the—”

“All for sale. And they
had
the money. I learned something else. Even stillborn births are recorded.”

“Just another record they could make disappear?”

“Yes. But the mother, after that pregnancy, she was too delicate to take another risk. Or maybe they made up some other story—we'll never know. What we know is that they adopted two children. Newborns. A boy and a girl, less than two years apart. They grew up and slipped into that same river their parents rafted on. I doubt they even knew who…what was living just above their heads. That house, it was big enough to keep him isolated. All they had to do was seal off the top floors.”

“Why didn't his parents just—?”

“Kill him?
Way
too much risk. People like that, they know, if they reach out to our world for a job, they're setting themselves up for permanent blackmail. In their world, they were safe. Any of the doctors, they'd be risking their own licenses if the truth came out. The hospital? It was a small, private place. Funded by a foundation. I don't have to say more, do I?”