Drawing Dead (3 page)

“Look, I'm just…I mean, what's going on?”

“Again?” Condor sighed wearily. “Look: all we needed to know was, that guy who drove in here, he was the one who tipped what Hemp was gonna do. He got paid to make sure that
didn't
get done. A man sets up his own boss, you think he gets to just walk away after? No. And here's why: you do one thing for money, you'll do another thing for
more
money. Everybody knows that.”

INSIDE A
stone-walled room, as dimly lit as an underground bunker. “That two-bit mope actually thought he was gonna just roll up and take out Ace's woman, boss?”

“I guess so, brother,” was the laconic response. The speaker was as unremarkable-looking as Condor had been distinctive. Only the bull's-eye tattoo on the back of his right hand distinguished him from a human generic.

“Hemp is as good as dead.”

“Already is. Part of the deal was the second sample case. Hemp keeps a lot of them around, thinks they make good cover. The guy we paid, he dropped a package into one of them.”

“There's nothing more for us to do?”

“Buddha, what's your problem? All those rubber checks we wrote are
canceled
checks now. You're just—what—professionally insulted that anyone would even think about hitting one of us?”

“I don't see how that wet-brain could've even known there
was
any ‘us,' boss.”

“What difference?”

“Next thing you know, maybe some fool tries to muscle in on the Double-X. Or maybe even—”

“From what? A spaceship? We've got trip wires three layers deep.”

“How about if we—?”

“No pre-emptives, brother. You know that.”

“Buddha's always looking for an excuse,” said a man occupying the far corner of the Red 71 poolroom's back office. His quarter-ton formless body was covered in a dull-gray jumpsuit, making him nearly invisible in the darkness. Despite his bulk, his voice was a falsetto squeak.

“Cross…” Buddha appealed to the man with the bull's-eye tattoo.

“You know Rhino's right,” the answer came. “Not that I blame you: I was married to So Long, I'd probably want to go around blowing stuff up, too.”

“That was a cheap shot, boss.”

“The cost of the ammo doesn't change the result.”

“I can't win, huh?”

The back door opened, and the man who had terrified Antoine burst in, the black-masked Akita bounding at his side.

“You wouldn't believe how good Sweetie was!” the outrageously overmuscled man thundered. “We were playing in the—”

“We know,” Rhino said. “You've really got him trained, Princess.”

“No, I mean he—”

“We know about all of it,” Cross assured him.

“Well, I bet Tiger doesn't. And when she comes over, I'm gonna…” the huge child said, sulking at the disinterest everyone seemed to be displaying in this latest proof of his homicidal dog's excellent manners.

THE WOMAN
who entered by the same back door had once been described as “an Amazon on steroids” by a man too dense to understand the inherent contradiction in his words.

He didn't live long enough to learn.

“Tiger!” Princess boomed out. The woman whose striped hair matched her one-piece spandex outfit flowed forward, moving in five-inch spike heels—tiger-gold with black soles—as naturally as a jogger in running shoes.

“Calm down, honey,” she said, as softly as the throwing daggers she wore strapped around one massive thigh could enter flesh. “Just give me a minute to find out what's going on.”

Princess instantly transformed from full boil to docile.

“What was so…? Oh, I see,” she said, turning to glare at the man with the bull's-eye tattoo.

“You don't see anything,” he replied, tonelessly.

“Sure, baby. Whatever you say,” Tiger purred. She perched one perfectly curved haunch on the heavy wood slab positioned above a pair of iron sawhorses that Cross used as a desk, keeping her eyes pinned to just below the man's right eye…where a tiny blue hieroglyph seemed to be burning without flame. The mark was unreadable even at close range, but the man who bore it had felt its dry-ice burn days ago.

“Wait for Tracker,” Cross said. “No point saying the same thing over and over.”

“And Ace,” Buddha added.

“No,” Cross said. “This isn't something Ace can be in on.”

“Why is that?” A voice from behind Rhino.

“Damn! When did
you
get here, Tracker?” Buddha asked. “That ghost-walking stuff you do is just plain spooky.”

“I move as myself,” said Tracker, an Indian whose facial features were somewhere between Cherokee and Apache. “Just as you do, Buddha.”

Cross swept his eyes around the room, as if drawing all the others under the same outcropping in an enemy-occupied mountain range.

“Somebody wants a seat at our table,” he said.

“One seat, or the whole table?” Rhino squeaked.

“What's the difference?” Buddha sneered. “He sits in on
our
game, he's already drawing dead.”

“HEMP WASN'T
the takeover man,” Cross said. “He was just a tool.”

“Whose tool?” Tiger asked softly, her tone as sweet as sufuric acid.

“Don't know,” Cross told the whole room. “But, whoever he is, he's not local.”

“That's got to be right,” Buddha said. “Nobody from around here would even—”

“That's not the puzzle,” the gang's leader interrupted. “What have we got that's worth a war? The club? This joint?”

“That's the truth,” Tiger agreed. “Who'd want a cement-block building standing inside a junkyard? For that luxurious poolroom of yours?”

“We've been here a long time,” Rhino spoke, slowly and deliberately. “Plenty of mobs in Chicago know where to find Red 71. And Tiger's right—there's no ‘operation' anyone could cut into here.”

“The club?”

“Come on, Buddha. Sure, the Double-X makes some money, but what's it take to open a strip joint? There's empty buildings all over this town, and never a shortage of girls who want to work. Add any lawyer who knows how to grease his way to a liquor license, and you're all set.”

“Yeah, but—”

“There's no ‘but' in this,” the man behind the sawhorse desk said. “Plenty of joints way more upscale than ours. Plenty of others down the other side, too. And we're not exactly taking in a fortune.”

“The overhead,” Rhino squeaked his agreement.

“Hey, we could cut
that
way, way down, if the boss didn't want to turn a moneymaker into a…”

“Domestic-violence shelter?” Tiger picked up the thread. “Anyway, I thought everything was voted on.”

“Sure,” Buddha said, bitterly. “But there's only five votes—you and Tracker, you started out freelance, so you don't qualify. Cross and Ace, they did time together. That's when they first put together a crew. Not big, but they went all-in on every hand until nobody wanted to play no more, see? Rhino was locked in there, too. And Cross got close to him—he was the only one who ever did.

“Ace had a parole date, but Cross was never gonna get one. And Rhino was gonna do life in that wheelchair. The plan was, they were both supposed to hit the fence and go. But that dental-floss ladder they used wouldn't hold the weight—Cross made it over the wall, but they put Rhino back in those chemical handcuffs.

“Cross came back for him. All legal-like. Rhino'd never even committed a crime; they were just…holding him because there was no place to put him. And that made the first three OGs, see?”

Buddha paused, making sure his audience was still attentive. Or, at least, not getting restless enough to cut him off.

“Cross found me working a contract in Laos. He was coming over from Cambodia. So by the time we did that job down south, I was on the team, too. Why Rhino brought Princess back with us, I'll never know. But he answered the crew's prove-in, same as I did.”

“Do you hate them?” Cross said, just above a whisper.

“Yes,” Rhino answered. Exactly as Ace had, when Cross first asked that core question, back when they were both still incarcerated children.

“Do you hate them
all
?”

“Yes!” Rhino, Princess, and Buddha spoke as one.

“See?” said the pudgy man with nerveless hands and eyes a falcon would envy. “If Ace was here, it'd be the same answer. So any damn vote is gonna be five–zip. Only way it
can
be. It don't matter what any one of us might think is a better way to travel, we're all going down the same road. Don't matter who walks point, who walks drag—we're one unit.”

“So you all took a vote to make the Double-X into a DV shelter?” Tiger was not an easily deterred woman.

“That does not matter,” Tracker addressed her. “What you see here, what you have seen before—what Buddha says now—that will never change.”